GOTHIC

LANDSCAPES
Changing Eras, Changing Cultures,
Changing Anxieties

Edited by
S h a r o n R o s e Ya n g
and Kathleen Healey
Gothic Landscapes
 Sharon Rose Yang • Kathleen Healey
Editors

Gothic Landscapes
Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing
Anxieties
Editors
Sharon Rose Yang Kathleen Healey
Worcester State University Worcester State University
Worcester, Massachusetts, USA Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-33164-5 ISBN 978-3-319-33165-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This edition of essays has come a long way from its inception in a panel at a
Northeast Modern Language Association conference. Through the years,
we have had the help and guidance of many people. We would like to
thank, first, the people at Palgrave who made this book possible: Benjamin
Doyle, Tomas René, the anonymous reader, and all of the people who
work behind the scenes. The people at Palgrave have been very helpful
and easy to work with. We are tremendously grateful for this opportunity
to publish our book with Palgrave. In addition, we would like to express
our gratitude to and respect for the contributors to this volume. We have
had the good fortune to have such hard-working, insightful, and conge-
nial contributors. Kathleen would especially like to thank the Wadsworth
Atheneum and the National Gallery of Art for their permission to use
images in her essay.
Both of us have had many friends who have supported our project
and acted as sounding boards for our questions and ideas. We thank our
colleagues and friends at Worcester State University for their discussions,
inspiration, and support. Kathleen would especially like to thank Barbara
Aquila, who has patiently listened about the book, and Jennifer Page,
who has always encouraged her to keep writing. Kathleen also thanks
Sharon, who has been one of her closest friends since graduate school at
the University of Connecticut. This book is possible because of Sharon’s
motivation and knowledge about the publishing process. Sharon would
like to thank Kathleen, whose friendship and support have made this proj-
ect run smoothly and made life much happier.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would also like to thank our families who have supported us through
this process. Sharon thanks her husband, De-Ping Yang, for his technical
guidance and unflagging support with this book. Kathleen thanks her hus-
band, Pete Johnson, for his help and guidance. Both of us are incredibly
lucky to have such wonderful spouses. In addition, Kathleen thanks her
children, Robert and Nathaniel, for putting up with her research obses-
sions and for teaching her what is really important in life. Sharon thanks
her “children,” cats Natasha and Rosalind, for always lending a helping
paw. No acknowledgements would be complete without mentioning our
parents, Leo and Grace Healy and Robert and Lucille Healey, all of whom
instilled in us a love of reading, learning, and thinking. Without their
wisdom and guidance as we were growing up, this project would not have
happened. Finally, we thank our siblings, who, despite their teasing, have
always believed in us.
 CONTENTS

Introduction: Haunted Landscapes and Fearful

Spaces—Expanding Views on the Geography of the Gothic 1
Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healey

Part I Cross-Genre: Hideous Hybrids/Hybrids of Horror 19

Dark Shadows in the Promised Land: Landscapes of

Terror and the Visual Arts in Charles Brockden
Brown’s Edgar Huntly 21
Kathleen Healey

Haunting Landscapes in “Female Gothic” Thriller Films:

From Alfred Hitchcock to Orson Welles 47
Sheri Chinen Biesen

“Beauty Sleeping in the Lap of Horror”: Landscape Aesthetics

and Gothic Pleasures, from The Castle of Otranto to
Video Games 71
Alice Davenport

vii
viii CONTENTS

Part II Darkness in Unexpected Places: Not Your

Grandmother’s Haunted Castle 105

What the Green Grass Hides: Denial and Deception in

Suburban Detroit 107
Amber B. Vayo

“Go Steady, Undine!”: The Horror of Ambition in

Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country 125
Myrto Drizou

The Convent as Coven: Gothic Implications of

Women-Centered Illness and Healing Narratives
in Toni Morrison’s Paradise 147
Belinda M. Waller-Peterson

Haunting Memories: Gothic and Memoir 169

Erica Moore

Part III Gothic Social Landscapes 199

The Indian Gothic 201

Nalini Pai

St. Bernard’s: Terrors of the Light in the Gothic Hospital 225

Christy Rieger

Nature Selects the Horla: How the Concept of Natural

Selection Influences Guy de Maupassant’s Horror Tale 239
Sharon Rose Yang
 CONTENTS ix

Ruins of Empire: Refashioning the Gothic in J. G. Ballard’s

Empire of the Sun (1984) 271
Alex Watson

Gothic Landscapes in Mary Butts’s Ashe of Rings 293

Roslyn Reso Foy

Index 307
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sheri Chinen Biesen, PhD is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Rowan

University and the author of the books Blackout: World War II and the Origins of
Film Noir (2005) and Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films (2014) at Johns
Hopkins University Press. She received her BA and MA at the University of
Southern California School of Cinema, and her PhD at the University of Texas,
Austin. She has taught at USC, University of California, University of Texas, and
in England. She has contributed to Literature/Film Quarterly, Film and History,
and FilmNoir: The Directors.
Alice Davenport is an independent scholar who holds an MA in English literature
and an MPA in Public Administration/China Studies. She worked as a China-
based business journalist, served as a Foreign Service Officer in the US Commercial
Service, and established a small copyediting firm. In recent years, she has revived
her longstanding scholarly interest in the Gothic, Ann Radcliffe, and eighteenth-
century landscape aesthetic, contributing an essay (“An Adaptable Aesthetic:
Eighteenth-Century landscape aesthetic, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen”) to Jane
Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, and Harmony (2013).
Myrto Drizou, PhD is an Assistant Professor of English at Valdosta State
University, GA. She has expertise in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
American literature (especially realism, naturalism, and gender studies). She has
published widely on Edith Wharton and other American naturalist writers, includ-
ing Henry Adams and Theodore Dreiser. Her work has appeared in the journals
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies and 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of North American Studies, and in the edited collections Critical Insights:
American Writers in Exile and The Turn into the Twentieth-Century and the
Problem of Periodization: Critical Essays on American Literary History (forthcom-
ing). She has also written the introduction to the new edition of Mary Wilkins
Freeman’s ghost stories, The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the
Supernatural (Hastings College Press).

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Kathleen Healey, PhD is a Visiting Professor at Worcester State University,

MA. Her research and teaching interests include American literature, Gothic lit-
erature, literature and the visual arts, nature writing, and science fiction. Her pub-
lications include the entries for Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Washington Allston,
and Nathaniel P. Willis for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. She has also pre-
sented numerous papers on the Gothic and on landscapes in American literature at
conferences held by NEMLA, the New England American Studies Association, the
Mid-Atlantic American Culture Association, and the Northeast American Popular
Culture Association.
Erica Moore, PhD is Professor of Academic English, ONCAMPUS Boston,
Wheelock College. She focuses her research on the areas of post-humanism, sci-
ence fiction, Gothic, memoir, and gender. Her publications include “Concrete and
Steel Evolution in Crash” in Foundation: The International Review of Science
Fiction and “Language Games in the Whoniverse” in the book The Language of
Doctor Who: From Shakespeare to Alien Tongues.
Nalini Pai, MPhil is an Assistant Professor at St Joseph’s College of Arts and
Science in Bangalore, India. She teaches British literature. She has published in
areas such as English-language teaching, Dalit literature and translation, and film
stars and politics in the journals Artha Journal of Social Sciences and Al Shodhana:
A Multi-Disciplinary Refereed Research Journal. She also has a chapter in Dalit
Literatures in India.
Roslyn Reso Foy, PhD is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of English at
Tulane University, LA. She is considered one of the leading experts on Modernist
writer Mary Butts. Reso Foy’s work on Butts includes her book Ritual, Myth, and
Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts: Between Feminism and Modernism and her
entries for the author in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and Facts on File. She
has published articles in Studies in Short Fiction, International Review of
Modernism, The Explicator, and in the book Things of the Spirit: Women Writers
Constructing Spirituality. She has also co-authored the introduction for a previ-
ously unpublished work by Butts.
Christy Rieger, PhD is an Associate Professor of English at Mercyhurst University,
PA. She has written on Victorian authors and culture, memoir, film, and pedagogy
in journals and books such as Journal of Victorian Culture, Victorian Feminisms,
Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Double Visions: 18th and 19th Century
Palimpsests, Compelling Confessions: The Politics of Personal Disclosure, and Neo-
Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations.
Amber B. Vayo is a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. She has written and presented on the influence of popu-
lar culture and online fandoms on critical thinking. She has chaired a panel on
Lydia Maria Child at NEMLA and she presented a paper on the Harry Potter
series that will be a forthcoming article.
Belinda M. Waller-Peterson is Assistant Professor at Moravian College, PA. She
combines her nursing experience and literature background to explore multiple
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

intersecting areas of study, including the medical humanities, women, gender and
sexuality, and Africana studies. She has presented at the American Literature
Association Conference and the 2015 Annual Medicine, Humanities, and Social
Sciences Conference, and organized a panel for the 2015 National Women’s
Studies Association Conference. She also has published: “The Communal Womb
in Haile Gerima’s Sankofa” in Media Res (2014) and “The Communal Womb
Motif in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place” in Africalogical Perspectives:
Historical and Contemporary Analysis of Race and Africana Studies (2014).
Alex Watson, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English
Language and Literature at Japan Women’s University. He has published exten-
sively on Romantic literature in his book Romantic Marginality: Empire and
Nation on the Margins of the Page, 1789–1832, and in journals such as New Essays
on British Romanticism, The Byron Journal, International Journal of Scottish
Literature, and Japan Women’s University’s Journal of English Studies. He has
additionally edited several books and journals on the Romantics (including
POETICA). Dr. Watson has several projects in the works in such diverse areas as
Romanticism, post-colonialism, and cinema studies.
Sharon Rose Yang, PhD is a Professor at Worcester State University, MA. She
both teaches and writes on nineteenth-century literature, the Gothic, Renaissance
literature, and film and literature. Her research includes the book Goddesses, Mages
and Wise Women: the Female Pastoral Guide in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century
Drama, and she was editor of the collection The X-Files and Literature. Her arti-
cles have appeared in The Upstart Crow, Text and Performance Quarterly,
Literature/Film Quarterly, The Explicator, and ANQ.
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1 Daniel Boardman, 1789 Ralph Earl National Gallery of Art,

Washington, D.C. 25
Fig. 2 Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth,
1792 Ralph Earl Courtesy of the Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT 26
Fig. 1 Bloody Saturday, (ARC Identification 535557)
1937 Wong Hai-Sheng/Wang Xiao-Ting US National
Archives Catalog, College Park, Maryland 281

xv
 Introduction: Haunted Landscapes
and Fearful Spaces—Expanding Views
on the Geography of the Gothic

Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healey

At first glance, the landscapes that dominate Gothic texts may seem to be
simply backdrops to the action of the fiction and film or the ruminations
of the poetry. Crumbling architecture, dark confusing labyrinths, frighten-
ing interiors, and craggy outcroppings are just a few elements of landscape
that make up the Gothic and help set the stage for what unfolds in Gothic
texts. Rather than what Alan Lloyd-Smith calls “trappings as trivial stage
machinery” (7), Gothic landscapes are actually central to these works, a
means by which political, psychological, social, and cultural ideals are laid
bare, transmitted, and often critiqued. Leslie Fiedler, David Punter, Fred
Botting, and collections editors Charles L. Crow, and Monica Elbert and
Bridget M. Marshall are among some of the scholars who have demon-
strated that landscape in the Gothic is more than just a mere backdrop
to the main action. As much as these scholars have furthered the study
of landscape in the Gothic, there is much more that needs to be studied.
Recent discussion of the Gothic in computer gaming, film, and in con-
veying the voices of marginalized people demonstrates not only that the
Gothic is still thriving and open for interpretation but also that landscapes
play an important part in that discussion. This collection of essays deepens

S.R. Yang () • K. Healey

Department of English, Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 1

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_1
2 S.R. YANG AND K. HEALEY

current scholarship both by exploring how the Gothic’s interpenetration

enriches other genres and by expanding the perception of landscape in the
Gothic to include the social, psychological, and spiritual, as well as the
geographic.
To understand the evolving role of landscape in the Gothic, it is vital
to understand the development and conventions of the genre itself.
Comparatively speaking, the Gothic is relatively young. Most agree
that Horace Walpole gave the Gothic its terrible birth with the Castle of
Otranto in 1764 and that the first popularity peak of the genre came in
the 1790s.1 This genre, which can “embod[y] … unbearable or unaccept-
able fears, wishes, and desires that are driven from consciousness” (Hurley
197), came to permeate not just the Western world but other cultures
touched, for good or ill, by the West. Gothic and its variations can be
found ranging across creative/artistic forms of high and popular culture:
poetry, drama, novels, painting, film, television, graphic novels, and video
games. From its initial British incarnations, Gothic spread to France and
Germany, and back again, to later cross the Atlantic for the Americas, as
well as to reach out to Scandinavia, the Baltic, and the Eurasian regions of
the Ukraine and Russia. The “colonized” worlds of Australia, Africa, and
Asia have also been noted for adaptations of the Gothic.2
Down to the present, Gothic not only still manifests itself in traditional
literary forms—such as the novels of Stephen King, Peter Straub, Anne
Rice, and Scott Thomas (and their imitators)—but also straddles artistic
modes in the adaptations of some of these writers to film and television
(and imitations there, as well). Radio and television, in particular, speak
to the undying presence of the Gothic, pervaded by programming in this
genre that has proved exceedingly popular through the years. Witness
the predominance of radio programs from as early as 1931 through
radio’s last gasp in the late 1950s: The Witch’s Tale (1931–38), Suspense
(1942–62), Inner Sanctum (1941–52), and Lights Out (1934–47).3
Television’s parade of Gothic programming has similarly been haunted
by variations on a Gothic theme throughout its history, some overlap-
ping with a sister radio show, others developing cult followings: Suspense,
Lights Out, Thriller, Dark Shadows, True Blood, Forever Knight, Salem,
American Gothic, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Supernatural. And in
the spirit of the genre’s diffuse, unbounded nature, television Gothic has
evolved into many fearsome hybrids to deepen the emotional and aesthetic
impact of science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction: The X-Files, Helix,
and Sanctuary. One might even argue that Gothic’s strong influence is
 INTRODUCTION: HAUNTED LANDSCAPES AND FEARFUL... 3

demonstrated in such programs as Without a Trace, Cold Case, Criminal

Minds, and Law and Order: SVU or Criminal Intent through: the hos-
tile shadowy cityscapes; the crumbling warrens of slums or the towering
night-shadowed skyscrapers; the viciously perverse murderers, torturers,
rapists, and pedophiles; the dissection of cadavers; and the ghostly disap-
pearances of victims that infiltrate and reanimate modern crime dramas.
Why won’t we lay the Gothic to rest? What allows it such plasticity
to transcend time, genre, social constraints? What gives it the power to
speak the unspeakable, of “imagining the unimaginable” (Punter 111)?
Addressing these complicated questions requires an understanding of how
Gothic’s traits allow it to do the cultural work that societies, varying across
eras and geographies, have required of it. One can easily come up with
a laundry list of conventions for the Gothic: haunted castles, mansions,
monasteries, and graveyards replete with hidden chambers, passages, dun-
geons or attics; nature that is sublime and overwhelming (forests, cataracts,
cliffs, storms) and sometimes hostile; persecuted heroines and disinherited
or unjustly exiled heroes; corrupt persecuting villains, usually representing
some form of social authority in family, Church, or state (with an occa-
sional perverse combination of any of those three); Byronic overachievers
in forbidden knowledge (magical or scientific); seductive females; vari-
ous assortments of supernatural or unnatural beings, monstrosities of the
“natural” world in the form of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons,
sorcerers/witches, and so on. Yet, though the genre can be defined with
these distinctive conventions, Gothic texts deploy these conventions to
create porous worlds where social, political, spiritual, physical, geographi-
cal, and personal boundaries are as permeable, and as constantly shifting,
as the genre itself. As these conventions reveal, in Gothic: the supernatural
constantly bleeds into the natural; human distinction from the non- or
sub-human weakens or even disappears; the natural resists human con-
trol and understanding; rungs in the ladder of social hierarchy are subject
to slippage; the past invades and pervades the present; the mind cannot
distinguish dreams or madness from reality; social and political identities
shift; corruption contaminates those traditionally viewed as innately quali-
fied for moral and intellectual guidance; and architecture is riddled with
passages to the secret and terrible, the abject. As Julia Kristeva notes, the
abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect
borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”
(4). The Gothic reveals what we reject, what disturbs the systems of cul-
ture, continuity, and beliefs.
4 S.R. YANG AND K. HEALEY

There is a general critical consensus that this characteristic diffuse-

ness, this emphasis on the ineffable of Gothic was a reaction against
eighteenth-century Enlightenment views of the world as possible to be
organized and defined by reason, logic, and categorization. The Gothic
served as a literary backlash, not only against Augustan constraint on the
spiritual and emotional but also against its inadequacy in controlling, let
alone coping with, the irrationality of the human soul, the political strife,
and the economic and social instability of the world. As Valdine Clemens
writes, “[e]arly Gothic fiction revealed the one-sidedness of the Age of
Reason and tended to unsettle prevailing assumptions about civilized
superiority, the march of progress, and the powers of the rational mind”
(4–5), so that “when Reason and Science usurped God, Gothic rushed
in to fill the resulting vacuum with the daemonic” (3).4 The vociferous,
fearful condemnation by eighteenth-century clergy, politicians, artists,
and social movers of the subversive questioning of social and political
authority that Gothic offered to the lower orders, be they social (women,
foreigners, lower classes) or psychological (sexual, emotional, intellec-
tual), attests to its power to articulate and liberate the frustrations of the
oppressed.5
It is likely Gothic’s emphasis on the irrepressible, the unspeakable, the
inexplicable has kept it a vital part of art in both high and popular culture
through nearly three centuries and across continents. As such, it becomes
an apt venue for uncovering the limitations to Enlightenment rational-
ity’s claim to ordering, civilizing, and elevating humanity through science,
colonization, and social/political authority/order. Thus, Kelly Hurley
describes Gothic as “a cyclical genre that reemerges in times of cultural
stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its readership by working through
them in displaced (sometimes supernatural) form” (194). Gothic, then,
has constantly mutated to become a powerful mode to express such sup-
pressed anxieties as: human violence released by the French Revolution; an
American need to create a political and social identity that acknowledges
ties to the Old World yet is independent and original; guilt over slavery and
extermination of native peoples; the spiritual and social upheaval caused
by Darwinian undercutting of human ascendancy and divine protections;
conflict over woman’s sexual, social, and economic place; Imperialism in
Africa, Asia, and Canada; of Scandinavian and Russian struggle for identity;
and fear of the queer’s challenge to hetero-normativity. L. Andrew Cooper
writes, “In some form or other, the Gothic will keep intruding on our
realities, giving shape to the violence we see, believe, and do” (207).6
 INTRODUCTION: HAUNTED LANDSCAPES AND FEARFUL... 5

However, it might be more accurate to say not that the Gothic acts upon
us but that we participate in Gothic as its creators or audience.
Because of the political and cultural nature of the Gothic, it is no
wonder that landscape plays such a central role in the genre. Landscape
scholars such as Denis Cosgrove, Stephen Daniels, James Corner, Rachael
Ziady DeLue, and James Elkins, among others, have noted the cultural
reciprocity of landscape. Whether in a garden or in a literary work, land-
scape is more than a physical entity, it is a canvas upon which cultures paint
their world, their desires, and their cultural and political beliefs. Cosgrove
argues in Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape that “the landscape
idea represents a way of seeing—a way in which some Europeans have
represented to themselves and to others the world about them and their
relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social
relations” (1).7 Similarly, DeLue states “landscape … is both our sub-
ject and the thing within which we exist” (10). DeLue further notes that
“humans use landscapes of all sorts (natural, pictorial, symbolic, mythic,
imagined, built, and so forth if such distinctions can be drawn) as means
to artistic, social, economic and political ends” (11). Landscape is a “phys-
ical and multisensory medium … in which cultural meanings and values
are encoded” (Mitchell 14). Considering that landscape is, essentially,
a cultural artifact, it is not surprising that it plays a central role in the
overall meaning of Gothic works. Disordered landscapes in the Gothic
represent the chaos of a culture in transition, or the violence of passions
seething beneath the veneer of civilized society. Gothic landscapes are a
lens by which cultures reflect back their darkness hidden from the light of
consciousness. As Corner asserts, “landscape can be used (or deployed)
by those in power to conceal, consolidate, and represent certain interests
(whether of the aristocracy, the state, or corporate sector) … it so beauti-
fully conceals its artifice, ‘naturalizing’ or rendering invisible its construc-
tion and effects in time” (11). The Gothic unearths the “moral darkness”
(Corner 10) that the cultural elite seek to hide, whether that darkness is of
a political, historical, cultural, or social nature.
Landscape, whether natural or human-made, is an aspect of the Gothic
that powerfully embodies how the genre’s fluidity enables it to challenge
tradition and liberate anxieties. Gothic’s ambience of uncertainty, delu-
sion, fluidity, isolation, and instability is created mainly by landscape. In
terms of natural landscapes, the power and sensory obfuscation of storms,
fogs, dark forests, and night leave characters unable to orient themselves,
unable to assert human power to perceive a shifting, even hostile, nature,
6 S.R. YANG AND K. HEALEY

let alone to control or define it. Further, fierce personifications of nature,

such as storms, cataracts, mountains, or roaring oceans may mirror or
reinforce the passion, ferocity, and obsession of a character, while the
shadowed depths of caves, forests, or tarns may perform the same task in
terms of a character’s dark and hidden thoughts or past.
Man-made landscapes play an equally vital role in constructing Gothic’s
mood of destabilizing reason and order. In the Gothic, architecture,
depending on mathematics and science, is hardly a paean to humanity’s
rational genius and ascendancy over the nature it is designed to shut out.
Castles, mansions, and monasteries/abbeys are not secure, impermeable
structures protectively separating humans from the wilds. Rather, they are
weak with age and dissolution, riddled with passages and chambers, dun-
geons, crypts, and attics that admit agents of lust, violence, hypocrisy,
greed, and other kinds of corruption to prey upon and imprison their
unsuspecting inhabitants. Further symbolizing the inadequate protection
of rationality, this architecture provides no barrier against incarnations of
both the sexuality and violence humans wish to repress, and the super-
natural and imaginative that rationality seeks to constrain, even deny. For
ghosts, vampires, witches, and demons pass through “solid” walls or infin-
itesimal cracks to prey on their victims. In a similar vein, graves “ope and
let forth their dead” as ghosts and vampires. Tombs of earth, wood, and
stone refuse to be human-made containers, so that the past, the unnatural,
and the horrific refuse to stay buried.
Gothic architecture further shapes a perspective of instability by under-
mining traditional religious, social, and political institutions. So often,
“sacred” edifices are as morally riddled as they are architecturally—wit-
ness the monasteries and abbeys of The Monk, The Italian, Melmoth the
Wanderer, and Dracula. Castles, symbols of aristocratic standing and
power, are as decrepit and corrupt as the morality and legitimacy (lit-
eral and figurative) of their owners (Castle of Otranto, The Italian,
“Christabel,” Dracula). These crumbling castles are replaced by homes,
often inherited, in American Gothic, where the sunny idealism of the new
world is subverted and the true nature of America is revealed (Wieland,
The House of the Seven Gables, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” The
Shining). The sacred ground of the cemetery or crypt is equally polluted
(Dracula, The Monk, Varney the Vampire, “Carmilla,” “The Fall of the
House of Usher,” Pet Cemetery).
A particularly interesting way in which the architectural aspect of
Gothic landscape creates a mood that articulates questions on the limits of
 INTRODUCTION: HAUNTED LANDSCAPES AND FEARFUL... 7

human reason to bring order to the world is in the deployment of hidden

niches or chambers holding sought after hidden truths. In Caleb Williams,
a chamber holds a casket with the hidden truth corroding Falkland’s soul.
In Frankenstein, the title character chooses an isolated garret so he can
“penetrate into the recesses of nature, [sic] and show how she works in her
secret places” (Shelley 53) to grasp the ability to create life. In Jane Eyre,
Jane tries to determine exactly who is locked in the attic of Thornfield and
how to defend against the violence of that prisoner’s periodic escapes. In
Edgar Huntly, a room holds a strange box, the contents of which hold the
key to Clithero Edny’s torment. In all cases, as with other Gothic texts,
reason and rationality are employed to find a way to get at the truth. But
that rationality is also corrupted by passion, fear, or obsession. Further,
the truth discovered does not strengthen the searcher’s commitment to
traditional order and is frequently beyond the searcher’s ability to control,
empathize with, or fully understand.
Furthermore, landscape in the Gothic is a house that provides sufficient
doors for numerous keys of various literary theories to unlock. Valdine
Clemens points out that Gothic landscapes prove rich ground for psycho-
analytic approaches to Gothic texts, writing that “the dark tunnels and
underground passages of Gothic edifices represent descent into the uncon-
scious, away from the socially constructed self toward the uncivilized, the
primitive. Violence, pursuit, and rape occur in these lower depths, yet
they are also the realms where valuable discoveries are made.” In addition,
Clemens writes that “[a]rchitectural imagery frequently serves to signify
the forceful incursion of the unconscious life into the conscious,” draw-
ing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to elaborate her point: “moments of crisis
inevitably involve violent breaking, disruption, or transgression of bound-
aries: doors, walls, locked drawers.” (7)8 In a tangentially related discus-
sion, Clemens touches on Jung’s theory of individuation (8), a concept to
which nature in Gothic landscapes especially lends itself. For the deep cav-
erns, hidden dungeons, subterranean crypts, dark forests, and depthless
tarns and lakes into which characters frequently must descend to escape
pursuit, battle their human and supernatural nemeses, and find new lives
for themselves, are versions of the areas of darkness or depths representing
the unconscious into which the individual must plunge to face, battle, and
integrate his shadows before emerging as a whole psyche.9
These traits of Gothic landscape also present an effective venue for a
Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to interpreting the Gothic text. For
when the castle, the manse, the monastery may stand as “signs” for the
8 S.R. YANG AND K. HEALEY

power of “self” defined as white/male/Eurocentric/Protestant/rational-

ist, the porousness of these structures to the supernatural/irrational other
may symbolize a fear not just of incursion by the Other, “a presence in
that beyond-the-veil where the whole of Nature can be questioned about
its design” (Lacan, “Instance of Letter” 163),10 but that the self’s very
assertion of separation/difference is an illusion. The power of Nature to
subsume the individual in its sublime ineffability is yet another way Gothic
landscapes embody these anxieties.
Similarly, Gothic landscapes of horror and deterioration lend themselves
to Marxist approaches to decoding texts. Jerrold E. Hogle notes that the
Gothic is essentially based in class and ideology, arising from “highly mate-
rial conflicts among cultural groups and retrogressive-versus-progressive
modes of production” (6). David Punter further states that capitalist ele-
ments such as “the family, the concepts of creation and work, the claims of
the individual, the power of the repressive apparatus of church and state …
are precisely the areas in which Gothic fiction locates itself” (419). Thus,
Gothic castles, for example, while denying modernity, at the same time
express the political and class conflicts of the period in which the texts were
written. In early American Gothic texts, the anxieties of the new Republic,
the threat of the mob, and fears of human nature that threaten to overtake
the rational and idealistic Democracy are aptly reflected in natural as well
as man-made landscapes. Gothic texts both question and resist the given
scripts of power; their landscapes are projections of historical conflicts of
power and thought that have been pushed beneath the veneer of society.
In a similar vein, Gothic landscapes are fertile ground for understanding
the repressed and dispossessed in society, opening the genre to Feminist
Theory and giving voice to African Americans and indigenous peoples. For
example, critics such as Gilbert and Gubar, George Haggerty, and Kate
Furguson Ellis discuss how landscapes of patriarchal institutions, such as
castles, churches, and family homes, reveal the threat that the social order
poses to women. These institutions should offer women protection and
nurturing, but instead are realms of danger and terror. Heroines’ impris-
onment in underground chambers or locked rooms and cabinets, where
they are raped, physically abused, and/or terrorized by men, may not only
reflect actual experience but also symbolize the horrors of their educa-
tional, legal, and familial conditions.11
Likewise, the Gothic criticizes how power structures in society have also
exploited, terrorized, and dispossessed non-white and indigenous peoples.
Allan Lloyd-Smith aptly notes that one of the main themes underlying the
 INTRODUCTION: HAUNTED LANDSCAPES AND FEARFUL... 9

American Gothic is race, in terms of both slavery and the bloody history
between white settlers and Native Americans (38). Lloyd-Smith states,

The power of blackness, to borrow the title of Harry Levin’s critique of

the contrasts within American Romances, was also, as Toni Morrison has
recently argued in Playing in the Dark, a power of definition of the “Other,”
the resident non-American whose abjection supported the self-definition of
the dominant whites. (38)

Significantly, landscapes play a central role in this critique of the power

structures of white society. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example, the
landscape of trees filled with slaves who have been hung is a spectacle of
terror and speaks the truth that underlies American history. Similarly,
the wilderness landscapes of Charles Brockden Brown in Edgar Huntly
and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods reveal that the “sav-
agism” that white society ascribes to Native Americans is within all
humans, whites included.12 As the Gothic gives voice to the oppressed,
it also voices the fears of the oppressors, in a form that has been termed
“Imperial Gothic.” Gothic concern with issues of race extends beyond
the United States to include colonialism throughout the world. As
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert argues, fear of the racial Other in Gothic lit-
erature “mirrors a growing fear in British society around 1800” due to
“the nation’s exposure to colonial societies, nonwhite races, non-Chris-
tian belief systems, and the moral evils of slavery” (230). Inherent in
this fear is the “horror of interracial sexuality” and interracial marriage
(Paravisini-Gebert 230).
In the past, scholars such as David Punter, Valdine Clemens, Fred
Botting, and others have wisely devoted sections of their extensive sur-
veys of the Gothic genre to landscape, but they have not given it an in-
depth study. Other critics, such as Kate Ferguson Ellis, Sherry Truffin,
and the editors of Transnational Gothic, The Cambridge Companion to
Gothic Fiction, and Gothic Topographies, however, have opened up the
door to giving this aspect of the genre the focus and attention it deserves.
Yet, as intelligent and innovative as these writers are, they have not gone
far enough beyond that door. Ellis’s The Contested Castle provides a
fascinating, insightful feminist/Marxist examination of how a woman’s
sanctifying or saving of the haunted “castle”/domicile reflects economi-
cally driven changes in woman’s role in the domestic sphere and conse-
quent conflicts over woman’s place in the entire social order. However,
10 S.R. YANG AND K. HEALEY

the study only covers early Gothic through the late 1840s and, by defini-
tion of its mission, limits itself to one aspect of landscape. Sherry Truffin’s
Schoolhouse Gothic does cover writers of varied gender, ethnicity, and class,
and addresses twentieth-century writings. Still, its sharp focus on explor-
ing American attitudes to education limits its study to the specific land-
scape of the school. Transnational Gothic, Gothic Topographies, and The
Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction do valuable work in expanding
the study of Gothic landscapes even further. Amongst the essays of these
two collections are found scholarship addressing the Gothic’s adapta-
tion of landscape in film, in works ranging into the twenty-first century
and across cultural and geographic borders, reflecting the experiences of
Canadian and First Nation, Australian, South African, Caribbean, Russian,
and Scandinavian peoples. Yet our collection significantly expands the
work these studies approach.
Our essays carry the study of Gothic landscape further through the
door opened by Ellis, Truffin, and the contributors to those three col-
lections, both by developing in more depth some earlier approaches and
by revealing new insights into the evolution in the deployment of Gothic
landscapes from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We do so
in three important ways. First, our collection is a unique study that not
only reaches even further beyond the Eurocentric focus of many texts
concerning the Gothic, but is also cross-generic, exploring how and why
conventions of other art forms influence the creation of Gothic landscapes
as well as how Gothic landscapes influence the creation of work in other
artistic genres. Second, our collection reveals how non-Gothic texts draw
on audience associations with Gothic landscapes to convey more power-
fully a sense of horror or alienation with the author’s culture. Third, this
collection delves into how the isolation, powerlessness, and terror asso-
ciated with or provoked by the permeability, instability, or entrapment
of the castle, manse, crypt, or monastery have been transferred and are
now embodied by the entire personal, social, spiritual, geographical, and
physical fabrics of the characters’ worlds. These essays do so in several
ways. The authors rely on cutting-edge research in historicist, feminist,
and psychoanalytic criticism to give a fresh approach to American Gothic,
Imperial Gothic, Asian, and film studies, as well as to some unexpected
sites for Gothic, such as memoir studies, gaming studies, and landscape
painting. Equally innovative, this collection focuses on writers either redis-
covered or newly brought to scholarly prominence, some of whom had
not previously been recognized as using the Gothic: J.G. Ballard, Mary
 INTRODUCTION: HAUNTED LANDSCAPES AND FEARFUL... 11

Butts, Edward Berdoe, Jeffrey Eugenides, Frank McCourt, Augusten

Burroughs, and Anthony D’Aries.
Part One, is entitled “Cross-Genre: Hideous Hybrids/Hybrids of
Horror.” This group of articles explores how the medium of Gothic
landscapes reveals the evolution of reflexive relations between literature
and visual arts. The first essay, “Dark Shadows in the Promised Land:
Landscapes of Terror and the Visual Arts in Charles Brockden Brown’s
Edgar Huntly,” by Kathleen Healey, does not merely point out Brown’s
reliance on the conventional imagery of American landscape paintings
when creating his Gothic landscapes. More originally, Healey demon-
strates that Brown subverts the view of America as the “peaceable king-
dom” and God-given pastoral Eden that landscape painting promoted, by
coloring the imagery of this painting genre with Gothic elements of horror
and terror, creating a fearsome sublime to explore human savagery, deg-
radation, and anxiety. We move from the eighteenth-century to the mid-
twentieth with Sheri Chinen-Biesen’s “Haunting Landscapes in ‘Female
Gothic’ Thriller Films: From Alfred Hitchcock to Orson Welles.” This
chapter discusses how Gothic literature’s landscapes of haunted, secret-
ridden edifices, and sublimely terrifying nature provided artists with a tool
to interrogate contemporary cultural questions on film. In this respect,
Chinen-Beisen’s article looks into 1940s concerns about Nazi threats,
nuclear annihilation, and working women re-incarcerated in the home
after WWII. The essay goes beyond some other studies of Gothic land-
scapes by affording an especially in-depth exploration of how advances in
lighting and sound technology in cinema affect, even open up, new ways
to depict the Gothic landscape and its effects on its audience. Finally, with
“‘Beauty Sleeping in the Lap of Horror’: Landscape Aesthetics and Gothic
Pleasures from The Castle of Otranto to Videogames,” Alice Davenport
brings us into the twenty-first century’s incarnation of Gothic landscapes.
Davenport reports on how the videogames of the present both use and
transform earlier forms of Gothic landscape aesthetics. Thus, landscape
becomes an important means that links the Gothic to the evolution of the
visual arts.
The second part is “Darkness in Unexpected Places: Not Your
Grandmother’s Haunted Castle,” a grouping of essays revealing how
associations with Gothic landscapes have become so deeply embedded
in Western culture that authors, sometimes intentionally and sometimes
automatically, use these landscapes in non-Gothic texts as invaluable,
powerful shorthand to evoke in their readers horror, alienation, or uncer-
12 S.R. YANG AND K. HEALEY

tainty at the grotesquery, instability, and corruption of their worlds. This

cohort begins with Amber Vayo’s “What the Green Grass Hides: Denial
and Deception in Suburban Detroit,” which analyzes the darkness that
lurks behind the elm-tree-lined, upper-middle-class landscape of a 1970s
Detroit suburb in Jeffery Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Vayo demon-
strates that The Virgin Suicides, while not appearing to be “Gothic” in the
traditional sense, is a modern Gothic that, through drawing on horror
and the grotesque, reveals the hollowness of American values and sub-
urbia. Similarly, Myrto Drizou in “‘Go Steady, Undine!’: The Horror
of Ambition in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country” examines
Wharton’s use of the Gothic to critique American society. Drizou shows
that although The Custom of the Country is not viewed as a Gothic novel
in the traditional sense, Wharton uses Gothic tropes throughout the novel
to show the true horror of the class-climbing ambition of many of her
contemporary Americans. The economic, realistic, and inner landscapes of
her novel reveal the true horror of American capitalism and consumption.
In “The Convent as Coven: Gothic Implications of Women-Centered
Illness and Healing Narratives in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Belinda
Waller-Peterson argues that Morrison uses the Gothic to reveal the patri-
archal structure of the town of Paradise, and to enable the marginalized
women in the novel to find a way to voice their illnesses. The landscapes
of both town and convent uncover the social hierarchy of the town and
the women’s resistance to that hierarchy. Lastly, Erica Moore’s “Haunting
Memories: Gothic and Memoir” looks at how in the works of memoirists
Frank McCourt’s, Augusten Burroughs’s, and Anthony D’Aries’s memo-
ries are the ghosts and demons that haunt the landscape of the human
mind, uncertain in substance or truth. Moore explores how Gothic’s eeri-
ness, uncertainty, and fluidity shape these authors’ interrogations of mem-
oir’s “truthfulness” to reveal the unnerving instability of the worlds that
humans create based on memory.
The final part is called “Gothic Social Landscapes,” which studies how
authors create a Gothic landscape that is not so much geographical as psy-
chological, even epistemological; that the fabric of the world they perceive
surrounding them becomes a kind of edifice haunted by uncertainty. Nalini
Pai’s essay “Indian Gothic” looks at portrayals of the dak bungalow, a
wayfaring hut for British colonials traveling to the interior of India, found
in the literature, folktales, and anecdotes of both colonials and natives. Her
essay is a particularly interesting take on Imperial Gothic, exploring how
hauntings of the dak occur in a space that is liminal for both Indians and
 INTRODUCTION: HAUNTED LANDSCAPES AND FEARFUL... 13

British; both groups use this same space of the dak to define themselves
as Self and to express their anxieties of the Other. In Christy Reiger’s “St.
Bernard’s: Terrors of the Light in the Gothic Hospital,” Victorian anxiet-
ies with scientific progress, earnestness, and dehumanization/desensitiza-
tion are conveyed by doctors and medical students whose whole world
is limited to the hospital by their immersion in their profession, depicted
as Gothic’s isolated and brutal laboratories, dark caverns, and stone
walls—a worldscape of night, cruelty, and uncertainty. “Nature Selects the
Horla,” by Sharon Rose Yang, also deals with nineteenth-century anxiet-
ies, in this case the ramifications of natural selection. Yang explores how
Guy DeMaupassant relays the horror for humanity of being dethroned
from the chain of being through the sufferings of a narrator who per-
ceived his everyday world like a “secure” castle of felicitous privilege, until
that worldview was invaded and haunted by the supplanting Horla. The
next essay brings us to mid-century, Alex Watson’s “Ruins of Empire:
Refashioning Ruin in J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun,” which approaches
Imperialist Gothic from the perspective of a colonizer empathizing with
rather than exploiting a colonized people. This essay reveals that Ballard’s
reading the Chinese ruins of WWII through the lens of Gothic landscape
conventions enables him both to address his own anxieties about war (past
and future) and to communicate persuasively to his audience the brutality,
persecution, and horror of the war for the Chinese, and consequently for
all humans. The last essay is Roslyn Reso Foy’s “Gothic Landscape in Mary
Butts’s Ashe of Rings.” This piece further enriches scholarship on Mary
Butts, only recently recognized as a major player in British Modernism, by
demonstrating how she draws on traditional Gothic landscapes of ancient
ancestral homes, pagan ruins, and violent Nature, but not just to convey
the desolation, alienation, and ferocity to which the world was reduced
in the eyes of survivors of WWI. Foy also brings out how Butts is able to
deploy the Gothic’s bleak landscape into an embodiment of the possibility
for renewal and salvation through endurance and passion.
The essays in Gothic Landscapes reveal not only that landscape has
played a central role in Gothic’s articulation of repressed cultural fears and
social anxieties but also that these landscapes are as relevant in the twenty-
first century as they were in the eighteenth. Across time, culture, and
artistic form, Gothic landscapes give voice to the anxieties of Eurocentric
and non-Eurocentric cultures and are just as illuminating to the study of
video games and film as they are to that of literature. These landscapes
reach beyond their original generic boundaries to lend power and insight
14 S.R. YANG AND K. HEALEY

to other types of literature, even other forms of art. The work of our edi-
tion in studying the mutation of Gothic landscapes, then, explores further
than the criticism that has preceded it, while opening up the way for a
more creative, insightful understanding of the influence and effects of the
Gothic in literature and other arts.

NOTES
1. See Punter (1980) 1–8, 61–62; Botting (2014) 57–58; Ellis
(1989) ix–xii, 30; and Clemens (1999) 15–16.
2. On the continental cross-pollination of Gothic, see Terry Hale (2002),
“French and German Gothic, the Beginnings,” and Hendrik van
Gorp (2013), “Jan Potocki in the Intertextual Tradition of the
Roman Anglais (the Gothic Novel)”; with additional references in
Botting (2014) 70 and Punter (1980) 64–66, 114, 106–08, 131–32.
For useful studies on Gothic in North American and Caribbean
texts see, Eric Savoy (2003), “The Rise of American Gothic”;
Candace Ward (2013), “‘Dupy Know Who Fi Frighten’: Laying
Ghosts in Jamaican Fiction”; Matti Savolainen (2013) and Christos
Angelis (2013), “The ‘New World’ Gothic Monster: Spatio-Temporal
Ambiguities, Male Bonding and Canadianness in John Richarson’s
Wacousta”; Tomasz Skora (2013), “‘Murderous Pleasures’: The
(Female) Gothic and Death Drive in Selected Short Stories by
Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.” Also Punter (1980), Chapters
7 (189–213) and 11 (268–313) in The Literature of Terror and
Clemens (1999), Chapter 8 (185–212) in The Return of the Repressed.
For interesting studies on Imperial Gothic in African, Asian, and
Australian writings, see Jack W. Shear (2013), “Spectres of
Apartheid: Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf”; Mary Goodwin (2013),
“Stranger Fiction: The Asian Ghost Tales of Rudyard Kipling and
Lafcadio Herarn”; Maureen Clark (2013), “Out of the Shadows:
Aborignial Gothic, ‘Race’, Identity and Voice in Tracey Moffatt’s
bedevil”; and H.L. Malchow’s (1996) Gothic Images of Race in
Nineteenth-Century Britain. For studies of Russian and Scandinavian
Gothic, see Diana Khapaeva (2013), “The International Vampire
Boom and Post-Soviet Gothic Aesthetics”; Pasi Nttssönen (2013),
“Gothic Liminality in A.J. Annila’s Film Sauna”; Kristine
Kastbjerg (2013), “The Aesthetics of Surface: The Danish Gothic
1820–2000”; and Yvonne Leffler (2013), “The Devious Landscape
in Contemporary Scandinavian Horror.”
 INTRODUCTION: HAUNTED LANDSCAPES AND FEARFUL... 15

3. Though Richard J. Hand’s (2006) Terror on the Air: Horror Radio

in America, 1931–1952 could be a bit more critically rigorous, it still
provides a thorough, interesting, and readable catalogue of horror
programs on the radio and the Gothic elements shaping them.
4. See Punter (1980) 6–32, 62–65, 87; Botting (2014) 3–4, 1–22;
Clemens (1999) 2–5; Cooper (2010) 3–4, 25, 29–46; and
Haggerty (1989), Gothic Fiction 217.
5. Condemning Gothic: Cooper (2010) 3–4, 25, 29–46; Punter
(1980) 6–12; Clemens (1999) 2, 46, 60–63.
6. Interestingly, Maria Belville (2012) 120 points out that Gothic
may be used not only to give voice to the repressed but also to
confront and tame it, so that “horror may be shown alive but
expelled and conquered.”
7. Reprinted in Delue and Elkins (2008) 17–44.
8. On both human-made and natural settings, see Botting (2014) 4–7,
19, 32–38, 76–78, 132, 139, 154; Punter (1980) 200, 220; Ellis
(1989) ix, xiv, 7, 37, 47; Clemens (1999) 7–12; Haggerty, Form/
Fiction (1989) 17–18, 20–21 and Queer Gothic (2006) 14–15, 16–17.
9. Jung, “Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation” (1968) 275,
288–89; “Archetypes” (1968) 17–22, 30–32, “The Self,” (1991)
23–35 and Campbell, Hero (1968) 90–94.
10. See Lacan, “Function and Field (2002) 64–71, “The Freudian
Thing” (2002) 132–33, “Instance of the Letter” (2002) 163.
11. Julia Kristeva’s (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection;
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s (1979) The Madwoman in the
Attic; Juliann E. Fleenor’s (1983) edited work, The Female Gothic;
Diane Long Hoeveler’s (1995) Gothic Feminism; and Kate
Ferguson Ellis’s (1989) The Contested Castle, among others, have
demonstrated the many ways the Gothic has both helped to define
women and give them voice.
12. Discussions of race in American Gothic is a growing body of schol-
arship, as witnessed by Teresa A. Goddu’s (1997) (2013) work,
Maisha L. Wester’s (2012) African American Gothic: Screams from
Shadowed Places; Justin D.Edwards’s (2003) Gothic Passages:
Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic Jared Gardner’s (2000)
Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature,
1787–1845 and Keith B. Mitchell’s (2013) “All This Difficult
Darkness: Lynching and Exorcism of the Black Other in Theodore
Dreiser’s ‘Nigger Jeff’.” For other examples of Imperial Gothic cf
endnote 2 above.
16 S.R. YANG AND K. HEALEY

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Hampshire, U.K.: Palgrave, 2012. Print.
 PART I

Cross-Genre: Hideous Hybrids/

Hybrids of Horror
 Dark Shadows in the Promised Land:
Landscapes of Terror and the Visual Arts
in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly

Kathleen Healey

Charles Brockden Brown is widely known as America’s first writer in the

Gothic genre. From the horrors of yellow fever to disembodied voices,
murder, and Indian captivity, Brown’s works lead the reader through the
twists and turns of the dark side of human nature. While working within
what was, in the late eighteenth century, a mainly European mode of writ-
ing, Brown depicted a uniquely American experience. In his Preface to
his novel Edgar Huntly (1799), Brown wrote that he would replace the
“[p]uerile superstition and exploded manners,” the “Gothic castles and
chimeras” of Europe with “[t]he incidents of Indian hostility, and the
perils of the western wilderness,” which are far more suitable “to create
his American tale.”1
While Brown’s novels are uniquely American, the American landscape
itself, for the most part, plays a minor role in the unfolding drama. Indeed,
with the exception of Edgar Huntly, his novels contain little description
of terrain. When scholars discuss Brown’s landscapes at all, they usually
interpret them in terms of their psychological or mythic elements.2 A
few scholars, such as Ezra Tawil, Kenneth Bernard, Beth Lueck, Dennis
Berthold, and Robert Lawson-Peebles, have recognized the aesthetic
qualities of landscape in Edgar Huntly, offering a fresh look at the work

K. Healey ( )
Department of English, Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 21

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_2
22 K. HEALEY

and artistry of Charles Brockden Brown.3 In this chapter, I argue that

the landscape in Edgar Huntly is central to his novel, but not just on
mythic or psychological levels; the American landscape plays a vital role
in the development of political meaning in his work.4 Brown examines
what James Goho states as central to the American Gothic—he “gives
voice, often in a disfigured and threatening fashion, to those displaced by
the nation, to the anxieties of the nation, and to the fears of the nation”
(Goho 17). Utilizing the imagery of the American landscape popular in
American paintings of the late eighteenth century, Brown, in his novel,
critiques the social and political ideology inherent in those images. In
this way, Brown reveals his vision of the condition of the new nation and
demonstrates that America’s utopian expectations for the future cannot
be achieved.
Born in Philadelphia in 1771, Charles Brockden Brown could not
help being affected by the political climate of the newly born country.5
During the years following the Revolution, the new American nation was
busy constructing a government, society, and culture. This was a time of
great political strife and fear, and also of great hope. As many historians
have noted, the decade of the 1790s was a period of turbulence in which
Federalists and Republicans clashed over the nature of the American
government and the future of the nation.6 Republicans believed in the
idea of humankind’s natural goodness and advocated little government
interference, and many desired that America become an agrarian nation.
Federalists, on the other hand, were not idealistic about human nature.
They believed that humankind and society needed laws and strong gov-
ernment; otherwise, humankind, with its base passions, would run amuck,
anarchy would reign, and society would crumble. As Jay Fliegelman notes,
while Jefferson believed in the power of education, Federalist Adams
feared that “human reason and human conscience are not a match for
human passion, human imagination, and human enthusiasm” (Fliegelman
237). Federalists feared that the forces unleashed during the Revolution
would cause the destruction of the new American Republic. The split
between Federalists and Republicans widened as these fears were com-
pounded after the French Revolution. Once supported and celebrated
by America, the French Revolution turned especially violent and bloody,
filling many Americans with the fear that this type of Revolution would
occur in America. Federalists spoke out against liberal, revolutionary
French ideology; and some Americans voiced fears that the French were
infiltrating America in order to subvert the new nation. Political figures
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 23

friendly toward the French government, including Thomas Jefferson,

were suspect.
Yet at the same time, this era was a time of hope and idealism about
America’s future. While Americans struggled with their national birth
pangs, many believed that America, now politically free from the deca-
dence, oppression, and decay of Europe, might create an ideal society. A
sense of pride devolved upon the American landscape, and it became the
means by which Americans defined their nation and themselves against
Europe. Not only was the American landscape uniquely American, seem-
ingly virgin and innocent, it also offered enormous potential for economic
exploitation no longer viable in Europe. Furthermore, many saw it as
the means by which America might attain a utopian society. As Thomas
Jefferson argued in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), if America
would become a nation of farmers, it would attain political and social
felicity. He notes “[c]orruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a
phaenomenon [sic] of which no age nor nation has furnished an example
… It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in
vigour” (Jefferson 165). Underlying Jefferson’s ideology is the concept
of American independence and individualism. Owning their own land and
working for themselves, he reasoned, farmers are independent, happy, and
virtuous, and thus make the best citizens. In turn, the American nation
itself would thrive because its citizens were virtuous and content. The
domesticated landscape reflected the order and control America had
achieved over the wilderness and, to some extent, the darker forces in
humankind. This ideology of the virtuous farmer shaped America’s devel-
opment of the frontier. Inherent in this belief was a faith in the enlighten-
ment ideals and the principles of the American Revolution (Cohen 88).
Rational, enlightened people would transform the wilderness and insure a
rational, enlightened frontier community. And at the heart of this utopia
was a Republican government, which helped ensure the development of
civilization.
Because the landscape was central to the developing myths and ideal-
ism America had of itself, it is not surprising that the hopes and anxiet-
ies about America’s future came to be embodied in representations of
the American landscape in the years following the Revolution. In both
landscape painting and written descriptions of American landscape dur-
ing this period, images of neat farms, villages, and peaceful rural retreats
are celebrated; houses, barns, roads, mills, fences, bridges, and grazing
livestock are the focal points, demonstrating the virtue and productivity
24 K. HEALEY

of the inhabitants and the righteous, and the wholesome progress of

America’s efforts to tame the landscape. Wilderness scenes were rarely
painted before the nineteenth century and, if they appeared in written
works, they were shown as an evil to be conquered. These descriptions
or paintings of pacific rural villages and prosperous farms demonstrate
the virtue, industry, and tranquility of America. This sight of beneficence,
of peace and plenty, is based upon the belief that the moral, social, and
economic successes of society arise from hard working citizens (Clarke
149). In this sense, as Angela Miller notes, images of the American land-
scape in painting and writing were fraught with meaning, for Americans
were taught to “translate visual elements into social and moral values”
(Miller 80). These images of fenced land, farms, and villages, became
icons representing the height of the moral, social, and political condition
of America.
Paintings such as Ralph Earl’s Daniel Boardman (1789) (Fig. 1) and
Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth (1792) (Fig. 2), convey
images of prosperous America, a land of social harmony, endless oppor-
tunities, and little poverty (Nygren 25). In many of these paintings the
message of America’s progress and civilization is evident in the images of
houses and estates that revealed the success of the American experiment
(Nygren 25).
The paintings of Ralph Earl are especially representative of the ide-
alism embodied in the American landscape. Primarily a portrait painter,
Earl both included regional landscape features in his portraits and painted
landscapes alone. Earl was, in fact, “[o]ne of the first native-born American
artists to focus on regional landscape subjects” (Kornhauser 57). His
Looking East from Denny Hill exemplifies the idea of American progress.
The painting of the town (Leicester, Massachusetts) is a representation of
the eighteenth-century pastoral ideal, with pastures, workers harvesting
hay, and a church steeple in the distance. There is no wilderness to disrupt
the rural scene (Kornhauser et al. 236). The sky is pink and blue, which,
as in his Houses Fronting New Milford Green (1796), conveys a sense of
well-being (Kornhauser et al. 217).
Like his Looking East from Denny Hill, Earl’s painting, Daniel
Boardman (1789) (Fig. 1), exemplifies the values of American democracy,
hard work, and progress. Daniel Boardman, along with his brother, Elijah,
had a partnership in a dry goods store in New Milford, Connecticut, and
also jointly owned a considerable amount of land and real estate in the
town (Kornhauser et al. 152). This portrait, along with one of his brother,
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 25

Fig. 1 Daniel Boardman, 1789 Ralph Earl National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.

represents, among other things, the prosperity of the brothers’ business

partnership. Daniel stands in the foreground while a view of the town
of New Milford is laid out behind him (Kornhauser 47). The predomi-
nant landscape setting of the portrait may symbolize the various properties
Daniel owned at the time his portrait was painted.
26 K. HEALEY

Fig. 2 Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth, 1792 Ralph Earl Courtesy
of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

The painting also represents America as a prosperous, ordered land, a

pastoral ideal. Earl depicts New Milford as a thriving village, with a meet-
ing house and colonial home with fenced yard as focal points in the paint-
ing (Kornhauser et al. 152). The meeting house at the center of the town
seems to represent the heart of a virtuous and thriving community, and
the rightness of democracy. A closer examination of the elements of the
painting further reveals social and political meaning in Earl’s other paint-
ings that I discussed earlier. The landscapes in the paintings are extensively
fenced. According to Graham Clarke, “[t]he fence was not so much to
keep individuals out as to keep wilderness—and chaos—at bay” (Clarke
158). In a sense, these images of the virtue and progress brought to
America through settlement and farming sanctioned westward expansion;
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 27

they reinforced America’s belief in the civilizing power of the pastoral and
promised that utopia could be achieved in the new Republic.
At the same time, these paintings celebrate American democracy, for it
is democracy that is at the very base of the values inherent in the paintings.
This point is especially borne out by Earl’s Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail
Wolcott Ellsworth (Fig. 2). The painting depicts the lawyer, politician,
and Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth and his wife. Through the window
is the Ellsworth home, Elmwood, in Windsor, Connecticut (Kornhauser
et al. 181). Ellsworth sits at a table holding a copy of the Constitution.
Behind Ellsworth are shelves of books denoting his extensive library,
which contained numerous books dealing with law and political philoso-
phy (Kornhauser et al. 181). The house itself is central to the painting
and, therefore, framed as a portrait. Significantly, Ellsworth holds the
Constitution upon which the house itself seems to rest. The painting con-
veys the message that the Constitution, Justice Ellsworth, and the law,
symbolized by the books, uphold the values of land ownership (Clarke
159). The iconology in this painting is clear: the virtue, prosperity, and
order of American society rests upon democracy, law, and the enlightened
ideals of the Revolution. This iconology sanctioned westward expansion
and American frontier policy, while also defining America as distinct and
unique from the poverty, decadence, and political despotism of the “Old
World.”
The relationship between visual and written landscapes is one that
Brown and many of his contemporaries would have understood. An
educated writer, especially one who traveled, Brown would have known
the vogue for the picturesque way of seeing the landscape.7 The pictur-
esque traveler is one who has learned—by examining landscape paint-
ings, through reading aesthetic treatises on landscape composition, or
by reading landscape poetry—how to “see” landscapes in terms of paint-
ings, especially the works of Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, and Nicolas
Poussin. Even if a landscape did not actually look like a Claude or Salvator
painting, an observer with a picturesque eye could, in writing or painting
and sketching, manipulate the scene to create a composed pictorial whole.
One of the most influential figures in the development of the pictur-
esque way of seeing, both in England and America, was William Gilpin.
By the mid-eighteenth century, beginning with his work A Dialogue
Upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable The Lord Viscount at Stow in
Buckinghamshire (1748), Gilpin helped create a vocabulary by which to
describe actual landscapes. Gilpin added the “picturesque” to the aesthetic
28 K. HEALEY

categories of the sublime and the beautiful. A picturesque landscape was

one which combined the roughness of the sublime with the smooth and
gentle imagery of the beautiful. It had qualities of roughness, variation,
contrasts, and irregular surfaces (Hipple 194–195). Gilpin’s “picturesque”
helped an English audience see landscape in a new way and to appreci-
ate English scenery rather than the scenery depicted in Italian paintings
(Hussey 89).
Gilpin’s works became influential in America by the end of the
eighteenth century. His treatises were available in America, as extracts
reprinted in magazines and in full, book-length form, by the 1790s. The
New York Magazine or Literary Repository even published, in its entirety,
Gilpin’s Essay on Picturesque Travel (Robertson 189).8 Gilpin helped to
give young America a new way of seeing and describing its developing
landscape.
Larry Kutchen, Ezra Tawil, Dennis Berthold, Beth Lueck, Kenneth
Bernard, and Robert Lawson-Peebles have ably demonstrated Brown’s
knowledge of the visual arts and his use of aesthetic techniques in his
novels. Articles on the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime, as well
as picturesque travel, the application of techniques of landscape painting
in writing, and the discussion of elements in landscape paintings, such
as water, are evident in various issues of two of the magazines Brown
edited, The Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1799–1800) and
The Literary Magazine, and American Register (1803–1808). Many or all
of these articles are believed to have been written by Brown, who wrote
a great deal of the material in his magazines. In an article entitled “On a
Taste for the Picturesque,” which appeared in the Monthly Magazine and
American Review in July 1800, the author, probably Brown, describes the
connection between the picturesque way of seeing, picturesque travel, and
landscape painting:

To examine with a picturesque-discerning and cause-inquiring eye, every

scene that really occurs; to ponder in a like manner on the landscapes of
painters and picturesque travelers, many of whom delineate and describe
at the same time, seems to be the best mode of opening, in your breast,
this source of high and beneficial pleasure (Brown, “On a Taste for the
Picturesque” 13).9

Earlier in the same article, Brown also reveals his knowledge of specific
artists and aestheticians:
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 29

I know of but one writer any ways eminent for displaying the principles of
landscape; I mean Mr. Gilpin, whose works ought to be perfectly familiar
to every mind endowed with virtuous propensities and true taste. There is
another set of writers who are, in some sense, to be regarded as commenta-
tors upon Gilpin; who have traveled and written books for little other pur-
pose than to deduce the application of the principles of this kind of beauty
and to furnish out such a set of pictures in words, as Verney, Claude, and
Salvator exhibited on canvas (Brown, “On a Taste for the Picturesque” 12).

In his novel Edgar Huntly, Brown works within the conventions of the
travel-narrative genre as well as the Gothic as a means to sketch and define
the character of the young American nation. Brown’s narrator, Edgar
Huntly, is indeed a traveler, wandering through the American wilder-
ness in search of picturesque views.10 As scholars such as Alan Lloyd-
Smith, Bernice Murphy, David Mogen, Scott Saunders, and Joanne
B. Karpinski in their edited work Frontier Gothic have noted, the wilder-
ness in the American experience especially lent itself to the Gothic mode.
Frightening, confusing, overwhelming, and seemingly teeming with evil,
the wilderness was “a profoundly American symbol of an ambiguous
relationship to the land, of an alienation that was first articulated when,
in the words of Peter N. Carroll, the Puritans perceived ‘beneath the
florid plenty of the new world … The devil lurking in the wilderness’”
(Mogen, Saunders, and Karpiniski 20). The Gothic wilderness was an
ideal landscape for Brown to examine and critique the American experi-
ence and express the culture’s anxieties about political and social stabil-
ity. Its chaos and inexplicability contrasted with the utopian idealism of
the new Republic. Bernice Murphy argues that the Gothic was the per-
fect genre to examine America, for there is an “inherent contradiction
between everything the United States as a nation believed itself to be—a
rational, secular, utopian society—and the characteristics of irrationality,
disorder and chaos” (Murphy 4).
Brown’s narrator, Edgar Huntly, is both Gothic adventurer and pictur-
esque traveler. Like contemporary picturesque travelers, he describes the
landscape pictorially, in the language of landscape paintings. Utilizing the
images of America represented in American paintings and literature of the
post-revolutionary period, as well as the picturesque and Gothic conven-
tions, Brown demonstrates that because of human nature, political and
social utopia cannot be achieved. As Edgar Huntly progresses, the land-
scape is transformed into a Gothic nightmare. Despite America’s belief in
30 K. HEALEY

its progress and virtue, the darkness and unintelligibility often ascribed to
the wilderness they hope to subdue is still within them; the taming of the
wilderness cannot insure a virtuous republic. This is not to say that Brown
did not believe in westward expansion, but that he critiqued the idealism
behind that movement.11
Scholars have traditionally viewed Brown as a radical and a utopianist
who became more conservative after he married and joined his broth-
ers’ mercantile business.12 Brown was interpreted as a radical during his
early years because of his interest in the works and philosophy of William
Godwin and the radical ideals he put forth in his utopian treatise, Alcuin.
Yet there is much evidence to suggest that Brown was more conserva-
tive during the 1790s, not a liberal Godwinian.13 As Cathy Davidson has
suggested, although Brown draws on Godwin’s utopia in Alcuin, it is
never affirmed in the treatise. Davidson argues “neither participant in the
debate agrees with Godwin, and any other conveniently available radical
utopia would have served Brown’s purposes as well as Godwin’s ideas
did. Such observations suggest that Brown employed the dialogue form
to explore ideas, not to advance or to substantiate them” (Davidson 82).
Furthermore, Brown has been noted as a Federalist by the late 1790s. In
a letter to Reverend Jedidiah Morse dated April 3, 1799, the Reverend
Samuel Miller—a member, with Brown and other intellectuals, of the
Friendly Club14—writes of Brown’s editorship of the Monthly Magazine
and American Review and notes: “You may, I believe, fully confide in
him as a federalist. Of his learning and taste, there can be no question.”15
Although the Reverend Miller’s letter notes Brown’s conservatism in
1799, there is no reason to believe that Brown became a Federalist over-
night; instead, if he did move towards conservatism at all, it was prob-
ably a gradual change over a number of years. Brown himself echoed the
Federalist pessimism about human nature in his address at the conception
of the Belles Lettres Club––a literary club formed by Brown and some
friends in 1786.16 Here, Brown delineates the difficulty, because of human
nature, of creating a perfect society:

The idea of a perfect commonwealth is not the same extravagant thing in

education as in politics. The settled depravity of mankind, will never yield
to the gentle admonitions of the wise, and the stubborn and inveterate
prejudices of the vulgar will be always hostile to the kindly influence of good
government. (qtd. in Dunlap, I, 24)
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 31

Years later, in a column in the Monthly Magazine and American Review

attributed to Brown, “The Speculatist,” he reflects similar sentiments:
“Man, at present, is debased by error, and society convulsed by tempes-
tuous passions, which it is the direct tendency of present institutions to
foster and inflame” (Brown, “The Speculatist” 258).17
This reflects what Eric Savoy states is “the essentially conservative
nature of Brown’s American Gothic. By raising doubts about the ability
of individuals to govern themselves in a full-fledged democracy, Brown
participates in Alexander Hamilton’s state-oriented Federalist skepti-
cism about the realizability of Thomas Jefferson’s confidence in suppos-
edly ‘free individualism’” (Savoy 175). For Brown, the inherent flaws of
human nature limit the ability to create a utopian society. The inexpli-
cability and passion of human nature which lurks beneath the veneer of
social order and rationality is also evident in Brown’s Gothic fiction. It is
Brown’s insight into and trepidation about human nature that leads him
to deconstruct the utopian ideals many Americans held about the nation’s
“civilizing mission” on the frontier.
Scholars have long noted the “Americanness” of Edgar Huntly, partic-
ularly because of the wilderness landscapes which dominate the novel. By
emphasizing the American landscape and the American experience, Brown
defined what he believed to be the condition of the young Republic. His
political meaning is compounded when one considers the symbolic aspect
of the landscape. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds notes that the Gothicism in
Edgar Huntly “grows out of the landscape forever impenetrable” (109). As
noted earlier, to many early European settlers the wilderness represented
the uncontrollable forces in nature. The wilderness, like the labyrinths of
the European Gothic, was perceived to be full of danger, darkness, and
confusion. The chaos and seemingly impenetrable darkness of the wilder-
ness can lead to physical as well as psychological confusion and loss. For
as numerous critics have argued, the landscape in Edgar Huntly is sym-
bolic of the psychological state of the narrator, Edgar Huntly.18 In a sense,
Huntly is a representative American, the new American living on the
fringes of the frontier and civilizing the wilderness. If the landscape in the
novel on some level symbolizes Huntly’s psychological and moral state,
then it must, by extension, also be representative of the national condi-
tion. For, as Carol Margaret Davison argues, “Brown’s most consistent
sleight of hand in his Gothic national allegories involved probing and
exposing the human/American psyche, what might be called the wilder-
32 K. HEALEY

ness of self” (111). What Huntly learns during his adventure is that the
wilderness does indeed lurk within him. The horror and confusion of
the Gothic wilderness is the horror and confusion within Huntly and, by
extension, the new Republic.
Huntly, in every respect, appears to be the civilized American, the indi-
vidual who will bring virtue and progress to the wilderness. In his let-
ters to his fiancée, Mary Waldegrave, which comprise the novel, Huntly
paints himself as a highly sensitive man who is often moved to tears in
sympathy with the sufferings of his fellow human beings. Benevolence in
the eighteenth century was believed to be a sign of an individual’s highly
developed sense of morality; and true to the part of the “man of feeling,”
Huntly expounds on his feelings of benevolence for the unhappy Clithero
Edny. Furthermore, Huntly plays the part of the “civilized” picturesque
traveler, an individual with taste and sense developed enough to enjoy
scenery and nature. Finally, he often boasts of “the mildness of my habits,
my antipathy to scenes of violence and bloodshed, my unacquaintance with
the use of fire-arms” (EH 193), believing himself to be above the darker
passions which he sees ruling the Native Americans whom he abhors. Yet,
as the novel progresses, the values of eighteenth-century Reason collapse
beneath the Gothic elements of dark passion and chaos.
Although the bulk of Edgar Huntly takes place in the wilderness, it is
a wilderness that, in the initial chapters, appears placid and tamed. While
Huntly’s hometown is Solebury, Pennsylvania, he enjoys excursions into
the woods nearby in an area called Norwalk. Huntly mentions that nei-
ther Indians nor dangerous animals, such as panthers, have been seen in
the area for some time, having been driven far west or destroyed by the
settlers. It is a landscape in which all that is fearful in nature seems to be
domesticated, a landscape in which Huntly, even as a child, felt free to
wander in search of picturesque scenes. As Dennis Berthold has noted,
Norwalk lies on the fringes of the frontier. Houses, farms, and villages are
not far from the Huntly farm (Berthold 73). Norwalk is rugged, but is
not like the wilderness beyond it (Berthold 74). Yet it is this very appear-
ance of civilization that makes the Gothic horror of Edgar Huntly more
real. As Huntly appears to be the rational, civilized American, in control
of his darkest impulses, so too does the landscape appear to be tamed and
controlled. It is no coincidence that Huntly is a sleepwalker. As Valdine
Clemens states, “Goya’s eighteenth-century dictum that ‘the sleep of
reason breeds monsters’ could be rephrased into the Gothic recognition
that reason (or excessive rationality) itself is a form of sleep or unaware-
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 33

ness” (5). It is this sleep that “breeds monsters” (5) in the chaos and
savagism of Huntly and the landscape itself.
As the wilderness appears to be civilized by farming and hunting,
Huntly also attempts to subdue the fearful in the landscape through his
picturesque gaze. What may actually be dangerous and terrifying in the
wilderness, Huntly translates into a vision which is aesthetic, pleasing, and
tame:

It would not be easy to describe the face of this district in a few words.
Half of Solebury, thou knowest, admits neither of plough nor spade. The
cultivable space lies along the river, and the desert, lying on the north, has
gained, by some means, the apellation of Norwalk. Canst thou imagine a
space, somewhat circular, about six miles in diameter, and exhibiting a per-
petual and intricate variety of craggy eminences and deep dells.
The hollows are single, and walled around by cliffs, ever varying in shape
and height, and have seldom any perceptible communication with each
other. These hollows are of all dimensions, from the narrowness and depth
of a well, to the amplitude of one hundred yards. … The streams that burst
forth from every crevice, are thrown, by the irregularities of the surface,
into numberless cascades, often disappear in mists or in chasms, and emerge
from subterranean channels, and, finally, either subside into lakes, or quietly
meander through the lower and more level grounds.
Wherever nature left a flat it is made rugged and scarcely passable by
enormous and fallen trunks, accumulated by the storm of ages, and form-
ing, by their slow decay, a moss covered soil, the haunt of rabbets [sic]
and lizards. These spots are obscured by the melancholy umbrage of pines,
whose eternal murmurs are in unison with vacancy and solitude, with the
reverberations of the torrents and the whistling of the blasts.
A sort of continued vale, winding and abrupt, leads into the midst of
this region and through it. This vale serves the purpose of a road. (EH 96)

Huntly’s construction of the landscape in this passage is clearly based upon

Gilpin’s picturesque way of seeing, discussed earlier. Although Huntly
describes the terrain as rugged, full of roughness and variation, possibly
even danger, he creates, through his way of seeing, a pleasing picture of
the wilderness. Thus, Huntly gives what is wild and unknowable meaning
and domesticates the landscape.19
Yet Huntly’s attempt at civilizing the landscape is only a construction
of balance and control, for in actuality the danger and fearful elements of
the natural world still exist. Beneath the appearance of ordered, aestheti-
34 K. HEALEY

cally pleasing, and benign landscapes lies the uncontrollable, dark side of
nature. While following Clithero into a cave in the wilderness, Huntly
constructs a bridge to cross a chasm and is nearly destroyed:

I passed through the cave and reached the bridge which my own ingenu-
ity had formed. At that moment, torrents of rain poured from above, and
stronger blasts thundered amidst these desolate recesses and profound
chasms. Instead of lamenting the prevalence of this tempest, I now began
to regard it with pleasure. It conferred new forms of sublimity and grandeur
on this scene.
As I crept with hands and feet, along my imperfect bridge, a sudden gust
had nearly whirled me into the frightful abyss below. (EH 122)

In this passage, Huntly describes an aesthetically pleasing landscape

using the picturesque and the sublime reminiscent of the scenes painted
by Salvatore Rosa. Because Huntly has learned to control the landscape
through his vision, transforming it into a pleasing picture, the terrain he
describes is not frightening and wild, but it seems benign. In a sense,
Brown rewrites the Gothic; the power of Huntly’s picturesque gaze gives
a sense of power over the terrifying forces of nature, making it seem
domesticated.
Yet clearly, despite the fact that the landscape seems domesticated, the
danger of the wilderness still lurks there. The forces which settlers like
Huntly believe to be controlled remain; in the cave, Huntly is twice faced
with panthers, and later in the novel he discovers the settlements have
been raided by Indians. As Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock notes, the Indians
in Edgar Huntly are “living extensions of the threat of the wilderness”
(43). Beneath the veneer of the control of the picturesque, the forces
of nature threaten. Brown uses American Gothic tropes such as the fear
of captivity, the cave, Native Americans, and threatening wild animals to
show that, despite appearances and the rational mind’s belief in its power
to overcome the chaos in nature and the self, the uncontrollable seethes
close to the surface. Brown’s use of the Native American clearly drives
home this point. David Punter argues that the Gothic in America has
at its heart “real terrors about the indigene—terrors probably neutral-
ized over many decades of colonization in the ‘above-ground’ world, but
still, as Gothic is bound to remind us, fully active in the underworld”
(“Gothic, Theory, Drama” 17). The Native American represented all that
was uncontrollable and chaotic to the Euro-Americans of the eighteenth
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 35

and nineteenth centuries. Those forces, believed to be eradicated, are sim-

ply driven underground.
If the landscape in Edgar Huntly is symbolic of the interior landscape of
Huntly himself, then Brown’s depiction of the scenery raises some inter-
esting questions about the moral condition of humankind, and especially
American idealism about the westward movement. As noted earlier, the
Gothic as a genre focuses on and reveals the political and social anxieties
of the culture as well as the nature of evil. Brown depicts the reality of the
new American Republic founded on the tenets of Democracy and Reason.
For Huntly himself appears to be the picture of balance, a civilized man
who enjoys nature and has the darker recesses of his psyche within control.
Yet what Huntly discovers about himself, and what Brown reveals about
humanity, is that hidden beneath the mask of civilization lie the wilder
forces of nature which modern individuals believed to be eradicated. After
what seems to be a night of fitful dreams, Huntly awakens in a pitch dark
cave, totally bereft of a sense of time and points of reference. The cave is
like the Gothic tomb, and Huntly is forced to confront the uncontrolled
passion and chaos within himself. Once the epitome of the rational man,
Huntly now imagines himself the victim of some evil entity, left to die
in the depths of the cave. Overcome with hunger, Huntly, the man who
abhors bloodshed, is filled with bloodthirsty passion:

My hunger speedily became ferocious. I tore the linen of my shirt between

my teeth and swallowed the fragments. I felt a strong propensity to bite the
flesh from my arm. My heart overflowed with cruelty, and I pondered the
delight I should experience in rending some living animal to pieces, and
drinking its blood and grinding its quivering fibres between my teeth. (EH
164)

Despite all of his pretensions of being a civilized man, Huntly finds himself
as much prey to the forces of nature as the animals in the wild. The cave
acts as a womb from which Huntly emerges a new man. Eventually, he
kills and eats a panther and, on his way back to his home, kills a number
of Indians. His parents and a sibling had died in an Indian raid some years
before, and believing the present Indian raid had destroyed the rest of his
family, Huntly is filled with “a spirit vengeful, unrelenting, and ferocious”
(EH 192). The Gothic horror of Edgar Huntly is that a man who is
seemingly so rational becomes overwhelmed with the darker passions of
his nature. David Punter calls this “the dethronement of Reason” (The
36 K. HEALEY

Literature of Terror 193). Brown uses Gothic tropes to overturn his age’s
belief in the power of reason over baser instincts and shows that, under
the right circumstances, humans easily lose their rationalism and control.
As all four of Brown’s major novels demonstrate, the human psyche is
complex and inexplicable. The very image of sleepwalking—the phenom-
enon to which both Huntly and Clithero are victim—reveals how little
human beings know of their own actions.20 After killing several Indians,
Huntly reflects that “All my education and the habits of my life tended to
unfit me for a contest and scene like this” (EH 192). What Brown reveals,
then, is that despite education and moral upbringing, the darker, unknown
elements of the psyche cannot be eradicated. Huntly believed himself to
be morally superior to the Native Americans, whom he describes both as
savages and in terms of the romantic “Noble Savage.”21 Yet, ironically, as
Huntly wanders through the wilderness, trying to find his way home, he
is accosted by a search party who shoot at him, believing he is an Indian.
The civilized man has become what he most hates and fears; the savage
passion he sees in the Indian also resides in himself.22
Brown drives home his point even further in his depiction of the Selby
farm, which Huntly encounters on his way out of the wilderness. From
the Gothic chaos and horror of the wilderness, Huntly finds “a fenced
field and corn stack” (EH 226). The Selby farm appears to be the picture
of order and rural happiness on the frontier, an icon of the domesticated
wilderness:

Meanwhile I looked up at the house. It was the model of cleanliness and

comfort. It was built of wood; but the materials had undergone the plane,
as well as the axe and had sashes, but these sashes were supplied, contrary
to custom, with glass … The door had not only all its parts entire, but was
embellished with moulding and a pediment. (EH 226)

Huntly’s description is a neatly framed picture of tidy meadows and fields

laid out before a sturdy and attractive American farmhouse. The Selby
farm is the image of the American ideal of progress and virtue expressed
in the paintings of Ralph Earl discussed earlier in this chapter. The well-
fenced Selby land implies the order and control that they have over the
landscape and reflects their thrift and own sense of personal orderliness.
Huntly emphasizes his belief in the virtue of the Selbys by noting, “I
gathered from these tokens that this was the abode not only of rural
competence and innocence, but of some beings, raised by education and
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 37

fortune, above the intellectual mediocrity of clowns” (EH 226). Like the
landscapes in the Earl paintings, the farm is neatly fenced, with a well-built
home supposedly reflecting the industry and moral fiber of its inhabitants.
In every respect the description of this farm reflects the civilizing effects of
American settlement in the wilderness.
Yet what lurks beneath the orderly American farmhouse is the Gothic
landscape of the dark side of human nature. As Brown has demonstrated
in his major novels, appearances are deceiving, for the inhabitants of the
Selby farm are not what the image of the farm suggests. Upon enter-
ing the house, Huntly sees a home in disarray, with dishes broken and
a fire recently put out in the middle of the floor. Huntly enters a nearby
room and disturbs the sleeping Mr. Selby. Rather than finding the rational,
educated individual that he expects, he is accosted with “the accents of
drunkenness” that “denoted a wild and ruffian life” (EH 228). The man,
in his drunken rage, threatens to cut his wife’s throat. The condition of
the Selby home and its inhabitant “were little in unison with the external
appearances of the mansion” (EH 228). Huntly later discovers Mrs. Selby
and her baby in the barn, driven out of the house by the drunken husband
and father.
As Huntly flees the Selby home, he is faced with a landscape more ter-
rifying than any he has seen before. Brown uses Gothic tropes of murder,
darkness, and confusion to show the true nature of the American experi-
ment. The terror of the wilderness envelopes the scene as Huntly finds
“the corse [sic] of a girl, mangled by an hatchet [sic]” with “her head
gory and deprived of its locks” and the body of a murdered Indian in a
meadow not far from the Selby farm (EH 230). Yet the horror and brutal-
ity that Huntly sees in the meadow and attributes to the wilderness resides
also within the walls of the farmhouse. The American dream has become
the American nightmare, where the dark side of humanity lurks within all
individuals, despite appearances. The well-fenced lands here have not held
the forces of wilderness at bay. In the image of the Selby farm and the real-
ity of its inhabitants’ existence, Brown reveals the hollowness behind the
idealism of a rural utopia and, by extension, the newly formed American
democracy. Brown invokes the image of an American pastoral utopia
celebrated in contemporary paintings and then deconstructs that image
through Gothic imagery, thus confounding his readers’ expectations and
revealing that a landscape of ordered farms does not necessarily denote an
ideal society or people.
38 K. HEALEY

Brown demonstrates this point further by contrasting the image of

the Selby farm with a dwelling which Huntly stumbles upon in his quest
through the wilderness. This dwelling, Deb’s Hut—coincidently the
dwelling of a Native American—blends in with the wilderness which sur-
rounds it; it is the very image of wildness, poverty, and neglect:

This dwelling was suited to the poverty and desolation which surrounded
it. It consisted of a few unhewn logs laid upon each other, to the height of
eight or ten feet, including a quadrangular space of similar dimensions, and
covered by thatch. There was no window, light being sufficiently admitted
into the crevices between the logs … Somewhat like a chimney, built of
half-burnt bricks, was perceived at one corner. The door was fastened by a
leathern thong, tied to a peg. (EH 183)

Deb’s Hut contrasts starkly with the order, cleanliness, and respect-
able appearance of the Selby farm. Considering the idealism inscribed in
the images of neat farmhouses and fertile fields, the contrast is ironic.
Although Huntly—and perhaps Brown’s readers—expected the Selbys to
be the image of rural felicity and the owner of Deb’s Hut to be rude and
uncivilized, there is no difference. Brown makes this point further, con-
sidering that Deb’s Hut is owned by “Old Deb,” a Native American. The
equation of Native Americans with all that is dark, fearful, and uncontrol-
lable in the American Gothic gives deeper meaning to the image of the
hut. Despite America’s belief in the power of Reason, “civilization” has
not eradicated the wilderness in humanity.
This is not to say, however, that Brown indicates all settlers are brutes.
At a dwelling before he reaches the Selbys, Huntly finds a house “small
and as low, but its wall consisted of boards. A window of four panes admit-
ted the light, and a chimney of brick, well burnt, and neatly arranged,
peeped over the roof” (EH 205). This home does not appear as civilized
as the home of the Selbys, but here Huntly finds a woman and her chil-
dren and is treated with kindness. Yet, considering Huntly’s transforma-
tion from an apparently civilized man to one driven by passions, Brown
seems to be saying that the potential for darkness still lurks beneath the
surface, waiting for the right circumstances to appear.
The Gothic as a genre helps to reveal what humanity would like to
keep underground, what they deny. It brings to light the passions and
corruption, the hidden sins and dark recesses of individuals and culture as
a whole. These repressed dark shadows of self and culture are writ large
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 39

on the psychic, social, political, and physical landscapes in Gothic fiction.

This is evident in Edgar Huntly, where the fears and anxieties of the new
American Republic are drawn on both the wilderness and apparently
tamed landscape of Pennsylvania. What Charles Brockden Brown reveals
through the Gothic is that the idealism surrounding the new American
Republic, idealism about the nation’s quest to tame the wilderness and
build an empire of virtuous individuals, is impossible because of the dark
nature of human beings. This idealism was reflected in the images of the
landscape in many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American
painters. These utopian images of farms and villages dotting and contain-
ing a once uncontrollable, wild land affirmed the young nation’s hopes
that the dark and uncontrollable aspects of human nature had been con-
trolled as well. The Gothic shows us the truth that lies beneath the surface;
Brown’s Gothic landscapes undercut the idealism inherent in the popular
images of paintings of his time, demonstrating that the icons of an ordered
society are false representations of rationalism, order, and control. At the
same time, he critiques the belief that America can create a utopia in the
developing frontier. Lurking under the surface of rationalism and civiliza-
tion within humanity lie the darkness, passion, and incomprehensibility of
the Gothic wilderness, making the formation of a utopia impossible. As
Edgar Huntly exclaims toward the end of his narrative, “Disastrous and
humiliating is the state of man! By his own hands is constructed the mass
of misery and error in which his steps are forever involved” (EH 278).

NOTES
1. Charles Brockden Brown (1984) Edgar Huntly or Memoirs of a
Sleepwalker 3. All further references to this text will be indicated by
the initials “EH” in the body of the paper.
2. See Bernard (1964); Slotkin (1981); Fiedler (1966); Toles (1973);
Grabo (1981).
3. See Tawil (2006); Bernard (1964); Berthold (1984); Lueck
(1987); Lawson-Peebles (1988) 231–262. Kutchen (2001) dis-
cusses aesthetics and landscape in Brown’s Wieland.
4. See also Mogen, Sanders, and Karpinski (1993); Hinds (1993)
“Charles Brockden Brown and the Frontiers of Discourse”; Goho
(2014); Carol Margaret Davison (2013) 110–123.
5. For a discussion of the effects of the political tensions of the 1790s
on Brown’s works, see Kafer (2004); Kamrath (2010); Hinds
40 K. HEALEY

(1993) “Charles Brockden Brown’s Revenge Tragedy: Edgar

Huntly and the Uses of Property”; Samuels (1990); Jared Gardner
(1994) “Alien Nation: Edgar Huntly’s Savage Awakening.”
6. See Smelzer (1951); Wills (1981); Kerber (1970).
7. See also Barbier (1963); Berthold (1984) 67.
8. The same article also appeared in Brown’s (June1806) The Literary
Magazine and American Register, 163–65. Among other articles
appearing in The Monthly Magazine and American Review and The
Literary Magazine and American Register believed to be written
by Brown on aesthetics are “On the Picturesque” (July 1800),
“Use of Water in Landscape” (August 1806), “Distinctions
Between the Beautiful and the Picturesque” (June 1806), and
“Moral and Physical Sublimity Compared” (May 1806). Lueck
(1987) and Berthold (1984) include detailed discussions of
Brown’s knowledge of aesthetics and the content of articles on
aesthetics in his magazines.
9. Bernard (1964) argues that Brown in actuality had no ability to
describe scenes picturesquely or observe nature closely, as borne
out by his own writing. Bernard cites a letter Brown supposedly
wrote during a trip to Rockaway, NY, which was published in
William Dunlap’s The Life of Charles Brockden Brown and also in
one of Brown’s literary magazines. Much of Brown’s other per-
sonal writing while traveling—cited also in Dunlap’s The Life of
Charles Brockden Brown and evident in Brown’s personal letters—
refutes this argument.
10. Lueck (1987) argues that Huntly is a picturesque traveler, questing
through the American wilderness in search of picturesque views.
Yet while picturesque travel is safe and viable in England and
Europe, it is not realistic in the American wilderness, which is
fraught with danger.
11. Jared Gardner (1994) also notes that one of the concerns of Edgar
Huntly is Manifest Destiny.
12. Brown’s twentieth-century biographers, Warfel (1949) and Clark
(1952), both depict Brown as a liberal and a radical. A stimulating
article that defines the meaning of the word “liberal” in the eigh-
teenth century, and places Brown’s shift to conservatism earlier
than once believed, is Berthoff’s (1966) “Brockden Brown: The
Politics of the Man of Letters.” Levine (2008) argues that Brown
did not experience a large shift from Republican to Federalist,
 DARK SHADOWS IN THE PROMISED LAND: LANDSCAPES OF TERROR... 41

while Downes (1996) finds that Brown does not promote either
ideology.
13. Clemit (1993), for example, sees Brown as a conservative who
actually inverts Godwin’s ideas. Clemit notes: “in opposition to
Godwin’s exploration of the intrusion of government into private
life, Brown is preoccupied with how people might behave in a
world without institutional restraints.” (109)
14. Warfel (1949), in his discussion of the members of the Friendly
Club in his biography of Brown, states that William Dunlap noted
that the membership included the Reverend Samuel Miller, author
of A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century. For further discus-
sion of the members of the Friendly Club, see James E. Cronin
(1949), William Dunlap and Elihu Hubbard Smith (1973).
15. Letter written by Reverend Samuel Miller (1799) to Jedidiah
Morse, April 3, 1799. Located in the Morse Family Papers,
Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. I would like to
thank the staff of the Manuscripts and Archives Department for
allowing me access to this letter. Arner also mentions this letter in
a footnote, p. 296.
16. Clark (1952) states that the Belles Lettres Society lasted from
1786–1793.
17. Brown further wrote of the danger of human passions in his short
story “Thessalonica: A Roman Story” (1799), which also appeared
in the Monthly Magazine and American Review. Brown describes
how a society is destroyed because of mob action. A man named
Macro attempts to enter the theater by an entrance saved only for
the Senators. He is stopped by two soldiers, a fight ensues, and he
is wounded. The crowd, in reaction to Macro’s injury, explodes in
fury, and the soldiers kill several more people in defense. Brown’s
depiction of the people’s reactions to the soldiers is total anarchy,
reminiscent of descriptions of the French Revolution.
18. See Grabo (1981); Ringe (1966) Charles Brockden Brown; Ringe
(1972) “Charles Brockden Brown” in Major Writers of Early
American Literature; Hughes (1973); Toles (1981); Axelrod
(1983).
19. Fabricant (1985) and Meyers (1986) also discuss subduing the
landscape through the viewer’s artistic gaze.
20. See Christopherson (1993); Murison (2009).
42 K. HEALEY

21. Kimball (1967) also argues that Brown extends his definition of
“savage” to the white race in Edgar Huntly. He notes that in his
translation of Volney, Brown laments “what a mistaken notion that
cruelty prevails only among hunting tribes, and that posterity will
cease to be governed by the same ferocious passions, or prompted
by the same excesses” (220).
22. It is not my intention to argue that Brown was sympathetic toward
Native Americans or that his view of them was ahead of its time.
Krause (1984) in his “Introduction” has demonstrated that Brown
had “Indian-phobic” tendencies, citing Brown’s translation of
Volney’s A View of the Soil and Climate of the United States of
America as being laced with racist comments. Kazanjian (2001)
discusses Brown’s treatment of Native Americans in Memoirs of
Carwin. Discussions of Brown’s view of Native Americans in
Edgar Huntly include Krause (1994) “Penn’s Elm and Edgar
Huntly: Dark ‘Instructions to the Heart’” and Gardner (1994)
“Alien Nation: Edgar Huntly’s Savage Awakening.” For further
discussions of Brown’s treatment of Native Americans, see
Weinstock (2013); Goho (2014); Gardner (1994) Master Plots:
Race and the Founding of an American Literature; Levine (2008).

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Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. “American Monsters.” Crow 41–55. Print.
Wills, Garry. Explaining America: The Federalist. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1981. Print.
 Haunting Landscapes in “Female Gothic”
Thriller Films: From Alfred Hitchcock
to Orson Welles

Sheri Chinen Biesen

The treacherous iconography of Gothic landscapes was a recurring visual

motif in “female Gothic” thriller films inspired by roman noir literature.
Alfred Hitchcock’s and Orson Welles’s haunting female Gothic suspense
thrillers reimagined perilous landscapes on screen in evocative chiaroscuro
film noir style. French critics praised Hollywood film noir as “black film”
or “dark cinema” in shadowy crime films that influenced the shrouded
cinematic landscapes in female Gothic screen thrillers. The evolution and
innovation of Gothic landscapes reflected social, historical, technological,
and cultural changes across evolving eras with the onset—and eventual
end—of World War II in shifting from prewar to wartime to postwar pro-
duction and reception contexts, as well as across artistic genres. This chap-
ter examines the dangerous haunted landscapes in atmospheric female
Gothic thriller film adaptations, in traditional Gothics such as William
Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (1939), Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn
(1939), and Orson Welles’s design and production of Jane Eyre (1944),
while also investigating how the Gothic is adapted to film and the twen-
tieth century in 1940s noir cinema such as Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940),
Suspicion (1941), Spellbound (1945), and Notorious (1946); Welles’s The
Stranger (1946); and Joseph H. Lewis’s My Name is Julia Ross (1945).

S. Chinen Biesen ()

Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 47

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_3
48 S. CHINEN BIESEN

Most significantly, these latter four refashioned expressionistic Gothic

landscapes to articulate wartime and postwar cultural anxieties.
Gothic landscapes in Wuthering Heights, Jamaica Inn, Jane Eyre, and
Rebecca showcased eerie mansions—such as Wuthering Heights, Jamaica
Inn, Thornfield, and Manderley—perched high atop the intimidating
crags and moors or harsh coastlines where raging seas, high cliffs, and
the macabre architectural structures themselves endanger lives, as spirits
haunt the mysterious terrain, sinister manors, and their possessed inhab-
itants. Ominous Gothic landscapes in Wuthering Heights, Jamaica Inn,
Jane Eyre, and Rebecca visualized dysfunctional sexual relationships, mari-
tal infidelity, domestic love triangles, murder, and supernatural elements,
including a deceased (or entrapped) female object of desire.
The howling, windswept landscape of stormy moors and mysterious
dark romantic undertones of haunted mansions in traditional Gothic
roman noir narratives, like Wuthering Heights, and the climactic fiery
inferno of Jane Eyre’s ghostly Gothic castle Thornfield (its name con-
noting a harsh, threatening landscape) influenced the evocative spirit of
Rebecca and its ethereal Manderley, which seemed to recall the landscapes
and iconography of earlier Gothic novels and their troubled, ghoulish
great houses. In Wuthering Heights Olivier portrayed tormented, Gothic
homme fatal, antihero Heathcliff—the name itself suggesting the turbu-
lent, desolate moors where, under the stormy skies, he is pelted by rain
while searching for his lost and unattainable love Cathy (Merle Oberon)—
and then reprised a similar disturbed, menacing Gothic romantic lover/
spouse, Maxim in Rebecca.
As with traditional Gothics on film (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre,
Jamaica Inn), “female Gothic” roman noir thriller films addressed fears
about or of women through misogynistic husbands, especially during
World War II. By the end of the war, Gothic screen villains eventually
transformed into films about awful husbands who were Nazis, in cinematic
narratives that specifically transpired in the context of ominous Gothic
landscapes: the mansion, the home, and natural settings (what they contain
and what they represent). For instance, rugged Cornwall coastlines and
dark, menacing mansions take on vivid lives of their own in Hitchcock’s
film adaptations of Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novels Jamaica Inn and
Rebecca, while becoming a mysterious site of danger, passion, and murder.
Behind the scenes, British filmmaker Hitchcock’s cultural and historical
material, and geographic production landscape changed and evolved as he
directed Jamaica Inn in England just before the outbreak of the Second
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 49

World War in Europe. Visual and aural cinematic techniques in noir-styled

female Gothic thriller films recreated the landscapes, and their symbolic
and visceral effects, of traditional Gothics onscreen. At the same time,
strong, intrepid Gothic heroines struggled with more contemporary forms
of domestic imprisonment, as earlier Gothic oppressions were updated to
depict modern settings and the problems that twentieth-century career
women experienced; most specifically, the anxiety of Rosie the Riveter
being forced back into the home. Thus, these mid-century Gothic films
provided an extension of the traditional Gothic landscape of the home,
haunted castle, or isolation in a remote mansion in the form of a landscape
of the “house/home,” to reveal anxieties about the inadequacies, even
threats, lurking within that setting: oppression, death, delusion, imprison-
ment, and strange predatory mothers.
Far from urban civilization there is no escape from the merciless Gothic
landscape of windy moors, creepy corridors, or the jagged rocks of steep sea
cliffs where huge waves crash violently onshore, as in William Wyler’s film
of Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel Wuthering Heights (1939), Hitchcock’s
Jamaica Inn (1939), and Manderley in Rebecca (1940), or Welles’s incar-
nation of Thornfield in Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic Jane Eyre (1943). The
ominous deadly landscape in Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn revealed a Gothic
thriller that incorporated elements of seafaring adventure films amid mys-
terious terrain along rugged crags on the British Cornwall Coast, as vicious
criminal pirate gangs hole up in an infamous haunted house known as
Jamaica Inn. Crooked squire Charles Laughton runs black market enter-
prises from his mansion and orders the shady blackguards to destroy ships,
kill crews, make off with their loot of gold, and smuggle cargo. Lovely
Irish orphan and Gothic heroine Maureen O’Hara gets embroiled in this
web of intrigue and tries to stop their barbarous activities.
These distinctive, dangerous visual and psychological landscapes of
female Gothic thrillers reflected troubled romantic and domestic relation-
ships. Harsh Gothic landscapes visually articulated a disturbing, destruc-
tive trap for naïve Gothic ingénues ensnared in menacing, misogynistic
gender relations and imprisoned in remote, claustrophobic manor houses
pressed precariously against a rocky precipice. Traditional female Gothic
roman noir thrillers set to film (Jamaica Inn, Wuthering Heights, Jane
Eyre) established how cinematic auteurs, such as Hitchcock and Welles,
drew on film techniques to reimagine traditional Gothics. In particular,
film noir cinematography provided an apt venue for the disturbing female
Gothic romance, as the cinematic Gothic moved into the twentieth cen-
50 S. CHINEN BIESEN

tury and adapted itself to the most popular, predominant art and enter-
tainment format. These cinematic articulations of female Gothic, roman
noir thrillers, recreated the Gothic itself in its concerns, characterizations,
and use of landscapes (or what Gothics placed into the landscape) by the
circumstances of the war years.
Gothic thriller maestro and master of suspense Hitchcock drew on
his earlier expressionistic experience working at Weimar Germany’s UFA
studio in collaborating with Jamaica Inn producer Erich Pommer, who
had also produced the German expressionist psychological horror mas-
terwork, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Following Jamaica Inn, Hitchcock
moved across the Atlantic to America and directed his first Hollywood
film, Rebecca. With the escalating tensions and conflict in Europe by the
late 1930s and early 1940s, many talented, creative European émigré art-
ists and filmmakers flocked to the American film industry and enhanced
Hollywood’s burgeoning film noir and female Gothic thriller pictures:
including noir stalwarts like Robert and Curt Siodmak, Fritz Lang, and
Jean Renoir; along with cinematic artists from Great Britain and its former
colonies, such as Hitchcock, Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Judith
Anderson, and Irish actress Maureen O’Hara.
Hitchcock’s psychological thrillers Rebecca and Suspicion initiated his
Hollywood female Gothic film cycle, followed by Shadow of a Doubt,
Spellbound, and Notorious, which combined the female Gothic with an
espionage thriller and film noir style. As in hard-boiled serie noir, the term
film noir related to roman noir or “black novel,” the name given by eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century French critics to the British Gothic novel.
Like film noir, gender distress, psychic trauma (or insanity), and misogyny
were essential to Gothic thrillers. The war was also a catalyst for a dark
breed of film noir pictures, as basic Hollywood production materials, sets,
and electricity were rationed for the duration amid blackouts in the Los
Angeles basin, which was considered a theater of war.1
Disturbing stories set against dangerous landscapes involving toxic rela-
tionships centering on murder and tormented unstable psyches, hysteria,
and crimes of passion were hallmarks of female Gothic roman noir nar-
ratives. Hollywood’s female Gothic film cycle developed a darker visual
style and revolved around what Thomas Schatz describes as “gender dif-
ference, sexual identity, and the ‘gender distress’ that accompanied the
social and cultural disruption of the war and postwar eras.” Schatz fur-
ther observes that, like hard-boiled detective narratives, the Gothic cen-
tered on an “essentially good though flawed and vulnerable protagonist
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 51

at odds with a mysterious and menacing sexual other.”2 In the Gothic’s

harsh, remote settings of steep cliffs, violent surf, and haunted mansions,
a young, innocent female meets, becomes romantically involved with,
and marries a suave enigmatic stranger. The Gothic heroine’s mysteri-
ous, sometimes charming and older, lover or husband (such as Laurence
Olivier’s brooding Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Maxim in Rebecca,
and Orson Welles’s moody Rochester in Jane Eyre), with a dubious past
and with secrets to conceal, becomes an alluring but potentially predatorial
sexual presence. These traditional Gothic hommes fatals would eventually
shift from threatening, sexy, or creepy Catholic/Continental sexual preda-
tors, like Walpole’s Manfred, Lewis’s Ambrosio, or Radcliffe’s Schedoni to
treacherous, sinister Nazi or Germanic predators, such as Claude Rains’s
Nazi momma’s boy Alex (opposite Cary Grant’s repressed spy Devlin) in
Notorious, Orson Welles’s Gestapo war criminal in The Stranger, or George
Macready’s murderous characters in My Name Is Julia Ross and Gilda.
The dark, menacing atmospheric landscape in 1940s female Gothic
films developed in relation to the chiaroscuro, expressionistic style of noir.
As in film noir, dysfunctional romantic relations in suspenseful female
Gothic melodramas embodied a sexual threat to disturbed protagonists.
The mature, hard-boiled protagonists and youthful Rosie the Riveter-like
working women (played by actresses like Lucille Ball, Claire Trevor, or
Ella Raines), or the deadly seductive femme fatales of film noir were joined
by young naïve Gothic ingénues (or redeemers) opposite menacing older
masculine antiheroes. The presence of these ingénues created a female
Gothic film genre that coincided with a wartime labor market of aging
men and younger women in Hollywood, as younger men went off to
war.3 Both film noir and female Gothic thrillers involved toxic “dark love”
romances and lethal fatal attraction. Harsh landscapes visually reflected
the “seeds of romantic estrangement” in female Gothic thrillers. In this
brooding, perilous noir Gothic setting, the homme fatal’s “moodiness and
unpredictability sometimes signal potential danger to the heroine even
before she marries,” as in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), where menac-
ing criminal spouse Charles Boyer preys on a young, unsuspecting Ingrid
Bergman. In Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female
Gothic Film, Helen Hanson observes the “rapid move from the romance
stage of the narrative to one of suspicion and investigation shows the tran-
sition in the heroine’s perception of her husband.”4
Film scholars have observed that while film noir was emerging in the
1940s, World War II was transforming the motion picture industry in
52 S. CHINEN BIESEN

the United States as America mobilized for the conflict and Hollywood
shifted from a pre-war to a wartime climate, which affected studio pro-
duction conditions, creative personnel, censorship, and the types of films
produced.5 Film noir capitalized on these unique wartime production
conditions—such as war-related blackouts in the Los Angeles basin, and
restrictions on location shooting, rationing of film, lighting, electricity,
and set materials—by creatively disguising recycled sets through shroud-
ing them in shadow, fog, rain, cigarette smoke, mirrors, and develop-
ing the shrewd camera angles so distinctive of noir’s cinematic milieu.
New advances in technology also enabled noir filmmaking innovations
with lightweight cameras and better, deep-focus lenses (and faster,
light-sensitive film stock), which enhanced noir’s distinctive shadowy
chiaroscuro look and aesthetic visual style with high contrast, low-key
lighting and cinematography, as evident in the 1944 noir-styled Gothic
Jane Eyre.
As the war intensified, evolving landscapes in female Gothic melodrama
adopted a progressively dark film noir style, as in Jane Eyre. Welles designed
(produced [uncredited], and possibly directed sequences) the shadowy
chiaroscuro Gothic landscape in the 1944 American film adaptation of
Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 British Gothic novel. In doing so, Welles called
on his Mercury Theater past for his involvement in the film. The screen-
play, drawn from Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air radio script, was
co-adapted by his radio cohort John Houseman, while fellow players from
the program, Agnes Moorehead and Erskine Sanford, also appeared in
the film. The cast was rounded out by Joan Fontaine, Peggy Ann Garner,
and eleven-year-old Elizabeth Taylor as a young orphaned girl who dies
from the abuse of imperious reverend-schoolmaster Henry Brocklehurst
(Henry Daniell).
Drawing on their established star personas, Welles and Fontaine were
perfectly cast as Rochester and Jane Eyre. Fontaine admitted that Welles
was a powerful force of nature, taking charge on and off screen. Further,
she corroborated Welles’s creative involvement behind the scenes (along
with July 1943 production memos) in crafting the Gothic design look and
feel of Jane Eyre: from the shadowy Gothic castle spires and intimidating
haunted towers of eerie Thornfield mansion sets; to the deep-focus com-
positions, brooding low key noir lighting, shot composition, casting,
script, and his incomparable performance as Rochester. Welles also sug-
gested that Citizen Kane composer Bernard Hermann score the music
(replacing Igor Stravinsky). As a result, Jane Eyre had the undeniably strik-
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 53

ing sights and sounds of Welles’s dark noir style of his brilliant 1941 fea-
ture film debut, Citizen Kane.
Amid raging Gothic storms with pelting rain, lightning, and thunder
on the moors, added to creeping mists of fog swirling and swallowing
the menacing turrets and gargoyles of Thornfield castle, Jane Eyre viv-
idly brings the Gothic noir landscape to life on the screen. Echoing the
Gothic outdoors, the ominous doors and gloomy corridors of Thornfield
are cloaked in harsh, murky shadows. In addition, the abusive Lowood
school for unwanted orphans bears stunning geometric patterns of barred
shadows to convey its harsh entrapment cinematically, resembling Welles’s
earlier films and Mercury Theater stage productions. Though Fontaine’s
Jane Eyre is bathed in softer light, this illumination still contributes to the
film’s Gothic eerieness. Rochester (Welles) tells Jane (Fontaine) there is an
otherworldly quality about her as she appeared in the shrouded fog of the
moors at night to frighten his horse into rearing and throwing him in the
ghostly Gothic landscape.
Welles’s production of Jane Eyre was shot during World War II black-
outs in Hollywood in 1943 on beautiful dark, enclosed soundstages that
resembled Welles’s gloomy Gothic-styled opening of Citizen Kane, with
the silhouette of Xanadu’s dark, depressing mansion on a hill. After a con-
ventional opening narration from the beginning of Brontë’s book, the
film Jane Eyre cuts to a stark shot of blackness illuminated only by a dim
candle, the contrast suggesting an existential abyss. The Gothic thriller
features extraordinary darkness and an exquisitely styled film noir aes-
thetic; stunning chiaroscuro cinematography, rolling mists of fog, deep
shadows swallowing a harsh expressionist landscape with a creepy, cav-
ernous Gothic castle that haunts and imprisons its troubled inhabitants,
including Welles’s mercurial antihero, hiding mysterious secrets.
The eerie Thornfield mansion burns to the ground at the end of Jane
Eyre (as does Rebecca’s Manderley, which re-imagines Jane Eyre), killing
or maiming victims, physically or psychologically. The haunting struc-
ture destroys lives and thus becomes a possessed entity in and of itself.
Even the door to the cell in Thornfield’s dark Gothic castle tower where
Rochester imprisons his violent, insane wife is lit from below with harsh,
demonic lighting, casting shadows on the door and thereby personifying
it as an evil character, while resembling the cramped enclosure where Jane
was trapped as a child. The cinematic ambiance in this adaptation of Jane
Eyre is strikingly expressionistic in its noir visual style, not only due to
Welles’s creative contributions, but also because of its wartime produc-
54 S. CHINEN BIESEN

tion, which enhanced its bleak rendering of Brontë’s Gothic landscape via
dark, enclosed 1940s blacked-out noir terrain.
Evoking the menacing Gothic landscapes of Jane Eyre, Jamaica Inn,
and Wuthering Heights, Rebecca opens with a shrouded, shadowy omi-
nous landscape in the tangled woods outside Manderley mansion, where
the heroine’s narration comments on the terrain. Rebecca begins as a
dream-like commentary: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive and for a
while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. Then, like all dream-
ers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like
a spirit through the barrier before me.” Inspired by the landscape and
iconography of traditional Gothic thrillers such as Jane Eyre, Hitchcock
in Rebecca depicts the deceased ghost of Rebecca haunting Manderley
and seeming to possess its inhabitants as the deadly tide surges against the
crags.
Huge tendrils of thick fog rise from the ground and swirl menac-
ingly around the dark silhouette of the trees and ominous black ruins
of Manderley mansion in Rebecca as the moon is cloaked behind clouds
evoking a horror story. The shadowy Gothic landscape itself symbolizes
isolation and imprisonment as the camera simulates a first-person point of
view. Following a murky overgrown path through fog-shrouded woods,
the first-person voiceover continues:

The drive wound away in front of me, twisting and turning as it had always
done, but as I advanced I was aware that a change had come upon it. Nature
had come into her own again, and, little by little, had encroached upon the
drive with long, tenacious fingers.

As in earlier written Gothic texts, the harsh landscape of the film reveals
the traditional Gothic ingénue’s subjective point of view, but now uses
the cinematic noir mise en scène of a dark, abandoned mansion in haunted
silhouette. “On and on wound the poor thread that had once been our
drive, and finally there was Manderley … secretive and silent. Time could
not mar the perfect symmetry of those walls.” The narrator admits:

Moonlight can play odd tricks upon the fancy—and suddenly it seemed to
me that light came from the windows. And then a cloud came upon the
moon and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face. The illusion
went with it. I looked upon a desolate shell—with no whisper of the past
about its staring walls.
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 55

In this ethereal flashback, the Gothic heroine focuses on the haunting,

ruinous landscape and warns, “We can never go back to Manderley again.
That much is certain. But sometimes in my dreams I do go back—to
the strange days of my life.” Here, she clearly recalls literary Gothic, for
example, Jane Eyre’s dream of the desolate ruins of Thornfield or Emily’s
conflicted fascination with the sublimely ancient Castle of Udolpho. Then
Hitchcock segues to the raging surf crashing violently against the steep
cliffs towering above the shore as Gothic antihero Maxim (Olivier) peers
over the edge contemplating suicide.
Cast against this menacing Gothic landscape, Gothic thrillers cleverly
used psychology and highlighted Gothic heroines’s subjective points of
view to reveal their tormented psyches as husbands committed harmful
crimes against their wives. Disturbing, shrouded Gothic landscapes visu-
ally articulated provocative gender relations embedded in Gothic thriller
films. Fontaine’s performances as a naïve Gothic ingénue in Hitchcock’s
Rebecca and Suspicion were influenced by tensions and production cir-
cumstances on the set that simulated the treacherous landscape setting
of Gothic narratives off-screen. Like her terrified nameless character in
Rebecca, Fontaine admitted Hitchcock (and producer David O. Selznick)
“made it clear to me that [Laurence] Olivier wanted Vivien Leigh in the
role.” Fontaine additionally acknowledged that Hitchcock’s contingent
of British actors—Olivier, Gladys Cooper, and Nigel Bruce—actually
enhanced the menacing Gothic landscape on set “above the demands of
the characters they were playing.”6 In this fascinating context, produc-
tion conditions on the set seemed to turn people and players into Gothic
types––like the menacing monks, mothers, and guardians of the novels.
Selznick also seemed to channel a paternalistic older Gothic homme fatal
to his young ingénue starlet in the harsh Gothic landscape of Hollywood
as a star-making mogul, like Olivier’s intimidating presence as Master of
Manderley dominating Fontaine’s naïve submissive wife in Rebecca.7
The visual cinematic landscape of Suspicion’s female Gothic thriller
shifts from Rebecca’s windy moors, sea cliffs, and brightly lit high-key set-
tings early on in the film to a more brooding, shadowy, low-key lighting
style and visual design at its climax, evoking the harsh, windswept Gothic
landscape of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Jamaica Inn, and Rebecca.
The film adopts increasing Gothic horror, thriller, and film noir conven-
tions in its aesthetic with shrouded, enclosed interiors, and a height-
ened musical soundtrack to intensify its disturbing mood and suspense.
Hitchcock invoked an expressionistic film noir style in its climactic finale
56 S. CHINEN BIESEN

as Cary Grant’s Gothic homme fatal, Johnnie, climbs the stairs in the dark
shadows and tries to murder his young wife with a poisoned glass of milk.
The changing Hollywood visualization of landscapes, and the climate
of war, hardened motion picture viewers to grislier film portrayals and
raised their expectations of seeing stronger women, which resonated with
tougher film noir and Gothic landscapes. Grant was publicized as a “reck-
less gambling adventurer” who instills “terror” in innocent Fontaine, and
introduces her to a “life of debts, excuses, evasions and fears in one of
the most ominous roles of his career.”8 As murderous actions transpire
over high sea cliffs in Hitchcock’s Suspicion, filmgoers at a 1941 preview
thought Fontaine should be stronger after Grant’s homme fatal tries to kill
her. Against the precipice of the Gothic landscape, when she drives along
the edge of steep cliffs with Grant, the audience thought, “She should pull
a gun out … for the purpose of killing him.”9
The cinematic landscape of Hollywood itself was evolving. Filmmakers
such as Hitchcock, Welles, and Joseph H. Lewis captured changing cul-
tural anxieties when adapting Gothic landscapes amid World War II and,
later, postwar tensions. After shadowy Gothic images resonated in the war
years, then as the conflict wound down, noir films Spellbound, Notorious,
My Name Is Julia Ross, and The Stranger refashioned Gothic landscapes.
Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Notorious featured Gothic heroines who
worked to solve crimes or practice espionage while Hollywood films,
including film noir and female Gothic thrillers, channeled wartime career
women to postwar domesticity in response to a changing cultural land-
scape as men returned from the war abroad to resume interrupted roman-
tic affairs with their absent sweethearts. In Spellbound and Notorious,
Hitchcock adapts the female Gothic thriller film from its historical British,
period setting to a more topical contemporary America, capturing an
evolving new landscape shifting from wartime to postwar culture.
In an evolving American film production and reception landscape,
masculine hard-boiled serie noire crime fiction appealed to tough guys
and war-hardened combat veterans, while an array of female-centered
noir styled, period films, such as roman noir Gothic thrillers (historically
set in an England of an earlier time), were popular with women viewers
in a domestic home-front film audience. Historical female Gothic, period
films also evaded Washington’s federal propaganda censorship of films—
which regulated Hollywood screen depictions of the domestic home
front and overseas combat front.10 Growing out of the conflict, many
female Gothic thriller films during this time adopted wartime and post-
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 57

war 1940s American themes and settings, as in Hitchcock’s Spellbound

and Notorious.
Ingrid Bergman’s naïve star persona and her classic Gothic ingénue
became a more seasoned career woman in two 1940s Hitchcock films. In
Spellbound she endeavors to unravel a murder mystery and in Notorious
to expose enemy Nazi agents and aid the American government in the
war’s aftermath. The independent, shrewd heroine is not a new figure
in the Gothic tradition. Clara Weiland and Marion (in Weiland and The
Woman in White, respectively) both draw on intrepidity and rationality to
uncover, understand, and act against threats not only to themselves but
also to their loved ones. Mina Harker, when using her business skills in
typing, shorthand, and organization, goes beyond her original intention
to help her husband with his profession and draws on this training to
trap and neutralize the vampire Dracula. The seasoned career woman in
Spellbound and Notorious is a mid-twentieth-century descendent of these
characters. In the first of these two films, director Hitchcock and producer
Selznick’s female Gothic narrative reimagined this heroine as an educated
variation on wartime images of Rosie the Riveter. Bergman’s working
heroine in Spellbound (originally based on Frances Beeding’s novel The
House of Dr. Edwardes) is an accomplished doctor of psychoanalysis, Dr.
Constance Peterson, doing scientific research on the mind. She is depicted
as an attractive woman who is married to her career, mature for her age,
yet derided as a cold, clinical intellectual out of touch with her roman-
tic feelings. This changes when she becomes romantically and sexually
involved with dangerous imposter Gregory Peck, an amnesiac doctor who
suffers violent psychological afflictions and may possibly be a murderer.
After Constance solves the mystery of his past, discovers his identity, cures
his amnesia, and works out the identity of the murderer, she leaves her
career to marry him … like so many women at the end of the war.
Such noir styled Gothic thriller films were known for their haunted
landscapes. Artist Salvador Dali famously designed a disturbing dream
sequence in Spellbound that helps solve the murder when Bergman psy-
chologically analyzes Peck’s violent, surreal nightmare. Instead of the
shadowy, fog-shrouded, haunted, storm-tortured moors and decrepit,
sinister manses of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Spellbound revolved
around Peck’s obsession with the color white. Rather than symbolizing
good or purity, the color stands in for guilt, violence, and misunderstand-
ing in this movie, triggering in Peck’s character tormented memories of
witnessing a murder on the steep, snowy cliffs of a ski resort, of which
58 S. CHINEN BIESEN

he believes himself the culprit. Ultimately, his misperception is revealed

through Constance Peterson’s hypnotherapy. He comes to realize that, in
reality, the guilty responsibility he had suffered over a childhood winter
accident that left his brother dead led him to misinterpret that memory
as proof that he had been the killer on the ski slope, another winter-white
setting. He is victimized by his own survivor’s guilt. This evolution or
change from a traditional Gothic context in the film Spellbound seems to
express different anxieties in adapting the conventional Gothic landscape
to a wartime and postwar American Gothic setting that suggests post-
traumatic stress growing out of the psychological toil of the violence of
war, of coping with the guilt of surviving when so many fellow soldiers
died in combat, when so many fellow families did not see their loved ones
return.
Following Spellbound, Hitchcock’s Notorious updated and refash-
ioned a Gothic landscape vis-à-vis a postwar American cultural terrain. In
Notorious, Hitchcock adapts female Gothic melodrama into an espionage-
thriller narrative hybrid, where Bergman’s undercover agent is flown from
America to Brazil after the war and becomes involved in a dangerous love
triangle: a clandestine affair with fellow spy Cary Grant and near-lethal
marriage to incognito war criminal Claude Rains. In Notorious (written
by Ben Hecht), Hitchcock recasts Bergman against her “good girl” type
to have her play a drunken “Notorious Woman,” Alicia Huberman, who
is reformed by “Adventurous Man” Devlin (Grant) into a secret agent
to romance, marry, and catch Nazi Alex (Claude Rains). As a result, she
nearly becomes victim to her criminal spouse and murderous mother-in-
law (Leopoldine Konstantin) after they secretly poison her. Fortunately,
Grant rescues her just before their poison kills her.
Hitchcock’s refashioned Gothic landscape in Notorious featured pictur-
esque scenery; a wild, wind-blown drive; runaway horses; aerial footage
of Brazil; a virtuoso upside-down shot of Devlin that turns completely
around to subjectively simulate Alicia’s drunken, disoriented point of
view; a brilliant crane shot from the top of the stairs of a mansion cocktail
party, which zooms in to a tight close-up of a key that she hides in her
hand; and a suspenseful rendezvous in a mysterious locked wine cellar
where she and Devlin are discovered.
In Notorious, produced and released in 1946, after the war has just
ended, Hitchcock reimagines the traditional Gothic landscape and pres-
ents Alex’s mansion in a different foreign land (1943 Rio de Janeiro in
Brazil; South America rather than the Victorian era British Cornwall
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 59

Coast) with locked rooms; the prying eyes of a deadly hostile mother-
in-law, who wickedly plots to poison Alicia (Bergman) with coffee; and
a wine cellar stocked with dangerous toxic uranium in wine bottles in a
burgeoning atomic age. The house becomes her prison and death house.
So, to redeem herself and expose the Nazi menace and sabotage in our
post-war midst, she must explore and open up the threatening mansion,
like traditional Gothic heroines who must expose the evil, bearded Satan
and his minion Catholics in their dens of corruption. She is less naïve and
more seasoned than Fontaine’s earlier heroines in Rebecca, Suspicion, and
Jane Eyre, or her own earlier ingénue in Gaslight. Like the working Rosie
the Riveter-style Gothic heroines in Spellbound and My Name is Julia Ross,
Bergman’s Alicia in Notorious actively works behind the scenes to solve
the crime. However, in the context of updating the Gothic landscape
and heroines to a more contemporary 1940s wartime setting, Bergman’s
Alicia changes the Gothic ingénue to a counterespionage spy who unlocks
the treacherous secrets of the Gothic landscape in her explorations of the
dangerous Nazi mansion. In the process, she almost dies, but endures the
subversive threats to her in this toxic, poisonous landscape.
On the heels of the sexist, misogynistic career environment of Spellbound,
in Notorious Bergman’s heroine Alicia (like Loretta Young’s naïve Gothic
housewife married to Welles’s Nazi war criminal in The Stranger) deals
with a Gothic landscape where Nazi infiltrators have replaced Catholics,
Prelates, or corrupt parents/guardians; (incognito) Nazi spouses and
lovers have supplanted demons, atheists, and libertines as hommes fatals;
and blasphemy and the damnation of the soul is replaced by the mak-
ings of atomic weapons and a fear of nuclear annihilation. Yet, even with
these adaptations of the Gothic, both the old traditional and new adapted
Gothic landscapes are concerned with redemption and saving the soul.
These themes resonated with the compensating moral values of onscreen
retribution that were encouraged by Hollywood’s Production Code cen-
sors. Alicia’s redemption revives her spirit and self-respect––and contrib-
utes to the humanization of repressed spy Devlin. Even more interesting,
Notorious’s redeemed bad girl, Alicia, has more sexual freedom than earlier
film Gothic heroines in Rebecca, Suspicion, Jane Eyre, or Gaslight. She cer-
tainly has far more freedom than her literary foremothers, such as Agnes
in The Monk or Lucy Westenra in Dracula, who are punished with deg-
radation or death for violating the parameters placed on women’s sexual
activity, let alone Matilda in The Castle of Otranto who dies for violating
those parameters only as far as trying to love and marry according to her
60 S. CHINEN BIESEN

own choice. Still, that freedom is conveyed to the audience with a frisson
of the forbidden, via imagery powerful for being as darkly Gothic as it is
romantic. Of all Hitchcock’s 1940s female Gothic films, Notorious is the
darkest in adapting Gothic thriller conventions to exquisitely shrouded
cinematography shot in shadowy film noir visual style. This is especially
evident in chiaroscuro lit scenes where Grant and Bergman engage in a
series of torrid kisses, shot in near silhouette, yet interrupted (to appease
censors) and extended to reveal their repressed smoldering passion for one
another in a dangerous, deceptive environment. Ads for the film under-
line this intention. Notorious was promoted as “Fateful Fascination!” and
“Electric Tension!” Other ads featured publicity taglines that clamored:
“The screen’s top romantic stars in a melodramatic masterpiece!”11
Like Notorious, My Name is Julia Ross (1945) articulated a chang-
ing cultural landscape and shifting gender relations. Its director, Joseph
H. Lewis, who was later known for the classic low budget noir films Gun
Crazy and The Big Combo, had made combat films during World War
II and also had experience with new technological innovations. His big
break came with a chance to direct the female Gothic crime thriller My
Name is Julia Ross. This film, based on Anthony Gilbert’s 1941 British
roman noir The Woman in Red, was made at Columbia Pictures dur-
ing Hollywood’s wartime labor shortage—after men went overseas for
the duration and women filled labor needs due to America’s manpower
scarcity on the home front. In 1943, Time called The Woman in Red an
“excellent thriller” of a “jobless and desperate English girl” employed and
victimized by a “sinister London household” ruled by an “old lady with
murderous intentions” until a private detective “rescues the damsel” and
“clears out the villainous nest.”12
My Name is Julia Ross presented a job seeker’s nightmare, filmed at a
time when Rosie the Riveter working women were redirected back into
the home at the end of the war. Gothic ingénue Julia (Nina Foch) plays a
single, out-of-work woman seeking a secretarial job. After applying for a
position in London (responding to a newspaper ad), Julia is abducted by a
crooked, criminal mother/son duo who trap her in a creepy old mansion
on the cliffs of the Cornwall coast. Her employer turns out to be a deadly
scam artist/kidnapper/mother-in-law (Dame May Whitty) with a psy-
chotic, homicidal “momma’s boy” son (George MacReady), who claims
to be Julia’s husband. Removed from London’s metropolis, remotely sep-
arated from any help, she is kept behind bars, drugged, and imprisoned
in a fake marriage to a sadistic psychopath. As in Hitchcock’s Notorious,
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 61

his overbearing mother menacingly leads Julia to doubt her sanity, then
endeavors to obliterate her identity, before trying to kill her. The evil
mother, as an extension of the home setting, comments on women with
power. Woman embodies the home. This version of mother as monster
reframes the Gothic setting of home to draw on an older tradition to
express new anxieties in the cultural shift in gender roles from wartime
to postwar. In fine Gothic noir form, the working heroine’s would-be
employer transforms into a lethal femme fatale-in-law, manipulating her
serial-killer son to ensure Julia’s demise—after he has already murdered
his real wife, a situation evocative of that of prior Gothic villains (such as
Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliff, the sinister husbands of Radcliffe’s novels,
and Rebecca’s Maxim), where solicitude and care—all the trappings of
traditional marriage—are just a mask for malevolent domestic relations,
misogyny, and even murder. Claude Rains’s Alex will later embody this
male threat as a Nazi momma’s boy, manipulated by a monstrous evil
mother in Notorious.
The brooding, treacherous Gothic landscape, moody noir style, “psy-
chological overtones” and “effectively ominous atmosphere” were praised
in My Name is Julia Ross.13 As the female Gothic thriller film channeled
women, advertising for My Name is Julia Ross was aimed at a female home-
front audience. Promotion taglines proclaimed: “She went to sleep as a sec-
retary…and woke up a madman’s ‘bride’!” and “‘Bride’ of a Madman Who
Married To Murder!” Studio publicity showed a cold-blooded murder-
ous husband malevolently clutching an unconscious Julia, towering over
her as his evil mother/co-conspirator suspiciously looks on. Adopting
Gothic horror conventions, posters read: “In This Weird Mansion Dwells
The Eeriest Mystery You Will Ever See!” and “Meet Julia Ross who lived
through a nightmare of terror! Trap The Husband whose insane whims
had to be obeyed! Beware Of The Mother who would even kill to save her
son! Help The Bachelor who risked his life on a desperate gamble!”14
As in the sordid atmospheric terrain of the film noir and its serie noir
source material, Gothic literary narratives, including roman noir novels,
thrived on psychological terror, dark passions, obsession, crime (often in
the domestic sphere, visually reflected by their inhospitable landscape,
ruins, Gothic architecture, and surroundings), deceptive betrayal amid
decay, and a chaotic milieu where death is omnipresent. These Gothic
stories originally developed in response to their late eighteenth- to early
nineteenth-century cultural context. David Punter in The Literature
of Terror and Fred Botting in Gothic also trace the evolution of Gothic
62 S. CHINEN BIESEN

novels into the twentieth century. Drawing on Gothic literature, such as

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818),
and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, in The Contested Castle: Gothic
Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology, Kate Ferguson Ellis exam-
ines heroines victimized in Gothic landscapes, “haunted” manses, and
troubled gender relations in the realm of domestic violence as Gothic nov-
els explored harsh “dark” romances against the shrouded fog, shadows,
and permeating mist in a dangerous vision of the home as a menacing,
potentially lethal, site of imprisonment for women. Almost providing a
blueprint for these later “noir styled” female Gothic films, Ellis sets down
how early Gothic novels subverted naïve conceptions of the home as an
idyllic “safe,” “protected” sanctuary in Gothic fiction, where inhabit-
ants are instead locked inside (and outside) of houses amid their rugged,
tumultuous landscapes to instill terror of vengeful crimes of transgression
and misogyny.15 This is certainly the case in My Name is Julia Ross.
Similar to the cinematic adaptations of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre,
Rebecca, and Notorious, the Gothic landscape in Lewis’s My Name is Julia
Ross is harsh and menacing. Julia’s trapped ingénue looks down from the
precipice—through bars on the open mansion window—at steep crags
to see the vast ocean and hear waves crash violently against jagged rocks
on the coast below, as she desperately tries to escape. In the end, her
(seeming) corpse and that of the dead homme fatal lie, washed up by the
surf onshore. More importantly, the murderous mother and son make use
of the landscape itself—the house, the cliffs, and the sea—to knock off
young women, dismantling the stairs in the dark in hopes of luring the
heroine to fall to her demise, or stabbing the sofa (to “death” as surrogate
spouse) reenacting the crime (after attacking his first wife with a knife and
throwing her body into the ocean). Indicating an ongoing trend in film,
this vicious husband was played by George MacReady, who later starred
in Gilda as an Axis criminal spouse, much like the Nazi hommes fatals in
Notorious and The Stranger, who was a brutal sadist to his independent,
working (nightclub singer) wife, Rita Hayworth.
Cinematically, in My Name is Julia Ross Lewis heightened psychological
terror by drawing on horror conventions that amplified the Gothic film’s
murderous criminal deeds, tormented dysfunctional gender relations,
misogyny, and psychological instability with ominous chiaroscuro visual
style, dim low-key lighting, shrouded tight close-up camera shots, and a
black cat (that surprisingly brings good luck) revealing a secret passage-
way cloaked in mysterious shadows. The Gothic thriller featured a female
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 63

protagonist’s point-of-view (with whom American and British home-front

working women could relate) and depicted an independent Rosie the
Riveter’s worst fear, that marriage and a wealthy quiet life on a country
estate are not wedded bliss but a surreal nightmare of misogynistic impris-
onment. There are some strong parallels between Jane Eyre (the book) and
Julia Ross about working women and mad women in the attic. The films
certainly express women’s fears about being re-incarcerated in the home,
which resonated with women channeled from career back to domesticity
after World War II. As the war wound down, such refashioned Gothic
themes resonated with real-life career girls lured away from employment
in the city into suburban matrimony after the conflict. Although Julia Ross
thinks she is seeking employment, she is drugged, imprisoned, and ends
up giving up her career to marry the “nice boy,” as women were chan-
neled into domesticity in real life after the war.
Yet the film does not crush the clever, independent woman. When the
resourceful Gothic ingénue Julia learns that the mother and son are plot-
ting to kill her, like one of Ferguson Ellis’s early Gothic heroines, she
shrewdly converts her menacing house/landscape of imprisonment to one
of liberation by removing the prison bars, climbing out her window and
down the cliffs (screaming and pretending to fall), then awaiting the kill-
ers on the rocks of the beach. It is only her courage and cleverness in
planning and executing her ploy that frees her and ultimately exposes the
criminals and brings them to justice. For her boyfriend and the authorities
only arrive to rescue her after she has pulled off her trap. Development of
this film could very well have reflected the concerns of a real-life working
woman. The Gothic heroine seeking employment rather than marriage
alone in My Name is Julia Ross reflected the situation of real women at the
time, including writer-turned-executive producer Virginia Van Upp, who
served as executive in charge of production at Columbia Pictures from
1945–47, inclusive of the time the studio produced this film.16
Lewis’s My Name is Julia Ross, like Hitchcock’s Spellbound and
Notorious, captured the changing cultural landscape, including the gender
distress, paranoia, and domestic strife faced by many women after moving
from career to domesticity at the end of the war. Lewis filmed My Name
is Julia Ross just days before the war ended.17 The Gothic thriller revealed
the importance of showcasing and targeting women in a wartime film and
labor market at home and abroad (both in the US and the UK). Wartime
films noirs targeted independent women on the home front, many working
(with a disposable income) in booming defense industries as men served
64 S. CHINEN BIESEN

overseas. By the end of the war, men began returning from military service
seeking employment as they resumed civilian life. Paralleling the predica-
ment of the unemployed protagonist Julia Ross, women found that many
jobs they had filled to aid the manpower shortage, temporarily, dried up
as veterans returned and women were rechanneled into more subservient
domestic roles in the home. Equally important, the controlling mother
who emasculates and infantilizes her son in My Name is Julia Ross antici-
pates some of the revelations in When Our Mothers Went to War, where the
author brings out that returning soldiers were disquieted, even disturbed,
by wives who had learned to run a house on their own without their hus-
bands (147, 151). Similarly, the film My Name is Julia Ross reflects a com-
plicated, even conflicted, view of contemporary postwar anxieties—those
of both men and women. The homme fatal husband’s psychotic violence
in the film displaces the fear of spousal mental instability (with many vet-
erans suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result of the war) on to a
non-veteran. That is, it was cinematically safer to express in this instance
because the murderous husband is just plain asocial and not a veteran.
As the war wound down, film critics lauded the popularity of psycho-
logical crime pictures, and the public’s penchant for realistic graphic depic-
tions of violence and a brooding dark visual style (so characteristic of film
noir) growing out of the war. Hollywood jumped on the noir bandwagon
as critics and filmgoers craved the shadowy, stylish noir films so popular
with war-hardened audiences. After the war year constraints of blackouts,
rationing and location shooting that shaped Jane Eyre, Orson Welles shot
another brooding noir far different in looks from the dark studio-bound
Gothic shadows of his earlier effort. He created a noir atmosphere in the
unlikely setting of a bright, sunlight small town (a Hollywood back lot
outdoors) cloaking evil in his classic 1946 film noir The Stranger, which
captured the changing cultural landscape of the female Gothic thriller,
moving it to a rural, postwar Connecticut setting.
Welles articulated postwar tensions in The Stranger, another Gothic
espionage hybrid like Hitchcock’s Notorious, which captures the cultural
climate, brutality, and paranoia of a shifting historical landscape in a decep-
tive, visually lighter vein. Welles’s The Stranger moves from cinematic noir
shadows to broad daylight as the director adapts Gothic landscapes to
outdoor Main Street, small town America (like Hitchcock’s Shadow of a
Doubt) and updates a postwar Gothic suspense narrative with war crimes
investigator Edward G. Robinson hunting down Gestapo murderer Franz
Kindler (Welles), who kills a collaborator amid rays of sunlight in a forest.
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 65

Significantly, Welles updates and evokes Gothic uses of landscape by

innovatively splicing some of the first actual documentary glimpses of real-
life Nazi Holocaust footage into The Stranger to reveal the horror and
genocide of the war. It was the first time many Americans saw the footage.
In the wake of the brutal conflict, by the end of the war, grisly material—
including greater violence provocative to Hollywood Production Code
censors—was permitted in films, especially in low budget independent
productions.18 Welles cast Loretta Young, who starred in his radio pro-
duction of Jane Eyre, as the naïve Gothic ingénue in The Stranger. Not
only does the Gothic landscape setting change in The Stranger, so does
the iconic innocent Gothic heroine (Loretta Young), once she realizes the
full extent of her husband’s crimes, especially after he kills her beloved dog
and tries to kill her. After much psychological denial of his atrocities, in the
end Kindler’s young wife faces the cold reality that she’s married a criminal
monster, and then transforms from a passive Gothic victim into a stronger,
more independent woman who, like a femme fatale (or Mina Harker, or a
modern woman fighting mythical vampires and real monsters), guns down
Welles’s Nazi war criminal in a shadowy clock tower. Like Manderley and
Thornfield, the deadly Gothic structure of the tower takes on a life of its
own and destroys its inhabitants, finishing Kindler off as the clock’s rotat-
ing gargoyles spear his body in a gruesome ordeal that horrifies the town’s
population. Welles makes fine use of Gothic imagery, landscape, and set-
ting for Gothic symbolism as the first gargoyle figure is Satan and the
second is St. Michael. Thus, Franz Kindler, literally, comes after Satan and
is finally transfixed then tossed off by one of the ultimate sources of good,
Satan’s own vanquisher. Further strengthening the bond between literary
and film genres, Gothic villains were often patterned on Satan, tempted to
emulate his pride and ambition in evil. In this scene, Satan’s crime of pride
and revolt parallels Kindler’s Nazi egotism and treachery.
Welles’s dramatic finale of The Stranger marked a fitting demise for a
lethal Gestapo homme fatal Gothic antagonist on screen that captured
the changing postwar landscape. Moreover, as seen in The Stranger and
Notorious, Welles and Hitchcock adapted the female Gothic thriller into a
hybrid espionage narrative, which comments on the end of the global con-
flict vis-à-vis an evolving film noir style by 1946. As a result, the classic ico-
nography of rugged Cornwall coastlines, dark eerie mansions, and steep
rocky crags and precipices of conventional Gothic thrillers had shifted
across the Atlantic from Britain to the United States, and across time from
a century-old-period film, such as Wuthering Heights, Jamaica Inn, or
66 S. CHINEN BIESEN

Jane Eyre, to a topical contemporary noir thriller, as seen in Spellbound,

The Stranger, and Notorious. These 1940s female Gothic thriller films by
Welles and Hitchcock inspired stark, haunted landscapes in later screen
adaptations such as Wuthering Heights (2009, PBS/ITV) and Jane Eyre
(2011, BBC Films/Focus Features), which captured the brooding atmo-
spheric spirit of Gothic films noirs and their stormy windswept terrain to
reflect visually their troubled, tormented relationships.

NOTES
1. Sheri Chinen Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of
Film Noir (1–5); see also “Windfall for the Salvagers,” New York
Times, October 26, 1941.
2. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s
(236); see also Diane Waldman, unpublished PhD dissertation,
“Horror and Domesticity: The Modern Gothic Romance of the
1940s.”
3. See Biesen, Schatz.
4. Helen Hanson, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the
Female Gothic Film (67). (Gaslight was a transatlantic Hollywood
adaptation of Thorold Dickinson’s fine 1940 British Gothic thriller
featuring an extraordinary performance by Gothic antagonist
Anton Walbrook.).
5. Publicity for Suspicion, University of Southern California Cinema
Library Special Collections, Los Angeles, California, 1941; see also
Biesen, Schatz.
6. Hitchcock “divided and conquered,” Fontaine explained, “a very
clever device. On both films I did for him we all ended up hardly
civil because of these tactics.” She conceded, “I was an ingénue …
and I was scared to death of Olivier” which “helped me subcon-
sciously. He made me feel so dreadfully intimidated that I was
believable in my portrayal. I was told every day that I was about to
be replaced.” Brian McFarlane observes, “whatever forces were at
work, it gave … that marvelous impression of being overawed,
vulnerable, shy.” Joan Fontaine interviewed by Brian McFarlane,
Cinema Papers, June 1982.
7. Fontaine was under contract to Selznick (as was Hitchcock), who
admitted after Rebecca was completed, “I don’t care … so much
about how much [money] she makes as I do about making sure we
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 67

keep her in line.” David O. Selznick, Memo to Danny O’Shea,

David O. Selznick Archive, Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center, University of Texas at Austin, October 10, 1941, 1; see
also Biesen (38).
8. Publicity for Suspicion, University of Southern California Cinema
Library Special Collections, Los Angeles, California, 1941; see also
Biesen.
9. On viewers being reluctant to accept Grant as a Gothic homme
fatale in Suspicion: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Library, June 13–23, 1941, 1; Biesen (39).
10. As the US became involved in the conflict in the early-mid 1940s,
to boost morale and mobilize for the war effort, Washington’s
Office of War Information (OWI), Bureau of Motion Pictures
(BMP), and Office of Censorship regulated Hollywood films con-
cerning the wartime combat and home fronts as the industry
churned out political propaganda (Biesen; Clayton Koppes and
Gregory Black, Hollywood Goes to War (viii, 113, 324–328).
11. Publicity for Notorious, University of Southern California Cinema
Library Special Collections, Los Angeles, California, 1946.
12. “September Murders,” Time, October 11, 1943. The 1945 film
adaptation was scripted by Muriel Roy Bolton and produced by
Wallace MacDonald for Columbia’s low budget B unit.
13. Bosley Crowther, “My Name Is Julia Ross,” New York Times,
November 9, 1945, 16. Although My Name is Julia Ross was a
modest low-budget B picture, it was previewed to audiences in
advance and shown as a top-billed feature rather than a second-
billed programmer in many theaters. It was a successful sleeper hit.
See Biesen, Blackout.
14. Publicity for My Name is Julia Ross, University of Southern
California Cinema Library Special Collections, Los Angeles,
California, 1945.
15. Regarding heroines in “haunted” manses in Gothic Literature, see
Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the
Subversion of Domestic Ideology; David Punter, The Literature of
Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day;
Fred Botting, Gothic; Valdine Clemens, Return of the Repressed.
For general Gothic background, see Punter and Botting.
16. Van Upp also produced and supervised the noir Gilda (1946),
which adapted elements of the female Gothic thriller into a film
68 S. CHINEN BIESEN

noir, and even gave up her producing gig at Columbia after her
husband returned from the war … before getting a divorce. Biesen
(154); Lizzie Francke, Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in
Hollywood (50–65).
17. My Name is Julia Ross was shot from July 19 to August 4, 1945
(American Film Institute, 1945). Lewis estimated the film’s mod-
est cost was $175,000—actually $50,000 over budget. Peter
Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It? (New York: Ballantine,
1997), (659–662).
18. For more on The Stranger, see Biesen (205–07).

WORKS CITED
Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Print.
Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It? New York: Ballantine, 1997. Print.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.
Clemens, Valdine. Return of the Repressed. New York: State U of New York P,
1999. Print.
Crowther, Bosley. “My Name Is Julia Ross,” New York Times, November 9, 1945,
16. Print.
Ferguson Ellis, Kate. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of
Domestic Ideology. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1989. Print.
Fontaine, Joan. “An interview with Brian McFarlane,” n. pag. Cinema Papers,
June 1982.
Francke, Lizzie. Script Girls: Women Screenwriters in Hollywood. London: British
Film Institute, 1994. Print.
Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic
Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Print.
Koppes, Clayton and Gregory Black. Hollywood Goes to War. New York: The Free
Press, 1987. Print.
“Preview Results for Suspicion.” N. pag. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences Library, June 13–23, 1941. Print.
Production Schedule for My Name Is Julia Ross. N. pag. American Film Institute,
1945. Print.
Publicity for Notorious, n. pag. University of Southern California Cinema Library
Special Collections, Los Angeles, California, 1946. Print.
Publicity for My Name is Julia Ross, University of Southern California Cinema
Library Special Collections, Los Angeles, California, 1945. Print.
Publicity for Suspicion, University of Southern California Cinema Library Special
Collections, Los Angeles, California, 1941. Print.
 HAUNTING LANDSCAPES IN “FEMALE GOTHIC” THRILLER FILMS... 69

Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to
the Present Day. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
Schatz, Thomas. Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. New York:
Scribners, 1997. Print.
Selznick, David O. Memo to Danny O’Shea. David O. Selznick Archive, Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, 10
October 1941. Print.
“September Murders,” Time, n. pag. October 11, 1943. USC Cinema Library.
Waldman, Diane. “Horror and Domesticity: The Modern Gothic Romance of the
1940s.” Diss. U of Wisconsin, Madison, 1981. Print.
“Windfall for the Salvagers,” New York Times, n. pag. October 26, 1941. USC
Cinema Library.
 “Beauty Sleeping in the Lap of Horror”:
Landscape Aesthetics and Gothic Pleasures,
from The Castle of Otranto to Video Games

Alice Davenport

In the latter part of the eighteenth century a new enthusiasm—a new way
of looking at the physical world—swept through England. This new land-
scape aesthetic was generally expressed in terms of the closely interrelated
concepts of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. As a system of
artistic, psychological, and philosophical references, the aesthetic fired the
imaginations of many eighteenth-century British novelists, especially those
who were turning their attention to a then-emerging fictional form, the
Gothic novel. The ideas encompassed by this system of landscape aesthet-
ics were perfect vehicles for these eighteenth-century stories of suspense
and terror; and during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this adapt-
able aesthetic continued to provide a common reference point for creators
and readers of Gothic fiction. Even today, although we may not use the
same terminology, landscape aesthetics based on the sublime, the beauti-
ful, and the picturesque are still alive and well in popular culture. Many
modern-day writers and artists who work in the Gothic tradition—from
novelists to film makers to video game designers—continue to draw from
the same aesthetic conventions. The plot constructs that thrill today’s
audiences (attacks by space aliens; love stories of teenage vampires) dif-
fer from the constructs used by eighteenth-century authors (menacing,

A. Davenport ()
Independent Scholar, Eugene, OR, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 71

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_4
72 A. DAVENPORT

ghostly figures; terrified virgins fleeing would-be seducers). Nevertheless,

the complex emotions—apprehension and terror, anticipation and plea-
sure—evoked by the best Gothic fictions have remained remarkably con-
sistent.1 This chapter shows how some of the best-respected practitioners
of Gothic have, over the years, used specific elements of an eighteenth-
century aesthetic canon to produce specific emotional responses in their
audience—that is, to produce the range of feelings that comprise the
“delicious terror” of the true Gothic experience.
Many excellent general studies are available on the cultural and histori-
cal antecedents of these eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics.2 Other
works (by landscape architects as well as literary scholars) discuss the way
these aesthetics have evolved over the centuries and how they are refer-
enced in a variety of disciplines.3 In the area of Gothic studies, a number
of scholars have considered, to some extent at least, the important role
played by landscapes and landscape aesthetics (e.g., Fred Botting, Rictor
Norton, and Robert Miles). Other scholars, like Vijay Mishra in The Gothic
Sublime, have focused more specifically on the interface between Gothic
and the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque.4 This chapter will
take a somewhat different approach and will rely on a closer textual (or
screenplay) analysis to discover ways individual creators of Gothic works
have, over the centuries, used these aesthetics to further their own artistic
purposes.5

THE SUBLIME, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE PICTURESQUE

Before looking at the ways creators of Gothic fiction have referenced
eighteenth-century English landscape aesthetics, let us take a quick look
at the basic tenets involved; tenets that quickly caught the attention of the
eighteenth-century reading public and became a sort of aesthetic short-
hand for describing landscapes, in nature as well as in art. For many, Claude
de Lorraine and Salvatore Rosa (two popular Baroque landscape artists
from the previous century) neatly encapsulated the two different ways
of looking at a landscape: de Lorraine created peaceful, beautiful scenes;
and Rosa painted wild and sublime landscapes. Claude-like or Salvatorean
became convenient descriptions for two types of landscape.
In 1757, the statesman-cum-aesthetican Edmund Burke laid out clear
definitions for the key concepts of beauty and sublimity; and he explained
how these aesthetic values were linked to emotion and mood. According
to Burke, beautiful objects were comparatively small, smooth, polished,
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 73

of delicate color, and with soft form and outline. Sublime objects were
often overwhelming, and were characterized by vastness and rugged-
ness, jagged edges and abrupt angles. Beauty was associated with clarity
and light; sublimity with darkness and gloom. Burke theorized that a
person’s emotional response to these aesthetic values was instinctive.
Beauty (linked with the basic human desire for self-propagation) elicited
pleasurable emotions. Sublimity (linked with an equally basic human
instinct for self-preservation) could cause a range of emotions that
included reverence and awe, anxiety and fear. Of the two aesthetic val-
ues, sublimity elicited the more powerful human emotions; a very great
degree of sublimity could even evoke a sort of frozen horror (Burke,
pt. 2, sect. 2).6
However, this Burkean bi-polar system of aesthetics, with the beautiful
and the sublime as mutually opposing values, did not encompass objects
that had neither the gentleness of the beautiful, nor the awful nature of
the sublime. These types of objects would come to be known as pictur-
esque. The travel writer and landscape artist Reverend William Gilpin was a
prominent late eighteenth-century exponent of the new aesthetic theories.
Gilpin’s enormously popular books (with attractive aquatint illustrations)
were widely read by a British public that was already interested in the new
way of looking at nature. For Gilpin, as for Burke, one major characteris-
tic of beauty was smoothness. However, an inherent characteristic of the
picturesque, in Gilpin’s view, was the quality of roughness, which could
be found, for example “in the outline, and bark of a tree, as in the rude
summit, and the craggy sides of a mountain” (Gilpin 7). For Gilpin, the
aesthetic basis of the picturesque lay in contrasting elements, and he drew
a clear distinction between the picturesque and the sublime—that is, sub-
limity of itself could not make an object picturesque. No matter how awe-
inspiring and sublime a mountain or a rock might be, the overall landscape
could not be called picturesque unless it was accompanied to some degree
by beauty (Gilpin 43).
Uvedale Price was another well-known late eighteenth-century expo-
nent of landscape aesthetics; his popular essays were used as a practical ref-
erence for gardeners, as well as for painters and sketch artists. (Price’s On
the Picturesque became an important resource for those English gentlemen
who wished to “improve their grounds.”)7 Price accepted Burke’s basic
idea of beauty (small, soft, pleasant) and of sublimity (vast, awe-inspiring,
frightening); and he usually agreed with Gilpin on the specific compo-
nents of the picturesque (which combined elements of both beauty and
74 A. DAVENPORT

sublimity). Generally, overgrown ruins were picturesque; classical ruins

with mossy cornices or Gothic castles with crumbling battlements were
especially picturesque. Rugged and knotty oaks were more picturesque
than smooth, regular-shaped elms; goats and worn-out cart horses were
more picturesque than soft, fleecy sheep or sleek, pampered steeds. Fast
running water, torrents, waterfalls, or waves dashing against the shore
were highly picturesque; similarly, colorful gypsies or fierce banditti were
desirable additions to a picturesque landscape.8
A final, overarching, element of the picturesque for Gilpin and Price
was lighting; dim lighting, for example, would enhance a picturesque
landscape. However, it was also possible for bright sunlight (used judi-
ciously) to contribute to a picturesque effect. As Price explained, sunlight
can give a landscape a mellow, harmonious glow—but to place a dark col-
ored building in a sunny landscape will produce a picturesque effect, like
“an object of sober tint unexpectedly gilded by the sun … like a serious
countenance suddenly lighted up by a smile” (132).
Like Burke, Price believed that different aesthetic qualities of a land-
scape evoked different emotions: the sublime evoked astonishment and
varying degrees of horror; and beauty caused feelings of love and com-
placency. The emotion inspired by the picturesque, suggested Price, was
curiosity:

Those who have felt the excitement produced by the intricacies of wild
romantic mountainous scenes, can tell how curiosity, while it prompts us
to scale every rocky promontory, to explore every new recess, by its active
agency keeps the fibers to their full tone; and thus picturesqueness, when
mixed with either of the other characters, corrects the languor of beauty, or
the tension of sublimity (98).

The alert, curious observer described in the passage above is an integral

part of the general picturesque aesthetic. And self-actuation—a sense of
movement—is an important part of an individual picturesque experience.
As architect-academic Sidney K. Robinson has noted, “Wandering and
searching are essentially picturesque activities that the eighteenth century
formalized for tourists traveling to views recognized as pictures … [The
novelty-seeking tourist] moves about seeking delightful agitation” (xiii
and 10).9 This sense of movement, reinforced by excited curiosity, inspires
the self-actualized observer to move literally through a real garden, or to
move figuratively through a landscape painting or a fictional world. As
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 75

we will see, this characteristic of the picturesque would become especially

valuable to the craft of writers and artists working in the Gothic tradition.
One other aesthetic quality, which was also to prove especially valu-
able to creators of Gothic fiction, was the negative quality of ugliness. For
eighteenth-century aestheticians, the relationship of the ugly with the sub-
lime, the beautiful, and the picturesque was a complicated one. Edmund
Burke believed that ugliness was consistent with the sublime, but noted,
“I would by no means insinuate that ugliness, of itself, is a sublime idea,
unless united with such qualities as excite a strong terror [emphasis added]”
(Burke, pt. 3, sect. 21). Uvedale Price developed this idea further, sug-
gesting the possibility that a related aesthetic value, deformity, could in
some cases be linked with the sublime:

Deformity is to ugliness what picturesqueness is to beauty—though distinct

from it, and in many cases arising from opposite causes, it is often mistaken
for it, often accompanies it, and greatly heightens its effect. Ugliness alone is
merely disagreeable—by the addition of deformity it becomes hideous—by
that of terror it may become sublime. (148)10

In addition to Burke, Gilpin, and Price, other eighteenth century writ-

ers (Richard Payne Knight, for example) also explored the new aesthetic,
and each had somewhat different interpretations of its basic terminology.11
Thanks to the work of such writers, this system of landscape aesthetics
soon became a common cultural reference in Great Britain, and then in
other European countries and North America.12 British novelists—espe-
cially those who worked within the then-new Gothic form—often refer-
enced these aesthetics as a way of adding layers of emotional interest and
drawing readers into the story. Their readers were already familiar with
the conventions of these landscape aesthetics, for example, readers would
expect to feel pleasure when reading about a beautiful pastoral landscape
and to feel sublime awe (or even a delicious terror) when encountering a
scene set in a vast, dark forest or on a towering mountain peak.13

LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND GOTHIC PLEASURES

IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

How eighteenth-century Gothic authors made use of these aesthetic val-

ues depended, in large part, on the type of Gothic works in question.
There have been many attempts to categorize Gothic works into sub-
76 A. DAVENPORT

categories, but the most useful system for our discussion of aesthetics is
the relatively clean cut distinction between terror stories and horror stories.
Gothic scholar Rictor Norton describes the former as emphasizing sensi-
bility and a “corner-of-the-eye creepiness”; and as usually relying on inter-
nal agents to move the plot (Introduction). Ann Radcliffe’s 1790s Gothic
romances are preeminent examples of this type. The second category, “the
school of horror,” Rictor describes as relying more heavily on external
agents, sensationalism, and themes of sado-masochism (as, for example,
in the extravagant violence in Mathew Lewis’s The Monk, 1796). For the
reader, the two experiences are different, unlike terror—which activates an
attempt to escape—horror freezes a character into passivity and immobility.
For example, a terror-school heroine might flee some evil-minded pursuer
through dark, endless castle halls—but at least she can run! On the other
hand, horror-school characters may be shocked into immobility by the
overwhelming ugliness of a scene; the protagonist may be frozen by a hor-
rifying “encounter with physical mortality, the touching of a cold corpse,
the sight of a decaying body” (Botting, Gothic 68–69).14
Eighteenth-century Gothic authors in both schools referenced the prin-
ciples of landscape aesthetics in their craft. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto (1764) may seem heavy handed to modern readers, but it was the
first work to include all the basic elements of what later came to be known
as the Gothic novel.15 Otranto also serves as an excellent example of how
an author could draw on eighteenth-century aesthetics to further specific
artistic goals. As we have seen, the aesthetician Edmund Burke was willing
to consider ugliness as a component of the sublime when it is linked “with
such qualities as excite a strong terror” (Burke, pt. 3, sect. 21).; and it can
certainly be said that Walpole’s tale of Otranto links ugly elements with
terror. In the opening scene, for example, Duke Manfred finds his own
son dashed to pieces in the courtyard and views the horrifying sight of
“the bleeding mangled remains of the young Prince” (Walpole Chap. 1).
However, by the standards of the horror school, The Castle of Otranto
could be considered a mild-mannered story when contrasted with the
immoderate ugliness found in Mathew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). This
novel provides a horrifying fictional experience that has, for reasons prob-
ably best left to psychologists, resonated with readers for centuries. Poor,
long-suffering Agnes de Medina finds herself locked in a tomb with the
decaying corpse of a nun she had known. A few pages on matters go from
bad to worse. Agnes gives birth to a child in this horror-filled place. When
the child dies, the grief-stricken woman straps its moldering remains to
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 77

her bosom and attempts to trace the babe’s features in the decaying flesh
of its face (Lewis, vol. 3, Chap. 4).
But even in these two worthy examples of the horror school, the authors
do not rely exclusively on ugliness and horror. Both Walpole and Lewis
relied on what might be called picturesque effects to provoke the feeling
of creepiness that is more characteristic of the terror-Gothic school.16
Walpole combined the aesthetic vocabulary of both the picturesque (in
the example below, the moonlight on the casement windows) and the
enormity of the sublime (a huge, dangerous plumed helmet) to add terror
elements to his horror tale. In this passage, Lord Manfred pursues the ter-
rified Lady Isabella through the castle:

[Isabella] shrieked, and started from him, Manfred rose to pursue her, when
the moon, which was now up, and gleamed in at the opposite casement, pre-
sented to his sight the plumes of the fatal helmet, which rose to the height of
the windows, waving backwards and forwards in a tempestuous manner, and
accompanied with a hollow and rustling sound. (Walpole Chap. 1)

This is an unusually descriptive scene, for Walpole never described Otranto

or the surrounding landscape in much detail. However, in this early Gothic
example, sublime and picturesque elements work together to create the
memorably haunted atmosphere of Otranto.
Like Walpole, Mathew Lewis also combined sublime and picturesque
elements in scenes that inspire unease. As in one scene from The Monk,
when Don Raymond experiences “a sad and reverential horror” at his first
view of a castle, a building “equally awful and picturesque. Its ponder-
ous Walls tinged by the moon with solemn brightness, its old and partly-
ruined Towers lifting themselves into the clouds and seeming to frown on
the plains around them, its lofty battlements oergrown with ivy” (Lewis,
vol. 2, Chap. 1).

ANN RADCLIFFE, QUEEN OF THE TERROR GOTHIC

Walpole and Lewis were inventive masters of the new eighteenth-century
fictional form—the Gothic. However, their near-contemporary Ann
Radcliffe took the genre to a new level. She was the pre-eminent practi-
tioner of eighteenth-century terror Gothic, and it is difficult to overstate
her importance to the genre. She was widely read and highly respected:
“far and away the best-selling English novelist of the 1790s; the most
78 A. DAVENPORT

read, the most imitated, and the most translated. She was a huge, Europe-
wide success” (Miles, Ann Radcliffe 8). As the eighteenth century drew
to a close, she used the elements of the new aesthetic canon to create
her popular Gothic romances. Although Radcliffe’s novels have some-
times been criticized for emphasizing landscape over character and plot,
her word-pictures of landscapes comprised the core of her craft. As J. M.
S. Tompkins wrote, “The raison-d’être of her books is not a story, nor a
character, nor a moral truth, but a mood, the mood of a sensitive dreamer
before Gothic buildings and picturesque scenery. Story and characters are
evolved in illustration of this mood” (255).
The aesthetic conventions of eighteenth-century English landscape
design are of overarching importance to Ann Radcliffe’s craft. She used
the conventions of sublime, beautiful, and picturesque, first, as a way
to elicit the reader’s admiration and sympathy for her sensitive and
intelligent heroines, and then to create the word-pictures of the land-
scapes through which the characters move. Today, we can argue about
Radcliffe’s place in literature; and we can raise our eyebrows at old-
fashioned plot devices like virginal heroines resisting tyrannical parent-
figures and evil seducers. Nevertheless, Ann Radcliffe’s works have been
very influential over time, and they can still provide a “how to” manual
for modern artists and writers who want to create spine-tingling envi-
ronments in their own Gothic stories. It is because Ann Radcliffe has
been so influential for so many years, that this chapter examines her craft
in some detail.
Like Gilpin or Price, Ann Radcliffe used the term sublime to describe
objects that are vast and awesome. Because the emotional effects of the
sublime are strong (much stronger, for example, than the emotions evoked
by beauty), it was logical that Ann Radcliffe should rely heavily on sublime
scenes to tell her dramatic, thrilling stories. Sometimes, in a Radcliffean
world, sublimity evokes a strong fear, as in this scene from The Italian
(1797):

They soon after arrived at the tremendous pass, through which Ellena had
approached the monastery, and whose horrors were considerably height-
ened at this dusky hour, for the moonlight fell only partially upon the deep
barriers of the gorge, and frequently the precipice, with the road on its
brow, was entirely shadowed by other cliffs and woody points that rose
above it. (Radcliffe Chap. 11)
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 79

In other Radcliffean scenes, however, sublimity inspires powerful spiritual

feelings. In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, Emily loves to
explore wild mountain paths and she often rambles through the moun-
tain’s “stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur and solitude
impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her troubled thoughts
to the God of Heaven and Earth” (Mysteries of Udolpho, vol. 1, Chap. 1.).
And Ellena (The Italian) who at the time is too upset to be moved by
a merely beautiful garden, experiences a “dreadful pleasure” and almost
forgets her misfortunes as she passes through wild mountains, terrible
chasms, and roaring torrents (The Italian, Chap. 5).
In Ann Radcliffe’s novels, the emotions evoked by beauty are much
less powerful, and such scenes tend to draw her characters into a peace-
ful, pleasant reverie. An appreciation of beauty can measure a character’s
moral worth, but a peaceful, beautiful scene can also give the reader an
emotional reprieve from overwhelming sublimity. For example, a beau-
tiful scene, in a Radcliffe novel, includes such standard components as
daylight, a quietly flowing body of water, pleasant trees, and perhaps a
pastoral note—that is, no ruggedness or abruptness. In one example, from
A Sicilian Romance (1790), a beautiful scene is described this way: “The
sun, involved in clouds of splendid and innumerable hues, was setting o’er
the distant waters, whose clear bosom glowed with rich reflection. The
beauty of the scene, the soothing murmur of the high trees … the waves
that flowed gently upon the shores, insensibly sunk her mind into a state
of repose” (Chap. 3).
However, purely beautiful scenes rarely appear in Ann Radcliffe’s nov-
els. Much more frequently, she weaves sublime elements (a vast mountain
range, a powerful storm) into her word pictures of beauty. Following the
precepts of Gilpin and Price, she uses the dramatic contrast of the sub-
lime and the beautiful to create picturesqueness. The clearest example of
a Radcliffean picturesque scene, contrasting pure beauty and pure sublim-
ity, is in The Mysteries of Udolpho when Emily’s party descends from the
sublimity of a high, craggy mountain range, and passes through pastoral
beauty to the sea beyond. As the travelers descend:

The gay tints of cultivation once more beautified the landscape, for the low-
lands were coloured with the richest hues, which a luxuriant climate and
an industrious people can awaken into life. Groves of orange and lemon
perfumed the air … extensive vineyards spread their treasures. Beyond these,
80 A. DAVENPORT

woods and pastures, and mingled towns and hamlets, stretched towards the
sea … the landscape, with the surrounding Alps, did indeed present a perfect
picture of the lovely and the sublime—of “beauty sleeping in the lap of hor-
ror.” (vol. 1, Chap. 5)17

Keeping this general aesthetic framework in mind, then, let us look in

more detail at how Ann Radcliffe uses landscape aesthetics in her craft. For
example, in characterization the author uses an appreciation of landscape
aesthetics as a reliable measure of moral worth. Praiseworthy characters
like Monsieur St. Aubert (our heroine’s admirable father in Udolpho) show
an intelligent and sensitive understanding of landscape values. However,
crass and selfish characters, like Monsieur Quesnel in the same novel,
show only disdain for stately trees and picturesque Gothic mansions (The
Mysteries of Udolpho, vol. 1, Chap. 1).
Ann Radcliffe also integrates landscape aesthetics into the construc-
tion of her plots. In The Romance of the Forest (1791), for example, the
home of Adeline’s would-be seducer, the Marquis de Montalt, is spacious
and elegant, filled with such luxurious objects as a bed that is hung with
painted silk hangings and supported by silver Cupids. The Marquis’s house
is full of smooth textures and soft lights—all beautiful elements. However,
Radcliffe returns to picturesque principles immediately outside of the
house where there is an English, not a French-style, pleasure garden. It
suits the plot structure that the attempted seduction take place in beau-
tiful, voluptuous surroundings; but after our terrified heroine extricates
herself from the Marquis’s clutches, it is important to the effectiveness of
the next scene, that Adeline should wander distractedly through the pic-
turesque, shadowed, and winding paths of an English garden, instead of
strolling along straight moonlit avenues of beautifully manicured, French
pleasure grounds (Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, Chap. 11).18
As noted above, Ann Radcliffe’s true genius lies in her ability to create
vivid moods, rather than tight plots, or multi-layered characters. To do
this, she draws heavily upon the principles of landscape aesthetics; and
one of her most frequent references is to the aesthetic qualities of light. As
Gilpin and Price observed, different lighting effects can produce dramati-
cally different effects and Radcliffe draws on this to create fictional moods.
One good example is found in The Mysteries of Udolpho, where Radcliffe
describes more or less the same scene (the view from Udolpho Castle)
under three different lightings. The author subtly changes the mood of
the scene each time. First, we experience the view from Udolpho with our
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 81

heroine, Emily, as she wakes to her first morning in the castle. The scene
is inspiring in the fresh morning light; a classically picturesque mixture
of sublimity (castle fortifications, huge mountains, dark forests, deep val-
leys, and shadows) with soft, pastoral beauty (cattle, cottages, streams).
All these elements uplift Emily’s spirits and engage her imagination as she
views the sunny landscape (The Mysteries of Udolpho, vol. 2, Chap. 6).
A little later, Emily walks the lonely ramparts of Udolpho, where under
the “gloom of a lowering sky … [the surrounding landscape] assisted the
musings of her mind, and threw over it a kind of melancholy tranquility,
such as she often loved to indulge.” But suddenly, a sunbeam, “streaming
from behind a heavy cloud,” reveals to Emily three unpleasant-looking
strangers in a castle archway who are staring at her with an ominous curi-
osity. Our startled heroine immediately suspects the worst and abruptly
rushes back to the relative safety of her own chamber (The Mysteries of
Udolpho, vol. 2, Chap. 7). In yet another mood swing for Emily, Ann
Radcliffe places the intrepid heroine on the ramparts of Udolpho in the
dead of night: “The moon gave a faint and uncertain light, for heavy
vapours surrounded it, and, often rolling over the disk, left the scene
below [the landscape around Udolpho] in total darkness.” “Lurid and
heavy” thunderclouds hang over Emily’s head and “vivid lightnings [sic]
darted from cloud to cloud, and flashed silently on the woods below” (vol.
3, Chap. 4). Emily is at first uplifted by this sublime scene, but the sky
becomes more and more threatening; her spirits sink lower and she feels
strong apprehension about the mysterious, possibly dangerous, figure she
hopes to meet on the ramparts. These three passages all describe a similar
view from Udolpho, but they each evoke a very different emotion in the
heroine and the reader.
In another example, Ann Radcliffe references more general landscape
values, in addition to lighting values, as she changes the mood from pure
terror, to wary relief, and then to near happiness. “Trembling with terror”
of her evil pursuers, Julia (heroine of A Sicilian Romance) embarks on
a fearful night journey through a dense, dark forest: “The way was only
faintly illuminated by the moon, which shed a trembling lustre through
the dark foliage, and which was seen but at intervals, as the passing clouds
yielded to the power of her rays” (Chap. 12). When Julia reaches the edges
of the forest, it is sunrise; and in spite of the rigors of the journey and the
biting morning chill, the mood changes. Julia’s terror begins to dissipate
in the early morning light. However, Julia’s anxieties are not fully gone at
this point, and she is thus unable to appreciate the extraordinarily pictur-
82 A. DAVENPORT

esque scene that full daylight unfolds before her: a meandering stream in
the foreground; hills and vales in the middle distance; wild, lofty moun-
tains in the background; clusters of peasants’ cottages; a blue sea lying
in the distance. It is a measure of her continued anxiety that our heroine
cannot enjoy the aesthetic pleasures, “which in other circumstances Julia
would have contemplated with rapture” (Chap. 12). In the next section,
however, Radcliffe gives us a scene of pure beauty and the mood changes
to one of near happiness: “The freshness of morning breathed over the
scene, and vivified each colour of the landscape. The bright dewdrops
hung trembling from the branches of the trees, which at intervals over-
shadowed the road; and the sprightly music of the birds saluted the rising
day.” And at this point, in spite of her terrible night journey and her well-
founded fears of pursuit, the sheer beauty of the scene “diffused a soft
complacency over the mind of Julia” (Chap. 12).
Radcliffe sometimes uses the intense aesthetic values of a classic under-
ground passage (ugly-sublime as well as picturesque) to create scenes that
are poignant as well as frightening. In Udolpho, Emily’s aunt has died
(possibly at the hands of her own husband) and Emily believes it is her
duty to accompany the body of her not-much-loved relative to the grave
site. Radcliffe has psychologically prepared the reader for this scene for
many chapters. Madame Montoni may be insensitive and unpleasant, but
she is a wronged woman who has a certain amount of vitality in her loud
insistence that she be treated fairly. Her death, after much suffering, comes
as a sort of horrible relief to Emily and to the reader. Emily’s descent to
graveside in the tunnels beneath Udolpho is a terrible duty she feels she
must perform, though the pallbearers have the countenances of murder-
ers and though it is reasonable for her to suppose that Montoni would
regret her disappearance as little as he regretted his wife’s death. Radcliffe
extends the description of Emily’s passage to the gravesite over several
pages, and skillfully teases out the emotional potential of the scene. By
the time the author actually describes the gravesite, the reader is in a state
of delicious Gothic tension that makes the following, highly picturesque,
scene all the more effective:

The fierce features and wild dress of the condottieri, bending with their
torches over the grave, into which the corpse was descending, were con-
trasted by the venerable figure of the monk, wrapt in long black garments,
his cowl thrown back from his pale face, on which the light gleaming
strongly shewed the lines of affliction softened by piety, and the few grey
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 83

locks, which time had spared on his temples: while, beside him, stood the
softer form of Emily … her face half averted, and shaded by a thin veil, that
fell over her figure; and her mild and beautiful countenance fixed in grief
so solemn as admitted not of tears, while she thus saw committed untimely
to the earth her last relative and friend … the misguided and unfortunate
Madame Montoni. (The Mysteries of Udolpho, vol. 3, Chap. 5)

The classic terror school apprehension that Ann Radcliffe evokes is one
of the most important characteristics of her novels. But terror is not the
only emotion aroused. Radcliffe’s frequent flights into the picturesque—
or even the beautiful—provide an emotional relief from feelings of appre-
hension and help to pace her storyline. Ann Radcliffe’s “turning from
the highway to dream in wayside arbors” contributes a great deal to the
pleasurable frisson of her novels (Tompkins 309); and frequent opportuni-
ties for picturesque tourism ensure that readers of Radcliffe novels are not
kept in a constant state of apprehension. In other words, terror elements
serve as punctuation to Ann Radcliffe’s storylines; these elements do not
comprise the whole of the story. To give just one example (from the open-
ing pages of The Romance of the Forest), Adeline experiences a “tumult of
emotions” (Chap. 1)—terror, anxiety, despair, grief—during one dreadful
night. To create a disquieting mood and build narrative tension Radcliffe
references the picturesque as well as the sublime: a forlorn, desolate room;
an isolated and ancient house; menacing, pistol-wielding ruffians; a dark,
storm-drenched landscape. But then the author provides (at least tempo-
rary) emotional relief from the narrative tension:

[The beauty of the following morning] animated the spirits of Adeline,

whose mind was delicately sensible to the beauties of nature … As she viewed
the flowery luxuriance of the turf, and the tender green of the trees, or
caught, between the opening banks, a glimpse of the varied landscape, rich
with wood, and fading into blue and distant mountains, her heart expanded
in momentary joy. (Romance of the Forest, Chap. 1)

It has been worth examining Ann Radcliffe’s work in some detail because
she was expert in using the popular aesthetic ideas of her day to create
vivid and memorable word-pictures of the landscapes through which her
heroines travelled or (almost as often) fled. And these landscape descrip-
tions help create the satisfying plot rhythms of her novels. Gothic scholar
Robert Miles has praised Ann Radcliffe for dexterously working on the
84 A. DAVENPORT

nerves of her reader to create an emotional rhythm of almost unbearable

suspense (Ann Radcliffe 51). Radcliffean heroines flee through the sub-
limity of wild landscapes, and the reader’s nerves tighten in delicious ter-
ror. But then, just at the right point in the narrative, the author interposes
scenes in peaceful, beautiful landscapes, and both heroine and reader can
relax.
Other eighteenth-century writers (like Charlotte Turner Smith, Clara
Reeve, and Charles Brockden Brown) also created Gothic novels and also
referenced landscape aesthetics in their works.19 However, Ann Radcliffe
remains the benchmark against which eighteenth-century Gothic nov-
els (especially those of the terror school) are judged. As we will see, her
manipulations of landscape aesthetics to communicate mood and create
emotional rhythm became the mainstay of Gothic novels (and Gothic film
scripts) in the centuries that followed.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY GOTHICS
Gothic fiction saw further developments in the nineteenth century, in
the works of masters like Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe,
and Henry James.20 The aesthetic terminology continued to be fluid, for
different authors had different ideas of what comprised the sublime, the
beautiful, and the picturesque. But the basic concepts remained intact and
the landscape aesthetics that had proved so useful for their eighteenth-
century predecessors continued to be an important part of nineteenth-
century Gothic craft.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre (1847) used the principles of landscape aesthetics both to
create moods and to reveal more about their characters. For example,
Charlotte Brontë’s landscape-minded Jane Eyre who, as a girl, wistfully
dreamed of creating “freely pencilled houses and trees, picturesque rocks
and ruins,” gazes on Thornfield Hall, home of her mysterious employer,
Mr. Rochester. The grey edifice, with battlements all around, stands in
the warm light of a sunny autumn morning. In the background, Jane can
see a rookery, a meadow and an “array of mighty old thorn trees, strong,
knotty, and broad as oaks,” with quiet, lonely hills lying beyond (Chaps.
8 and 11). The highly picturesque, contrasting elements of the land-
scape—dark and light, rough and smooth—add to the narrative tension
and reflect the qualities of its fascinating, attractive, and somewhat dis-
turbing owner. In another example from this period, Wuthering Heights,
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 85

Emily Brontë draws on landscape precepts to show the clear contrast

between the personality of the energetic, passionate young Catherine and
the placid Linton. The two characters argue about what would comprise
heavenly happiness. Linton’s “most perfect idea of heaven’s happiness”
was spending a hot day in the blooming heath, while the bees hummed
dreamily and larks sang high up in a clear blue sky (that is, his ideal
was a soft and pleasant landscape of Burkean beauty). In dramatic con-
trast, Catherine’s idea of heaven was a wild landscape “with a west wind
blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above … [birds] pour-
ing out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken
into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating
in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole
world awake and wild with joy” (Chap. 24). In other words, Catherine
craves the intense emotions of a more sublime landscape. These tem-
peramental differences—expressed here through different appreciations
of landscape aesthetics—add immeasurably to the fraught tensions of
Wuthering Heights.
Another nineteenth-century author in the Gothic tradition, Edgar Allan
Poe, made the link between landscape and mood very explicit in “The Fall
of the House of Usher” (1839). The narrator muses, as he views a bleak,
wintry landscape of intense Burkean ugliness: “Beyond doubt, there are
combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus
affecting us [emphasis in original].” The sight inspires in him “an utter
depression of the soul … an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart,”
(Poe) and these uneasy feelings prepare the reader for the horrible revela-
tions later in the story.
Similarly, in one scene of The Turn of the Screw (1898), Henry James
draws on a rapid succession of emotions—those evoked by beauty, pictur-
esqueness, and sublimity—to move the story forward and to set the stage
for the terrifying events to come. The scene opens as the unnamed female
narrator wanders about a gentleman’s property in the fading light of late
afternoon. Her first emotion is pleasure as she calmly enjoys the peaceful
beauty of the grounds. Suddenly, she sees a ghostly figure gazing over
distant battlements (“as definite as a picture in a frame”), and her reaction
to this highly picturesque scene is a state of alertness and curiosity. But her
mood shifts to an overwhelmed, frozen horror when the man then gazes
upon her with frightening fixedness: “[It was as if] all the rest of the scene
had been stricken with death … I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken”
(James Chaps. 3 and 4).
86 A. DAVENPORT

LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS AND THE MODERN GOTHIC

In these nineteenth-century examples, the authors used essentially the
same system of landscape aesthetics as had their eighteenth-century
predecessors. More modern Gothic creators have referenced these aes-
thetic principles, but they also draw on newer expressions of the same
basic landscape values. The post-industrial ruin is a good example of a
modern expression of landscape aesthetics. As landscape architect Susan
Herrington has noted: “Some of the most provocative works of land-
scape architecture today frame deteriorating relics from our industrial
past. These are hulking industrial structures, which would have been
deemed eyesores in earlier landscape creations” (77). Today these indus-
trial ruins often provide a positive and stimulating picturesque experience
(81). However, the interesting picturesque values can merge impercepti-
bly into the negative ugly-sublime values of a deteriorating, threatening
cityscape. This sort of blighted urban scenery has become the perfect
backdrop for modern Gothic tales of criminals and detectives. As Fred
Botting writes:

The modern city—industrial, gloomy and labyrinthine—is the locus of hor-

ror violence and corruption … crime and the criminal mind present new
threatening figures of social and individual disintegration … traces of gothic
and Romantic forms, however, appear as signs of loss and nostalgia, projec-
tion of a culture possessed of an increasingly disturbing sense of deteriorat-
ing identity, order and spirit (Botting, Gothic 105).21

The basic tenets of eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics have expanded

and evolved; and Gothic works of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries
continue to reference this flexible system of landscape aesthetics. In addi-
tion, the Gothic tradition has been enriched by new artistic forms: motion
pictures; television; comic books; and, more recently, video games.22 As in
previous centuries, the exact terminologies (e.g., the definitions of sub-
lime, beautiful, picturesque) are less important than the emotions that the
aesthetic is capable of evoking and the ways artists draw on this tradition
to create a Gothic experience for the reader/viewer.
Some twentieth-century fictional works, like those of Daphne Du
Maurier, continued the Radcliffean terror tradition of Gothic romance.
In the opening pages of Rebecca (1938), for example, Du Maurier ref-
erences eighteenth-century aesthetics in a nightmare description of sub-
lime ugliness (fifty-foot tall rhododendrons, “malevolent ivy”) and awful
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 87

desolation (the house was “a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried
in the ruins”), contrasted with memories of beauty (“tea under the chest-
nut tree, and the murmur of the sea coming up to us from the lawns
below”) (Chap. 1). Other fictional works—for example the Alien series
of science fiction movies (1970s–1990s) lie squarely in the horror-school
tradition of Mathew Lewis. As in Lewis’s The Monk, the aesthetic of Alien
follows Uvedale Price’s model (see above): ugliness plus deformity equals
hideous; and hideous scenes (e.g., of aliens erupting from human bod-
ies) produce the sublime and intense emotion of horror. Or, for another
more recent example in the science fiction genre, see clips from the long-
running, dark and Gothic-flavored Battlestar Galactica television series
(2003–2009), which incorporate a wide range of aesthetic values to evoke
an equally wide range of moods in its audience: graphic and ugly scenes of
battle casualties inspire a sublime horror; vast, balletic space battles evoke a
sublime awe; and the peaceful beauty of an Eden-like planet creates a sense
of serenity and contentment.23

VIDEO GAMES
In the preceding section we looked at a few ways modern Gothics have
drawn on—and sometimes modified—the principles of eighteenth-
century landscape aesthetics. However, some of the clearest recent mani-
festations of eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics can now be found in
the Gothic worlds of many popular twenty-first century video games. This
section takes a closer look at how these aesthetics are referenced in elec-
tronic games and how many modern video games manifest the centuries-
old Gothic tradition.
Just as many eighteenth-century British readers enjoyed the deli-
cious terrors of Radcliffean novels and the more violent emotions of
horror-school novels, many modern gamers also enjoy exciting games
that can deliver tingling Gothic emotions. And like their Gothic-genre
predecessors, modern videogame designers often reference the aesthetic
conventions of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. However,
as we will see in this section, videogame designers take these aesthetic con-
ventions one step further because of a unique property of the videogame
format, that is, participants can be offered the opportunity for picturesque
tourism within the fictional game world. And here, in a sense, our discus-
sion of eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics comes full circle. Video
games can provide a thrilling Gothic experience through gameplay; but
88 A. DAVENPORT

they can also provide a pleasantly stimulating—even relaxing—change of

pace when a player decides to explore a picturesque e-landscape.
Without wading into the fray of current arguments about the artistic
merits of video games or the best way to understand this new genre,24 and
keeping strictly to our focus on eighteenth-century aesthetics, it is clear
to even a casual, non-gamer observer that Gothic-inspired video games
frequently use the same aesthetic conventions as, say, did Horace Walpole
or Ann Radcliffe. Although found in many types of video games, this con-
nection is probably easiest to see in the sub-genre of photorealistic games,
in which (more or less) realistic protagonists move through (more or less)
realistic landscapes.25
Many photorealistic games are thrilling, Gothic-mode, shooter games,
in which the player-protagonist tries to complete a quest (or just tries to
survive) in an amazingly hostile electronic landscape.26 A recent glance at
a few YouTube postings about video games and gameplay (e.g., postings
about hugely popular series like Gothic, Elderscrolls, or World of Warcraft)
will show how much these creations rely on an inventory of eighteenth-
century landscape aesthetics to further their artistic goals.27 In such games,
designers often reference an awe-inspiring sublimity (looming mountains,
jutting crags, deep gorges), or a terror-inducing sublime ugliness (hos-
tile zombies, exploding bodies), or the post-industrial picturesque (post-
apocalyptic cityscapes). These may be contrasted with beautiful scenes
of, say: misty forests in soft light; open sunny meadows; placid lakes; or
snug cottages. Often these beautiful scenes include picturesque elements
like rushing streams, looming clouds, or pounding surf against a jagged
shoreline.28
A sense of intense, involved self-agency is an important tool for artists
and writers crafting video games in the Gothic mode, and this is espe-
cially evident in sub-genre survival horror video games. Videogame com-
mentators have noted that this entire sub-genre is based on the player’s
emotional response to feeling helpless and threatened within the game
world—a fictional construct that takes us back to trapped and terrified
Radcliffean heroines, and to later Gothic characters like the apprehen-
sive narrators in Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and in Du Maurier’s
Rebecca.29 Critic John Lanchester explains the attraction of the survival
horror video game genre:

The basic premise [of survival horror games] is that you go into a bad place
and have to escape … The person moving down the darkened hallway, lis-
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 89

tening to the sinister creaking noise coming from behind the wall, is you …
Resident Evil 4, to name the generally agreed peak of the genre, is a better
scary entertainment than any horror film made in years. (“Is it Art?”)

From even a small sampling of Resident Evil gameplay (on Youtube, for
example) we can see that the series relies on the emotional effects of dim
lighting, dead-looking trees, or moldering buildings to help draw the
player/protagonist more deeply into the Gothic thrills of the game. And
another highly praised survival horror game, Silent Hill, uses the contrast
of “everyday places,” like cafes and gas stations, and the “ordinariness
and familiarity make it all the more disturbing when things turn nasty …
Normality is threatened, trashed, by the monstrous” (Carr, “Play Dead”).
This game relies on both dank, dark landscapes and ugly, zombie-like ene-
mies to help create its thrills.30
Some survival horror games, like the Dead Space games, draw even
more heavily on ugliness and deformity to produce their emotional
effects.31 In our earlier discussion of Burke and Price, we saw that when
these two negative aesthetic qualities (ugliness and deformity) are linked
with terror, the effect can be classified as sublime. Horror-school Gothics
have long drawn on these negative aesthetic values—Mathew Lewis, for
example, gave us a half-crazed mother, trapped in a dismal tomb with her
infant’s moldering corpse. But Dead Space goes much further, it gives us
whole armies of moldering bodies that torment our often hallucinating
protagonist while he is trapped in his spaceship. In the course of gameplay,
the protagonist suffers multiple deaths (stabbing, slashing, suffocation,
beheading, and dismembering). Like The Monk, the Dead Space games are
hugely popular, in spite of (or perhaps because of) their excess of “blood,
gore, and gunk” (Carr, “Ability, Disability and Dead Space”).32
Referencing the Burkean aesthetic value of the ugly-sublime can be
very useful in designing Gothic-mode video games like these, but many
such games, even the most bloodthirsty, also reference other aesthetic
values. As in Gothic novels or Gothic films, the judicious use of other
landscape elements helps draw the viewer-player into the storyline and
adds emotional complexity to the experience. For example, game design-
ers can use ugly-sublime scenes to ensure generous doses of Gothic horror
for the player; but designers can also interpose episodes of beauty to allow
the player to draw a breath. A good videogame designer will often use
aesthetic values both to provide narrative depth and to move the storyline
forward. Even the over-the-top sublime ugliness of the Dead Space series
90 A. DAVENPORT

is occasionally broken with scenes referencing alternative aesthetics. As a

small break from all the blood and gore, Dead Space games do offer the
player scenes (of outer space or ice planets) that possess a sublimity tinged
with beauty.
Designers of Gothic-flavored games also draw on references to the pic-
turesque (e.g., twisted trees, ruined castles) that hark back to eighteenth-
century aestheticians like Gilpin and Price. Especially popular are shadowy
Gothic corridors that can be traced back to Walpole’s dark underground
passageways and to Radcliffe’s castle galleries at midnight. For example,
the well-regarded System Shock 2 creates a terrifying and unsettling world
in the shadowy corridors of a deserted space ship. The view of the first-
person shooter protagonist restricts the field of vision; and in the dim and
threatening corridors of the spaceship, this lack of peripheral vision is very
disquieting.33
However, even in a terror-ridden shooter or survival-horror game, it is
often desirable to provide moments of relative calm and, to ensure that
there will be an emotional change of pace, game designers can make use
of the player-agency that is characteristic of all video games. The players
themselves can decide if they need a break from the adrenaline rush of
fast gameplay; all the game designer needs do is to provide interesting
e-locales for these rest breaks. Self-agency makes it possible for an emo-
tionally frazzled player to drop the main storyline for a time, and to wan-
der about in an e-landscape, rather like an eighteenth-century gentleman
engaged in picturesque tourism. Like their eighteenth-century predeces-
sors, videogame players are alert, curious observers of their environment
and, like their predecessors, they have the ability to move about within an
intriguing, often highly picturesque, landscape.
The videogame sense of physical movement within a fictional landscape
is unique to this medium.34 The British critic John Lanchester writes that
the two great strengths of video games are their beauty (“the best games
are already beautiful”) and their sense of agency (“the player is free to act
and to choose”). In many games, the virtual landscapes are so fascinating
that many players are strongly tempted to ignore the game rules, to move
away from the quest-battle-escape storyline and to take off on an inde-
pendent tour of the game’s virtual environment. In recent years, many
highly-rated (and most commercially successful) video games are open-
world games that make it possible for a player to explore the aesthetics
of the game environment, even though this may not further goal-driven
gameplay.35
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 91

Videogame commentators have called this temptation to roam about

within a game the quality of sandboxiness. This can be viewed as a very
special kind of picturesqueness and it is characteristic of the most per-
fectly realized videogame environments.36 The link between picturesque-
ness and curiosity can draw the player deeper into a fictional world; and a
player’s curious exploration of an e-landscape can provide additional hours
of pleasurable gameplay, while at the same time providing a change of pace
from the emotional turbulence of the main storyline. Sounding rather like
Uvedale Price on the subject of picturesque exploration (see earlier quota-
tion), commentator Grant Tavinor tells us that he frequently succumbs to
his curiosity about a game’s electronic environment:

I have personally spent a huge amount of time exploring the game world
… and often not with the desire to complete some gameplay mission, but
rather for the sheer enjoyment of exploration. What is behind that next hill-
ock, or within the ancient ruin on the near shore? How far can I climb into
the mountains? What is the view like from up there? (147)

Or, to give a few other examples of picturesque tourism: games from the
dystopian Fallout series allow players to take a break from the thrills of
fighting off enemies and to roam among the picturesque, post-industrial
ruins of what was once Washington D.C; and the medieval-themed
Kingdom Come Deliverance tempts gamers to wander through impres-
sive castles and to journey through picturesque landscapes (perhaps inter-
spersed with an occasional sword fight in a sun-dappled forest glade).
Even the quintessential first-person shooter games of the Grand Theft
Auto series are designed to encourage e-tourism (game instructions are in
the form of tourist guides [Miller]). In fact, many players of Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas so enjoy exploring the game’s interesting, well-crafted
California setting, that they simply abandon the thrills of gameplay, drive
to the virtual coast, and watch the sun set over the beautiful virtual ocean
(Lanchester; Tavinor 173).37
Designing an open-world videogame that provides a true Gothic expe-
rience is not easy. Tanya Krzywinska points out the challenges that face the
creators of Gothic video games when they use an open-world format that
allows full touristic enjoyment of picturesque e-landscapes: “A core prob-
lem with the open format is that it proves difficult to determine the order
in which players discover plot nodes” (510). That is, it is more difficult
for game designers to create a thrilling pace, full of suspense and dramatic
92 A. DAVENPORT

tension. For example, one well-known Gothic videogame, Alan Wake,

was originally designed as an open-world game; but its designers soon
decided that a closed format, where the player must follow a controlled
path, would work better in the game’s “breathless, roller-coaster plot
structure” (Krzywinska 510). However, other popular Gothic-flavored
games have successfully used an open-world format. In the multi-player
The Secret World, players can choose to go on quests, investigate mysteries,
indulge in exploration, go shopping, or wage battles against other factions.
The game is well-known for its noir screen portrayals of real-world loca-
tions like Seoul and London; and in this game, the Gothic mood depends
less on linear narrative form than on “accumulative, slow-burn character
development and world-building” (Krzywinska 511).
A second challenge in incorporating landscape aesthetics into the
design of Gothic-flavored video games is that designers must ensure that
superb technical qualities (e.g., of a picturesque e-landscape) do not dis-
tract players too much from the pleasurable terrors of the main story-
line. In many well-crafted games, the landscape itself undergoes changes,
whether or not the player is actively involved; during a lull in the action,
a game may settle into “a moment of equilibrium” (Galloway 10), an
ambient state which can continue indefinitely. Although the video land-
scape continues to change during this ambient state, “nothing changes
that is of any importance … It rains. The sun goes down, then it comes
up. Trees stir … [in] a living tableau” (Galloway 10–11). Instead of a
rule-bound activity, the game is temporarily transformed into a series of
slightly moving images on the screen. At times, the beauties of these
mesmerizing, barely moving images can distract from the Gothic tensions
of the game.
The fictional medium of Gothic video games is a new one and its form
is still evolving. However, these games are part of the long Gothic tradi-
tion, reaching back to Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto. The
pleasurable Gothic thrills experienced by modern gamers, whose idealized
young avatars run through picturesque e-scenery while fighting off exotic
enemies, cannot be very different from the emotions felt by devotees of
eighteenth-century Gothic novels, who read about idealized young her-
oines fleeing evil villains through the dark corridors of haunted castles.
Players of modern Gothic-flavored video games, like earlier readers of
Gothic novels, thoroughly enjoy the tension of the storyline; but, like
many eighteenth-century readers, modern gamers also enjoy an occasional
break from the terrors of the main plot. To provide this emotional change
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 93

of pace, videogame designers, like their novelist predecessors, can draw

from a cultural heritage of still-relevant landscape aesthetics.
This tradition of eighteenth-century English landscape aesthetics is
already integral to the craft of videogame design; and it is likely that future
game designers will continue to make use of reliable emotional vectors
like the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. Successfully incor-
porating these vectors into videogame design can ensure a multi-layered
Gothic game experience—one which not only includes the nervous thrill
of a spooky room and the gut-wrenching horror of a bloody e-battle, but
which can also include the pleasant stimulation of picturesque tourism and
even the peaceful contemplation of an e-sunset.
This chapter, then, has offered an initial exploration of the ways indi-
vidual artists and writers, from the eighteenth century to the present, have
referenced traditional English landscape aesthetics in order to provide
pleasurable Gothic terrors for their audiences. It is true that the sources of
these terrors have changed over the centuries. Eighteenth-century readers
thrilled to villainous threats to a heroine’s chastity and to ghostly figures
pacing castle ramparts; but we are similarly thrilled with our noir detective
stories and our battles with videogame zombies. We have seen that incor-
porating eighteenth-century English landscape aesthetics into a modern
Gothic work can still add layers of emotional interest and can still draw an
audience deeper into a fictional construct. Consciously or unconsciously,
Gothic creators have repeatedly referenced the Burkean sublime to inspire
strong emotions of awe or terror, and have drawn from the softer aesthetics
of beauty to provide scenes of tranquility and peace. Equally importantly,
Gothic artists and writers have also relied on the picturesque to awaken
curiosity and to draw the reader/viewer/player deeper into imagined
Gothic worlds. This enduring and adaptable system of eighteenth-century
landscape aesthetics continues to inspire writers, artists, film makers—and
now videogame designers—who reference this canon in their engrossing
Gothic creations.

NOTES
1. Joseph Crawford (2015) points out, “Gothic as a genre is perfectly
adapted to new and hybrid media forms … every new form of
media technology over the last two centuries has … been rapidly
adapted to the articulation of Gothic fiction” (36). Throughout
this development process, as Valdine Clemens (1999) notes, “The
94 A. DAVENPORT

Gothic tale is generally most effective [emphasis added] when it is

most affective” (1).
2. The works of early twentieth-century writers Elizabeth Wheeler
Manwaring (1925) and Christopher Hussey (1967) still provide a
good introduction to eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics.
More recently, John Dixon Hunt’s (2002) The Picturesque Garden
in Europe offers a well-researched, beautifully illustrated analysis of
eighteenth-century theoreticians and practitioners of picturesque
aesthetics. James Corner (1999), in his preface, shows that “the
landscape idea” has varied over time and across cultures, and that
landscape is inextricably linked with cultural ideas and images
(Corner 5 and 7).
3. For a discussion of the aesthetics of modern landscape architecture,
see Herrington (2009); for a similar discussion, focusing more on
architecture, see Macarthur (2007). Other writers have explored
how these landscape aesthetics have influenced art forms like paint-
ing, poetry, or literature (e.g., Robinson (1991), Broglio (2008)).
Also see Copley and Garside (1994); Ross (1986); and DeLue and
Elkins (2008).
4. See Botting (2008), Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and
Technology in Contemporary Fictions; Botting (2014), Gothic; Miles
(1995) (2002); and Mishra (1994).
5. Portions of the following discussion were drawn from Alice
Davenport (2014), “Mrs. Radcliffe and the Cult of the Picturesque”
and Davenport, “An Adaptable Aesthetic: Eighteenth-century
Landscape, Ann Radcliffe, and Jane Austen.”
6. According to Burke (1757), “Terror is in all cases whatsoever,
either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime”
(Chap. 2, pt. 2). Also see Monk (1960).
7. For Price (1842), the beautiful was based on smoothness, gradual
variation, youth and freshness; the picturesque was characterized
by roughness, contrast, and sudden variation, age and even decay.
For more, see Price, Chaps. 3 and 4.
8. See Price (1842), especially 84–87 and 338–39; and Gilpin (1792),
especially. 7 and 13–14. Although Gilpin and Price presented their
aesthetic theories clearly in their publications, neither author was
completely consistent in his use of the term picturesque.
9. In Robinson’s (1991) view, movement, the special quality of the
picturesque, reinforces the importance of the observer as a focal
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 95

point for this aesthetic experience. Landscape architect Susan

Herrington (2009) puts it this way: “This repositioning of the
viewer from passive receptor to active participant shifted emphasis
from what was being observed to the observer” (71).
10. Though Burke (1757) and Price (1842) suggest that ugliness is
linked with the sublime, other observers have rightly pointed out
that the picturesque itself often includes a large share of ugliness.
For example, see Charles Dickens’s acerbic comments, in his
Pictures from Italy, of the “miserable depravity, degradation, and
wretchedness” that was the reality behind a tourist’s view of color-
ful, picturesque Naples. Modern-day architect John Macarthur
(2007) notes that the picturesque always held an ugly secret: in
those charming landscapes the picturesque shepherdesses were
scarred with smallpox, and the smoke filled cottages were full of
pig manure (57).
11. To further confuse the issue, other terms, like romantic, were
thrown into the mix, and in many early Gothics it is often necessary
to closely examine the context to determine if romantic is intended
to describe Burkean beauty or something that is picturesque.
12. “Tourists visiting England in the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury now made a point of including on their itinerary some gar-
dens that were ‘modern,’ ‘natural,’ or ‘picturesque’” (Hunt 90).
13. In his study of nineteenth-century British novelists, Alexander
M. Ross (1986) explains that writers as different as Sir Walter Scott
and Henry James “found that the picturesque offered a very
tempting and sensible approach whereby they could make their
readers see and even feel what they wanted them to see and feel. As
so many of their readers were quite familiar with the conventions
of this aesthetic, really competent novelists had no need to erect
‘picturesque’ signposts in their prose” (45).
14. And see part 2, section 2, “Terror” in Burke (1757). Note,
Edmund Burke sometimes used the terms terror and horror inter-
changeably; but Burke clearly stated that this strong emotion was
linked with sublimity and that it robbed the person of the ability to
think and act. For more, see Norton, Introduction. For another
analysis of terror vs. horror narratives see Botting (2014), Gothic,
especially Chapter Four (“Gothic Writing in the 1790s”) and
Chapter Nine (“Consuming Monsters”). Botting suggests addi-
tional Gothic sub-categories, like cybergothic or vampire gothic.
96 A. DAVENPORT

15. See Botting (2014), Gothic, 44. However, Tobias Smollet’s (1753)
pre-Gothic novel The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom and
John Leland’s (1957) adventure-romance Longsword, Earl of
Salisbury did use some elements of this aesthetic to create a sense
of place.
16. It was Horace Walpole (1764) who introduced the spooky subter-
ranean tunnel scene that has served as a reliable source of creepi-
ness from the terror school Gothics of the eighteenth century to
modern, Gothic-flavored video games. In Walpole’s seminal scene:
“The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate
cloisters … An awful silence reigned throughout the subterranean
regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the
doors … [that the heroine] had passed, and through which grat-
ing on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through that long laby-
rinth of darkness. Every murmur struck her with near terror”
(Chap. 1).
17. Ann Radcliffe did not invent the phrase “beauty sleeping in the lap
of horror,” but this passage has often been quoted to illustrate the
contrast between beauty and sublimity.
18. In another example, this time from Udolpho, Radcliffe (1794) uses
the sublimity of a wild thunderstorm to raise the narrative ten-
sion—and also to serve as an agent in the plotline. In this example,
Emily and her friends are fleeing in a small boat when they are
caught by a storm. Lady Blanche and her family rescue the heroine
and the subsequent meeting between Emily and Blanche is crucial
to the plotline of the latter part of the novel (vol. 3, Chap. 11).
19. See, for example, Charlotte Turner Smith (1788), Emmeline: The
Orphan of the Castle; Clara Reeve (1778), The Old English Baron;
Charles Brockden Brown (1798), Wieland; or the Transformation:
An American Tale.
20. Other nineteenth-century novelists also referenced this tradition.
For example, see Mary Shelley’s (1818) Frankenstein for descrip-
tions of the picturesque Rhine (Chap. 18) and a comparison of the
pleasant emotions inspired by the “fair lakes” and “gentle sky” of
Switzerland, with the grey misery of a desolate, sublimely ugly
Orkney Island (Chap. 19). Non-Gothic authors also drew on these
aesthetics—Jane Austen for instance in her humor-filled Gothic
parody, Northanger Abbey. See Davenport (2014), “Adaptable
Aesthetic” 106.
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 97

21. Gloomy post-industrial cities, full of decayed ruins are also charac-
teristic of Gothic science/fantasy fiction in the dystopian mode
and stories in the “steampunk fantasy” subgenre.
22. For further discussion, see Tanya Krzywinska (2014). Krzywinska
prefers to use the term digital games rather than video games, and
notes that such Gothic-flavored games are very diverse: from sim-
ple first-person shooters like the House of the Dead series to block-
buster games like Bioshock; single-player games (e.g., the Silent Hill
series) to multiplayer games (e.g., Left 4 Dead 1 and 2). Other
independently made or art-based games that seek to test the
boundaries of digital game form also draw from the Gothic tradi-
tion. For example, Slender, a videogame based on the video log
(vlog) “Slenderman” incorporates a visual aesthetic that references
the sublime and the picturesque. In the videogame, the protago-
nist runs through dark, mysterious forests and dimly lit corridors
(“Let’s Play Slenderman Videogame”). And the mock documen-
tary vlog “THE SLENDER MAN IS REAL!!!” uses spooky land-
scape and architecture to help produce a delicious Radcliffean
terror. For a more detailed analysis of the Slenderman vlogs and
video games, see Crawford (2015) 42–46.
23. For a detailed analysis of the Alien series, see Fred Botting (2008),
Gothic Romanced, 162–180. See <www.Youtube.com> for an ever-
changing menu of posted Battlestar Galactica battle sequences.
For scenes from the emotionally charged final BG episode (2009)
see “The Things Men Do For Love—Last 10 Minutes (HD)—
Battlestar Galactica Extended Finale (2009).”
24. For two points of view regarding video games as art, see Tom
Bissell’s (2010) lucid explanation of the art of videogame design
and his discussion of the intricacies and joys of gameplay (Extra
Lives). Also see Phillip D. Dean (May 2011), who argues, “Video
games may be judged by classical conceptions of beauty and artistic
merit.” However, for another point of view, see the blogs of the
late Chicago Sun Times film critic, Roger Ebert (16 April 2010),
whose “Video games can never be art” touched nerves out in
cyberspace and sparked widespread and passionate online discus-
sions. For additional discussion, see Tavinor (2009); Clarke and
Mitchell (2007); and Wesp December 2014). Also see Galloway
(2006), who analyzes the sub-category of “artist-made video game
mods” (where the purpose of the videogame format is to express
98 A. DAVENPORT

an artistic vision). Sometimes, “the game loses its rule set com-
pletely and ceases to be a game at all” (Galloway 107).
25. See the popular (non-Gothic) Sims series—especially Sims, Island
Paradise—for examples of picturesque landscape values in a digital
world.
26. This format includes the first-person shooter, in which the player
sees the environment from the point of view of the avatar; and the
third-person shooter, in which the player can see the avatar’s entire
body, and the player’s view of the environment is not limited to the
avatar’s viewpoint. The third-person shooter format makes it easier
to notice and enjoy the surrounding electronic landscape—though
in this format it is harder for the players to aim and shoot at the
electronic enemy. Videogame researchers Andy Clarke and Grete
Mitchell (2007) note the “supreme ability” of the first-person
shooter to represent architectural space (15).
27. Occasionally, videogame creators make this link explicit. See, for
example, a 2012 interview with Ray Cobo, producer of the multi-
player game, Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. In a YouTube posting,
Cobo explains that the game starts in the “lush … calming envi-
ronment” of the beautiful place called the Jade Forest. The player
goes through other realms that slowly “get darker and more omi-
nous” as the challenges mount (“Blizzard Entertainment Producer
Ray Cobo Explores World of WarCraft: Mists of Pandaria”).
28. The non-gamer can share the experience of “picturesque e-tourism”
on websites like <www.youtube.com> or <www.twitch.tv>. For
example, the posting “The Lord of the Rings Online: Siege of
Mirkwood Jeffrey Steefel interview” (2009) guides the viewer
through game scenes that can be readily identified as sublime,
beautiful, or picturesque. In addition, the online research journal
Game Studies occasionally publishes articles on videogame envi-
ronments (i.e., a story’s visual backdrop) though the focus of these
articles tends to be more on the procedures and the gameplay
rather than on game aesthetics. For example, see Hayot and Wesp
(April 2009). Also see Martin (December 2011).
29. See Chap. 7 in Tavinor (2009), especially page 142.
30. The exact terminology used to describe the emotions felt by play-
ers during gameplay (e.g., terror vs. horror) may not correspond
precisely with the definitions of terror school/horror school Gothic
outlined earlier in this chapter. But this does not seem to be critical
 “BEAUTY SLEEPING IN THE LAP OF HORROR”: LANDSCAPE AESTHETICS... 99

to the argument here, for, as we have seen, the best Gothic cre-
ations often include elements of both schools.
31. Categorization of videogame types is often fluid. As Diane Carr
(December 2014) points out, “In addition to being structured as
an action adventure game, and functioning as survival horror,
Dead Space is [also] a science fiction” (“Ability, Disability and
Dead Space”).
32. In “Ability, Disability and Dead Space,” Diane Carr (December
2014) notes that in Dead Space the protagonist’s frequently
repeated and spectacularly violent deaths may seem “over-
determined or excessive” game design.
33. New Zealand academic Grant Tavinor (2009) explains that in
System Shock 2, “the few other people encountered in the [game]
world are usually dead, or are screaming and being chased by
mutants wielding shotguns, and thus about to become dead.” As
the player attempts to reach deeper into the ship’s decks, the ten-
sion builds. Tavinor admits that while he was playing the game his
avatar occasionally got into situations when “All I could do was
panic. My ability to deal with the situation briefly left me, and I
hurriedly ran away; I was unable to keep my head straight in order
to face the danger.” Nevertheless, Tavinor (2009) stoutly main-
tains that this game was “terrific fun” (131).
34. For additional discussion, see Murray (1997), who points out,
“Digital environments are characterized by a power to represent
navigable space. Linear media such as books or films can portray
space, either by verbal description or image, but only digital envi-
ronments present space that we can move through” (79).
35. These well-regarded, world-exploring games range from Oblivion
and Assassin’s Creed to racing games like Gran Turismo. Tavinor
(2009) 182.
36. The YouTube posting, “Call of Juarez Glitch: Journey to the edge of
the world” (30 August 2007), offers tips on how, exactly, to explore
the virtual environment of this game (and find the design glitches).
37. Tavinor (2009) notes that the lighting effects of Grand Theft Auto
are particularly effective: “The light changes during the course of
the day from the watery green light of early morning, to the late
afternoon, burgundy glow of a setting sun. Sometimes I start up …
[this game] just so that I can … see how the light changes the city
scene” (173).
100 A. DAVENPORT

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 PART II

Darkness in Unexpected Places: Not

Your Grandmother’s Haunted Castle
 What the Green Grass Hides: Denial
and Deception in Suburban Detroit

Amber B. Vayo

In The Virgin Suicides Jeffery Eugenides brings the American Gothic

traditions of excess and psychological trauma to the affluent suburb of
Grosse Point, Michigan. Set in the early 1970s, Eugenides uses the land-
scape of Detroit and its suburb to illustrate the deception of the perfect
lawn and white picket fence image of the American Dream. The neighbor-
hood denies the seething horrors hiding behind their landscape, but as the
elm-lined window dressing is carried away, both characters and reader are
left to see that there is no difference between the urban decay of Detroit
in the background and the suburban deterioration of Grosse Point in the
foreground.
The Virgin Suicides is the story of the five Lisbon sisters—Therese,
Bonnie, Mary, Lux, and Cecilia—all of whom commit suicide over the
course of a year. The Lisbons are a white-collar family with a teacher father
and a stay at home mom who, like their neighbors, strive to conform to
the American ideals of success. A result of the homogenization of desire
and identity is that the entire community attempts to forgo the ethnic
roots and cultural history that should represent American diversity in favor
of conformity so complete that it leads to a dull paperboard existence
where everything is background scenery and nothing seems to remain but

A.B. Vayo ()

Department of Political Science, UMASS, Amherst, MA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 107

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_5
108 A.B. VAYO

an unpleasant present. In “Some Stations of Suburban Gothic,” Kim Ian

Michasiw reflects that “the suburb emerges … as revenant, residual—not
so much a scene in itself as a specter haunting the postmodern condition”
(250). This is the first indicator of Gothicism in this novel where “[a]
sense of cultural exhaustion haunts the present” (Botting 298), both in
the form of a cultureless past and an exhaustion with contemporary society
as exposed by Cecilia’s suicide. The Lisbon suicides form “Gothic repre-
sentations [which] are a product of cultural anxieties about the nature
of human identity, the stability of cultural formations, and processes of
change” (Botting 280).
The novel opens with the anonymous narrators describing their mem-
ory of Cecilia being wheeled out on a stretcher and indicating that they
would become familiar with that scene as the remaining girls committed
suicide. After Cecilia’s death her parents and the community try to forget
it happened. The neighbors, rather than helping the family grieve, attempt
to remove the fence upon which she impaled herself. This is the first sign
of the communal denial that arises in Grosse Point. The schools offer no
real counseling or commemoration and the family does not seek profes-
sional help. Additionally, the Lisbon parents refuse to follow up with men-
tal health professionals after Cecilia’s first suicide attempt by slitting her
wrists. The four living sisters attempt to lead normal lives, going to home-
coming dances and attending classes, until they are forced into isolation
by their mother. Even so, they reach out to the neighborhood boys who
chronically neglect to see the impending suicides, preferring to imagine
the girls as romantic icons rather than individuals who need help.
Detroit and the surrounding areas are a suitable setting for an American
Gothic. The suburban antiseptic, ageless, conformity wears thin as,
Michasiw suggests, the suburb becomes merely a station that is part of
mass culture’s materialism where “consumers are offered prefab patterns”
absent of originality (239). But Eugenides’ narrative is, in some ways,
meta-stationary as the consumerist society stations the suburbs as conve-
nient objects of anxiety; this story becomes both part of and above such
stationing. The narrators’ rarely see the girls as more than interchange-
able commodities, but The Virgin Suicides itself is an anti-consumerist
narrative, including showing negatively one of the pinnacles of American
consumerism, Detroit. Further, as Eric Savoy notes, “the specificity of
the American Gothic, what makes it distinctively American, does not
come just from formulaic plots and situations of an aristocratic genre
being adapted to the democratic situation of the new world” (168) as
 WHAT THE GREEN GRASS HIDES: DENIAL AND DECEPTION IN SUBURBAN... 109

Michasiw’s stations suggest. Rather, American Gothic attempts to grap-

ple with the troubles of creating one nation out of many immigrants at
the expense of identity and indigenous peoples. Savoy asserts “American
Gothic … express[es] a profound anxiety about historical crimes and per-
verse human desires that cast their shadow over what many would like to
be the sunny American republic” (168). Placing the novel in the suburbs
beside Detroit—a city which embodied American white and blue collar
aspirations—“the Gothic … gives voice to the dark nightmare that is the
underside of the ‘American dream’” (Savoy 167). The American night-
mare is not the arbeit macht frei (work will set you free) of the concentra-
tion camp, but rather that work will enslave you to consumerism until it
casts you out with unemployment.
The price of suburban progress is conformity via denial and deception;
the cost is identity and even life. This contemporary Gothic does not deal
with Shelley’s Creature or Charles Brockden Brown’s mysterious voices;
rather, it “has come to deal with how the middle class dissociates from
itself, and then fears, the extremes of what surrounds it: the very high
or the decadently aristocratic and the very low or the animalistic, work-
ing class, [or] underfinanced” (Hogle 9). Post-World War II America had
created an economic boom which is petering out by the time The Virgin
Suicides is set, and the characters in the novel begin to recognize that
“progress generates an almost unbearable anxiety about its costs” (Savoy
167). As Michasiw notes, “the prime function of the culture industry is
to provide appropriate screens on which anxieties may assume appropriate
forms” (238) and the stereotypically materialist suburbs make the most
logical stage. These anxieties manifest themselves appropriately by being
safely relatable, angst-ridden teenage years, and safely relegated (to the
suburban station). Through the shelter of the suburban landscape and the
denial of its decay, “[t]he future is anxiously perceived as another place of
destruction and decay, as ruined as the Gothic past. Social and corporeal
disintegration awaits in postindustrial devastation” (Botting 279), both
for adults who cannot wholly forget and youths who cannot yet remem-
ber the histories each family has brought with their boxes to the suburbs.
Dines describes it as “the preference of the novel’s first-generation sub-
urban settlers for shelter, anaesthetized lives … a traumatized response to
the experience of war and loss” (Dines 963).
The Gothic imagination is illustrated by this novel through barren
landscapes and background environmental disasters. Grosse Point bor-
ders Detroit and through this dichotomy you can see the deception of
110 A.B. VAYO

the suburbs and the denial that breeds in its residents. Such landscapes
“depict modern alienation, and miraculous, fragile, and potentially dan-
gerous human connection” (Weston 39). Eugenides falls into the psy-
chological Gothic of Nathaniel Hawthorne whose “romances became so
intense a quest into the depth of the human mind and heart, into the
human personality’s doubleness, separateness, and essential mystery …
a way of knowing reality that is a very different product from the early
Gothic entertainments in Europe” (Weston 50).
Delving into the human psyche by using narrators who obsess over
the five girls and the constant mystery surrounding their motives in com-
mitting suicide enhances the tone of Gothic and grotesque. It is not the
suicides as much as the response to them which lends the Gothic element
to the novel. We see the Gothic horror is not in the shrine Cecilia’s sisters
made to her or the unexplained apparitions of ghostly daughters, both
living and dead, that frighten; rather, the horror of life is that “[c]hild-
hood ends, we despoil the landscape, all that is beautiful must die” (Ringel
211). The suburbs are “the space of nostalgia for childhood and a space
within which a slippage occurs between nature and technology, thereby
illuminating the tropes of dying nature and dying childhood, emblema-
tized by the Lisbon sisters” (Hoskin). As in many Gothic novels, “the
ghost story … is the book’s jumping off point, not its essence” (Brown 5).
Writers of the Gothic often use the grotesque or startling—here the five
suicides and the boys’ dark obsession—to “operate on political, social, and
philosophical planes as well as on the psychological” (Brown 5). It is the
state of suspense that is frightening, not the specter of ghosts or images of
dead teens (Brown 9).
Complicating the reader’s relationship to the narrative is that “[t]he
Gothic formula requires hero/villains, innocent victims, places of haunt-
ing, historical pasts weighing upon the present, and an author’s willing-
ness to write to excess” (Kafer xv). It is the recent past and contemporary
history that weighs on these narrators in their reference to race riots and
environmental degradation. Dines notes that “Eugenides’s novel recon-
stitutes the postwar suburbs as a historical space, a site of conflict under-
going change” (961). Are the girls victims of their society’s conflict,
change, and decay or of their mother’s denial? Or are they hero/villains
living out their lives in Byronic tragedy? Whatever the answer, Eugenides
uses the Gothic to delve into the subconscious impact the Lisbon girls
had on their peers, painting the sisters as anything but selfish teenagers,
despite several of their actions which, otherwise framed, would support
 WHAT THE GREEN GRASS HIDES: DENIAL AND DECEPTION IN SUBURBAN... 111

that claim. The girls become hero/villains by the end of the novel as
some neighbors start to view their suicides as wisdom rather than mad-
ness. This world was unacceptable and “[p]eople saw their clairvoyance
in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, the continuing decline of our
auto industry” (Eugenides 244). Exploring the wisdom of suicide is how
Eugenides “writes to excess” and drags the reader into the psychologi-
cal conflicts on this suburban street. The role of the hero/villain also
applies to the narrators—the primarily anonymous men who frame the
story as their lifelong obsession with the ghosts of the sisters—who can
be viewed as voyeurs (examining the girls’ used tampons as pieces of
modern art, buying their flavor of lipstick and then kissing each other).
The girls are both seen and unseen as objects of the boys’ speculation;
the boys themselves function as unseen seers detailing the steady col-
lapse of the Lisbon family, the ultimate ruin of the Lisbon house, and
later the entire neighborhood. Together seen/unseen worlds create a
psychological tapestry where every thread comes undone via contempo-
rary struggles: identity; powerlessness in the face of corrupt social and
political authority; and the decline of both ecological and community
environments.
The Gothic further manifests itself in the gratuitous descriptions of
decay. Eugenides writes about excess by describing the environmental
degradation caused as the product of human wastefulness. The wasteful-
ness continues in the loss of five promising futures, including the college-
bound Therese Lisbon. The Lisbon parents and the community at large
have wasted the potential of these girls and have wasted their lives by
denying and concealing their problems. Even the narrators wasted their
chance to know the real Lisbon girls by preferring to create artificial con-
structs of them as victims, martyrs, or clairvoyants. With the landscape,
Eugenides reflects a sense of environmental catastrophe. These allusions
to various corporate deeds speak to the element of mistrust of author-
ity in the Gothic and allude to events like GM and DELCO knowingly
using health hazards (Steinberg 209), the fire along the Cuyahoga River
(Steinberg 239), and others that took place around the time of the nov-
el’s setting. Together these “adult” actions make Cecilia Lisbon’s suicide
seem rational, or at least understandable. This world of chaos and failed
responsibility is the world the narrators’ parents are trying to ignore, but
they are forced to confront it even in their isolated community. It is the
landscape’s decline that symbolizes the non-sustainability of the denial-
deception modus operandi.
112 A.B. VAYO

ISOLATION, FISH-FLIES, AND OTHER DEGRADATION

The Virgin Suicides uses several allusions to nature to focus on the isola-
tion of this suburb; the primary example is fish-flies. Isolation here is both
cause and consequence of neighborhood denial; they do not want to deal
with matters beyond their suburb, so they do not. What is a natural/sea-
sonal occurrence, the yearly fish-fly invasion, becomes the barrier against
the outside world which the boys, as narrators and as members of the
community, cannot escape. These fish-flies flank the story, giving it the
geographic quality of Gothic isolation in the same way craggy German
mountains would have done in Europe. Despite the role the narrators play
in observing the girls’ deaths and preserving their memories, they remain
apart from them emotionally and psychologically in denial about who the
girls really were and the role communal apathy played in their demise. The
alienation from other people and places is represented both in the texts’
allusion to racial problems and inner city poverty just beyond the narra-
tors’ range of vision, and the way the fish-flies coat the town before the
first Lisbon suicide and a year later during the final one.
The suicides both begin and end during the fish-fly season when “each
year our town is covered in the flotsam of those ephemeral insects. Rising
in clouds from the algae in the polluted lake, they blacken windows, coat
cars and street lamps, plaster the municipal docks and festoon the rigging
of sailboats, always in the same brown ubiquity of flying scum” (Eugenides
4). Like a barrier around the narrative itself, the fish-flies literally block
out the beginning of the story, for each summer they come and stand as
reminders of the temporality of life and the futility of the human attempt
to control nature. The fish-flies “seem to herald … the suburb’s failure to
divorce itself physically and socially from the city which produced it, and
from which its inhabitants have come” (Dines 966). Despite the pesticides
and yearly neighborhood clean ups, these creatures will invade if only to
“live twenty-four hours … hatch, they reproduce, then they croak. They
don’t even get to eat” (Eugenides 4). They serve as a reminder that the
natural world will do as it pleases. As Marshall Brown notes, “[n]atural
time does not exist in the gothic except in the form of a simple illusion”
(Brown 73). The fish-flies are the only real mark of time in this non-linear
narrative, yet they also serve as the artifice of denial creating a barrier
between what is on the surface and seeing what is underneath it.
Even the crux of the narrative, the Lisbon suicides, is meaningless
outside the world of the fish-flies; the city newspapers did not report the
 WHAT THE GREEN GRASS HIDES: DENIAL AND DECEPTION IN SUBURBAN... 113

suicides “because of its sheer prosaicness. Owing to extensive layoffs at

the automotive plant, hardly a day passes without some despairing soul
sinking beneath a tide of the recession” (Brown 93). Other parts of the
community forget about the girls; firing Mr. Lisbon from his teaching
job and refusing to visit or engage with the family allows them to for-
get and deny the festering wound. The isolation exemplifies Marshall
Brown’s description of Gothic characters in The Gothic Text as “incarcer-
ated by darkness and cut off from concrete experiences, gothic victims
regenerate from within their own space and time” (13). The four older
Lisbon girls do regenerate and die throughout the novel. The four elder
sisters sink into depression when their youngest sister, Cecilia, impales
herself. In the interim year before they join her in death, Lux, Bonnie,
Mary, and Therese have a small regeneration as normal teens when their
mother lets them attend homecoming. They die as they are pulled out
of school and locked into their house, becoming phantoms to the nar-
rators who see their apparitions in windows, or receive mysterious mes-
sages from them without ever seeing them leave the house. Then they
regenerate as they send covert messages to the boys asking for help prior
to their final earthly deaths. Even later in adult life, the narrators resur-
rect the sisters via memory and a collection of mementos stored in an
old tree house.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter, Mary, takes her life, the
fish-flies have just hatched (Eugenides 237), juxtaposing the rebirth of
the natural world and the collapse of the human world. The fish-fly season
should be a beginning. In the June of summer amidst the “coming out
parties” for the city debutantes, it should not be a time for death; after
all, “winter is the season of alcoholism and despair” (Eugenides 175). But
the flies, too, with their futile and brief lives (like the Lisbon sisters), mir-
ror the narrators and their constant desire to see and attach themselves to
their perception of the Lisbon daughters: “inert unless detached … [the
fish-flies] flapped furiously … then flew away to cling again on anything”
(Eugenides 203). It is the Lisbon girls that unite the boys; without them,
the narrators have no connection to others and they founder around, later
having to memorialize the Lisbon relics in order to find reasons to visit
each other as adults. Their obsession becomes their survival conduit as
they do not have a community without it because all they have ever known
is the façade of community. The ethnic ties that allowed their parents to
bond were not passed to this generation, only the trappings of ethnic-
ity—another façade.
114 A.B. VAYO

Their constant revisions of the Lisbon girls furthers the Gothic imagi-
nation, “[t]he collapse of all distinctions between space and time, near and
far, actual and imaginary, the limitless domain of pain, subjective and cor-
poreal dissolution” (Botting 298). In the same way the city fails to contain
the cyclical coming of the fish-flies, the comfortable suburban archetype
cannot protect the boys from the horrors of the world. When Cecilia dies,
the boys recognize the futility of the utopian-suburban narrative their par-
ents have created and begin to see the powerlessness of their parents to
protect them. After the first suicide the boys get a glimpse behind the
suburban veil and become aware that their parents, who had survived the
Great Depression and fought in World War II or Korea, were playing a
part for them as they “realized that the version of the world they rendered
for us was not the world they really believed in” (Eugenides 55).
Beyond the veil of fish-flies stands adult life, the world the parents do
believe in, and which is constantly threatening their suburban sprawl. The
“real” world is a place where tragedy happens for no reason, lives are
ruined simply because they are, and a pervasive meaninglessness exists as
a result, and as the cause, of environmental and landscape degradation.
The overload of denial-deception has led to the boys’ attempt at “locat-
ing authenticity in material objects, [as] a legitimate means of attempt-
ing to satisfy nostalgic desire” (Hoskin). The desire for authenticity stems
from the anxieties these characters endure due to the constant psycho-
logical torture of reality-denial about the world around them. Eugenides
employs “[G]othic tropes such as setting, atmosphere, and style … to pro-
voke this fundamental sense of anxiety … these tropes have increasingly
been applied to mundane or familiar settings, such as suburbia or high
school corridors, in order to enhance their disruptive effects” (Hoskin).
Even in their anguish, the Lisbon parents confront this reality of anxiety
beyond the suburban pale while searching for a plot to bury thirteen-
year-old Cecilia. They refuse the beautiful Catholic cemetery because “Mr.
Lisbon saw two miles of leveled land that reminded him of photographs
of Hiroshima” and found out that it was the former Polish section of
town until “GM bought out like twenty-five thousand Polacks to build
this huge automotive plant. They knocked down twenty-four city blocks
and then ran out of money. So the place was all rubble and weeds. It was
desolate” (Eugenides 37).
This is the Gothic’s ability to play with these “mad impulses” of human
nature (Brown 110). It “confronts the principal characters with the gross
violence of physical or psychological dissolution, explicitly shattering the
 WHAT THE GREEN GRASS HIDES: DENIAL AND DECEPTION IN SUBURBAN... 115

assumed norms (including the repressions) of everyday life with wildly

shocking, and even revolting, consequences” (Hogle 3). The mad impulses,
though, are not what we expect—suicide. The mad impulses stem from
the supposed care-takers and titans of the community—the parks depart-
ment, the automotive millionaire families, the parents. Madness is not
symptomized by wanting to leave one’s life; rather, it is a mark of those
who make the economic, social, and environmental realities so unbearable
to begin with. Captain of MoTown industry GM scattered 25,000 families
and destroyed their homes—their history and their communal link—with-
out even the proper planning to see the project to fruition in hopes of
redeeming itself by at least returning jobs to the people it had destroyed.
This is a corporate mad impulse both in scope and due to the fact that it
was not properly planned.
The narrators, and presumably everyone else in their community, know
destruction and madness exist because over the “heaps of trees throwing
themselves into the air, the abrupt demarcation where the trees end and
the city began” they can hear the “sounds of the impoverished city we
never visited” (Eugenides 34) and “gun shots from the ghetto” (35) that
their parents assure them are just cars backfiring. The suburb is so insular
that the Black Americans who shop there are called “brave” (99). The
only time the outside world seemed to encroach on the boys was during
the “race riots, when tanks had appeared at the end of our block and the
National Guardsmen had parachuted into our backyards” (124), its own
image of madness. But even then, this invasion was carried out to maintain
the suburban denial artifice. The National Guard serves as a militarized
version of the fish-flies, dropping from the air to cloak the suburb from the
outside world. Despite the rise in population, and technological advances
like telephones and highways, the isolation of American life continues.
The narrators recognize this Gothic reality as they become cognizant of
their isolation and their own failures to make any changes in the world
when they grow up to continue the suburban-denial paradigm.

THE ASPHYXIATION PARTY

In The Virgin Suicides, the ultimate moment of denial to the point of
absurdity, a denial that cannot be explained by parental grief or protec-
tive instincts, is the asphyxiation party. Dines suggests that this party was
“[p]recisely to put the Lisbons out of mind, and to restore their faith
in a specifically American narrative of success” (973) despite ecological
116 A.B. VAYO

and human failures. Due to a chemical spill at the River Rogue Plant the
neighborhood can smell, even if it cannot see, landscape degradation:
“the swamp smell that arose was outrageous amid the genteel mansions
of the automotive families” (Eugenides 234). Here, The Virgin Suicides
“in proper Gothic fashion … narrates the fall of the local aristocracy”
(Ringel 209) by undercutting both our faith in their morality and leader-
ship and by illustrating the hollowness of their traditions. A pretext of
Gothic literature addresses the choice to despair because it recognizes that
“our institutions and authority figures are corrupt and rotten, and our
elders, when not complicit with the evil about us … are clueless to what’s
really going on. Meanwhile our loving, well-meaning parents … abet the
evil/hypocrisy by mindlessly mouthing and practicing the establishment’s
shibboleths” (Kafer xix). Local aristocrats, the O’Connors, personify the
superficiality and meaninglessness of social conventions, both in their
focus on antiquated “coming out” parties and by being one of the auto-
motive families who are responsible for industry’s role in environmental
and economic collapse.
But the O’Connors are so inflexible in aristocratic traditions or by
holding to the suburban trappings of them, that rather than cancel the
meaningless party (a shibboleth for affluent teenagehood), they create the
theme of asphyxiation: “Guests arrived in tuxedoes and gas masks, evening
gowns and astronaut helmets” (Eugenides 234). The grotesque image of
teens in ball gowns and gas masks is a passing moment in the narrative,
but it is a chilling metaphor for the economic and environmental future
of these families. The poor leadership of the aristocracy choked, and con-
tinues to choke, the underclasses, the whites feel strangled by suburban
lives, and the air becomes toxic, both literally (pollution) and figuratively
(by the contagion of suicide). Thanks to these corroded authority fig-
ures, “[u]rban decay and suburban sprawl became two sides of the same
coin” (Steinberg 217). But the teenagers are still unaware of this future
and what it means for them. The Lisbons are still viewed as deserving of
ridicule. At one point someone at the party shouts, in the vicinity of the
Lisbon house whose final living daughter is at that moment committing
suicide “I’m a teenager! I’ve got problems” (Eugenides 236) and fakes
drowning, mocking the four dead girls and their struggle.
The continual corruption of the natural order and a further represen-
tation of poor moral leadership occurs as Mr. O’Connor, ignoring his
intoxicated wife, “pull[s] one of his daughter’s friends into the bathroom
with him” (Eugenides 236). Throughout the novel the parents seem, at
 WHAT THE GREEN GRASS HIDES: DENIAL AND DECEPTION IN SUBURBAN... 117

best, oblivious and, at worst, apathetic about their role in the decline of
quality and quantity in their life. These debutantes should be wearing gas
masks because the future they are coming into is being eroded by the
neglectful parents who are destroying the future for them by refusing to
accept reality. In this world parents decide it is better to have a unique
party theme with gas masks rather than work to check the wastefulness
that leads to their use.

TREE HUGGERS: THE CITY FIGHTS BACK

The gas masks were props in a life play that was supposed to undercut social
fears, another in a line of constructs designed to indoctrinate the youth
culture into conformity and denialism, but the most prominent prop in
this Gothic landscape are the elm trees. They serve as barrier between city
and suburb, allowing denial of race and economic unrest, but they also
serve as window dressing throughout the suburbs to keep the neighbors
from examining their own superficiality and unoriginal attitudes—as the
boys/narrators will discover. Unlike the invading fish-flies that continue
to bombard the suburb regardless of carcinogens, Dutch elm disease has a
cure, elimination. The adult human males, who cannot control the natural
world, create a solution—they must destroy it. The neighborhood deals
with Dutch elm disease by chopping down the trees. To this community
the trees brought a kinship; families would gather together up and down
the blocks to rake yards in the autumn, and even the narrators, so obsessed
with passively watching the world go by, become enlivened with the pride
of a work outdoors (Eugenides 91). It is the trees, rather than the overly
tended lawns, that formed the last bond between humans and nature:

People felt they owned their trees. Their dogs had marked them daily. Their
children had used them for home plate. The trees had been there when
they’d moved in, and had promised to be there when they moved out. But
when the Parks Department came to cut them down, it was clear our trees
were not ours but the city’s (Eugenides 179).

The Parks Department continued their arboricidal trade “removing a

sick elm to save the remaining twenty, then removing another to save the
remaining nineteen, and so on and so on” (Eugenides 242). The Lisbon
girls fought against the forces of decay in hopes of saving their tree, but
after the final Lisbon had died and their tree went unguarded, even that sad
118 A.B. VAYO

relic, just a hollow trunk, was tossed into the wood chipper. The Gothic
landscape degrades into nothingness like the house in Poe’s “The Fall of the
House of Usher.” Further, the Lisbon sisters were unable to save their tree,
showing the futility of characters within the Gothic to alter the destruc-
tive nature of a corrupt society. While, typically, families came out to see
their trees off, “everyone stayed inside during the execution of the Lisbon’s
tree” (Eugenides 243), the neighborhood’s last, further denying both the
past trauma and the present crisis. And those trees that had served to cre-
ate a neighborhood were gone, taking with them the façade of originality
and creativity and any sense of present or history, stationing the Gothic in
Michasiw’s consumerist cultural model. The trees had always been fashion
accessories and without them the neighbors “got to see how truly unimagi-
native our suburb was, everything laid out on a grid whose bland unifor-
mity the trees had hidden, and the old ruses of differentiated architectural
styles lost their power to make us feel unique” (243). The Gothic ramparts
are torn down but society is still incapable of allowing the light in.
Like every other part of the natural world, the trees had become a com-
modity with no value. It was too costly to let them live: “Conceiving of
things as commodities allowed people to reduce all that was complex and
unique … to a single common denominator: price” (Steinberg 69), and
the usurpation of the trees only reminds the narrators that they, too, are
commodities. Like the lawns the parents pretended to love, the trees were
nothing more than props in the consumption-consumerist model of US
history. Steinberg notes that “[i]n the 1920s, as the economy evolved into
its present consumption-oriented mode, companies specializing in lawn-
care products preyed on the fear that failure to keep grass neatly manicured
reflected badly on the homeowner themselves” (222). The lawn was the
first wave of the denial-deception artifice, covering the suburban sprawl
and creating the illusion of safety. Later, the earthwork of denial—the elm
trees—were deployed to give communities their superficial normalcy. The
elm tree was planted across America because of its decorative value and it
became symbolic of American suburbanism—that it is rotting from the
inside is a further reference to the moral decay wrapped in a clever Gothic
façade. Eugenides’ ode to the elm tree serves a clever purpose; though the
city and government view the trees as a commodity, the families’ love for
the trees stem from their belief in their longevity. This subversive love of
trees occurs directly because of the commodification of the suburbs and
the push that “urged the man of the house to assume his civic duty and
make sure the grounds appeared well trimmed and orderly” (Steinberg
 WHAT THE GREEN GRASS HIDES: DENIAL AND DECEPTION IN SUBURBAN... 119

222). The love people have for their trees shows that the steady march
towards decay is not inevitable; however, this only serves to make the story
more tragic because these people do have some agency but choose to cede
it to popular will.
The love of trees stemmed from a passion long denied suburban fami-
lies, who were supposed to harbor only materialist obligations. But it is
also likely that the destruction of the elms represents the loss of human-
ity’s last natural refuge. For while “[t]he lawn had the force of law behind
it” with regard to homeowners’ associations (Steinberg 225),1 love for
the family tree had come from the familial link to it, and even that was
beginning to be broken, like the Polish families GM removed. Whether
a deliberate act or an unfortunate consequence, no trees means no com-
munity; people have been cut off from nature and each other: “we rarely
ran into one another anymore. Without trees, there were no leaves to
rake, no piles of leaves to burn” (Eugenides 244), and no more commu-
nal effort to engage even slightly with the natural world. The one cultural
practice that had developed in the suburban landscape was taken away,
leading to furthering isolation and continuing the psychological decay of
the community.

A HOUSE HAUNTED: REFLECTING THE TROUBLE WITHIN

Community decay stems from a haunted place and it is scary—so goes
the stereotype of the Gothic. For the Lisbon family, though, the haunted
house is scary because of both its gradual decay and the unavoidability of
the circumstances. It is haunted more by life than by death as the daughters
linger long after they have given up the pretense of a future. Mrs. Lisbon’s
desire to protect her remaining daughters leads her to administer a prison-
like regulation of her children. Here Eugenides joins the American Gothic
tradition in the likes of “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Evelyn Scott, Ellen
Glasgow, and Kate Chopin, who adapted American Gothic conventions to
depict the realities of women’s confinement by houses and customs and
of their psychological distress” (Weston 20). The psychology of confine-
ment shows on the girls while they are still allowed to go to school, but
the post-curfew arrival of Lux Lisbon changes all that and the house goes
completely dark, both inside and out.
When Mrs. Lisbon began to isolate her daughters from the supposed
corrupting influence of their peers (denying that Mary had already been
corrupted by vanity, Therese by science, and Lux by sex), the external
120 A.B. VAYO

house starts to reflect the decay both inside the house and within the
family. The Lisbon girls both represent and deplore the suburban con-
sumerism and conformity. The boys could hardly see their objects and
began to forget the girls, creating their own artificial Lisbon adventures.
The community outside becomes a memory for the Lisbons, and vice
versa. As the yearly rituals fade after the tree removal and the sisters fade
with their confinement, there is no reason for the boys to gather in their
neighborhood. The neighborhood itself starts to forget the Lisbons, but
“the growing disrepair of the Lisbon house constantly reminded us of the
trouble within” (Eugenides 94). With Gothic ironic awareness, Eugenides
sets the scene:

As October came … The yellow bricks turned brown. Bats flew out of the
chimney in the evening, as they did from the Stamarowski mansion the next
block over … we always thought the bats had come with the Stamarowskis
from Poland; they made sense swooping over that somber house with its
velvet curtains and Old World decay, but not over the practical double chim-
neys of the Lisbon house (Eugenides 88–89).

The house becomes visually akin to the character in a cartoon with a dark
cloud hanging over his/her head, or the Gothic mansion or castle that
is crumbling around the characters. But despite their awareness of the
inequalities of the world and their growing sensation that something is
amiss, the narrators still have difficulty seeing what it is.
The Old World has bats and monsters and cultural history, but the prac-
tical suburbs are merely a cheap knock off of the “pseudo-aristocratic posi-
tion of the displaced European intellectual” (Michasiw 243–44). True to
form, the Lisbon house was blindingly bright, clean, and tidy only months
earlier when the boys arrived for Cecilia’s party, the only time they were
allowed inside while all five girls lived (Eugenides 25), but by the winter,
“[t]he first slate tile slid off their roof … embedding in the soft turf, and
from a distance we could see the tar underneath, letting in the water.”
Rather than rescue their house at the first sign of danger, the Lisbon fam-
ily retreated further into their denial by refusing to seek outside help and
call a roofer; instead, they used Cecilia’s old paint cans to soak up leaks
(159), as, ironically, they had failed to rescue Cecilia after her first suicide
attempt. To the young narrators the decay is unthinkable because they
still believe the myth of the suburbs their parents created as wholesome,
clean communities. The Lisbon house is the reminder of the futility of that
 WHAT THE GREEN GRASS HIDES: DENIAL AND DECEPTION IN SUBURBAN... 121

hope. As the house crumbles, it turns into a Gothic trope, complete with
bats and an eerie feeling.
Even as their objects were sinking out of sight behind the rotting
house, these boys had trouble recognizing the subversion and corrup-
tion of suburbia. This place should be the symbol of Americana, ever in
the present moment, seemingly unrestricted by history, clean, trendy,
and materialistic. Here we see the suburban Gothic, “a sub-genre of the
wider American Gothic tradition which dramatizes anxieties arising from
the mass urbanization of the United States” (Murphy 2). Further, the
suburban Gothic’s emphasis on teenagers and the internal struggles of
family and neighborhood (Murphy 3) characterize the narrators and their
inability to either fully grasp or fully ignore the horrible realities around
them. The boys have seen the criminality in Sammy the Shark, the absur-
dity in the asphyxiation party, and the futility of thinking that a beautiful
façade will lead to a happy ending—the Lisbon girls. It is not until they see
the Lisbon house that these messages coalesce into a symbol of suburban
decay, a message that finally breaks though the culture of prefabricated
denial, only to be locked into a moment of history, freezing them in time
in the same way suburban stations are locked into 1950s aesthetics. The
boys’ first awakening comes when the roles are reversed as they became
objects: “We noticed how tattered the curtains had become, then we real-
ized we weren’t looking at curtains at all but at a film of dirt, with spy
holes wiped clean” (Eugenides 160). The watchers had all along been the
watched. The girls still tried to escape using the boys obsession as a lifeline
to the outside, calling them, playing records over the phone, and asking
the boys to take them away. Obsession becomes the problem and the
potential solution for the Lisbons; their mother’s obsessions imprisoning
them and the boys’ offering salvation. But obsession cannot cure obses-
sion and there is no escape. Perhaps the most Gothic element of the house
is the steady close of the trap on the four bright futures, all the while the
narrators remind us there is no hope—for the girls began the story dead.
On the night when Lux, Bonnie, and Therese would commit suicide,
and Mary would attempt but fail, the boys enter the house once more.
The sisters claimed to be packing for a trip, while Lux—whose sexual
exploits on the roof had become a sign of both moral decay in the family
and resistance to parental authority, closely watched by the narrators—
entertained the guests. In the fashion of communal denial, Lux and the
boys planned their escape from the house and from the town. The boys
imagined a future with these girls they hardly knew, but once she was
122 A.B. VAYO

sure of her sisters’ suicides, Lux left the boys and went to kill herself.
All the while ignorant of this, the narrators travel downstairs to the site
of Cecilia’s party, which had never been cleaned up (Eugenides 214).
The ghosts of the party linger in the minds of the protagonists until they
are confronted with Bonnie Lisbon hanging by her neck from the raf-
ters (215). Through the narrators, Eugenides shows us finally that the
house had been rotting from the inside out, “[a] brownish scum of punch
lay caked in the cut-glass bowl, sprinkled with flies” (214). The house
decays like Mrs. Havisham’s in Great Expectations. Similarly, the remnants
of ruin follow the neighborhood. Even later attempts to fix the house by
the new owners resulted in “Kenitexting” that looked like “a giant wed-
ding cake dripping frosting,” but it melted off within a year of the Lisbon
parents’ departure (241). Some places, it would seem, cannot be updated
or scrubbed clean.

CONCLUSION
We use the expression “unimaginable horrors” so often that we forget
how many horrors have been imagined, and this is “[t]he greatness of the
gothic … not that it plays with terror and the limits of reason, but rather,
precisely that it plays with these things, that is, that it imagines them”
(Brown 14). But, “why do we enjoy disgust and horror generated in us by
the imagination of violence, disease, or injury visited upon other people?”
(Dawes 442). For the boys the inability to look away completely was, in
part, an effort to save the Lisbons, at least in memory, but we readers can-
not say that. Rather, reading and writing the Gothic seems to be explor-
ing more fully the “conflict between what confines the human spirit and
what impels it to break free” (Weston 50). This juxtaposition between the
desire to examine the grotesque and the need to enlighten the spirit cre-
ate the duality that explains, in part, the genre’s longevity. This life is only
temporary; the recognition of this and a preoccupation with the darker
impulses of human nature remain subjects of discussion. But the need to
delve into these darkening subversions and lament these commonplace
and unnecessary tragedies is why “the Gothic continues to be adaptable
to modern cultural formations” (Weston 55). The freedom Cecilia Lisbon
and her sisters chose is the ultimate subversive act against society, their
God, and themselves: “the encounter with evil and bodily violation substi-
tutes for a lost spiritual transcendence, and the transgression of crime and
 WHAT THE GREEN GRASS HIDES: DENIAL AND DECEPTION IN SUBURBAN... 123

horror represents a form of liberation” (Dawes 443). They visit physical

evils and violation on themselves via pills, a noose, carbon monoxide, and
razor blades in a way that could not be denied.
The Lisbon girls served as a guidepost for the narrators who, in turn,
illustrate trauma not just from witnessing the suicides but also from wit-
nessing life. The girls also serve as a metaphor for the world that had
been created around them—steeped in material and spiritual wastefulness.
Suicides become prophets, and the girls’ refusal to grow up becomes wise
(Eugenides 244). The haunted house becomes the monument; once a
blight on the suburban landscape, it is now a headstone. And the girls
stand as the wisdom of innocence, while the narrators and the community
constantly try to rationalize their suicides: “They had killed themselves
over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers … they had
killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyra-
mids … the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned
refusal to accept the world … so full of flaws” (Eugenides 245). The nar-
rators and the readers may never be able to find a reason for the act that is
beyond reason. But the parallel the boys make between the environment
and the Lisbons points out the connection of the Gothic landscape as its
own character.
The psychological Gothic elements cannot be separated from the eco-
logical and that is from where they draw their strength. We feel for the
girls—despite their damaging acts we cannot help but understand their
mad impulses, the unimaginable becomes imaginable, the unseen psyche
becomes seen as we have a glimpse of their world and their confinement.
The horrors, the obsessions, the degradation are all meaningless as the
narrators resume their adult lives not far from where they assumed their
childhoods:

for a while it appeared our only legacy would be desertion. After deserting
the city to escape its rot, we now deserted the green banks of our water
locked spit of land … the exodus was short-lived, however. One by one,
people returned (Eugenides 245).

The inescapable environment pulls the narrators back to it, creating a

community still based on obsession and denial. Everything has happened
in this community—life and death, the march of historical progress, the
mundane and the mysterious—but in the end Motor City still stands in
124 A.B. VAYO

the distance as its decay spider webs out to the communities and land-
scapes it touches.

NOTE
1. As Dines (2012) notes, this was particularly so in exclusionary, afflu-
ent suburbs like Grosse Point, MI.

WORKS CITED
Botting, Fred. “Aftergothic: Consumption, Machines, and Black Holes.” Hogle
277–300. Print.
Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005. Print.
Dawes, James. “Fictional Feeling: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the American
Gothic.” American Literature 76.3 (2004): 437–466. Print.
Dines, Martin. “Suburban Gothic and the Ethnic Uncanny in Jerffery Eugenides’s
The Virgin Suicides.” The Journal of American Studies 46 (2012), 4: 959–975.
Eugenides, Jeffery. The Virgin Suicides. New York: Warner, 1994. Print.
Hogle, Jerold, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.
———. “Introduction.” Hogle 1–19. Print.
Hoskin, Bree. “Playground Love: Landscape and Loning in Sofia Coppola’s The
Virgin Suicides.” Literature-Film Quarterly 35.3 (July 2007). Web.
Kafer, Peter. “Introduction.” Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of
the American Gothic. Philidelphia: UPenn Press, 2004. Print.
Michasiw, Kim Ian. “Some Stations of Suburban Gothic.” American Gothic: New
Interventions in a National Narrative. Eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy.
Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 2009.
Murphy, Bernice M. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. London:
Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009. Print.
Ringel, Faye. New England’s Gothic Literature: History and Folklore of the
Supernatural From the Seventeenth Century Through the Twentieth Century.
Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1995. Print.
Savoy, Eric. “The Rise of the American Gothic.” Hogle 167–188. Print.
Steinberg, Ted. Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History. New York:
Oxford UP, 2002. Print.
Weston, Ruth. Gothic Traditions and the Narrative Techniques in the Fiction of
Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994. Print.
 “Go Steady, Undine!”: The Horror
of Ambition in Edith Wharton’s The Custom
of the Country

Myrto Drizou

In one of the most cutting remarks about society, in her 1913 novel The
Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton points out that what is thought
of as society is really like the houses it lives in: “a muddle of misapplied
ornament over a thin steel shell of utility” (52). She goes on to suggest
that “[t]he steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings
were hastily added in Fifth Avenue,” and “the union between them was
as monstrous and factitious” as that “between the Blois gargoyles on Peter
Van Degen’s [one of the nouveau riche characters’] roof and the skel-
eton walls supporting them” (52; emphasis added). Wharton’s reference
to late-Gothic architecture underlines not only the grotesque vacuity of
her social surroundings but also the monstrous translation of the Gothic
element in the economic landscape of early twentieth-century middle- and
upper middle-class New York; the Blois gargoyles in Peter Van Degen’s
gaudy residence illustrate the sacrifice of taste, measure, and proportion
for the sake of conspicuous consumption, enabled by the business deals of
Wall Street and the fashionable world of Fifth Avenue.1 As opposed to this
abuse of the Gothic by her contemporaries, Wharton utilizes a vast array
of Gothic tropes in the novel to foreground the monstrous effects of late

M. Drizou ()
Department of English, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, GA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 125

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_6
126 M. DRIZOU

capitalism and unrestrained consumption on the social landscape of early

twentieth-century America.
Although Gothic tropes sound at odds with the realistic style of
Wharton’s fiction, they figure prominently in her oeuvre. By the time
Wharton published The Custom of the Country, she had already experi-
mented with the Gothic in a significant number of short stories that testi-
fied to her philosophy of composition; a studied approach that provides
“an immediate sense of security” to her readers and keeps tight control
over their attention, measuring the doses of “improbability” to sustain
the “quiet iteration” of fearful events (Wharton, “Telling a Short Story”
30–31).2 The measured control of fear sustains what Wharton calls “the
thermometrical quality” of a ghost story, that is, to send a shiver down the
readers’ spine (Preface 11). Wharton is masterful in achieving this effect;
she weaves such Gothic tropes as doppelgängers, mirror images, and abys-
mal symbols with the Gothic aesthetic of terror, ranging from hauntingly
enigmatic landscapes to claustrophobic interior spaces that are both ter-
rifying and attractive.
For most critics, Wharton’s engagement with the Gothic begins as an
attempt to exorcise personal ghosts, particularly with regard to her con-
flicting views about authorship and gender.3 While this approach offers a
plausible account of Wharton’s effort to reconcile professional authorship
with her contemporary gender roles, it rests on a rather limited inter-
pretation of the Gothic as a dramatization of intense personal conflicts.4
Recent scholarship, however, has shifted the focus of Gothic fiction from
the expression of individual psychic struggles to “a tradition of opposi-
tional literature, presenting in disturbing, usually frightening ways, a skep-
tical, ambiguous view of human nature and of history” (Crow 2). This
expanded definition foregrounds the socially subversive impulse of Gothic
literature while stressing its ability to speak larger truths about human
nature.5 In this sense, The Custom of the Country—a work that has invited
surprisingly little discussion with regard to its Gothic elements6—assumes
a prominent role in Wharton’s Gothic canon. In this novel, I argue,
Wharton rests on the subversive function of the Gothic to sharpen the cri-
tique of her contemporary consumer capitalist culture. What is more, she
launches this critique by reversing conventional Gothic patterns. Whereas
the traditional Gothic narrative aims at conveying hidden forces and unset-
tling reality, Wharton’s novel presents a reality that is deeply unsettled by
the fact that all forces—social, economic, biological—are already let loose.
In addition, where most Gothic fiction questions the limits between reality
 “GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 127

and imagination, reason and madness, nature and the supernatural, The
Custom of the Country questions why such limits are not even possible to
consider. For Wharton, the impossibility of understanding such limits is a
result of unrestrained social and economic ambition, as illustrated through
the novel’s main heroine, Undine Spragg.
Undine’s voracious ambition recalls animal-like qualities, while her
feline adaptability echoes her non-human origin in the water nymph after
which she is named. Unlike other heroines in Wharton’s Gothic fiction,
Undine undergoes no process of discovery and self-awareness, because her
instincts, passions, and desires (which would normally lie beneath the sur-
face) have taken such hold of her that she is unable to know and measure
her own excess. This loss of measure borders on the grotesque; it encap-
sulates the monstrosity of Wharton’s contemporary culture, as it glorifies
and exemplifies excess. And Wharton’s novel confronts us with the fearful
fact that the monstrosity of excess has become the social and economic
reality of early twentieth-century America.
To criticize this reality, Wharton resorts to the Gothic as the most fit-
ting genre for signifying excess and foregrounding its results. Although
the Gothic is fraught with supernatural tropes and exotic landscapes that
seem to clash with reality, it is as useful a tool of social critique as real-
ism. As Valdine Clemens points out, “[i]t is commonly thought that the
backward-looking Gothic novel, with its oneiric landscapes, is less socially
responsible than the ‘realistic’ novel, which pays closer attention to the
surface textures of daily life” (4). Clemens rightly argues against this view,
stressing the continuing importance of the Gothic as a literary landscape
that remains timely, commensurate with the reality of the urban-industrial
world (4). In this sense, the Gothic is more than just the thematic or nar-
rative subtext of realism, and Wharton’s novel is exemplary in exploiting
the dynamic between reality and excess. In The Custom of the Country,
I argue, the Gothic becomes the realist landscape of the novel, insofar as
it consummates excess as the very condition of reality. Using an array of
Gothic tropes that range from the romantic to the grotesque and that cul-
minate in the fantastic spectrality of Undine’s mirrored abode, Wharton
explodes the limits of the measured, realist landscape and turns the Gothic
into the main vehicle of her social critique.7 In doing so, she revises the
escapist landscape that is associated with the Gothic genre—and which
dominates the rest of her Gothic fiction8—into the inescapable reality of
her contemporary society, illustrating the continuing critical import of
Gothic excess.
128 M. DRIZOU

GO STEADY, UNDINE, AND YOU’LL GET ANYWHERES

The first scene of The Custom of the Country introduces the reader to the
thematic interplay between excess and restraint, as seen in the interchange
between the main character, Undine Spragg, and Mrs. Heeny, her mas-
seuse and trusted advisor on all matters of aesthetic and social concern.
Undine receives an invitation to dine with Ralph Marvell’s family, and is
both excited and nervous at the prospect of entering the coveted circle
of New York aristocracy. The fierceness of her ambition is evident in her
bodily expressions: her “straight black brows” are “darting warnings” at
her mother (who is also present); while her eyes are flashing at any objec-
tion to her ways of fulfilling her social ambition (6). Undine’s ardent ambi-
tion and consequent nervousness cause fear to her parents, who dread
nothing more than Undine’s fits of nervous, restless energy. Mrs. Heeny
tries to rein in Undine’s energy when she advises her to be patient, other-
wise she might go too fast and “rip out the whole seam” of her plans (12).
Mrs. Heeny repeats her advice later when she suggests that if Undine went
“steady,” she would get “anywheres” (20). The steady course of action
that Mrs. Heeny endorses is further embodied in her manners; she has a
“reassuring look of solidity and reality,” as illustrated in the “planting” of
her body and the grasp of her arms on her chair, bespeaking “an organized
and self-reliant activity” (6). Mrs. Heeny’s bodily demeanor suggests a
solid, self-sufficient outlook that grounds itself in a firm grasp of facts, and
hearkens to the realist vision of a measured, rational view of reality that
repudiates any form of excess.
Undine’s excessive ambition and uncontainable energy, however, deny
any reasonable containment.9 The solid ground of Mrs. Heeny’s advice
(as well as the solidity of her body) is contrasted with Undine’s flowing
energy, which Wharton renders as a visualization of unlimited ripples on
her heroine’s body: “[s]he was always doubling and twisting on herself,
and every movement she made seemed to start at the nape of her neck,
just below the lifted roll of reddish-gold hair, and flow without a break
through her whole slim length to the tips of her fingers and the points of
her slender restless feet” (7). Undine’s ripple-like body recalls the water
element after which she is named; Undine was also the name of a water
nymph in European folklore, beautifully recreated in Friedrich de la Motte
Fouqué’s popular romance Undine (1811), in which the main character
becomes mortal after falling in love with a man. Though Fouqué’s text
utilizes many fairy tale conventions, such as the antithesis between good
 “GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 129

and evil, it also resorts to various Gothic tropes that intensify the roman-
tic effect of the story. The reader encounters: sunless, impassable woods
that evoke terror associated with evil; sudden storms that cause brooks
and lakes to overflow; and the supernatural character of Undine, whose
origin remains an enigma for her foster parents, a fisherman and his wife.
Undine is often seen as a freak whose mischievous temper and frolicsome
behavior obey no rules of reason; the only way for her father to explain her
behavior is by comparing her whims to the sudden overflow of water that
beats down dams and breaks the meshes of his nets (8). Undine’s extrava-
gant behavior is equally perplexing to the knight she will love and who is
instantly attracted to her erratic, willful ways.
As Susan Wolstenholme has argued, the romantic element of Fouqué’s
novel evokes a sense of nostalgia for a literary genre (the romance) that
deviates from realism and calls attention to its own “fictiveness,” its “loca-
tion in a dreamlike space,” its “framed quality,” and hence its very identity
as “art” (132). For Wolstenholme, the recreation of romantic conventions
in late nineteenth-century art offers a way for Wharton to push beyond
the rationally defined and male-oriented strictures of her contemporary
dominant realist fiction. Though Wolstenholme is right to point out the
importance of Gothic romance in Wharton’s fiction, she reads The Custom
of the Country as a companion piece to The House of Mirth (the main
focus of her analysis), and argues that The Custom of the Country illustrates
Wharton’s ambivalent view of romance, moving progressively toward the
vantage point of satire. I want to suggest, however, that The Custom of
the Country presents a rather deeper problematic in Wharton’s fiction;
instead of a satiric view of romance that reflects indirectly on the issue of
realist representation, it offers a direct commentary on realism by equat-
ing the monstrosity of the Gothic with the fabric of reality. The restless
and capricious energy of Wharton’s Undine is equally extravagant as the
erratic, intractable behavior of her namesake in Fouqué’s romance. Yet
what differentiates the willful personality of Fouqué’s heroine from the
manipulative character of Wharton’s protagonist is the way they relate to
their contemporary social contexts, as seen in the contrasting qualifica-
tions of fear they produce in other characters: while the former’s freak
nature causes a sense of awe that parallels the feeling of sublime in nature’
the latter’s excessive energy evokes a sense of terror that becomes a horrific
monstrosity when it comes to represent the norm rather than a deviation.
Wharton expresses this view through the character of Charles Bowen,
the perspicacious socialite who functions as a cynical social critic. His
130 M. DRIZOU

account of Undine’s unreasonable behavior with regard to her child—she

has forgotten to take him to his grandmother’s for his birthday cake—
exposes the wider issue with American marriages. For Bowen, the separa-
tion of gender spheres has come to be the “custom of the country” to
such a degree that it has deeply corroded the gender balance of marriage;
men are devoted solely to business, relegating women to the passive role
of consuming the earnings of a business in which they have no interest
(145). The more devoted women become to consumption the less inter-
est they take in their husbands, and the more they become disconnected
from the family hearth.10 When asked whether Undine is the exception to
this standard, Bowen concedes she is the opposite; Undine is the “mon-
strously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph”
(147; emphases added). As Wharton’s mouthpiece, Bowen sees Undine
as both the product and the capitulation of a socioeconomic system that
is based on conspicuous consumption and the unequal gender dynamic
that feeds its power. Wharton’s stance toward this gender dynamic, how-
ever, is ambivalent at best. Even though she is critical of the shallow social
relations that it engenders, she seems to vindicate its success in Undine’s
upward social mobility and increased spending power; much as her hero-
ine’s finances often suffer throughout the novel, they do not withhold
Undine from fulfilling her ambition to enter the privileged circles of
New York and French aristocracy. While this ending might seem liberating
for her female heroine and the “New Women” who seek independence in
early twentieth-century America, it confines Undine to the same infan-
tilizing model of the avid consumer and ambitious socialite, suggesting
Wharton’s deep distrust of a system that rewards women with an increase
in their spending power.11
Wharton’s cynical portrayal of her heroine, though, complicates further
her gender critique. Instead of evoking the reader’s sympathy for Undine’s
stunted development as a person, Wharton arouses sympathy for Ralph,
Undine’s hopelessly romantic yet increasingly estranged second husband,
who offers Undine the first big opportunity for social and economic privi-
lege. As Undine begins usurping this privilege at the expense of her fam-
ily with Ralph, the latter becomes the underside of her triumph. Charles
Bowen wryly remarks that Ralph represents the victim and the exception
in the system that condones his wife’s social ambition and reckless expense
(147). To emphasize the contrast between Ralph and Undine’s attitudes
toward ambition, Wharton utilizes more Gothic tropes in her protago-
nists’ description. Her account of Undine moves between a supernatural
 “GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 131

creature and a fierce, Gothic heroine, building upon the contrast between
light and darkness. Undine’s black brows, reddish-tawny hair, along with
her pure red and white complexion, make her seem like “some fabled crea-
ture whose home was in a beam of light” (17) or a “luminous apparition”
(19) who can nonetheless have a dark, stormy explosion of temper when
her desires are not met; her parents could see “the approaching storm in
the darkening of her eyes from limpid grey to slate-colour, and in the way
her straight black brows met above them and the red curves of her lips
narrowed to parallel line below” (30).12
Undine’s description breaks the stereotype of the physically weak and
emotionally passive Gothic heroine. As Syndy McMillen Conger points
out, the early Gothic heroine is “[p]hysically slight, emotionally passive,
and intellectually ill-trained,” while her stature lies in her moral impeccabil-
ity (94). Although Undine’s intellectual training is far from developed, her
emotional ruthlessness and aggressive social pursuit raise serious doubts
about her morality. On the other hand, her tempestuous personality does
not necessarily fit the trope of the femme fatale in Gothic fiction. Conger
describes the Gothic femme fatale as “dark, imperious, passion-ridden,”
with “independence of spirit,” “emotional vibrancy,” “ingenuity,” and
“moral fallibility” (95). Undine’s imperious independence, though, is not
that ingenious, albeit morally fallible. Furthermore, Wharton draws her
heroine’s emotional vibrancy as the result of a whimsical temperament
and a constitutional nervousness rather than a deeper, emotionally com-
plex sensibility. In fact, Undine’s temperamental fits, insensitive attitude,
and morally reprehensible choices fit more into the figure of the Gothic
villain who causes pain and harm to his surroundings without feeling any
remorse. Rather than a frail, moral heroine or tormented femme fatale,
Undine is more of a predatory villain(ess) who focuses on seducing her
victims—first and foremost, Ralph—with cold calculation and inveterate
determination.
Wharton also reverses the Gothic gender dynamic through Ralph’s
description. She portrays Ralph as an effeminate, romantic hero, whose
decreasing economic power fails to control his wife’s ambitious expen-
diture. Ralph’s lack of capital reflects the decreasing economic sta-
tus of the aristocratic circles of New York. Though he is more sensitive
to the changing American culture than the rest of his class, Ralph is
equally steeped in the old-fashioned milieu of the mausoleum houses on
Washington Square; he often describes the old New York aristocracy as an
aboriginal race that is doomed to rapid extinction “with the advance of
132 M. DRIZOU

the invading race” of the newly rich (53). In the same vein, he describes
Washington Square as the “Reservation,” and prophesies that “before
long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically
engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries” (53).13 Wharton’s
ironic pen complements Ralph’s evaluation of his class; she draws the
houses on Washington Square as impressive yet decaying Gothic mansions
with dark, worn curtains, heavy, half-open doors, and the “old stale usual
things” that represent the heirlooms of a slowly vanishing class (328).
Though Ralph is often able to distance himself and confront the members
of his class in an objective light, he is eventually unable to detach himself
from their way of life; he repeatedly fails to integrate himself in the world
of business while he longs for the leisurely cultivation of his aesthetic and
artistic tastes.
Ralph’s eventual return to his empty family mansion culminates in his
ambivalent stance toward his class and illustrates his feeling of estrange-
ment; the dark, silent house where he grew up seems like a familiar yet
strange place. When he enters his room, the old stale things confront him
with their banality and intensify his longing to be in a place that would
be “really strange” (328). As he thinks back to Undine’s careless, ruth-
less behavior toward him—he has discovered the truth about her previ-
ous connection to Elmer Moffatt, Undine’s first husband who will later
become her fourth—Ralph feels overwhelmed by the extent of his wife’s
deception, as well as by his dire financial situation. His sense of entrap-
ment in this predicament mirrors and intensifies his suffocation in the
dated ideals of his class and the stale surroundings of his family’s man-
sion. The ghostly atmosphere of the house—eerily familiar and uncan-
nily estranged—is magnified by Undine’s spectral presence, as she returns
to Ralph’s thoughts and his mental journey over their marriage years.
Ralph’s final moments are marked by a series of Gothic elements that
Wharton handles artfully to heighten her protagonist’s feeling of over-
whelming resignation that leads to his suicide. Ralph’s room becomes
a haven, defined by a threshold he wishes to protect from invaders—
the silence of the empty house; the (imagined) closing and opening of
doors downstairs; the bolting of his room door to secure his privacy;
and his eventual focus on the bookcase drawer (where his revolver is
hidden)—complete the reader’s sense of Ralph’s powerlessness and his
submission to fate. His suicide crowns Ralph’s portrayal as a weak hero,
whose feminine delicacy and lack of physical strength recall the power-
lessness of female Gothic heroines, incarcerated in remote locales.14 In
 “GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 133

his final scenes, Ralph becomes encased in the empty landscape of his
family’s haunting mansion and the insulated culture of his background,
receding into the backdrop of the narrative and clearing the stage for the
more dominant characters, such as Elmer Moffatt and Peter Van Degen,
who use their newly made fortunes to conquer the bastions of New York
aristocracy.
The contrast between Ralph Marvell and Undine’s nouveau riche suit-
ors is built upon the Radcliffean pairing of heroes and villains. As Cynthia
Griffin Wolff points out, the hero represents a sense of order and benevo-
lent control, while the demon lovers are powerful figures who could exert
a malevolent influence on the main heroine (213). In The Custom of the
Country, Wharton translates the power of Moffatt and Van Degen in eco-
nomic terms, while using the grotesque mode of the Gothic to render
their “demonic” qualities. As opposed to the romantic hues of Ralph’s
portrayal—his blonde, refined physique suggesting his delicate manners—
Moffatt and Van Degen possess exaggerated, animal-like physical traits
that match their coarse, unrefined personalities. The first time that Undine
meets Van Degen, she wonders where she had seen before “this grotesque
saurian head, with eyelids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes”
(36). Had she not recognized him from the celebrity section of the news-
papers, Undine would have receded from his stare in disgust. Van Degen’s
“bulging stare” (45) and “batrachian countenance” (48) keep ogling at
her throughout the novel, as Undine is manipulating her wiles to remain
in his favor. Van Degen’s grotesque appearance concurs with what Kelly
Hurley has described as an “abhuman being” that “retains vestiges of its
human identity, but has already become, or is in the process of becoming,
some half-human other … simply ‘unspeakable’ in its gross, changeful
corporeality” (190).15 By the same token, Elmer Moffatt preys on Undine
and makes her uncomfortable with his vulgar stare upon his sudden arrival
in New York. Moffatt is also presented as a creature of the underworld;
for Ralph, Moffatt is part of the “dim underworld of affairs” where people
move like “shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of
the surface” (181–82). As the novel progresses, however, such monstrous
characters rise to the surface; they win Undine’s favor—she elopes with
Van Degen, while she later marries Moffatt—and they rise in status and
wealth—Moffatt ends up a billionaire as opposed to Ralph’s tremendous
financial loss. The latter’s suicide becomes symbolic of the demise of his
class, as well as of the rise of a new mentality that favors fast-made money
over inherited fortune, and conspicuous consumption over elaborate taste.
134 M. DRIZOU

When the vulgar taste of the newly rich takes over the traditional rites of
New York aristocracy, the “monsters” of the “dim underworld of affairs”
(181) lose their spectrality and become the fabric of reality. For Wharton,
the consequences of this change are monstrous not so much because they
entail a transition from inherited money to fast wealth, but because they
signify the loss of a sense of measure that only inherited traditions can
sustain. This sense of measure is important throughout Wharton’s oeuvre.
One of her early works, The Decoration of Houses (an architectural study
she co-authored with Ogden Codman, Jr.) emphasizes that “[p]ropor-
tion is the good breeding of architecture” (35), foregrounding the impor-
tance of values, such as symmetry and harmony, for a well-proportioned
result. Wharton’s preference for symmetry and order is not confined to
the architectural realm; it echoes her broader identification of taste with
the avoidance of vulgarity in social interaction. Ailsa Boyd suggests that
The Decoration of Houses endorses a style that has “an ethical foundation
of order, fitness, proportion, and the avoidance of vulgarity” (14). Boyd
is right to stress the ethical dimension of Wharton’s aesthetic concerns
to convey “further layers of character and meaning” in The Custom of the
Country. Yet, to decipher the full range of meaning in Wharton’s novel,
we need to add one more dimension, namely, the role of the Gothic as a
signifier of aesthetic and moral excess. As shown in the following section,
the exaggerated aesthetic landscape and the tropes of spectrality in Gothic
fiction facilitate Wharton’s critique of vulgarity in the wake of consumerist
excess.

AESTHETIC VULGARITIES, SOCIAL ABERRATIONS: THE LOSS

OF TRADITION AND THE NIGHTMARE OF EXCESS

For Wharton, there is no more fitting culture to signify taste as a carrier

of tradition than the French. In her 1919 collection of essays, French Ways
and Their Meaning, Wharton argues that the continuity of French culture
lies in its reverence for tradition as a safeguard of proportion and order.
This sense of order—sustained by strong political, religious, and educa-
tional institutions—ensures the coherent structure of the social body and
the genuine character of social interaction. Wharton draws a sharp contrast
between the true character of French manners and the sham nature of
American mores through Charles Bowen’s wry outlook on the American
circle in Paris. As he observes the American crowd at the Nouveau Luxe
 “GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 135

restaurant, Bowen points out the exaggerated aesthetic of the ladies’ fash-
ion as the “costly expression of a social ideal”; a “phantom ‘society,’ with
all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity
and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and
choice” (191). For Bowen, the American society of Paris remains a phan-
tom imitation of the French social landscape, and becomes the utmost
expression of the discrepancy between the discriminatory refinement of
French society and the sense of excess that defines American culture (193).
Wharton depicts the “fantastic spectacle” (193) of Americans in Paris
as the transatlantic extension of the spectrality in the monstrous “under-
world of affairs” (181) that Ralph has identified earlier in the novel. As
this underworld takes over the surface through the social status and eco-
nomic success of characters such as Moffatt and Van Degen, it loses its
spectrality in the sense of rising to prominence, but it retains its fantastic
character as the sham imitation of a more stable and more coherent social
order. The use of spectrality—a major Gothic trope—allows Wharton to
draw a deeper character contrast. As opposed to the underground vulgar-
ity and grotesque excess of Moffatt and Van Degen, the Count Raymond
de Chelles, a prominent member of the French aristocracy, embodies a
“happy mean of simplicity and intelligence” (193) that stems from his
inherited notions of social and political order. As such, de Chelles becomes
Undine’s third husband and her ticket for entry into the formidable for-
tress of French aristocracy.
Despite her impatience to taste the splendor of Parisian wealth and
entertainment, however, the new Countess de Chelles finds herself
secluded in her husband’s family château in Saint-Désert. The description
of the landscape rings with Gothic undertones: an interminable rain has
resulted in water laying “in glassy stretches under the trees and along the
sodden edges of the garden-paths,” as “it rose in a white mist from the
fields beyond,” and “exuded in a chill moisture” (341–42).16 The wet,
chilling atmosphere enhances the air of gloom and the sense of decay that
characterizes all parts of the “great empty house”, “the stuffing of the
chairs, the threadbare folds of the faded curtains, the splendid tapestries,
that were fading too” (342). In these fading, aristocratic surroundings,
Undine is lost in a mournful state of ennui. The “wide bands of crape”
and her black dresses—tokens of mourning that de Chelles has insisted she
should keep after his father’s death—trigger Undine’s moody temper and
instigate her fearful, tempestuous disposition.
136 M. DRIZOU

To emphasize her heroine’s sense of suffocation in the remoteness of

Saint-Désert, Wharton reconfigures the previous portrayal of Undine as a
Gothic villain(ess) into the powerless female heroine who is incarcerated
in gloomy, inaccessible locales. Surrounded by “the inexorable conditions
of French mourning,” Undine feels suffocated by the “shrouded images
of woe” and the need to observe the routine of French social conven-
tions (343). The French château, with its aura of mourning, chill of decay,
and spatial isolation, becomes the embodiment of these conventions that
represent an evil force of oppression for Undine’s restless energy. In this
sense, Undine becomes the prototypical heroine of the female Gothic.
As Kate Ellis has argued, the traditional heroine of the female Gothic
attempts to expose the forces of evil and reclaim “an enclosed space that
should have been a refuge from evil, but has become the very opposite,
a prison” (xiii). For Ellis, the heroine of the female Gothic aims to purge
the home to reassert her dominance in the domestic sphere, as opposed to
the hero of the male Gothic who attempts to usurp the castle or destroy it
from the outside (xiv).17 Even though Undine fits into Ellis’s account of
the female Gothic—she is incarcerated and feels nearly powerless before
the oppression of French mores—she deviates from the conventional
model of the Radcliffean female heroine. Much as she tries to change the
conventions of French aristocracy, Undine has a different purpose than
the purging of her surroundings and the reinstatement of the domestic
sphere; rather, she aspires to escape this sphere and pursue her own sense
of freedom, namely, her relentless drive for social status, personal enjoy-
ment, and material wealth.
Undine’s ardent desire for fast, conspicuous wealth urges her to trans-
late the canon of French conventions in monetary terms. She insists that
her husband should make money out of his family’s legacy by selling their
elaborate collection of tapestries. For Undine—and for Elmer Moffatt
who is interested in buying this collection—the tapestries represent social
currency only insofar as they have significant exchange value. As Moffatt
explains to Undine, the value of tapestries foregrounds a deeper difference
between the American and French cultures; the “business” of nouveau
riche Americans is Wall Street, while the “business” of French aristocrats is
their ancestry (399). Raymond de Chelles takes great pride in his ancestry
because of its temporal longevity and the French reverence of traditions
that have withstood the test of time. On the other hand, Moffatt dissolves
the temporal foundation of tradition insomuch as he values fast cash and
the quick turnover of investments that yield an important exchange value.
 “GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 137

Interestingly enough, these two seemingly irreconcilable approaches

converge on the figure of Undine, who already sees herself as capital for
exchange. As she walks down the hallway with the elaborate, faded tap-
estries, Undine looks at them “as complacently as though they had been
mirrors reflecting her own image” (368). Seeing herself in these tapes-
tries, Undine mirrors them as capital for exchange at the same time that
she symbolically puts herself on the market. In doing so, she translates
the symbolic, ancestral value of the tapestries into an exchange value that
takes on the hues of the real as the embodiment of Undine’s insatiable
greed. The use of mirrors (a standard Gothic trope) allows Wharton to
illustrate symbolically the contradiction that Charles Bowen has described
as the fantastic spectacle of the Americans in Nouveau Luxe; the fantastic
becomes the real even though it retains nothing but a spectral quality in
relation to the original.18
In the last part of the novel, Wharton takes this spectrality one step
further, as the original—the French social landscape of orderly customs
and longstanding traditions as represented by the tapestries—is eliminated
into a commodity bound for the marketplace. Although the tapestries do
not circulate in the market but end up in Undine and Moffatt’s luxurious
abode, they retain their high exchange value; they will offer Undine a
ticket of re-entry to the upper echelons of French society and will crown
her desire for conspicuous consumption. The final pages of the novel take
this desire to the extreme as the reigning glory of spectrality is tinged with
overtones of the grotesque. Undine and Moffatt’s new residence is full of
gilded interiors lined with mirrors that deform any sense of proportion
and reduce the ordered reality of tradition to a disordered spectacle of
excess.
In the midst of this spectacle, the beauty of Wharton’s protagonist
assumes excessive proportions. Looking in the mirror, Undine sees a
vision of “dazzle,” as illustrated by “the blaze of her rubies” and the “glit-
ter of her hair” (413). The exaggerated tone of the description allows
Wharton to evoke the restless energy that has been her protagonist’s hall-
mark from the beginning of the novel. Even though the ending suggests
that there might be limits to Undine’s energy—she cannot be an ambas-
sador’s wife because of her status as divorcée—it does not rule out the
possibility that Undine’s manipulative acumen might bend this rule in
her favor. As one limit after the other seems to surrender to Moffatt and
Undine, The Custom of the Country ends with the horrific vision of a daz-
zling nightmare. The spectacle of economic and social excess has assumed
138 M. DRIZOU

such monstrous proportions that the shadow of underworld monsters—

the “dim underworld of affairs” (181)—has become radiant reality.

CONCLUSION
The hyperbolic tonality of Gothic tropes allows Wharton to express the
excessive character and the grotesque aesthetic of her contemporary nou-
veau riche American culture. The unlimited wealth, the relentless ambi-
tion, and the inordinate consumption of this culture are both fearful and
attractive, just like the fierce beauty of Undine Spragg. For Wharton, a
member of the invaded New York aborigines and a champion of classical
aesthetic symmetry, the Gothic is the fitting literary mode to express her
heroine’s extravagant taste and social (as well as economic) mobility. Only
through the heightened sense of imagery, the stark play of differences, and
the intensity of the Gothic aesthetic landscape could Wharton have com-
municated the violation of proportion and order (and the resulting lack
of balance) that she sees in her contemporary socioeconomic reality. As
David Punter concurs, the “lack of balance” becomes “the major character
weakness of Gothic,” as well as “the major feature of the fictional world
through which the characters move” (73). Wharton weaves the imbalance
of Gothic excess into the balanced representation of reality that structures
the realist mode, creating a literary and social landscape that fuses the
fantastic with the real. Though Wharton’s literary vision remains primar-
ily within the purview of realism, it deviates from the measured, com-
monplace aesthetic and the innocuous expression of middle-class reality
that characterize late nineteenth-century American realism, as illustrated
mostly in William Dean Howells’s rally for the realist genre. In fact, the
realism of The Custom of the Country incorporates the Gothic to the extent
that the latter becomes the primary mode of characterization and imagery.
As such, the Gothic becomes the main expression of reality, expanding the
limits of realism toward the excessive, the monstrous, and the grotesque.
That said, Wharton’s style refrains from jarring aesthetic crescendos.
Her prose remains sharply measured and subtly cynical. It weaves a variety
of Gothic tropes into the realist foundation of her text to find the most
fitting expression of her contemporary monstrous reality. In doing so,
Wharton remains loyal to her vision of orderly composition without com-
promising the irregular character and the heightened tone of the Gothic
genre. As she pointed out in the Preface to Ghosts, ghosts need silence
and continuity to appear (9). Even though she cannot discern either in
 “GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 139

her contemporary reality, Wharton succeeds in explaining how and why

she finds these qualities amiss. At the same time, she illustrates that the
irrational, spectral character of ghosts has turned into the unreasonable
vacuity of her nouveau riche characters who turn meaningful silence into
loud noise and cultural continuity into a fragmented social landscape. The
result is a grotesque reality where one is surrounded by mirrors that reflect
and multiply the shadows in reality.
In this sense, The Custom of the Country holds a unique place in
Wharton’s Gothic canon. Rather than a confrontation with an inner abyss
that would signify an intense personal conflict—the dominant critical
account of Wharton’s Gothic fiction—The Custom of the Country signifies
the dominance of a mentality that eradicates personal conflicts (such as
guilty or remorseful thoughts) in favor of a relentless pursuit for social sta-
tus and material wealth. Wharton’s prose is ingenious in using the Gothic
not only to describe this pursuit, but also—and more importantly— to
illustrate the horrific impossibility of “going steady” in the socioeconomic
landscape of early twentieth-century America.

NOTES
1. I am borrowing the term “conspicuous consumption” from
Thorstein Veblen’s famous analysis of the socioeconomic mores of
the turn-of-the-century nouveau riche social class. According to
Veblen (2008), the consumption of goods and luxury items
becomes a measure of one’s power of expenditure and social status.
For more on this, see his Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic
Study of Institutions.
2. Wharton’s earliest Gothic stories are “The House of the Dead
Hand,” “The Duchess at Prayer,” “The Angel at the Grave,” and
“The Lady Maid’s Bell” (all written between 1900 and 1904, and
included in the first volume of Lewis’s The Collected Short Stories of
Edith Wharton). Her 1910 collection Tales of Men and Ghosts fea-
tures “The Eyes” and “Afterward,” while Xingu and Other
Stories—published shortly after The Custom of the Country—con-
tains “Kerfol,” and “The Triumph of the Night.” Wharton’s
engagement with the Gothic extends throughout her career. See
her posthumously published collection Ghosts (1937) that also
includes “All Souls,” her only ghost story that had not been previ-
ously published. The 1973 collection The Ghost Stories of Edith
140 M. DRIZOU

Wharton contains the same stories as Ghosts with the exception of

replacing “A Bottle of Perrier” with “The Looking Glass.”
3. In one of the earliest treatments of Wharton’s Gothic, Margaret
Murray (1989) points out that “Wharton was able to address the
dichotomy between herself as an accomplished woman and her fic-
tional powerless women” (320). Kathy Fedorko (1995) elaborates
this view in her important study of gender in Wharton’s Gothic
fiction, where she argues that Wharton’s Gothic is “an enactment
of gender tension as well as an experiment in envisioning human
beings who are comfortable with both gender selves” (xi). See also
Candace Waid’s (1991) insightful analysis of Wharton’s ambiva-
lent relation to authorship (Letters from the Underworld).
4. This view lends itself to an important yet rather limited range of
theoretical frameworks; most scholars have opted for a biographi-
cal or psychoanalytic approach to interpret Wharton’s choice of
Gothic tropes and themes. See Singley and Sweeney (1991) for a
representative reading in this respect. Some exceptions include
Janet Beer and Avril Horner’s (2003) interpretation of Wharton’s
ghost stories as parodic commentary on her contemporary social
mores, particularly with regard to women’s sexuality (see their
intriguing reading of Wharton’s late fiction in “Parodic Gothic”).
5. In this vein, Candace Waid (1991) points out that some of
Wharton’s ghost stories, such as “Afterward” (1910) and “The
Triumph of the Night” (1916), introduce a form of “business
gothic,” where “the concealed forces of greed lead to unsettling
realizations” (“Introduction” 18). Both stories frame chronologi-
cally The Custom of the Country, suggesting Wharton’s insistent
concern with the forces of greed in her contemporary America. See
also Bonnie Shannon McMullen’s (2010) analysis of Wharton’s
short fiction—including her ghost stories between 1908 and
1912—as precursor to many social and economic themes that
appear in The Custom of the Country.
6. Though scholars have analyzed the Gothic subtext and aesthetic of
such novels as The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), and
Summer (1917), they have rarely addressed Wharton’s Gothic in
The Custom of the Country. For example, the novel is remarkably
absent from Fedorko’s (1995) seminal study of Wharton’s Gothic
and gender. Susan Wolstenholme (1993) addresses Wharton’s use of
romance—and her consequent use of some Gothic tropes—in The
“GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 141

Custom of the Country, yet only as a brief counterpoint to her analy-

sis of The House of Mirth. Only recently did Beverly Hume (2008)
discuss the Gothic underpinnings of The Custom of the Country,
though the main focus of her argument was Poe’s influence on
Wharton. My argument analyzes Wharton’s use of the Gothic not as
a critique of a romantic view of the eternal feminine (as Hume sug-
gests) but as an interpretive tool to describe and critique the effects
of unrestrained capitalism on early twentieth-century America.
7. The term realism is being used in the Howellsian sense. For more,
see, William Dean Howells’s 1891 realist manifesto “On Truth in
Fiction,” where he advocates the balanced representation of the
commonplace in an honest and truthful manner. His views have
been criticized for their bourgeois focus and tenor. See, for exam-
ple, Frank Norris’s (1986) naturalist manifesto “A Plea for
Romantic Fiction,” where he suggests that realism stultifies itself
by remaining on the surface of things (1168–69).
8. Wharton’s Gothic novellas Ethan Frome and Summer are set in
remote, New England locations that seem to be out of touch with
contemporary reality. In the same vein, most of her ghost stories
take place in the New England or European countryside, which
gives them an aura of detachment from the busy, socialite land-
scape that dominates The Custom of the Country. See also Wharton’s
ghost story “A Bottle of Perrier” that is set in the exotic, desert
landscape of the Orient.
9. Undine’s father often repeats Mrs. Heeny’s advice, asking his
daughter to “go steady” with her expenses. See, for instance, p. 14.
10. Wharton makes a similar commentary on the “custom of the coun-
try” in her ghost story “Afterward,” where Mary Boyne is sur-
prised to find out “how little she knew of the material foundation
on which her happiness was built” (70). Her husband’s mysterious
business deals suggest a world of commercial interests that fails to
capture her imagination: “[t]heoretically she deprecated the
American wife’s detachment from her husband’s professional inter-
ests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her
attention on Boyne’s report of the transactions in which his varied
interests involved him” (70). Mary is forced to confront the shady
reality of business, when the ghost of a man who shot himself after
a business failure claims her husband (who appears to be responsi-
ble for this death).
142 M. DRIZOU

11. For more on Wharton’s critique of marriage as an economic trans-

action, see Elizabeth Ammons’s (1980) seminal study Edith
Wharton’s Argument with America. For various perspectives on
the treatment of gender in The Custom of the Country, see Blazek
(2010); Patterson (1998); and Tichi (2003).
12. Wharton resorts to the disconcerting effects of red color through-
out her Gothic canon. See, for example, the “red sneer” of the
ghostly eyes in “The Eyes” (51) and the “red and savage” face of
Mr. Brympton—the epitome of a Gothic villain—in “The Lady’s
Maid’s Bell” (24).
13. Wharton uses a similar anthropological register when she describes
the Old New York aristocracy in her later work. See, for example,
Newland Archer’s evaluation of his class in The Age of Innocence.
Archer’s ambivalent attitude toward his class is similar to Ralph’s
mixed feelings about his aristocratic background and the dated tra-
ditions he has inherited. According to Fedorko (1995), The Age of
Innocence represents the maturation of Wharton’s Gothic in the
portrayal of a complementary fe/male self through the characters
of Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska and their confrontation with
the abyss of their inner darkness (99).
14. The prototypes of incarceration in Wharton’s ghost stories are
Lady Thudeney in “Mr. Jones” and Anne de Cornault in “Kerfol.”
Undine’s later confinement in her remote aristocratic abode in
France points to Wharton’s dynamic use of this trope in The
Custom of the Country.
15. Hurley (2002) borrows the term “abhuman” from the Gothic fic-
tion of William Hope Hodgson. For more, see her excellent analy-
sis of British Gothic literature (1885–1930) in The Cambridge
Companion to Gothic Fiction (189–207).
16. Wharton makes extensive use of the Gothic trope of weather to
emphasize the sense of decay and desolation in physical landscapes.
See, for instance, the misty fog in the ghost story “Miss Mary
Pask,” the enveloping snow in “Bewitched,” and the novella Ethan
Frome.
17. Ellis (1989) formulates her genealogy of male/female Gothic tra-
ditions based on the conventions in M. G. Lewis’s and Anne
Radcliffe’s works, respectively.
18. According to Kathy Fedorko (1995), Wharton’s Gothic fiction
makes use of mirrors to signify the encounter with eroticism and
 “GO STEADY, UNDINE!”: THE HORROR OF AMBITION IN EDITH WHARTON’S... 143

vulnerability, in other words, the unacknowledged feminine self. I

see a different use of the Gothic trope of mirroring and doubling
here—the mirrors become the symbolic illustration of spectrality
and Wharton’s commentary on realism as an illusory, hence inau-
thentic, depiction of reality. See also Sapora (2007) for an interest-
ing interpretation of Wharton’s use of mirrors and lamps with
regard to the latter’s relation to technology and material culture.

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The Convent as Coven: Gothic Implications
of Women-Centered Illness and Healing
Narratives in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Belinda M. Waller-Peterson

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison’s literary oeuvre explores

what she believes to be the oft-obscured engagement with black bodies
from the perspective of a writer who wants to see herself in the litera-
ture. Morrison creates literature that speaks to the suppressed and silenced
stories of black girls and women in a way that foregrounds desire as a
longing for the fullness of life, love, and self-awareness. In this chapter,
I argue that Morrison’s Paradise (1988) features a scene that reimag-
ines the womb as a figurative interior space in order to facilitate indi-
vidual and communal healing, and that Morrison employs and subverts
Gothic tropes to explore the ways in which female bodies that seek this
type of healing are Othered by threatened patriarchal structures.1 The rei-
magined space allows for the creation of illness narratives that signal the
possibility for the rebirth of physically and/or emotionally traumatized
women.2 These particular illness narratives depict some of the bleakest
and most critical mental and physical illnesses the affected women endure
throughout their lives, illnesses that cause them to become unmoored
from their communities, families, and selves and force them to seek
shelter at the Convent on the outskirts of an all-black town, Ruby. The
Convent women’s blatant dismissal of Ruby’s patriarchal structure in

B.M. Waller-Peterson ()

Department of English, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 147

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_7
148 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

favor of a woman-centered environment creates a space for the townsmen

to become suspicious of their independent behavior/actions, accuse them
of subversive actions, and galvanize a murderous mob to eliminate the
women. The actions of Ruby’s men signify a classic Gothic trope of the
witch-hunting townsmen who invade the witch’s home to protect their
town from her threatening and sinful ways. The violent disruption of this
healing process—the mob of men from Ruby breaking into the Convent
and shooting/killing the women there—marks the illness-narrative cre-
ation process not as futile or worthless, but as a necessary, powerful,
and urgent project for women to undertake. Maisha Wester notes that
“Otherness in the American Gothic signifies racial difference as well as
homosexuality and feminine threat, even as race marks these other trans-
gressions” (20). This chapter argues that when read through a Gothic lens
with an emphasis on landscape, the Other, and paranoia, Paradise demon-
strates the ways in which self-directed, woman-centered healing in femi-
nine spaces, without the authorization or validation of men, constitutes
subversive activity that must be contained and terminated to re-establish
patriarchal rule.
This chapter explores the genre of illness narratives and the applica-
tion of illness narrative theory as a methodological framework to analyze
the stories that ill women in Paradise tell with and through their bodies,
and the ways illness is socially coded as difference, which allows for the
Othering and marginalization of these bodies.3 Illness narratives actively
refute what Kathlyn Conway calls the triumph narrative and the promotion
of a physical and spiritual return to the healthy body as ideal by depicting
the wounds and traumas the women carry on and in their bodies as a result
of their illnesses. Conway favors writing that looks at “the devastating
reality of serious illness and disease” precisely because this type of illness
narrative embodies the “subjective experience of illness” in which the per-
son articulates the “loss of control, ruptures in the self, disruptions in the
life story, and questions of meaning in the face of personal annihilation”
(Conway 8–9). Conway’s insistence on depicting illness and the healing
process in this way liberates ill persons from the constraints of forcing
their bodies to conform to generic ideals that do not serve to embrace
the entirety of their illness and the possibility of permanent mental and/
or physical impairment. Similarly, the illness narratives of Paradise ren-
der illness, healing, and wellness as messy, incomplete, and communal
endeavors; and, in so doing, Morrison challenges her readers to consider
the ways in which they normalize and perpetuate constructions of illness
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 149

and wellness. Conway’s reconceptualization of illness narratives, as they

relate to the triumph narrative, is suggestive for interpretations of Paradise
as a text that in its embrace of complexity resists the urge to conform to or
be locked into any prescribed ideals about illness and healing or women-
centered communal spaces.

SEVENTEEN MILES FROM NOWHERE

Morrison employs the classic Gothic trope of the convent/castle/mansion
as a site danger for unsuspecting women and a source for unchecked defile-
ment and evil at the hands of single-minded men (Botting 4). Morrison
establishes the Convent on the outskirts of Ruby as a space prone to mis-
recognition and misunderstanding, which allows its occupants to become
Othered by those who do not live there. David Punter notes that this
type of setting “portray[s] precisely those manifestations of the wild and
barbaric” that feeds the idea of monstrosity and sadism running rampant
within the walls of the convent (Punter 7; Botting 5). The Convent’s
physical dislocation from any town or city contributes to its Gothic
mystique and allows Ruby’s men to victimize and murder the women
(without impunity). Aoi Mori states, “The remoteness of the Convent …
signifies the displacement and marginality of the women who live there”
(Mori 58). The men not only capitalize on the women’s vulnerability as a
result of their locale, they gain satisfaction in knowing that they can enact
whatever manner of terror and torture they deem necessary to subdue the
women. Justyna Sempruch argues that Ruby’s men, the “phallocentric
perspective,” identify the Convent as “a place at the edge of culture, a
locus of subversive intention” (102). Paradise begins with a chilling pas-
sage that establishes the Convent’s location as ideal for a murderous mob
of men intent on blotting out their existence:

They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No
need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has
ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the
Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun. (1)

The description of the Convent as spacious enough to house many “hiding

places” and the inclusion of “but there is time,” “the day has just begun,”
creates an unsettling picture of another Gothic trope—the imprisonment
of the heroine by the villain intent on her defilement. Punter states that
150 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

Gothic fiction features “heroines preyed on by unspeakable terrors” and

“landscapes of the mind, settings which are distorted by the pressure of the
principal characters’ psychological obsession” (Punter 1, 2). The women,
trapped seventeen miles from Ruby and any help, find themselves fighting
for their lives in the very place where they found deliverance from their
psychological traumas and illnesses because of the men’s faulty, paranoid
perceptions. In this way, the men transform the women’s home space from
a site that provides refuge and renewal, to one that is uncanny, threaten-
ing, and filled with death. The men’s misrecognition of the women and
their purpose allows them to create a narrative about the women in which
the women become satanic, witches determined to corrupt the morality of
Ruby’s inhabitants and destroy the town, actions that must be met with
swift and brute force.
The Convent, when read through a Gothic lens, operates as a space
of anxiety, mystery, misinterpretation, and ambivalence.4 Morrison situ-
ates the Convent as a physical space that at once encroaches upon and
gives back to the land around it, depending on its inhabitants. In all of
its manifestations, the Convent predates Ruby’s founding. Built in 1922,
the stone mansion was constructed by an embezzler who sought to cre-
ate a fortress for his enjoyment. The embezzler imagines the mansion as a
place where he can indulge in all forms of sexual and morally corrupting
activities, and he designs the space to reflect these desires—paintings of
half-naked women and fixtures in the shape of genitalia. In his vision, the
Convent morphs into the traditional elements of the Gothic in which the
mysterious edifice functions as a place that lures young women with the
promise of excitement only to trap them and abuse them at leisure (Wester
7; Punter 1; Botting 5). After his arrest and imprisonment, his playground
of debauchery became home to The Sisters of the Sacred Cross’ Christ
the King School for Native Girls, then, once all the girls were gone, the
Convent was left to the Sisters. Jerrilyn McGregory states, “The material
geography of this site teems with centuries of oppression directed toward
women in the name of religion and colonization. Specifically, the Gothic
machinery of the built edifice cannot be denied; the convent was originally
converted for the pacification and assimilation of Cheyenne/Arapaho
girls” (McGregory 163). What the embezzler constructs to keep the world
out, the Sisters repurpose in an effort to contain Native American girls. In
both instances, the physical structure functions as a tangible sign of social
and spacial marginalization; both groups can only exist at the margins
of society and even that existence is contingent on society’s acceptance
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 151

of what dwells on the margins. Girls and young women are subject to
the desires of both groups, the embezzler and the Sisters, and this type
of relationship speaks to the ways in which women are seen both as prey
within Gothic texts and as oppressed bodies. Morrison’s literary nod to a
“Brazilian urban legend of a convent run by black nuns who took in aban-
doned children and practiced Catholicism on one floor and Condomble
in the basement; the nuns are murdered by a posse of local men” further
casts the Convent as a subversive space that engages in practices outside of
accepted societal norms (McGregory 163). The Convent then, exists as a
site of contradictions, perversions, and misconceptions precisely because
of its physical detachment from any other community.
The initial construction of the mansion took place over two years under
the embezzler’s direction and the space signifies a physical and psycho-
logical movement away from a larger society. The space permits an iso-
lated, interiorized, self-reflexive gaze that forecloses on any conformity
to external social expectations. Prior to the Sister’s purchase, the man-
sion is described as having a “closed-off, protected ‘back,’ [a] poised and
watchful ‘tip,’ an entrance door guarded by the remaining claws of some
monstrous statuary” that reveal the embezzler’s fear and paranoia (71).
The embezzler’s obsession with protecting himself from intruders mani-
fests in the structural design of the mansion that appears “shaped like a
live cartridge” that “curved to a deadly point at the north” and “ended at
the flat end of the ammunition—its southern exposure” (71). This depic-
tion of the mansion as a gun reinforces the idea that the space is a source
of protection and violence. The language Morrison uses also suggests a
dangerous type of sexuality that dominates and devours, which is seen
through his appetite for some of life’s more eclectic pleasures. When one
of the Convent women initially walks through the home, she makes the
following observations about the conflation of the embezzler’s and the
Sister’s spatial imaginations:

[I]mmediately recognized the conversion of the dining room into a

schoolroom; the living room into a chapel; and the game room alteration
to an office … Then she discovered traces of the sisters’ failed industry.
The female-torso candleholders in the candelabra hanging from the hall
ceiling. The curls of hair winding through vines that once touched faces now
chipped away. The nursing cherubim emerging from layers of paint in the
foyer. The nipple-tipped doorknobs … She even found the brass genitalia
that had been ripped from the sinks and tubs, packed away in a chest. (72)
152 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

The embezzler’s playground and the Sisters’ defilement of the sexualized

aspects of his design transmogrify the mansion and perpetuate the Gothic
motif of the mysterious and nefarious house on the outskirts of town that
seeks to attract and corrupt.
In its final presentation, the Convent appears worn down and falling
apart, the massive home space overwhelming its occupants and their abil-
ity to manage its upkeep. Sempruch claims, “while for them [the Convent
women] the gradually collapsing convent symbolizes security, for the town
it is a haunted house, horrifying precisely because it contains secrets in dis-
ruptive excess” (101). Similar to the urban legend, the Convent women
secretly engage in ritual practices that cannot be known to outsiders.
Though the Convent women enact these practices to heal themselves, their
motives remain beyond the comprehension of men who have one concep-
tion of illness and wellness. The confluence of the embezzler’s embrace
of opulence and sexual deviance and the Sister’s denial/repression of all
physical desire emerges (in the minds of Ruby’s men) as a threatening and
uncontrollable mansion that “floated, dark and malevolently disconnected
from God’s earth” (18). There is a mutual detachment that reinforces
the idea of difference between the women in the Convent and the people
(men) of Ruby. This difference becomes magnified as the women inside
move away from participating or appeasing the men outside. As Sempruch
states, “The unknown inside of the convent reverses the patriarchal norm
by expelling it to the ‘outside,’ excluding it from its ‘center’” (100). The
reversal and expulsion of Ruby’s men denigrates the town’s existence and
purpose. After all, Ruby (and, earlier, Haven) was founded in response
to the exclusion of generations of newly freed slaves who were too black
and too unkempt to help populate emerging all-black towns.5 Because
the Convent (and the women in it) embody characteristics of the Gothic
and do not adhere to Ruby’s social standards, it/they must be accessed by
force (again).

BODIES, SPACE AND PLACE: “SCARY THINGS NOT ALWAYS

OUTSIDE. MOST SCARY THINGS INSIDE.”
The difference between the Convent women who, over the course of the
novel, face their illnesses and actively work to heal themselves, and the
women of Ruby who deny, ignore, and medicate their illnesses, lies in
part in the social structures and communities these women inhabit; space
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 153

and place impact the ability of each group of women to address their
respective illnesses and informs which women are cast as upstanding or
Other/monstrous. Morrison subverts traditional Gothic conceptions of
the Convent as a space where the evil resides unchecked and suggests
instead that the Convent is a place where the women find safety and move
towards self-enacted healing. The women of Ruby are given neither space
nor place in which to enact the type of communal healing that occurs
at the Convent as a result of the limited roles Ruby women play in the
imagination of the townsmen and are therefore safe from charges of witch-
craft and satanic activity. These limited roles ensure that the women of
Ruby remain confined and contained to the physical space of the town and
limit their movement to and from the Convent to business transactions
not personal relationships. Shirley Stave notes, “Prior to the founding of
Haven, then, the men were already engaged in the project of policing
the sexuality of their female companions and barring their participation
in decisions affecting the entire group” (25–26). Stave’s reference to the
men’s attitude towards women prior to the founding of Haven under-
scores the long-standing paternalistic relationship the men assumed within
their community.
This attitude pervades the story of “The Disallowing” in which
Haven’s founders (also known as The Old Fathers) were turned away from
newly established black towns because their skin was too black. Tammy
Clewell argues that “the Disallowing … was marked by and as loss—by
the meaningful relations to those different from themselves and as the
more enigmatic loss of the passing of time that is characteristic of trau-
matic experience” so that the Old Fathers lived and relived this rejection
based on difference and passed this traumatic event down through the
generations (3–4). The variation in the telling of the story, as well as the
events of the Disallowing, depends on the gender of the speaker. While
the men speak of and remember the Disallowing as their rejection based
on the color of their skin and the subsequent insult to them and their
families with the offering of handouts, the women tell of their efforts to
sustain their children in dire circumstances. This disconnection between
how Haven’s founders believed their wives should behave and how their
wives actually conducted themselves is indicative of the power structure
established by the Old Fathers—a structure that forced their wives to
sneak around behind their backs in the best interests of themselves and
their children. This attitude is passed down throughout the generations
so that when the descendants of the Old Fathers decide to leave Haven
154 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

to establish a new town, they carry these attitudes and oppressive social
structures with them.
Like the Old Fathers, the New Fathers determine that the manner in
which they are defined as men is through their ability to protect their
women. One of the founding men of Ruby describes the life and freedom
of a typical Ruby woman as:

A sleepless woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her
shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight … she could walk out the
yard and on down the road. No lamp and no fear … Nothing for ninety
miles around thought she was prey. She could stroll as slowly as she liked,
think of food preparations, war, of family things, or lift her eyes to stars and
think of nothing at all … And if a light shone from a house up a ways and the
cry of a colicky baby caught her attention, she might step over to the house
and call out softly to the woman inside, trying to soothe the baby … When
the baby quieted they could sit together for a spell, gossiping, chuckling low
so as not to wake anybody else … The woman could decide to go back to
her own house then, refreshed and ready to sleep, or she might keep in her
direction and walk further down the road, past the other houses, past the
three churches, past the feedlot. On out beyond the limits of town, because
nothing at the edge thought she was prey. (8–9)

This depiction erases and ignores the concern that causes the woman to
become “sleepless” in the first place. Instead, the man zeroes in on the
safety and protection the other men of Ruby provide for their women.
Linda Krumholz characterizes the men’s efforts as “laudable” and notes
that “the protection of women has often justified the oppression and pos-
session of women” (24). The women are unable to create illness narratives
in a communal setting away from the judgmental and oppressive (protec-
tive) eyes of the New Fathers and must adopt an “I’m okay, everything’s
okay” public attitude, despite the storms raging within. They are unable
to mourn openly their lost children—aborted, miscarried, sick, and killed.
The traumas that the women face have their locus in the womb and each
of the women attempts to negotiate her suffering by running away, self-
medicating, denying the trauma, and/or throwing herself into some long-
term project. The women mask their traumas in order to preserve the
illusion created by the Old and New Fathers—that of a community of
women free to live as they please, safe and protected from the dangers of
the outside world. However, as Consolata notes, “Scary things not always
outside. Most scary things inside” (39). The women of Ruby may strive
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 155

for, and at times grasp, the healing potential generated at the Convent, but
ultimately their physical positions within the town force them to remain
outside this healing matrix.

“THE WRAITH” AND “THE PRISONER”

The man in the above passage prides himself and the town on not harbor-
ing or cultivating “slack or sloven” women (8). These descriptors contrib-
ute to a culture and community that disregards (at worst) and ignores (at
best) any emotional and psychological challenges faced by women in the
town that contribute to their own physical weaknesses and impairments.
Arthur Kleinman notes that: “illness experience … is always culturally
shaped … there are normal ways of being ill (ways that our society regards
as appropriate) as well as anomalous ways” (5). The phrase “slack and
sloven women” further marginalizes women who are unable or unwilling
to adhere to Ruby’s standards of personal conduct, just as “harbouring”
draws connections to criminality. There is no room in this particular depic-
tion of women for those who suffer from physical and mental illness to
express their suffering. Sweetie Fleetwood’s story is a sobering and stark
example of the dangerous effect of creating normalized ideals of illness for
the women in Ruby and disallowing them opportunities to generate illness
narratives within communal settings that account for their weaknesses.
The normalization of illness within Ruby prevents the community
from acknowledging Sweetie’s unhealthy attachment to caring for her ail-
ing children, or from providing Sweetie with the respite and communal
embrace she so desperately needs. Besides her mother-in-law, there are
no other women who regularly assist Sweetie with the burden of caring
for her children or who encourage her to take time for herself to recover
from the cyclical and overwhelming routine of being a caregiver. Sweetie
watches over her four sickly children for six years, never leaving her house,
until she finally has a mental breakdown and walks from her home out
to the Convent (in her nightclothes and house shoes) in the middle of a
snowstorm. Instinctively, Sweetie knows that she can find respite at the
Convent. Sarah Appleton Aguiar states, “Although the Convent women
rarely actively seek out the other women, they do administer to the life
affirmations of these women. For the Convent shelters Ruby’s women,
providing food and care and a ‘haven’ for their anger and fears” (515).
Sweetie is described as “the walker,” “the wraith,” and “the black woman
weeping on a country road” by Seneca, a young woman who ends up at
156 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

the Convent after she witnesses Sweetie walking and attempts to help her
(126). To those outside Ruby’s structure, Sweetie embodies those ele-
ments associated with the Gothic—she becomes an apparition, haunting
the road that connects the Convent and Ruby. Sweetie resembles the ghost
from Gothic tales that has lost her way, or is so traumatized from a heinous
act that she is left always to wander. Seneca also notes of Sweetie, “Eyes
like those were not uncommon. In hospitals they belonged to patients
who paced day and night; on the road, unconfined, people with eyes like
that would walk forever” (128). Seneca identifies Sweetie as a woman who
is mentally ill; however, Ruby’s inhabitants normalize her behavior under
the guise of a mother’s sacrifice. Morrison uses Sweetie’s character to chal-
lenge established ideas of health and wellness and ultimately create a body
that is at once recognizable, terrifying, and uncanny.
Seneca tends to Sweetie along the way to the Convent, providing her
with “a serape from her duffel” to keep Sweetie warm. Seneca remains
with Sweetie on her journey down the road and guides her towards the
Convent because she understands that Sweetie is in crisis. Seneca’s actions
are in stark contrast to the two Ruby men who witness Sweetie “march-
ing out of town like a soldier” with no coat on and do not go to her to
inquire about her well-being (124). The men are able to ignore Sweetie’s
suffering, in part because they have provided her with a safe community
in which to live and raise her family. Seneca, however, identifies and empa-
thizes with Sweetie because of her own experience with trauma and illness
and sacrifices her own physical comfort in order to care for, accompany,
and guide Sweetie.
While the women at the Convent do care for Sweetie physically, she has
internalized Ruby’s culture and does not recognize this as an opportunity
to give voice to and construct her illness narrative and possibly enact some
semblance of healing. Sweetie believes that the Convent women are sin
and Satan incarnate and resists opening herself to the women for emo-
tional and spiritual healing. Aguiar states that “Sweetie finds strength in
hating the Convent women, especially Seneca, whom she insists is ‘sin.’
In despising Seneca, Sweetie can then transfer her anger instead of rec-
ognizing her own horrible desire to desert her four unresponsive chil-
dren” (516). Sweetie’s refusal to face her own desire to be free from her
children also causes her to fight against the women who care for her in
much the same way that she cares for her children. She likens the women
to birds “pecking at her, flapping” and throughout most of her night
at the Convent she remains silent, only praying “for deliverance” (129).
Sweetie’s hatred and anger, fueled by her own guilt and fatigue, speak to
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 157

the sheer desperation she feels as a mother who cannot voice her own suf-
fering because it relates to her children. For Sweetie to admit that she is
overwhelmed by the task of caring for her children would also be for her
to admit her failure to be one of Ruby’s infallible women. And in doing so,
she would fall into the category of the slack and sloven woman that Ruby
does not tolerate. As a result of Sweetie’s inability to come to terms with
her own illness, she is unable to create a narrative other than the one in
which she allows herself to deteriorate physically and emotionally in order
to care for her ailing children. Sweetie falls victim to Ruby’s social con-
struction of illness and shuns the very “laying on of hands” she desperately
needs to visualize and actualize wellness.
The men of Ruby have so thoroughly established the Convent as a
(Gothic) space that engages in unnatural and amoral practices that Ruby’s
women internalize these sentiments at their own expense. Though Sweetie
seeks out the women of the Convent to help heal her, she also carries cer-
tain negative ideas about who and what the Convent women are, which
results in the construction of even more wild accusations about what
nefarious practices they engage in out of the sight/surveillance of Ruby’s
men. The effort the Convent women make to work through Sweetie’s ill-
nesses is automatically met with suspicion from the townspeople precisely
because the Convent women are outside the physical limits and social
norms of Ruby. Sempruch contends, “Both the co(n)ven(t) and its inhab-
itants are culturally formless, symbolically embracing the boundless body
of the witch, her ability to transform into other bodies, or to change shape
and disappear. It frightens by invoking uncertainty about the witch’s ‘true’
identity, her intention and her course of action” (102). Sweetie reports
that she hears crying babies and accuses the women of unspeakable and
unknowable acts against these unseen children. Sweetie thinks to herself
that Seneca is a “demon(s)” and the other women are “hawks,” terrorizing
her despite their attempts to warm her feverish, snow-battered body (129,
130). Sweetie (mis)recognizes and (mis)names the women. By Othering
the Convent women, Sweetie creates a separation between her and the
women and maintains what she believes to be the moral high ground; she
does not succumb to what she believes are the corrupting desires of the
villains within the Convent. The women of Ruby and the women at the
Convent all suffer from the restrictive and oppressive social constructions
of illness and wellness as established and reinforced by the townsmen; and,
therefore, it comes as no surprise that even though some women from the
town travel to the Convent for spiritual, emotional, and physical healing,
these visits fail to produce meaningful interactions between the women.
158 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

For some women like Sweetie, these interactions and failed healing inter-
ventions further widen the chasm between the two groups of women.
Soane Morgan represents yet another example of a woman from Ruby
who suffers from illness but lacks the ability to express her pain and trauma
as a result of her status within the town. Soane Morgan married Deacon
(Deek) Morgan, one of Ruby’s New Fathers. Soane is firmly anchored to
Ruby and suffers from emotional and psychological illnesses that cause her
to self-medicate with remedies she gets from Consolata. Soane is described
by her sister Dovey as “hav[ing] periods of frailty not related to the death
of her sons” (90), her husband has “a steady sense of [her] losing ground”
(112), and her nephew thinks “she worked thread like a prisoner: daily
methodically, for free, producing more lace than could ever be practical”
(53). Soane steadily comes undone over the course of the novel and what
becomes apparent is her inability to connect to her life in Ruby because of
all that she has lost—both of her sons die as young men, her husband has
an affair with Consolata, and she has a miscarriage. The remedies she relies
on to maintain her mental and emotional stability also serve to impair her,
though they lessen the pain of her daily life. Given the strict and restrict-
ing framework that Ruby’s women face, Soane has little choice other than
to conceal her illness and secretly medicate. Soane’s actions—consum-
ing Consolata’s special tea and spinning/producing copious amounts of
thread—suggest that she desires a life that provides her with the freedom
to live organically and in communion with herself the way the Convent
women do. Unfortunately for Sweetie and Soane, they chose to conceal
their true illness stories and find themselves unable to create new maps and
new ways of understanding themselves. This choice is, in part, an aversion
to the work and risk associated with telling a true illness narrative, and the
stigma attached to women who transgress against Ruby’s powerful male-
driven social structure; one that results in being labeled troublemaking
witches and bitches.

BODIES, SPACE AND NAMING: “I CALL MYSELF CONSOLATA

SOSA”
When read through the Gothic lens, the Convent can be seen as a negative
and corrupting space. However, I argue that Morrison actually rewrites
and redefines the Gothic as she repurposes the Convent as a place of
potential woman-centered healing and safety. Patricia Hill Collins’ dis-
cussion of “safe spaces” for black women and the importance of being
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 159

able to name one’s self, trauma, and so on, provides a nuanced contex-
tual lens for reading and interpreting the healing ceremony that occurs
in the cellar of the Convent, the remnants of which are grossly mischar-
acterized by the invading men as “the devil’s bedroom, bathroom, and
his nasty playroom” and “lovingly drawn filth carpets” (Collins 111;
Morrison 17, 287). Consolata’s choice of the cellar as a safe space where
the women, literally and figuratively, lay themselves bare to their traumas
and one another, symbolizes and promotes the intimate, private nature
of their individual and collective healing. The cellar as a safe space signi-
fies a generative, womb-like space that remains hidden from the general
surveillance of men and anyone who does not live in the Convent, an idea
that directly contradicts Gothic tropes of cellars/basements as tombs that
house the monster/villain. McGregory notes that, unlike the Gothic tra-
dition of women being imprisoned, the Convent women use their space to
“defiantly create their own disjointed community of female ‘misfits’ who
are deemed ‘a coven’ by the men seeking to conceal their own wanton
nature and disunity” (163). In much the same way that Morrison subverts
the patriarchal order to empower the women, she recasts the townsmen as
the deviant and monstrous villains lurching at the edge of the Convent’s
safe interior space.
Consolata’s choice of the cellar for the healing ceremony marks the
second time that she envisions the cellar as a safe space in which she can
circumvent surveillance to tend to her desires and needs. The first time,
Consolata imagines a room in the cellar as a lover’s retreat for her and “the
living man,” Deek Steward (Soane’s husband), with whom she is having
an affair (234). Consolata plans on decorating the room with candles and
making the space a romantic lovers’ hideaway where she envisions them
eating fruit and drinking the wine that is lined up on the walls “like pris-
oners waiting to be freed” (237). However, Consolata soon realizes after
she bites his lip and licks his blood that her “living man” has no interest
in being held captive in the cellar “with a woman bent on eating him like
a meal” (239). In this instance, for the man the cellar represents a space
that confines and conceals him from the outside world in restricting and
threatening ways. He cannot imagine the cellar as a space that allows him
to act out his male power in relation to Consolata; instead, he would be
subject to her desires. Sempruch describes the inside of the Convent as “a
metaphor for unspoken female jouissance,” and “an impenetrable mater-
nal womb” (102). If, in fact, the Convent represents an excess of that
which is female, then Deek’s refusal to be confined like a prisoner in the
160 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

depths of the cellar also signifies his outright rejection of female spaces. He
never returns to Consolata after the lip-biting incident, despite her earlier
pleas for him to “[p]lease do it. Come to my house” (237). Consolata’s
desire to secrete her “living man” within a safe space designated for the
cultivation of young women, alongside her physical act of consuming him,
disrupts the image of the womb as a space for regeneration and reaffirms
(for him) the womb as threatening and destructive.
Consolata’s second attempt at utilizing the cellar space comes after a
spiritual experience in the garden seemingly calls her to guide the wounded
Convent women through a healing ceremony (process) in an effort to
locate and tend to their illnesses/traumas. This healing ceremony ulti-
mately involves four separate processes for the women to engage in: clean-
ing and lying naked on the cellar floor; Consolata tracing their outlines
as they lie still; self-reflection, then naming their traumas; and creating
visual illness narratives within their outlines. Unlike her conversation with
her “living man,” Consolata does not have to beg the women to stay and
participate in her vision. She firmly states, “I call myself Consolata Sosa.
If you want to be here you do as I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say.
And I will teach you what you are hungry for” (262). Consolata’s decla-
ration to the women reflects her own healing and movement away from
her illnesses/traumas. Immediately preceding Consolata’s transfigura-
tion, the cellar embodies traditional Gothic tropes as Consolata, with her
terrible clear eyes, wastes away “belowground,” drunk “in a space tight
enough for a coffin” and the women “float down the stairs, carrying a
kerosene lamp or candle, like maidens entering a temple or a crypt” (221,
222). Sempruch raises an important point, “confined to her household,
Consolata transforms the place from within, and these (magic) transfor-
mations connect her with one of the most interesting aspects of the his-
torical witch, the healer figure who ‘belongs to the private sphere, from
which the rite stems, even if it collective’” (104). At this point in the
text, Consolata understands, and has come to terms with, the problematic
nature of her desire to consume pleasure and love in the form of her living
man. That is to say that love and pleasure are located within her. Through
her speech and actions, Consolata embodies many of the characteristics
of Karla Holloway’s ancestral mediator,6 intervening on behalf of women
in crisis to bring forth healing and reconcile them to themselves and their
communities. She moves forward in the spirit of reconciliation to self,
home, and community.
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 161

The creation of these new narratives for the women hinges on their
ability to access their illnesses, and to do so they must become vulner-
able and unashamed. Collins states, “Becoming personally empowered
through self-knowledge, even within conditions that severely limit one’s
ability to act, is essential” (129). Consolata’s foresight and spiritual incli-
nations about the dire consequences attached to each woman’s inactiv-
ity and personal decay allow her to conceive of a healing ceremony that
begins with a purification of the space and the nakedness of the women.
Magali Cornier Michael observes, “this maleless [emphasis added] com-
munity allows the women not only to work through their pain but also to
begin (re)constructing non-subjugated identities for themselves” (656).
Nakedness amongst the women in the womb-like space, absent the pres-
ence of men, serves several functions. First, nakedness in the company of
other wounded women allows for a deeper vulnerability to one’s inner self
and forces the women to view their external bodies as flesh. Second, the
community of naked bodies allows each woman to challenge the associa-
tion of her own body with tropes of overt sexuality, sexual objectification,
rape and abuse.7 Lorde argues, “As women, we have come to distrust that
power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge” (53).
Lorde locates this power in women’s use of the erotic, that space deep
within women where they can access sensual energy that strengthens and
empowers them throughout all aspects of their lives. Lorde warns, “The
erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women” and
this has caused an association of the erotic “with its opposite, the porno-
graphic” (54). The communal nakedness of the women and the vulner-
ability attached to them creates a space to access this deep knowledge
Lorde theorizes about and move beyond the constraints of being identi-
fied as objects of/for pleasure. Third, each naked body testifies to the
physical scars that each woman covers daily under her clothes and her will-
ingness to finally expose these scars to other women. The communal space
of the cellar affords the women a collective sense of shared vulnerability,
while it simultaneously validates the individuality of each woman’s body.8
Before the women can create new narratives and self-definitions they must
first locate, examine, and attend to the nadir of their traumas and illnesses,
a process that commences when Consolata outlines each woman’s naked
body on the floor and directs each to “remain there” (263). The outlines/
templates that hold the women to their spaces on the floor signify those
traumas and illnesses that also hold the women hostage, preventing them
162 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

from imagining or recreating themselves outside the defined shapes. Each

woman in her own template must search for the source of her suffering.
The collective movement towards healing can occur only after the women
take ownership of and voice their individual narratives. Collins asserts,
“Other Black women may assist a Black woman in this journey toward
personal empowerment, but the ultimate responsibility for self-definitions
and self-valuations lies within the individual woman herself” (130).9 This
internal, unspoken identification and naming process threatens to tear at
the women who might initially find what they believe to be the source of
their suffering, only to discover that it has grown deep into the body and
its removal will cause damage and pain. However deep, ragged, and pain-
ful their individual traumas may be, they must be removed for the women
to move towards self-definition and healing.
The next phase of the healing ceremony necessitates that the women
(as they lie in their templates) give voice to their traumas/illnesses, and in
this process of naming their sufferings they remove the shroud of shame,
guilt, fear, and regret associated with those illnesses. The process of nam-
ing takes shape as storytelling. Collins states, “Naming becomes a way of
transcending the limitations of intersecting oppressions [gender, race, sex-
uality, etc.]” (130). Consolata initiates the storytelling for the women and
models what it looks like to create an illness narrative. She tells two stories,
the first is her own and the second is of a mythical woman named Piedade,
“who sang but never said a word” (264). Both stories attempt to convey
to the women Consolata’s own struggle with the imposed separation of
her body and her spirit, as well as the larger question of the relationship
between physical desire and spirituality, indulgence and denial.
Frank insists that merely telling stories of one’s illness and suffering
does not necessarily correlate to healing, especially if those who are listen-
ing to the story choose not to hear or validate the storyteller. Frank notes,
“Testimony is distinct from other reports because it does not simply affect
those who receive it; testimony implicates others in what they witness” and
“this reciprocity of witnessing requires not one communicative body but
a relationship of communicative bodies” (Frank, 143). The responsibility
of witnessing illness then lies with the storyteller and the witness. What
Consolata is unable to make coherent or understandable in her initial nar-
rative about struggling with the relationship between the bones and the
spirit, she conveys in her second story about Piedade. Consolata’s shift to
Piedade allows the women, whom she earlier says have “foolish babygirl
wishes” as opposed to plans, to connect themselves with a breathtakingly
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 163

mystical figure who lives in a land of dreams and possibilities (222). By

providing the women with a story they can relate to, Consolata ensures
that they are able to act as witnesses to Consolata’s stories and her pain.
The women can then accept the responsibility of bearing her testimony.
Their listening and witnessing creates a relationship of bodies in com-
munication with one another. Consolata’s storytelling creates a space for
the women to construct and tell their own illness narratives: “That is how
the loud dreaming began. How the stories rose in that place. Half-tales
and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above the
guttering candles, shifting dust from crates and bottles. And it was never
important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning” (264).
The women enact Frank’s theory of communicative bodies relating to
one another and themselves as they lie naked on the cellar floor weaving
together the strands of their individual illness narratives. The work of exca-
vating the nadir of hurt is a communal effort as each woman brings pieces
of her story to the collective narrative and feels/lives the other women’s
stories as if they are her own.
After the initial loud dreaming/storytelling, the women progress to
creating visual illness narratives with their respective templates. This aspect
of the process allows the women to access the traumas that they choose
to tell and trauma they choose to show. “They understood and began
to begin. First with natural features: breasts and pudenda, toes, ears and
head hair … They spoke to each other about what had been dreamed and
what had been drawn” (265). The women fill their templates with all the
things that symbolize their suffering: babies, lockets, cookies, scars, and
neighborhood bushes. LeSeur notes, “the women displace the traumas
that set them apart onto the figures on the floor” and “the molds on
the floor become templates where they draw representations of their psy-
chic wounds” (18). The women continue to open themselves up to one
another through this additional process of creating visual illness narratives
and their illnesses “become … the common bond of suffering that joins
in their shared vulnerabilit[ies]” (Frank xi). The women return to their
outlines day after day to further elaborate their narratives and free silenced
and dead aspects of themselves. For the women, “The self is being formed
in what is told,” and as each woman voices and displays her trauma to
the other women over several months, she experiences a separation from
that debilitating pain and an exhilarating movement towards a new self
(Frank 55). The Convent women are “no longer haunted” after their suc-
cessful healing ritual and they dance in “the longed for rain” (266, 283).
164 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

Consolata helps move the women beyond the scary things that dwelled
inside to a space of individual and collective peace. However, the women’s
newfound healing and peace does not last, as the narrator notes that they
are hunted women; hunted, the reader knows, because of the accusations
and evidence the men have collected to justify their termination.
The list of offenses that Ruby charges the women with includes “revolt-
ing sex, deceit, and the sly torture of children,” so that the men justify
their murderous intent/action as necessary to maintain the virtue and
purpose of Ruby (8). The reprehensible murders contribute to a larger
Gothic trope of haunting. As a consequence of the women’s bodies disap-
pearing after the murders, mass speculation abounds about whether or
not they are alive and where their physical bodies went. Morrison dedi-
cates the last section of Paradise to the slain women as they return to
the people and places that contributed to their traumas and Consolata
ends up with Piedade. McGregory suggests that Morrison “sanctifies the
martyred women by spiritual resurrection,” which connects them to “the
Christian narrative of ascension” and casts them as part of the redeemed
(163). The women’s deaths come after the healing ceremony that allows
them to move beyond the traumas that imprison them. They are no lon-
ger shackled to the world, so it comes as no surprise that they live beyond
the physical death of their bodies. Krumholz also notes that their final
appearance “symbolizes their rebirth” and demonstrates their movement
“beyond the boundaries of representation in to new possibilities of knowl-
edge and imagination” (30). The women’s transition into this unknown
space and their refusal to go quietly into obscurity continues their legacy
of defying patriarchal order. In this way, the spirits of the women and the
(ghost) stories told about them haunt Ruby.

CONCLUSION
Paradise acknowledges that healing oneself, especially for women, is dan-
gerous and threatening to social structures at large and to smaller com-
munities, but these illness narratives must be told and are a crucial part of
the fabric of lived experiences. The process of textually situating wounded
women within an isolated physical space associated with marginality,
depravity, and the unknown, underscores Gothic tropes of femaleness as
Other, wild, and destructive. As an illness narrative, Paradise, calls readers
to witness the yet unheard and marginalized voices of those ill bodies who
are forced to leave their communities and inhabit unconventional spaces.
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 165

Paradise then examines the numerous ways in which those marginalized

bodies are further objectified, vilified, and preyed upon by community
members who seek them out because of their difference. Punter claims
that characters “prone to misjudgment,” who are cut off from society in
this way, suffer as result of this isolation and its accompanying vulnerability
(67–68). However, Morrison seems to rewrite this Gothic trope of vulner-
able heroines to allow for the emergence of self-enacted, woman-centered
healing. Morrison makes clear to the reader that the process of healing
oneself and coming to terms with one’s pain and suffering may lead to
the impossibility of, or a traumatic reentry into, one’s community. In fact,
this process can lead to death. This is partly because of the paranoia and
misconceptions carried by the community outside the Convent, who view
them as Other and monstrous, transgressing the laws of men (the Old and
New Fathers).
Paradise suggests that there is limited space for women to gather
together as a collective to find healing that is not inclusive of the norms or
traditions of their communities and society. Lorde contends that, “Caring
for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of
political warfare” (131). Lorde’s assertion conveys the danger and critical
importance of healing oneself. In these few words she manages to relay the
threat wellness has to social structures that use illness as a tool of control
and oppression. The act of seeking out wellness in the face of devastating
illness is indeed “political warfare” because it displaces and overthrows
those structures that define themselves in opposition to ill and dissimilar
bodies. The Convent women create what Collins refers to as a changed
consciousness that “encourages [women] to change the conditions of
their lives” (129). Despite the fact that the Convent women are not able
to live as women reborn within their empowered, woman-centered space,
their narratives live on in the minds of those women whose lives they
have impacted while their spirits wander the earth. The Convent women,
through their healing and occupation of the Convent, subvert traditional
Gothic notions of the Convent as evil (inside) and reveal the ways in which
it is the town (outside) that actually harbors the insatiable monster.

NOTES
1. David Dudley (2002) provides a detailed analysis of Morrison’s
Beloved and argues that while haunting, guilt, and shame afflict the
characters, slavery functions as the novel’s overarching gothic trope.
166 B.M. WALLER-PETERSON

Dudley (2002) and Teresa Goddu (1997) reference Morrison’s

1986 interview with Christina Davis (1994) to suggest that Morrison
“dislikes” the association of her literature with the Gothic because
critics have used this relationship to discount the seriousness of her
work. In the interview, Morrison notes that her “indifference” to
the term “magical realism” stems from literary historians and liter-
ary critics using it to “avoid what was the truth in the art of certain
writers” (Davis 226). According to the interview, Morrison does
not outwardly address the term “gothic,” rather she rejects the lan-
guage of magical realism used to constrain and diminish black writ-
ing. Morrison’s claim here is consistent with the theme of her 1993
Nobel Lecture in which she critiques the ways in which language is
used to oppress, dominate, and dehumanize people. As Dudley
(2002) and Goddu (1997) note, Morrison’s nuanced literary
engagement of the oppression of black bodies offers innovative (and
necessary) social and cultural contributions to the American Gothic.
2. Farah Jasmine Griffin (1996) confronts negative historical tropes of
black womanhood and argues that black women writers employ
instances of non-sexual touch between female characters within
their novels to enact healing.
3. See also Frank (1995); Kleinman (1989); Conway (2007).
4. See Edwards (2003) and Watkiss (2012).
5. Spaulding (2005) provides an insight into the ways in which Gothic
tropes emerge within postmodern slave narratives.
6. Karla Holloway (1992) develops the concepts ancestral mediator
and ancestral mediation in her book Moorings and Metaphors.
Holloway establishes the interconnectedness of the literary works of
certain African American women writers with their concern with
creating a tapestry of writing that speaks to the diasporic connec-
tions and needs of black women.
7. Elina Syri (2005) argues that Morrison establishes the Convent
space as one where the nuns regulate and police gender and sexuality.
Consolata’s healing ceremony moves away from these restrictive
practices towards an embrace of the body in all its complexities.
8. See also LeSeur (2002).
9. See also Ntozake Shange (1989). Shange depicts communal healing
and storytelling amongst a group of women who endure a wide
range of mental and physical illnesses and traumas.
 THE CONVENT AS COVEN: GOTHIC IMPLICATIONS OF WOMEN-CENTERED... 167

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 Haunting Memories: Gothic and Memoir

Erica Moore

“I enjoyed this scene; and yet my enjoyment was embittered both by the memory
of the past, and the anticipation of the future.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

INTRODUCTION

Landscapes of the Gothic Mind: Memory and Genre

The legacy of the Gothic has extended well beyond the ramparts of
Horace Walpole’s Castle (1764). Gothic landscapes haunt contemporary
genres, from science fiction to horror, and from the historical novel to a
presently popular incarnation of life writing: memoir. Memory is a Gothic
haunting. The words of the memoirist creep silently inside the writer’s
unconscious and are projected onto the shadowed walls of the blank
page, enacting a puppet show replete with uncanny props and a recently
unearthed, now un-dead, script. The human mind is a Gothic landscape,
painted as an unsettled space where memory intermingles with history,
and fact is perpetually contested and re-memorialized. Gothic geographies
intersect with those of the memoir via haunted and haunting memories.

E. Moore ( )
Department of English, Wheelock College, Boston, MA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 169

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_8
170 E. MOORE

To consider the memoir in a relationship with the Gothic is to call upon

these spectral concepts.
Alongside the emergence of the Gothic in the 1790s, memoir had its
beginnings in the eighteenth century (Couser 140). Next to the “high
culture” of novelists from Ann Radcliffe to Toni Morrison flows a rich
vein of non-fictional testimony, of personal account, of life-writing.
Three examples of contemporary memoir pose varying relationships with
the Gothic: Frank McCourt’s second memoir, ’Tis: A Memoir (1999);
Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors: A Memoir (2002); and
Anthony D’Aries’s The Language of Men: A Memoir (2012). Inadvertently,
and perhaps even intrinsically, memoir is influenced by the Gothic.
Julian Wolfreys maintains that: “to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts,
to open a space through which something other returns, although never as
a presence or to the present” (2). Considering textual haunting through
spectrality––mainly via Derrida’s discussion of the “trace” and the “spec-
tre”—Wolfreys also argues for the role of textuality in constructing present
reality, drawing attention to the idea that a text is always haunted, always
arriving from another time: “the book … seems to keep us in the here and
now by remaining with us from some past, from our pasts, from the past
in general” (xi). Indeed, Wolfreys asserts that “all forms of narrative are
spectral to some extent” (2). We might then say that memoirs especially
negotiate textual spectrality; the memoir inhabits a past memory for its
subject and the text thus becomes a representation of that memory space.
Furthermore, as this essay maintains, that space is Gothically haunted.
Memoir places us in an unfamiliar yet personal geography where, like
Frankenstein’s creation, we are both embittered and anticipatory.
Associations between Gothic and memory are often overlooked, yet
several key concepts informing Gothic studies intersect with the preoc-
cupations of the memoirist. For example, Freud’s eminent essay “The
Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche,” 1919) outlines how memory dismantles
and shapes a subject. If unheimlich recounts an eerily reminiscent experi-
ence, then memory lies at its very heart. Memory in the memoir func-
tions similarly. One’s memory must be familiar, yet simultaneously veiled;
unknown and sometimes unknowable. Freud famously asserted that “[T]
he uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is
known of old and long familiar” (220). Uncanniness, then, is not just
unsettling, but something which, as Andrew Bennett and Nicolas Royle
put it, “has to do more specifically with a disturbance of the familiar” (35).
Memory resides in the uncanny. Royle comments that:
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 171

The uncanny is ghostly. It is concerned with the strange, weird and mysteri-
ous, with a flickering of sense (but not conviction) of something supernatu-
ral. The uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding the
reality of who one is and what is being experienced. Suddenly one’s sense of
oneself (of one’s so called “personality” or “sexuality,” for example) seems
strangely questionable. (1)

Uncertainty resulting in identity skepticism links to the influence of

memory on the memoirist. So, too, are these themes prevalent in Gothic
literature.
Connections become more salient when one considers memory as a
companion to Gothic protagonists: Frankenstein’s creature constructs his
memories by reading Milton’s Paradise Lost; Dracula possesses memo-
ries as ancient as the Transylvanian mountains; Carmilla’s face is uncan-
nily familiar, while Rebecca’s portrait hangs ominously above the second
Mrs. de Winter. Memory eternally fluctuates between intangible and tan-
gible in a never-ending negotiation of past and present. To begin tracing
how memory inscribes both Gothic and memoir, we might first turn to a
canonical text that encapsulates major questions raised by this juncture.
James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner (1824) fragments subject and memory in both content and struc-
ture. Setting out two distinct accounts—the “Editor’s Narrative” and
the “Confessions”—forces the reader to unravel memory’s ambiguity.
“Confessions” features Wringham’s memory loss and supernatural dis-
turbances, leaving an incomplete interpretation of the “truth.” Distorted
perceptions of reality—coupled with the protagonist’s questionable men-
tal health and the uncertainty of Gil-Martin’s existence—render the text
an astute demonstration of issues that plague writers of fiction, memoir,
and history. Wringham’s struggle to determine his role as a reliable narra-
tor, as well as the readers’s inability to distinguish “truth” from “fiction,”
leads critics like Punter and Byron to comment that: “The reader is left
with what might be termed an ‘undecidable’ account, a story—or perhaps
a set of stories—from which no final interpretation may be derived” (211).
To this description of Hogg’s text, one might easily attribute the memoir,
which features continual, contentious negotiations of fact and fiction. In
fact, the ambiguous lines traversing truth and memory came to life in a
recent debate about the memoir.
In 2006, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) inspired media
uproar. Authenticity of the book was scrutinized and, after a federal
172 E. MOORE

court ruling, readers were reimbursed and the publisher included a

disclaimer that “not all portions of it may be accurate” (Yagoda 24).
Subsequently, Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors underwent
similar criticism; the family depicted claimed false representation, and
the publisher was forced to rename the “memoir” a “book.” Questing
after fact occurred for several comparable publications; the memoir
took center stage as a genre fraught with ambiguity. Yet Yagoda argues
that in the memoir, “Attention is resolutely focused on the self, and a
certain leeway or looseness with the facts is expected” (2). Accordingly,
the genre admits its own uncertainty—goals and processes are deter-
mined by something other than “fact.” Freud’s uncanny yet again
seems to dictate the space of the memoir, just as it has long domi-
nated Gothic literary criticism. Returning to Royle’s comment that
the “uncanny involves feelings of uncertainty, in particular regarding
the reality of who one is and what is being experienced” (1), we can
make a seamless transition between the debates driving Gothic literary
landscapes and those infiltrating the memoir genre. Along these lines,
Daniel Mendelsohn notes:

The seemingly pervasive inability on the part of both authors and readers to
distinguish their truth from the objective truth is nothing new in the history
of modern literature; it goes right back to issues that were simmering away
as both the memoir and the novel were emerging in their contemporary
forms, at the turn of the eighteenth century.
(Mendelsohn)

Indeed, Mendelsohn, as well as Yagoda, reminds us that Daniel Defoe cast

his early novels as memoirs, including The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1719), while Couser shows that memoirs are nothing new to the liter-
ary scene; memoir “emerg[ed] as a distinct genre in the eighteenth cen-
tury” (Courser 140). Still others trace the genre’s long history—from St.
Augustine’s Confessions (AD 397–98) to Rousseau’s Confessions (1782).
What is interesting is the present leveling out of the creative novel and
the non-fiction accounts of the memoir as literary forms; Couser notes
that “[o]nly recently has memoir been recognized as a genre with literary
potential on par with that of the novel” (141).
In its connection with debates about history and its incomplete pre-
sentation of fact, with its almost irrational representation of “wayward”
tales,1 the memoir draws a link to the Gothic. Fred Botting comments
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 173

that the Gothic is “a mode that exceeds genre and categories” (14). In
the memoir, we might adopt Wolfrey’s claim for spectral narratives; the
Gothic escapes the “tomb and the castle, the monastery and mansion
[and] arguably becomes more potentially terrifying because of its ability to
manifest itself and variations of itself anywhere” (9). The three texts con-
sidered here specify their identity—’Tis: A Memoir; Running with Scissors:
A Memoir; The Language of Men: A Memoir—in order that we, as readers,
do not misunderstand their narrative limitations; here is truth, but not
truth as one might find in a “history” or an “autobiography.” Gore Vidal’s
Palimpsest: A Memoir (1995) asserts that: “A memoir is how one remem-
bers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research,
dates, facts, double checked” (5). Similarly, Joanne Garde-Hansen distin-
guishes between “history” and “memory” by identifying the former as
“authoritative” and the latter as “private”:

When we leave the territory of history and embrace the more inclusive
domain of memory we reveal some important questions: how is memory
different to history, is it a substitute for history, does it make history, does it
make it up, or does history determine what is remembered and forgotten? (7)

Identified here are the issues that trouble and motivate any consideration
of memory. Where, if existent, is the line between memory and history
located? Perhaps the boundary lies in the division between the personal
(the private) and the collective (the grasping after the cultural). The mem-
oirs analyzed here respond to this distinction by conveying the impact of
memory upon individual and collective identity. The mind is navigated as
a physical space upon which memorialized geographies are mapped, often
by way of Gothic tropes: memory’s location in the present is undeniably
linked with an undiscovered past; its persistent manifestation is grounded
in a physical locale, and memory possesses the ability to unsettle even
the deepest beliefs about personal identity. Memory is conveyed as an
unknowable entity, a kind of spectral or haunting figure. It is as indeter-
minate as the existence of Hogg’s demonic and influential Gil-Martin,
yet it is just as relevant and persuasive. Thus, the anxiety of memory, the
anxiety of accurate representation, manifests contemporary concerns as
the memoir becomes a Gothic landscape where issues—including confine-
ment, haunted spaces, childhood terror, and the ghosts of technologi-
cal mediation—compete for dominance and definition of the individual
psyche.
174 E. MOORE

Memoir: A Persistent Pastime

In 1998 William Zinsser named this era, “the age of the memoir” (1–22,
3), while Julie Rak tells us that the boom: “starts between 1989 and 1992
with the publication of two books: Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes,
which becomes an international bestseller, and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl,
Interrupted.”2 All this becomes interesting for us as the memoirist depicts
the processes of memory retrieval and interpretation. To exemplify, we
can turn briefly to Kurt Vonnegut’s memory-novel Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969), a text that is other-worldly both in its depiction of wartime terror
and in the narrator’s handling of trauma:

When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I
thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden,
since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen … But not
many words about Dresden came from my mind then … And not many
words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories
… I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been. (2)

The narrator is then “reminded” of several limericks, which he proceeds

to quote. In this stylized introduction to the fraught process of remem-
bering, Vonnegut identifies barriers to personal recollection and structur-
ally mimics these hindrances on the very pages on which he is, in fact,
attempting to narrate his memories. Vonnegut possesses the memories,
yet simultaneously this fragment of his experience belongs to a younger
self, and thus is unknown and uncanny. Instead of affording control to
one’s mind, the memory comes to control Vonnegut’s voice so that, remi-
niscent of Couser’s remark about Henry James’s memoir: “memory is
endowed with its own agency.” (136). Significantly, Vonnegut elects to
utilize the novel as a form, a choice that speaks to Daniel Mendelsohn’s
assertion that we understand fiction as “an uplifting entertainment that
can tell truths but cannot tell the truth.” Hence, Vonnegut elects for a
science fiction novel to house his memories. The result is an attempt to
translate memory into language, from an uninhabitable past to a process
of uncanny re-visitations, resulting in a twisting tale that begins, “Listen:
Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” (3), which is precisely what the
memoir achieves; the memoirist comes unstuck. Structurally, memoir-
ists present snippets of a life, windows into moments in time, rather than
exhaustive accounts with clearly defined roadmaps. We enter the memoir
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 175

in medias res, in the midst of things, dropped in with little or no context.

Memory thus presents a fragmented subject, composed of multiple influ-
ences and distorted perspectives. Erasure and rewriting recur as the
unstuck memoirist lands unexpectedly in a moment, each instance unlock-
ing a revised context, perhaps even a contradictory memory. Mendolsohn
comments that “the truth we seek from novels is different from the truth
we seek from memoirs. Novels, you might say, represent ‘a truth’ about
life, whereas memoirs and nonfiction accounts represent ‘the truth’ about
specific things that have happened.” If we recall Aristotle’s alignment of
truth with history, and universal truth with poetry, the memoir seems to
teeter on this boundary, truly serving, as Vidal would have it, as a re-
scriptable palimpsest.
Time is not linear. Like Billy Pilgrim we come and go, in and out
of moments without conscious control. Critics speak of the Gothic in
comparable tones. Punter and Byron identify what they term “Gothic
moments,” which:

reveal something about the possibilities and depths of human misrecogni-

tion, something about the degree to which life is pursued “in the light of” a
certain degree of untruth, of misunderstanding, whether of ourselves or of
others, or of the perceptions that govern our relations with others. (295–96)

If Gothic moments epitomize the above, then memoir is replete with the
Gothic. Likewise, Fred Botting defines Gothic:

Historical events or imagined pasts, also, delineate the boundaries of the

normalised present in a movement, an interplay, that leaves neither where
they were … images and figures that are reiterated constitute a place where
cultural fears and fantasies are projected. (20)

The changeable Gothic landscape is reiterated here, as is the significance

of “imagined pasts,” historicity and personal and cultural constructs in
shaping and reshaping subject and genre. Markman Ellis asserts that:

the gothic is particularly interested in exploiting the emotions, both by

detailing the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, and by asking that the
reader identify with them. The principle of pathos, arousing feelings in the
reader, is established as the primary pattern for consumption of these works.
(8–9)
176 E. MOORE

Conveyed by these three critics is the sense that the genre somehow manip-
ulates readers’s sympathies, while also presenting an irresolvable tension
between “self” and “truth,” a circumstance linking Gothic to representa-
tions of memory in the memoir. Indeed, memory—along with its deeply
complex cousin history—is as transgressive and as boundary-crossing as
any Gothic tale.
The memoir boom heralds a revised landscape that, it can be argued, is
indebted to representations of memory in the Gothic. Memoir’s memo-
ries are as elusive and indefinable as Maupassant’s horla,3 and just as haunt-
ing and mind-wrenching, leading us into the psychological landscapes of
the memoirist, much in the way Dracula infiltrates Mina’s mind. Julian
Barnes—himself a prolific memoirist—opens The Sense of an Ending
(2012) with the aged narrator recalling his schooldays. A list of random
remembered images is detailed: “This last isn’t something I actually saw,
but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you
have witnessed” (3). A pivotal connection between memoir and Gothic,
ambiguity of identity and events, snakes through the Gothic genre from
the 1790s to the present, captured and caged by the threat of the inau-
thenticity of personal memory. Is memory unreliable, or is it rather an
unreliable interpreter? Punter and Byron assert that in Gothic, “charac-
ters—and even narrators—frequently know little or nothing about the
world through which they move or about the structures of power which
envelop them” (273). Memoir mirrors this trend, where forces unknown
or uncontrollable dictate action and perception and construct geographi-
cal landscapes in the minds of memoirists and readers alike. We are all
unstuck, floating like pilgrims towards perceived truths and guided by a
landscape dotted with dubious memories.

BABY OF THE BOOM

McCourt’s Tumultuous Gothic Memory-Scape

Frank McCourt’s memoir trilogy is a precursor and inspiration to the
boom in memoirs. His second memoir, ’Tis, directly relates to the prob-
lematic established here; the memoirist attempts to comprehend the
fluctuating landscapes comprising personal memory, combined with a
spectrum of conflicting and competing legacies, both from familial history
and from nationally inspired constructions of identity. Hence, in this case,
it is both the intangible space of the individual’s psyche and the tangible
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 177

physical geography of a new world, that dictates how memory haunts the
writer. Two key aspects of Gothic can be mapped on to the geography of
McCourt’s text: invocation of an unknowable unconscious realm (the nar-
rator’s memory space) that exerts control over the unwitting narrator; and
confinement of the Gothic hero.

Geographies of Gothic Memoir

McCourt’s opening pages exude an untamable memory-scape. The nar-
rator tells us that while enjoying his cross-Atlantic voyage to New York,
“Limerick would push me into the past” (4). Memory has a physical
strength, an urge, the power to push. Already, the adolescent McCourt
struggles to transition from a past replete with unpleasant memories: bed-
bugs; overcrowded churches; hungry citizens; and men “with the great
thirst” awaiting a visit to the pub. McCourt describes his memory process:

I’d sit on that deck chair and look into my head to see myself cycling around
Limerick City and out into the country delivering telegrams. I’d see myself
early in the morning riding along country roads with the mist rising in the
fields and cows giving me the odd moo and dogs coming at me till I drove
them away with rocks. I’d hear babies in farmhouses crying for their moth-
ers and farmers whacking cows back to the fields after the milking … I’d
wonder what in God’s name was wrong with me that I should be missing
Limerick already, city of gray miseries, the place where I dreamed of escape
to New York. (5–6)

Of interest here is how McCourt’s memories play like a cinematic film

in his head. Already, there is an uncanny ability to stand outside of one-
self, to perceive oneself as other. Importantly, McCourt does not say he
remembers himself, but that he sees himself, a kind of Freudian fright via
the uncanny, where McCourt is “[led] back to what is known of old and
long familiar” (220). Constructing this type of perspective in the opening
pages of the memoir gives the reader a sense that one can trust McCourt’s
perspective. Yet he also has the ability to view himself as both knowable
and unfamiliar, thus constructing an uncanny memory space. If we recall
Freud’s point that heimlich can mean both homely and familiar, but at the
same time something “hidden, secretive” (Freud 220). McCourt’s image
of himself, his ability to see himself in his own memories, effervesces with
uncanniness.
178 E. MOORE

Memory is conveyed in close relation to dream. Indeed, it is notable

that ’Tis begins with a dream description. The Preface speaks of the nar-
rator’s dream to live in America: “The one I had over and over was where
I sailed into New York Harbor awed by the skyscrapers before me” (1).
Here, the dreamscape is likened to a physical space: “I’d tell my broth-
ers and they’d envy me for having spent a night in America till they
began to claim they’d had that dream, too” (1). The dream space of the
mind equates to the memory space of the memoir, fantastical imaginings
become a lived reality. “I’d argue with them [his brothers], tell them I was
the oldest, that it was my dream and they’d better stay out of it or there
would be trouble … I told [my mother] it wasn’t fair the way the whole
family was invading my dreams” (1). Here McCourt seems to present his
imagined space as a geographical destination. A place with real borders
circumscribes McCourt’s memory, even before America becomes a real
geography in this memoir. Divisions between physical reality and the tan-
gible dreamscape are ambiguous as McCourt’s brothers have his dream
and then invade his dreams. Valdine Clemens suggests that “characters
in Gothic stories are like the figures in our dreams; they embody and act
out conflicting, subconscious psychic energies” (9), which, again, links
the Gothic to Freudian concepts in the idea that the dream represents a
hidden wish of the unconscious. Here McCourt is at once a figure in his
own dream and a Gothic character.
The dreamscape as memory is a pivotal juncture between memoir and
Gothic. At Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley’s
portentous dream transformed into the composition of Frankenstein:

I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of
unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing that he had put together. I saw
the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of
some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital
motion.4

For these writers, dreams operate as both a tangible space, and a mem-
ory space—a graspable vision appears before the author, though in fact it
remains ultimately intangible until Shelley composes her tome. Memory
does not become un-dead until language endows the memory-scape with
a corporeal shape. Also, like the way that McCourt’s dream is invaded
against his wishes, Shelley’s vision suggests that the idea for the novel is
something over which she has no control, which appeared independent
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 179

of her choice. Similarly, another Gothic work, Robert Louis Stevenson’s

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), evokes a compositional
dreamscape:

I had long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehi-
cle, for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in
upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature … For two days I
went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night
I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in
which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the
change in the presence of his pursuers. (“Chapter on Dreams” 189)

Along with Shelley and Stevenson, Horace Walpole claimed the terrors of
his tale were first shown to him in a dream. Memoir is always operating on
this tenuous boundary between constructed, or even imposed, visions of
reality and the quest for a true personal history. Through its representation
of intermingled dream/memory-scapes, and for an unwittingly, uncanny
ambiguity, McCourt’s narrative style plays with memory’s influence and
grasp on compositional limitations, in a way that profoundly resembles
incidences informing Gothic writers. Furthermore, commencing a mem-
oir with a dream description subtly undermines memory’s ability to accu-
rately describe or conjure a truthful past, thus positioning ’Tis in dialogue
with the Gothic.

Gothic Heroes
McCourt’s memory-scape is Gothic in another aspect. When Ann
Radcliffe’s Vivaldi (The Italian, 1797), reflects on his position in a prison
cell and considers his captors, Radcliffe raises important distinctions
between male and female Gothic:

The conduct of the mysterious being, who now stood before him, … passed
like a vision over his memory. His mind resembled the glass of a magician,
on which the apparitions of long-buried events arise, and as they fleet away,
point portentously to shapes half-hid in the duskiness of futurity. An unusual
dread seized upon him; and a superstition, such as he had never before
admitted in an equal degree, usurped his judgment. He looked up to the
shadowy countenance of the stranger; and almost believed he beheld an
inhabitant of the world of spirits. (320)
180 E. MOORE

Significantly, rather than Ellena, it is the hero, Vivaldi, who is prone to

false imaginings about what horrors or dangers await him. Vivaldi finds
his judgment usurped, or impeached, in the face of terrifying experi-
ences. Robert Miles points out that, while the novel begins with Vivaldi’s
observation of Ellena underneath her veil during a church service, it ends
with Vivaldi’s own veiling by the Inquisitors, suggesting that throughout
the course of the novel he has undergone a process of “feminization”
(162). Confinement is a Gothic trope and here, as Miles points out, a
gender inversion occurs. So, too, in McCourt’s memoir is confinement
prominent. From the first moment he arrives in New York—the city of his
dreams—an inversion occurs, so that many of the spaces described suggest
McCourt’s role as a Gothic hero.
Enclosure with lack of escape paradoxically defines his first forays into
the free world of America. His rented apartment is rule-bound: no lights
after eleven; “No girls, no food, no drink” (17). Attempting to attend
a screening of Hamlet at a playhouse results in admonishment and self-
induced seclusion in the men’s lavatory (the only place he can find to
consume his lemon meringue pie and ginger ale). Even when attending
Catholic Mass on Christmas Day, McCourt is met with antagonism and
confinement:

The church is so crowded there are people standing in the back but I’m
so weak with the hunger and the long Christmas Eve of whiskey, glug and
throwing up I want to find a seat. There’s an empty spot at the end of a pew
far up the center aisle but as soon as I slip into it a man comes running at me.
He’s all dressed up in striped trousers, a coat with tails, and a frown over his
face and he whispers to me, You must leave this pew at once. (69)

Appropriately, just before this incident, McCourt recalls wandering up a

street, singing “Don’t Fence Me In.” He despairs: “New York was the city
of my dreams but now I’m here the dreams are gone and it’s not what I
expected at all” (54). It is as though the narrator was so entrapped within
a baseless, dreamscape geography that the real New York continually dis-
appoints and confines him and his mind. McCourt is thus feminized and
captured in a seemingly inescapable web of immovable forces, while his
unstoppable memory hems him into a longing for home, for the heimlich
of the uncanny.
A sense of displacement characterizes McCourt’s initial New York expe-
riences. With his trademark wit, he regretfully comments: “I’m sorry I
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 181

didn’t look for a book that tells you what to do on your first night in
New York in a hotel with a priest where you’re liable to make a fool of
yourself right and left” (15–16). Indeed, this early scene describes the nar-
rator’s most notable entrapping scenario: “[The priest] lifts the bedclothes
to let me in and it’s a shock to see he’s wearing nothing … It’s hard to
fall asleep in a bed with a naked priest snoring beside you” (16). With
early Gothic novels emphasizing the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, the
scene painted here aligns with the genre from yet another angle. We might
recall how Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is a novel that both repre-
sents and criticizes the structures of religion. With the monk Ambrosio’s
wanton desires and criminal acts, the text is rife with debates about orga-
nized religion. A direct response to Lewis, Radcliffe’s The Italian fea-
tures a scene where the heroine, Ellena, is imprisoned in the convent of
San Stefano and speaks directly of the corruption of religious ideas that
she perceives within the convent walls: “‘The sanctuary is profaned,’ said
Ellena, mildly, but with dignity, ‘it is become a prison’” (84).
In what can be read as another installment in this critique, McCourt’s
final encounter with the priest in ’Tis repeats this duplicity; the young
narrator is accosted and must flee his hotel room when the priest is “in a
state of excitement with his hand on himself. Come here to me, he says,
and I back away” (21). The sturdy sense of morality granted to McCourt
through his Catholic upbringing in Ireland tumbles in the face of this gro-
tesque episode. Recounting such a scene situates ’Tis as part confession,
part conversion tale—a space in which memories are utilized to reassess, or
perhaps to reaffirm, the narrator’s present worldview. This is certainly also
a place where expectations of national and religious identities are over-
turned in an unsettling manner. In the above-mentioned texts, authority
figures representing organized religion are educed, in part, as sites for
reexamination. Like McCourt’s young narrator, Gothic novels often seem
captivated by the structures of religion at the same time as they criticize
them.
Entrapment ultimately prevails as a descriptor for McCourt’s memo-
ries. From the rules and constrictions of his life in New York City, the
young narrator is transported to an army outfit in Bavaria, Germany,
where his initial assignment is dog training: “I have to stay in the cage
and watch my dog eating. The corporal calls this familiarization” (103).5
When he gets into an altercation with a fellow officer about his mother,
he is again “locked up for the night” (111). Once more, confinement
positions McCourt as a kind of Gothic hero. Similarly, back in New York,
182 E. MOORE

despite dreams of attending university and admiring glances at book-laden

students on the subway, McCourt feels trapped in his station as a dockyard
worker:

There’s nothing to do but sit at the bar tormenting myself with questions.
What am I doing here with this knockwurst and beer? What am I doing in
the world at all? Will I spend the rest of my life hauling sides of beef from
truck to freezer and vice versa? Will I end my days in a small apartment in
Queens … Will I ride the subways all my life envying people carrying books
from universities? (191)

The memoir’s turning point occurs the moment McCourt goes from a
hero confined by forces beyond his control—drifting through life like Billy
Pilgrim—to directing his own goals and achievements. Despite this shift,
he finds college almost equally entrapping, because “Everyone talks and
no one listens” (205), and the main concerns for students are their exams,
their grade-point averages, “the meaning of everything,” and existential-
ism (205). Overwhelmingly, however, McCourt’s tale is one of transfor-
mative possibilities, where he breaks out of the prison walls that surround
him: his working-class position; his impoverished upbringing; and his
immigrant status.
Returning to our initial discussion on the Gothic geographies of mem-
oirs, McCourt utilizes various formal structures to assemble an ambiguous
memory-scape. For example, when nationality becomes a confining and
confounding issue, he speculates:

Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they’re
Irish and we should all have a drink? It’s not enough to be American. You
always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and
you’d wonder how they’d get along if someone hadn’t invented the hyphen.
(113)

The text itself is haunted by national memory, and McCourt’s humor

relates to the inability of language to explicate and define personal iden-
tity, in spite of efforts to rely upon linguistic categories. Nation as an iden-
tity marker is a major factor for Gothic protagonists—consider Dracula’s
ability to reverse colonize due to his excellent British pronunciation
or Carmilla’s ancient German heritage—and McCourt emphasizes his
struggle to establish identity in between artificial markers, like hyphens.
By commenting on language here, McCourt is hinting at the inability of
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 183

linguistic markers to describe accurately or to contain memory and its

influence on individual subjectivity. Importantly, like the adventures of
Vonnegut’s unstuck Pilgrim, McCourt’s writing style mimics memory
retrieval. Dialogue is incorporated into sentence structure, effectively
demonstrating how, though other voices exist in memory, it is finally
McCourt’s interpretation and filtering of those memories that we receive
in the memoir. Memory does not inhabit the past, despite the assump-
tion that this is from whence it originates. Instead memory becomes a
present-day version of the past. All voices are the narrator’s voice because
it is the narrator’s memory that drives the tale. Take, for instance, the
first page of the memoir, where McCourt is describing the First Officer
on his journey to America aboard the MS Irish Oak in 1949: “He said
Albany had all the charm of Limerick, ha ha ha, a great place to die
but not a place where you’d want to get married or rear children” (3).
McCourt’s third-person dialogue transforms seamlessly into the First
Officer’s actual words, representing the inaccuracy of exact dialogue
when it is recalled from memory. This device defines the style employed
throughout. Formal features thus intermingle with representations of
memory and its contents.
Memory seems an unreliable and unwieldy companion for McCourt.
Also, there is the interference of past upon present. From the recollection
of his initial cross-Atlantic trek, the narrator notes how, when trying to
focus on the New York that awaits him, memory interferes:

Instead of sauntering up Fifth Avenue with the tan, the teeth, I’d be back in
the lanes of Limerick, women standing at doors chatting away and pulling
their shawls around their shoulders, children with faces dirty from bread
and jam, playing and laughing and crying to their mothers. I’d see people at
Mass on Sunday morning where a whisper would run through the church
when someone with a hunger weakness would collapse in the pew and have
to be carried outside by men from the back of the church who’d tell every-
one, Stand back, stand back, for the lovea Jaysus, can’t you see she’s gasp-
ing for the air, and I wanted to be a man like that telling people stand back
because that gave you the right to stay outside till the Mass was over and you
could go off to the pub which is why you were standing in the back with all
the other men in the first place. (4)

With these two long sentences, the narrator seems to encapsulate the
meandering nature of memory, as well as its intrusive qualities. It is not
only physical, cultural, or national designation that characterizes this
184 E. MOORE

memoir, but also the captive and captivating nature of memory itself. The
memoir genre is itself an entrapped Gothic hero/heroine.

BOOM GOES THE MEMOIR

Terrors of Memory, Memories of Terror

Terror—another concept pivotal to Gothic studies—combines with the
uncanny in Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors. Ellen Moers
admits: “what I mean––or anyone else means––by ‘the Gothic’ is not so
easily stated except that it has to do with fear” (90). Burroughs’s mem-
oir traverses the geographies of sanity and insanity to the point of non-
definition, bringing a new focus to the question of familiarity and the
haunted space of the psychological self. Burroughs’s text overwhelmingly
represents this through a contemporary version of the Gothic haunted
house.
The house from which the adolescent Burroughs is removed—the
house where he dwelt with his self-destructive, dysfunctional parents—is
described as an ominous sanctuary in the woods:

The house is quiet. I can hear the ticking of my mother’s watch. Outside,
the trees are dark and tall, they lean in toward the house, I imagine because
the house is bright inside and the trees crave light, like bugs. We live in the
woods, in a glass house surrounded by trees; tall pines, birch trees, iron-
woods. (6)

Yet the eerie image of this forest-enfolded dwelling and the uncanny
quiet that Burroughs recalls belie disturbing interior features: a negligent,
deeply unhappy alcoholic father; and a self-important, inattentive mother.
Emphasis on sound and light presents a peculiar space replete with high
ceilings, for which the mother emphasizes a need. Entrapment is turned
outwards—the need for a spacious abode is countered by the confining
and destructive marital relationship within: “Then, lights on the wall,
spreading to the ceiling, sliding through the room like a living thing. My
father is home” (7). The lifeless house is awakened more by a beam of
light than by its living inhabitants. The quietness of the scene is palpa-
ble, so that when his father’s arrival is described—“There is the sound of
gravel crackling beneath tires” (7)—an ominous tone develops. A kind of
Gothic terror pervades these descriptions and, though Burroughs’s exact
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 185

recollection of events transpiring between his parents is incomplete, we

are aware that separation is imminent and that violent acts have occurred
and threaten to resurface. Perhaps fittingly, Burroughs’s coming-of-age
memoir moves between domestic spaces, furnished in turn with new
degrees of terror.
If we turn to Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime and its link to
terror, readings of Burroughs’s seemingly haunted abodes can be under-
scored. While the narrator’s subsequent abode haunts in an entirely dif-
ferent manner, terror nonetheless continues to provide an important link.
From his first glimpse of the house of Dr. Finch (Burroughs’s mother’s
psychiatrist and his future adoptive father), disorder and hidden secrets
shape impressions: “The pink paint was peeling off, exposing veins and
patches of bare wood. All the windows lacked shutters and were covered
with thick plastic, making it impossible to see inside” (39). There is a dis-
tinct lack of order without, a feature which initially terrifies the borderline
obsessive-compulsive Burroughs. There is nothing uniform and nothing
conventional, structurally or behaviorally.
Significantly, the peeling paint reveals veins which, combined with later
descriptors, afford the house a corporeality, a living, breathing capac-
ity, like a Frankensteinian creation perhaps. Contrasted with the lifeless,
high-ceilinged abode that housed Burroughs with his parents, Dr. Finch’s
house seems alive. The inert becomes organic when Burroughs and his
adopted sister redecorate by punching a hole in the kitchen ceiling to cre-
ate a skylight—giving the house high ceilings for emotional release: “The
kitchen ceiling was too low. It was crushing us. It was the source of our
misery in life” (139):

The insulation tumbled out or was extracted by our powdery hands. It

looked like hair, the insulation. In fact, the whole ceiling seemed to be made
of organic materials; horsehair, human hair, bits of bone. It was some mum-
mified, mutant creature. By dawn we were knee-deep in debris. The kitchen
table, the top of the refrigerator, the stove, the sink—everything—was cov-
ered. (145)

A sense of entombment is conveyed with imagery that is, perversely, all-

consuming and lifelike in its qualities and textures to give it an eerie sense
of undeadness: “The house smelled like wet dog and something else”
(41). Death and decay are features of the characters’s lived spaces as the
Gothic uncanny dominates the memoir’s narrative. In another instance,
186 E. MOORE

the wife of Dr Finch, Agnes, cleans as a coping mechanism: “The sweep-

ing had the effect of spreading the animal hairs out thinner and moving
crumbs and toenail clippings into the corners” (169), not only illustrating
the idea of the house as living-dead, but also as imposing an architec-
tural control over its inhabitants. Human flesh and skin combine with the
seemingly inert house, replaying a long-standing Gothic trope wherein
the line between living and dead is continually blurred. The identity of
the structure mingles with the identity of its human inhabitants, like Poe’s
House of Usher (1839) or the haunted architectures of cinematic narratives
like Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), or
Stuart Rosenberg’s The Amityville Horror (1979). Burroughs intersects
with these prominent themes by displaying the memory—all it houses and
with all its houses—as a haunted space.
Hauntedness arises, too, in the terrifying and mind-altering people
and objects encountered. A psychiatric patient never leaves her upstairs
bedroom, plagued by obsessive compulsive neuroticism. Burroughs pic-
tures Joranne as “a ghoulish old lady, hands mangled by arthritis, crawling
along the floor upstairs” (57). Like a wolf, she howls for help; and when
the twelve-year-old Burroughs is introduced to her, he is fascinated to
meet a “real, live crazy person … her room was so bright that it looked like
a stage. She was dressed all in white, even a white shawl. And she looked
very clean and glowy, like a ghost except not transparent” (62). Gothic
characters and memoirs pervade Burroughs’s memory-scape, setting the
scene of his trauma and terror as a discarded individual, abandoned to a
psychiatrist by his irrational mother. As the house poses both challenges
and unprecedented acceptances, confusion prevails and depictions of the
Finch house unveil richly Gothic metaphors.
Terror is Burkean here. The house is described as “weird and awful
and fascinating and confusing and [Burroughs] wanted to go home to
the country and play with a tree” (50). Burroughs is fanatically neat and
despairs at the slipshod upkeep inside and out. At home he had a penchant
for polishing shiny objects and an obsession with smooth hair and a neat
appearance; in the Finch house, however, fascination wins over condem-
nation of the disorderly: “I glanced down at my slacks and noticed an
unsightly stain. It was some sort of grease. It would never come out. I
shrugged, got up and ran for the kitchen to see what small disaster had
happened” (66). Fascination with the grotesque, with the fearful, some-
how gives rise to deep affection and appreciation for what is, at first, most
frightening. Gothic heroes and heroines are rendered speechless by the
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 187

sublime; Burroughs is rendered defenseless, his identity engulfed by the

Finch family home, and his memory haunted.

Terrors of the Self

Twelve-year-old Burroughs contemplates his homosexuality and a por-
tion of the text describes his experiences with an older lover. Initially,
Burroughs fears the Finch family reaction to his “deep, dark secret … I
was worried my being gay would push the Finches’ acceptance of me past
the breaking point” (69). What is significant here, too, is the relation-
ship between the Finch house and Burroughs’s identity transformation.
Wolfreys contends: “Haunting cannot take place without the possibility of
its internal eruption and interruption within and as a condition of a famil-
iar everyday place and space” (5). Burroughs’s sense of self erupts from
within as the Finch house becomes both familiar and uncanny; and it is this
fine line between heimlich and unheimlich that creates the unsettling con-
ditions that somehow enable a transformation in the young Burroughs’s
approach to life and its dilemmas. When Burroughs asks: “‘Can you imag-
ine if the neighbors knew what went on in this house?”, his adoptive sister,
Natalie responds: “they’d throw my father in an insane asylum and burn
the house to the ground. It would be exactly like Frankenstein” (168).
And, likewise, Burroughs undergoes a kind of transformation incited by a
“disturbance of the familiar” (35) that leads him back to a more familiar
sense of self that had always lived within his personal landscape, marking
this memoir as a confessional and conversion tale.
The house is unstable—“the stairs themselves were tearing away from
the wall and every time somebody climbed them, they looked like they
might come crashing down” (60)—and acts as catalyst for Burroughs’s
identity shift. He describes how the “old Victorian had many rooms and
many hallways; two stairways and so many doors that it was easy to get
lost” (49). At the same time, he reassures the reader of his newly found
attitude of acceptance to uncertainty when he writes that upon hearing a
loud crash: “this made me smile and wonder what new mess had just hap-
pened” (65). A tension between the excitement of changing and becom-
ing, and the fear of losing one’s selfhood characterizes this memoir. On
the one hand is Burroughs’s excitement in striving for a powerful, firm
identity: “Outside it was dark. Because I was sitting at an angle to the
window, I couldn’t see my reflection, just the rest of the kitchen, and this
made me feel like a vampire. I was invisible” (140). On the other, is the
188 E. MOORE

horror of erasure of self, which in part explains Burroughs’s devotion to

writing in his journal: “because I felt that if I didn’t write at least four
hours a day, I might as well not exist” (154). There is, then, a striving for
existence and self-definition that is in itself terrifying in Burke’s sense—
exhilarating and frightening at once.
So it is with Burroughs’s sexual relations. A haunting image is pulled
from his memory of the moments after his first physical intimacy with
another male: “My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no
world outside of the car. Again, that feeling that everything has changed.
And the sensation, very real, of spinning” (116). After his initial encounter
with his friend and lover, Burroughs is once again haunted by a domestic
space, this time that of his lover, Neil:

I look back at the house. The window near the door provides a dull, yellow
light, mixed with some blue light from the TV in the other room. All the
other windows are dark. The house itself is dark; during the day it’s probably
gray or brown. At night, it’s black. There is no lawn. Just dirt and gravel
where a lawn could go. (115)

The fragmented, incomplete space described above suggests an other-

worldly abode, a liminal space where convention and rules do not apply,
in many ways akin to the Finch house. Wolfreys asserts that: “Haunting
and spectral effects … operate disruptively from within the most habit-
ual, accustomed structures of identity” (19), just as these domestic
spaces come to operate as disruptive yet formative structures for young
Burroughs. Also, the sense of disruption is made physically manifest when
first approaching the infamous home of Dr. Finch. Burroughs—“dressed
up in pressed gray slacks, a crisp white shirt and a navy blazer for the occa-
sion” (39)—is struck by the anathema he views before him:

The street was lined with immaculate homes, each more stately than the
next. Perfectly trimmed hedges, double fireplace chimneys, tall front doors
painted glossy black, porches fronted with latticework. It was a protracted-
jaw, New England money street … And then up on the right, I saw one
house that did not belong. Instead of being white and pristine like all the
others, this house was pink and seemed to sag. From a distance, it looked
abandoned. In a neighborhood of whispers, it was a shriek. (39)

Here, the quintessential image of the haunted house emerges. So it is

with his lover’s abode, and thus a parallel can be drawn with his iden-
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 189

tity; an ambiguous, liminal existence with few likenesses to conventional

behaviors and attitudes that terrifies in a Burkean sense. Burroughs defines
himself as an Other and finds solace amongst the other Others of the
Finch family. Fundamentally, like McCourt’s, the text is confessional—a
conversion memoir: the young Augusten Burroughs confronts his identity
via uncontrollable events and structures that come to define him. With
consideration of Gothic concepts, the spectral qualities of the memoir are
uncovered.

POST-MILLENNIAL GOTHIC MEMOIR

Ghosts of Technology Past

A final memoir case study is The Language of Men: A Memoir (2012) by
Anthony D’Aries, a young American writer, composed as a recent graduate
of an MFA program. Memoirs fall under a host of categorical markers—
celebrity, childhood, misery, survivor: “a million little subgenres” (Yagoda
11). Add to the list Lorraine Adams’s two overarching divisions: “nobody
memoir” and “somebody memoir.” Couser comments: “Never has mem-
oir writing been encouraged among students so young. The idea that an
MFA candidate or even an undergraduate may write memoir is no longer
considered ridiculous on the face of it” (141). Equally un-ridiculous, then,
is the consideration of such a memoir as a significant contribution to the
genre.
The Language of Men transitions from the lived experience of a sol-
dier interpreting a large-scale historical event—the Vietnam War—to a
small-scale bildungsroman set in the suburbs of Long Island, New York.
Memory strands of father and son interweave throughout and demon-
strate the limitations of oral history as a constructor of memory by moving
from wartime sketches of Vietnam to the impact of the author’s geograph-
ical and emotional journey to comprehend the meanings opened up by
his father’s accounts as a soldier stationed in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).
True to its title, the book is about language, but not just that of men; the
text draws attention to the space between words and meaning, between
intention and action, between listening and understanding, and between
constructing memory and constructing history.
From anecdotal evidence to political questions about international
military intervention, and from identity in consumer culture to the con-
struction of events through techno-media, memory is shaped by a host of
190 E. MOORE

forces in this book. Of note here is the role that technology plays in haunt-
ing the narrator, as well as intruding into the geography of the memory to
construct mountainous obstacles to self-perception.

Memories and Technological Mediation: Media as Memory

Through recorded interviews with his father, who narrates his experiences
as a soldier stationed in Saigon, D’Aries retrieves his father’s narrative, a
witness to specific events, who offers a distinct perspective on the war.
From the start, memory is construed as physical, and the methods by
which memories are enacted are largely concerned with technological
mediation.
Recalling his youth, D’Aries, an amateur filmmaker, tells us he was
“especially curious about the events occurring just outside the scope of the
camera’s lens” (96), enacting a common comparison between memory and
physical space. In her discussion of memory in a medieval context, Mary
Carruthers notes that: “Memory is a kind of photographic film, exposed
(we imply) by an amateur and developed by a duffer, and so marred by
scratches and inaccurate light-values” (1), emphasizing physical qualities
often associated with memory, its acquisition and retention. Researchers
across a range of disciplines reaffirm this idea. Charles Fernyhough, work-
ing in the intersecting fields of psychology and cognitive neuroscience,
notices how “Metaphors of memory are overwhelmingly physical: we talk
of filing cabinets, labyrinths and photographic plates, and we use verbs
such as impress, burn and imprint to describe the processes by which
memories are formed” (6). Often ascribed to memory is a mechanical
process of input and output, storage, and deletion, so that our compre-
hension of the brain is reliant on our understanding of technology.
Characters in The Language of Men also assemble and recapitulate their
memories through technologies, and this is where an intersection with the
Gothic becomes apparent. The trace or spectrality of memory is reconsti-
tuted via objects that operate in a hyperreal space. Most notably, physical
memory is evoked via the consumption of cinema and television narra-
tives. To take a prominent example, D’Aries’s incomprehension of his
father’s speech patterns frame the text:

My Father speaks his own language. A hillbilly twang of the Looney Tunes
dialect … His swearing is part of a well-oiled machine, except when a driver
cuts him off—then higher octane terms explode from his mouth. He cuts
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 191

words in half, stresses whichever syllable he wants. Verbs become nouns and
vice versa. He throws in song lyrics, movie quotes, even slogans from TV
commercials. It all swirls together and all you can do is try to keep up. I
tried. Sometimes we could speak at his pace. (5)

Language is built from the materials that surround individuals—from

the detritus of war or from the relics of an American “reality”—so that,
certainly for D’Aries and his father, language transmits a worldview con-
structed through media-inspired, fictional narratives—comprising adver-
tisements, music, films, and cartoons.
Notably, this narrative is constructed as a masculine space, as indicated
by the memoir’s title. In one scene, D’Aries’s mother is isolated from her
husband and two sons when, on Christmas morning, they sit on the sofa
together acting out scenes, mimicking the speech patterns of the cari-
catured Italian immigrants of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). An
identity is garnered by these men simply through the act of viewing a
fictional reality. As a result, the mother can locate no avenue of commu-
nication as her husband and sons persist in their characterizations. The
mother’s home space teeters on the precarious edge between heimlich and
unheimlich, and her incomprehension results in an alienating landscape
of language. D’Aries thus displays how the present is constructed by the
mediated past and historical reality proffered via caricatures of that past.
Even McCourt participates in this type of memory disjunction when he
comments: “My first day in New York and already people are talking like
gangsters from the films I saw in Limerick” (19–20). Memory is at once
dominated by and challenged through preconceived ideas constructed
through fake memories gathered from narratives. The challenge of The
Language of Men is the choice of its protagonist: to choose a mediated
past or an unmediated, starkly divergent reality.
From the preservation of the past through technological metaphors,
to the recapitulation of history through fictional portrayals, the process
of memory practiced in D’Aries’s account is overwhelmingly unfocussed,
multifaceted, and impenetrable. Joanne Garde-Hansen notes how:

mediated accounts of wars, assassinations, genocides and terrorist attacks

intermingle in our minds with multimedia national/local museum exhibits
and heritage sites, community history projects, oral histories, family photo
albums, even tribute bands, advertisement jingles and favourite TV shows
from childhood. (6)
192 E. MOORE

The memoir boom has often been attributed to the increasing access that
individuals have to social media, to avenues for sharing their stories with
the public, so that D’Aries’s depiction of memory retrieval coincides with
the materialist marketplace, as well as with the ways that individuals tend
to understand memory and its functions. Yet the Gothic ghost story also
plays a part here. Throughout his memoir, D’Aries draws from the record-
ings of his father’s voice, interviews that he listens and re-listens to, as he
wanders the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. The voice exists in a kind of
intangible geography, as a ghostly or spectral figure.
The memoir’s interpretative lens extends beyond his father’s disem-
bodied voice to a long list of Vietnam films that provide a soundtrack for
interpreting the country. During his stay, D’Aries attends a screening of
Brian de Palma’s Casualties of War (1989). Thereafter realizing how influ-
enced he has been by a manufactured, consumed version of historical real-
ity, produced and distributed by the machinations of American cinema: “I
thought I came here because I was sick of war films and still-shots of my
father in his hooch. Yet I retreated to a movie theater, as if the Vietnam
outside offered no insight” (62). The text invites a Baudrillardian read-
ing, a hyperreal exposure in which the original—the soldier’s experience
now mediated and re-enacted through the staged guilt and confusion of
Michael J. Fox or the jungle exploits of Charlie Sheen—is shrouded by its
representations; and these representative objects, in turn, are re-played, re-
recorded and aired through the mimicry of suburban, armchair America,
the men who have built a semblance of masculine identity through con-
structed realities. Wolfreys invokes Derrida’s comment on the spectral and
memory, where he maintains that: “When the very first perception of an
image is linked to a structure of reproduction, then we are dealing with
the realm of phantoms.”6 Because it is from within this geography that
D’Aries’s memoir operates, links between the spectrality of the Gothic
and the life story are made manifest. Joanne Garde-Hansen cites Maria
Sturken’s discussion of a US Vietnam veteran’s inability to distinguish
between his lived experience as a soldier and the subsequent Hollywood
representations of the event. Veteran William Adams comments that “The
Vietnam War is no longer a definite event so much as it is a collective and
mobile script in which we continue to scrawl, erase, rewrite our conflict-
ing and changing view of ourselves” (qtd. 52). The Gothic, too, offers
this continual process of self-reflection, erasure, and re-writing as fictional
characters and memoir narrators seek to find a semblance of identity
through perceptions of an unknowable past.
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 193

The Limits of Memory: Linguistic Alienation

Alongside the unaccountability of authentic memory is the inauthenticity
of language. Memory is untranslatable. Language fails to function and
acts as that familiar/unfamiliar space so typical of Gothic landscapes. Just
as McCourt scoffs at the ineffectuality of the hyphen, D’Aries conveys a
sense of linguistic entrapment that is Gothic in its implications.
In the first section of The Language of Men, “In Country,”—a reference
to Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1985 Vietnam novel—D’Aries is linguistically
alienated, as well as increasingly distant from his wife, who also travels to
Vietnam but to educate the city’s army of sex workers about sexual health
and hygiene. D’Aries identifies his inability to communicate his desires,
thoughts, and emotions to his partner: “I felt I was approaching a slippery
slope where my words could no longer express my intentions” (36). While
his wife volunteers with destitute women, Anthony re-listens to his father’s
accounts as a soldier—replete with sexual encounters, both personally
experienced and circulated as rumor throughout the hooch. D’Aries finds
he is unable to equate his father’s memory of Vietnam to the version of
reality he confronts in the twenty-first century. At times, he transplants his
understanding of the place to the perspective proffered by his father, stress-
ing the need “to splice the dialogue of the nineteen-year-old kid in his
hooch with the fifty-five-year-old man speaking into my recorder. There
was too much dead air in our conversation. I wanted to bring it back to
life” (11). The attempt is Frankensteinian; not only an attempt to create a
new life out of inert parts, but also a formative, linguistic attempt to forge
memories with pen and paper. Just as Shelley and Stoker elect for episto-
lary modes, D’Aries splices varying perspectives and dialogues together to
formulate a coherent geography for his and others’s memories.
Linguistic inefficacy and uncanny doublings also occur. This doubling
yet again returns us to the Freudian implications present in memoirs,
where doppelgängers and other, similar, familiar doubles recount hazy,
past/present-tense geographies of thought. D’Aries and his wife set off
to locate the best bun cha restaurant in town—allegedly owned by a deaf
and mute family—and the difficulty of navigating the linguistic and literal
streets of Ho Chi Minh City comingles with the complexity of expectation
and reality. Finally arriving at the correct street, the couple are faced with
a dilemma:

Two Vietnamese families, on opposite sides of the street, stand with their
hands clasped in front of them. Two mothers, two fathers, two daughters,
194 E. MOORE

two sons. As we walk by, the families reach out their hands and speak in
strained, warped voices … We feel mute everywhere in Vietnam, so I won-
der what difference it makes if the family here really is deaf and mute. (37)

This impossible choice hints at the quest for authenticity that characterizes
The Language of Men. As D’Aries navigates the bewildering alleyways of
the city, he becomes increasingly incapable of navigating the avenues of his
father’s memory paths.
While in Vietnam, D’Aries drowns out the present reality of his and the
country’s situation: “I want to close my ears. I want to mute my brain. I
want to reclaim my spot beside my father on the couch, crack open another
peanut, and let Hollywood return me to a Vietnam I remember” (64).
Questing to fill in the missing pieces of his father’s disjointed and puz-
zled recollections, D’Aries finds only a haunting series of spectral copies:
a cinema showing American films about Vietnam; streets filled with ven-
dors selling tourists poorly-translated T-shirts and buttons; one deaf-mute
family imitating another. The hyperreal becomes a viable way of perceiv-
ing post-war reality, a traumatic coping mechanism, or perhaps merely an
indicator of the increasing linguistic and cognitive alienation encouraged
and perpetuated by a society overladen with consumerism, with desire and
endless layers of representation, so that the “original,” if there ever was
one, is continually unaccounted for and unaccountable. In The Language
of Men, memory is unoriginal, with no origin, and thus incapable of being
firmly confirmed or disproved. The real and the represented are conflated
and become ambiguous partners in the haunting specters of consumerist
society; entrapment in the constructed image, in an unattainable pattern
of perfection that forever lingers beyond the camera’s frame.
For D’Aries, the memoir process entails matching the stories to each
other, or sometimes against each other. He relates a:

desire to stand on the ground I’d seen only in my father’s old photographs,
listen to his recorded voice talk about Long Binh and Saigon and apple-
sauce, and try to match his audio picture with the actual landscape. My
father didn’t live in history books or yellowed newspapers at the public
library. He didn’t keep a journal I could stumble upon in our attic. (11)

Instead, D’Aries’s memory-scape must serve as a viable replacement; and

as a new incarnation of the ghosts of the past, the uncanny project of
remembering continues.
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 195

An example of a nobody memoir that questions language, interro-

gates the ability to write the memoir itself, and that ultimately raises the
question of mediated memory, the trauma-of-the-war memoir assumes a
renewed role here: not the original generation who witnessed and fought
in the war, but the bequest of the subsequent generation, the children
who were raised within earshot of the stories conveyed in hushed tones;
who were daily witnesses to the terrors of maimed neighbors, of homeless-
ness, and to the horrors of Hollywood dramatizations; and who, today,
can and do travel to the country, only to experience an uncanny geogra-
phy beyond rational comprehension. The Language of Men thus serves as
an appropriate text with which to conclude a discussion of the connec-
tion between memoir and Gothic: a relationship defined by ambiguities in
identity, memory, recollection, terror and the uncanny. The closing sec-
tion describes “The Moving Wall,” a travelling display that replicates the
five-hundred-foot Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. D’Aries
concludes at the moment when his family views the exhibit: “We turn to
face the wall, and see our reflections behind the wide list of names” (257).
The Gothic themes of doubling and mirroring thus inscribe even our
present understanding of memory and of historical events. Fred Botting
reminds us that Gothic serves various functions in relation to historical
construction, noting that the genre: “appears in the awful obscurity that
haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality … Gothic atmo-
spheres––gloomy and mysterious––have repeatedly signaled the disturb-
ing return of pasts upon presents” (1–2).
Frankenstein’s creation bemoans his loss of appreciation for the beau-
tiful and the sublime. His memory precludes enjoyment of the present
moment: “I enjoyed this scene; and yet my enjoyment was embittered
both by the memory of the past, and the anticipation of the future” (140).
Similarly, the memoirists discussed here struggle to comprehend, control,
and represent their pasts and their futures, and memory comes to inhabit
a present landscape replete with hauntingly Gothic tropes, demonstrating
how Gothic continues to pervade and influence contemporary concerns.
With the post-1789 emphasis on individual rights and identity, with
the rise of the novel, with the prominence in literature of the lyrical “I,”
the era that saw the invention of the Gothic also witnessed the estab-
lishment of personal recollection as an activity available to a variety of
classes and with a variety of effects: from offering insight into marginal-
ized lives and experiences, to a vehicle for testimony and protest. In short,
life writing has had a long and diverse life; and, with the current memoir
196 E. MOORE

boom, the genre is undergoing reassessment from a critical perspective.

Contemporary concerns align with Gothic themes, making the memoir
a viable landscape for continuing to investigate the Gothic and its legacy.
Reading these memoirs as Gothic also unearths another pivotal junc-
ture for the Gothic: the re-making of the self through the travel narra-
tive. In each instance, a landscape has been traversed, a border crossed,
and the self re-invented through a specific interpretation of memory. As
memory haunts so, too, does it forge and formulate the individual. Like
Victor Frankenstein casting formerly rotting body parts into his mold to
invent a new being, so do the decaying memories of memoirists become
rejuvenated as they are reconfigured through various templates: from
McCourt’s geographical displacement; to Burroughs’s psychological for-
mation; to D’Aries’s personal quest to cast his father’s historical account in
a new guise. For each memoirist, a landscape at once physical and mental
is traversed, with haunting memories always biting at one’s neck, like the
fierce glare of R. Rider Haggard’s immortal Aysha, or the imminent threat
of Stoker’s Dracula. Ultimately, the haunted becomes the haunter for,
with each memoir, another depiction of a haunted individual is forged,
and another haunting legacy is thus created.

NOTES
1. Yagoda notes how memoirs “follow an account of the author’s way-
ward past (and the more wayward the better), his or her discovery
of some sort of secular or sacred light, and then, finally, sweet
redemption” (52).
2. Sarah Boesveld. 2013. “Q & A with Julie Rak: On Manufacturing
Memoir.” See also Julie Rak. 2013. Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir
for the Popular Market.
3. Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” was first published in a periodical
called Gil Blas in 1886. An earlier version of the tale—“Letter to a
Madman”—appeared the previous year. 1887 saw the publication of
a final, extended version of the story for inclusion in a collection, Le
Horla.
4. Mary Shelley, Author’s Introduction (9). Several other features con-
nect Shelley to debates relevant to the memoir. Firstly, Frankenstein’s
creation confuses fiction and reality by assuming the truth of
Milton’s Paradise Lost as a source of knowledge about the world.
The creature educates HIMself by reading Paradise Lost as “a true
 HAUNTING MEMORIES: GOTHIC AND MEMOIR 197

history,” identifying himself first as Adam and subsequently as

“Satan,” because he suffers from the “bitter gall of envy” (116–17).
Secondly, the narrative voice of Shelley’s novel is strikingly reminis-
cent of the memoirist’s depiction of memory recall. With a plurality
of viewpoints represented, we hear narration in the first person from
Victor Frankenstein; the explorer, Robert Walton; and, significantly,
the Creature. Thus, Shelley’s novel is eclectic and multi-voiced; the
novel is composed of various parts in a manner not unlike
Frankenstein’s Creature.
5. Connections with the uncanny can also be evoked here, with entrap-
ment with an unknowable, incomprehensible other as a foundation
for McCourt’s unhomely experience.
6. Wolfreys (1) referring to Jacques Derrida’s 1989 “The Ghost Dance:
An Interview with JD.”

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 PART III

Gothic Social Landscapes

 The Indian Gothic

Nalini Pai

The word Gothic usually brings to mind haunted castles, werewolves,

isolated mansions, and a certain forbidding architecture, among a host
of other associations. The term Gothic has usually been seen as confined
mainly to places far away from the Indian subcontinent. Yet it is impor-
tant to recall that the Gothic occurs in literature other than from the
cultures of Europe or the United States. Outside of the USA, yet still
on the North American continent, is found Southern Ontario Gothic,
a subgenre of the Gothic novel that employs the use of the bizarre and
the grotesque typical of Gothic tales. Similarly, literature from twentieth
century South Africa displays Gothic traits. This literature was born of
the anxiety of political, social, and cultural upheavals the country went
through, resulting in the triumph of democracy over oppression in 1994.
However, it is interesting to see that old bungalows of the British Raj in
India also carry a Gothic feel. The sahibs, or Englishmen, who traveled
across the plains and the hills of the Indian subcontinent often stayed at
these dak bungalows, as they were called, and many a tale is told of the
eerie happenings within. Many writers of the Raj have made reference to
these bungalows, which also find a place in local folklore. This chapter
looks at the dak bungalow as one of the spaces that is essentially the

N. Pai ()
St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

© The Author(s) 2016 201

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_9
202 N. PAI

Indian Gothic. It draws on literary as well as historical accounts of this

space and sees how it is simultaneously Indian and British. Furthermore,
the essay examines the presence and role played by women in the context
of the dak bungalow. Thus, the essential aim of this chapter is to show
the place that the Indian Gothic occupies in both literary and real-life
accounts of the writers of the Raj.
The term Gothic refers to both a form of architecture and a type of
literature. Gothic architecture is characterized by spires, huge windows,
pointed arches, flying buttresses, and ornamental facades, drawing puny
humanity upward toward the sublime of God (“Chhatrapati Shivaji
Terminus”). In terms of literature, Gothic refers to a specific kind of hor-
ror fiction that relies heavily on landscape to create a horrific rather than a
beatific version of the sublime, with an atmosphere of isolation, the hor-
rifying, the dark, the brooding, the ominous, and the grand yet sinister.
Often these responses are elicited from the audience through depictions
of a huge empty mansion under an ancient curse, rather than the creation
of a soaring cathedral drawing one closer to God.
With this definition established, it is important to note that this notion
of the Gothic, as is generally understood today, is essentially Western
in nature. Jerrold Hogle, in his “Introduction: The Gothic in Western
Culture,” traces the evolution and spread of the Gothic as a genre. The
generally agreed upon first Gothic text, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto,
was published in England in 1764. From 1764 to the 1790s writing in
the vein of the Gothic appeared now and then. Then in the 1790s the
genre of Gothic fiction spread across the British Isles and Europe, and to
the United States, giving rise to a slew of novels and short stories aimed
at a predominantly “female readership” (Hogle 1). However, as Western
culture infiltrated and overwhelmed the rest of the world, Gothic motifs
spread with it in terms of architecture and literature.
Not surprisingly India had her fair share of Gothic structures built in
the time of the Raj. As can be seen in Mumbai’s Victoria Terminus, in
cathedrals, and in churches as well as in structures like the dak bunga-
low, the Gothic seems to be influential in the Indian landscape. While
these Gothic structures are seen today as heritage buildings, indicative of a
colonial past and aesthetically pleasing, the Gothic as a site of sinister pres-
ences, ghosts, and unnatural happenings can be seen in the dak bungalow.
Jerrold Hogle explains that the space where the Gothic tale is usually set
is isolated and eerie:
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 203

a Gothic tale usually takes place (at least some of the time) in an antiquated
or seemingly antiquated place, be it a castle, a foreign palace, an abbey, a
vast prison, a subterranean crypt, a graveyard, a primeval frontier or island,
a large old house or theatre, an aging city or urban underworld, a decaying
storehouse, factory, laboratory, public building or some new recreation of
an older venue, such as an office with old filing cabinets, an overworked
spaceship or a computer memory. (2)

If castles, lonely mansions, and manors were places where ghostly pres-
ences and eerie noises could be experienced in the British landscape, it
is in the dak bungalow in the Indian landscape where much the same
things seem to occur. The Indian subcontinent, vast, wild, and only par-
tially explored, as far as the Englishman was concerned, had in its wildness
an area which he and his fellow countrymen could occupy from time to
time: the dak bungalow. Located in remote places––at the edge of forests,
overlooking valleys, and at the edge of tall cliffs, close to uninhabited
places and far from any kind of civilization––these buildings were akin to
the Gothic mansion or castle, be it that of Otranto in pseudo-medieval
England or in Dracula’s Transylvania. This isolated structure was just as
eerie and threatening in its own way as Dracula’s “vast ruined castle, from
whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battle-
ments showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky” (Stoker13).
Since the dak bungalow is located on the verge of familiar territory for
the Westerner, it is also the place where he/she looks on the unfamiliar
interior space that the native Indian occupies. It is a space that is discon-
certing to both races––the British man/woman feels uneasy because he/
she is encountering the strange native. On the other hand, the dak bun-
galow is the haunted space for the native who, here, comes face to face
with the sahib, an alien to India and therefore strange in his food, habits,
beliefs, and way of life. The dak bungalow is thus a place where the most
frightening aspects of both cultures meet. The cultural anxieties of both
native and white man/woman are manifest in the real incidents concern-
ing the dak bungalow. This in turn is reflected in the stories written about
this liminal space where both colonist and native meet and see each other
as both frightening and threatening. In these recountings, the dak bun-
galow is a place beyond civilization for the sahib, where the British man/
woman stops before invading the native Indian habitat; at the same time
it is the edge of a world that is Indian for the natives. Consequently, even
204 N. PAI

though the dak bungalow is not Gothic in architecture, it is so in spirit

for both races. The folklore, superstition, and beliefs of the natives about
these buildings and their surrounding areas make them a unique, distinc-
tive brand of the Gothic.
Kelly Hurley, in “British Gothic Fiction (1885–1930),” states: “The
Gothic is rightly, if partially understood as a cyclical genre that re-
emerges in times of cultural stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its
readership by working through them in displaced (sometimes supernatu-
ralized) form” (194). The rise of the Gothic novel in the Victorian era
was a response to the rapidly changing landscape and social and cultural
upheavals that were occurring around that time. Patrick Brantlinger, in his
essay “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure
Novel, 1880–1914,” puts forth a category of the Gothic that he calls
“imperial Gothic” (227). He contends that no other form of art has
more aptly conveyed the anxieties of the British (as a race) with regard
to their colonies. After the mid-Victorian era, Britain found it difficult to
see itself as progressive. In particular, people in Britain started worrying
about “the degeneration of their institutions, their culture, their racial
‘stock’” (230). Brantlinger goes on to enumerate the three main themes
of the Imperial Gothic: the “individual regression or going native, an
invasion of civilization by the forces of barbarism or demonism; and the
diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern
world” (230). Following from the premise that the Gothic as a genre
negotiates the cultural anxieties of a society, it is easy to see what the
brand of Gothic in the dak bungalow is all about. Although dak bunga-
lows allowed the British to meet and interact with people of their own
race, for it was not uncommon to meet sahibs of other regiments at dak
bungalows, they were still uncomfortably liminal spaces. For these bun-
galows also introduced colonists to the wilderness of India, which some
of them grew to like. References to khansamahs (keepers of the daks)
as menacing or mesmerizing, in one case even described by two British
ladies as having the fangs of a werewolf, perhaps reflect this deep-seated
fear. In this way the dak bungalow could be seen as a threatening space
in which the sahib/memsahib was in danger of giving in to the darker
side of his/her personality by becoming like the native and thus slipping
into savagery.
Tabish Khair in his book The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness
discusses the similarity of the Postcolonial to the Gothic. Both these
ideas have a common link: the idea of the Other. The Other is posited
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 205

as an evil force which has to be rooted out or made good. In other

words, the Other is seen either as good “waiting to be assimilated” into
the Self, and is therefore secondary to the Self, or a thoroughly negative
force which is the complete opposite of the Self. The Other is thus seen
as a “lack” and is therefore perceived as inferior to the European Self.
The Other is thus a central theme in Gothic literature (4-5, 6-7). David
Stevens opines that with scientific progress and economic prosperity
middle-class people in Britain could well afford “to cultivate imaginary
fears and fantasies” (Stevens qtd. in Khair 5). Gothic literature has been
defined as a writing of “excess” and transgression (Botting qtd. in Khair
5). Khair however contends that it is also a “writing of Otherness,” and
goes on to explain that Gothic writing has a variety of the Other–devils,
ghosts, Jews, lunatics, murderers and so on. Only when the Other is
defeated, assimilated or has his/her power quelled does the tale come
to an end (5).
The Other is what the average middle-class Britisher had to deal with
in England. This fear concerns two kinds of Others: internal and external.
Internal Others were both the aristocrats and the lower classes. The exter-
nal was empire. The empire was not just out there. From traveling sales
people to gypsies, a vast range of people of non-European blood passed in
and out of main cities and villages in England. However, when one looks
at literature that deals with the colonies, there is very little that has the
Other in a British setting. In other words, “the Imperial ‘periphery’ at the
‘centre’ of empire” has received very little attention. Khair goes on to add
that Gothic literature has afforded more of a space for the narratives of
these Others than any other kind of writing (Khair 8).
Khair refers to Malchow who, in his work titled Gothic Images of Race
in Nineteenth Century Britain, argues that social, sexual, and particu-
larly racial anxieties of the literate middle and lower middle classes in
England were vented and reflected in nineteenth-century Gothic writing.
Newspaper reports suggest that the common man in Britain was afraid of
invasion by the foreigner who lived in Britain (9). What Khair sets out to
do in his book is to

explore another major source of “deep fears and longings” on the part of
the Western reader––the colonial Other, the ghost from the empire, whose
presence, too, is deeply “unconscious” in the Gothic but no less significant
than the other “unconscious” ghosts of gender, madness, class, etc. that the
Gothic also grapples with. (10)
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The dak bungalow can be seen as a space which is geographically situated

in India but is very much a white man’s area. The ghosts of white people
haunting these spaces can thus be seen as those who went native and who
were therefore devoured by the native Other. Some tales of the haunted
dak bungalow have Indian ghost presences occasioning unnatural deaths.
This gives credibility to the invasion scare fiction published throughout
the nineteenth century. Going by this theory, the term Indian Gothic
takes on a new meaning; Indian as both a geographical space and a ghostly
figure with which the Gothic concerns itself.
David Punter, in his book Postcolonial Imaginings, discusses the idea of
phantoms and time and shows how the present and the past, in a sense,
haunt one another. He quotes from Derrida’s work of 1993, Spectres of
Marx: The State of Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International.

To be just: beyond the living present in general and beyond its simple nega-
tive reversal. A spectral moment; a moment that no longer belongs to time
… We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this
instant that is not docile to time, at least what we like to call time. Furtive
and untimely, the apparition of the spectre does not belong to that time, it
does not give time … (Derrida qtd. in Punter 61–62)

Derrida wonders what it will be like to live on after the collapse of a project
like Marxism. In other words, “what is it like to live in a world of posts––
postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and so on” (62).
Every one of these is a creation of what comes after a movement or a way
of thinking. At the same time, they evoke for us “the very phenomena
they have, in a different sense, surpassed, they prolong the life of their
predecessors—unnaturally … giving them the status of spirits haunting
the apparently purged landscape of the contemporary” (qtd. 62).
Punter goes on to consider Abraham and Tobrock’s neo-psychoanalytical
studies on haunting and ghosts. In their “Notes on the Phantom: A
Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology” a new way of interpreting
ghostly presence/s is seen. They also analyze the crypt as a place of haunt-
ing. Abraham and Tobrock assert that prevalent in all religions and cul-
tural systems is the idea of the dead returning to the world of the living.
The dead may return but only some haunt, those who carry secrets to
the grave or had to undergo some humiliation (63). More importantly, a
phantom is an “invention of the living” (qtd. in Punter 63). The phantom
is meant to objectify “the gap produced in us the concealment of some part
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 207

of a love object’s life. The phantom is therefore also a metapsychologi-

cal fact: what haunts are not the dead but the gaps left within us by the
secrets of others” (qtd. in Punter 63). As such, the domain of “the crypt is
below the unconscious, it is the site of the irredeemably other” (qtd. 63).
In it are stored secrets that are not one’s own but that nevertheless make
their presence felt through the effects they have on the life of the indi-
vidual. Therefore, an individual is an “unwitting host” to a host of spirits
of the dead which exist deep in the recesses of the mind, speaking with our
tongue and seeing with our eyes (qtd. 63).
Following from this, one can see how the dak bungalow is a site (where
stories of other people who have stayed in it abound) seen as other.
Haunting in this space can be considered as the secrets of others being
played out. Also, most dak bungalows have a history of unnatural death,
depression, and sorrow, for most people who died in dak bungalows did
so in an unnatural way: some due to failed love affairs; others due to a
curse; and so on. The dak bungalow is also an area which has outlived the
people who stayed in it––in a sense it is prolonging a past era. It might not
be out of place to suggest that even literary accounts of ghostly presences
in dak bungalows are the result of the secrets stored in the “crypt” of the
mind: secrets not one’s own (in this case, the writer’s) but secrets of others
expressing themselves through their hapless hosts.
Anne Wilson explains this fear with her observation that the British
who stayed at these bungalows were, on the whole, more outgoing and
made more casual conversation, very much more akin to “other races than
[to] taciturn Britons”(66). This observation of “overly” outgoing colo-
nists shows that the fear of going native, discussed by Brantlinger, was
clearly on the minds of the English in India. The sahib and his family were
looked at as being in danger of losing their British reserve and becoming
like the natives––chatty and loud. The anxiety of slipping into savagery is
heightened because of being in native territory.
Though the Gothic is a Western import, the dak bungalow can be
seen as the Indian adaptation of the Western Gothic space, the dark cas-
tle, dungeon, secret chamber, mansion. Both British and Indian women
writers have described the dak bungalow as a place of rest for the sahib,
the memsahib, and their retinue as they made their way over the dif-
ficult terrain of the Indian subcontinent. In the book titled Memsahibs
Abroad: Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth Century India,
Emma Roberts, an Englishwoman, recounts the complete requirements
for a dak journey, including the pre-departure procedure. The traveler
208 N. PAI

must let the postmaster know in advance that she/he is interested in

traveling to a particular place. The postmaster makes the arrangements
for a palanquin for the traveler, boxes, ropes, and bamboo. The neces-
sary baggage is then packed into boxes, or banghies, and slung over the
carrier’s shoulder with ropes, and the men carry the palanquin over their
shoulders. The men take turns at carrying the palanquin and a break
is taken at regular intervals. The dak, or mail, would also be sent from
place to place in the same way, sometimes being stored in the dak bun-
galow. The dak is thus a term that covers a mode of travel, a profession,
and a place of rest (100–103). As a place of rest the bungalow allows one
to have a good meal and relax. Christina Bremner in Memsahibs Abroad:
Writings by Women Travellers in Nineteenth Century India writes of the
dak bungalow with its ever present khansamah who would bring a book
where one could write one’s date and time of arrival, one’s date and
time of departure, and any comments on one’s stay. She also details
the features of the inside of the dak bungalow: some had no windows;
some had no curtains at the door and window (104–5). It must be kept
in mind that the dak bungalows and travelers’ houses were meant for
the sahibs and their families. They were out of bounds to the natives of
India.
As homey as this basic description of the bungalow makes it sound,
further details make it easy to see why some dak bungalows came to be
seen as haunted. Rajika Bhandari, in her book The Raj on the Move: Story of
the Dak Bungalow, explains why the dak bungalow came to be a setting of
horror in literary works during the nineteenth century and a little earlier.
They were situated in isolated places, deep in the forests or on hilltops,
with very little human habitation (56), and its relative antiquity may have
added to its Gothic ambiance. Kipling’s depiction of the dak bungalow
in his short story “My Very Own Ghost Story,” describes the building’s
conjunction with melancholy cemeteries and crazed or aged servants that
evoke the European Gothic’s preoccupation with corruption and decay
within manses and castles:

Some of the dâk-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little cem-
eteries in their compound––witnesses to the “changes and chances of this
mortal life” in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the Northwest.
These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in. They are generally
very old, always dirty, while the butler is as ancient as the bungalow. He
either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. (33)
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 209

The khansamah is a particularly interesting figure for bringing together

Indian culture and dark Gothic tradition. The eeriness and uncertainty of
the narrative in traditional Gothic tales is often heightened by the pres-
ence of a servant of some sort who seems to have been in the picture for a
very long time. For example, the air of mystery in Dracula is heightened
by the driver of the horse-drawn carriage who appears out of nowhere
and noiselessly guides the carriage with Harker in it to the castle where
Count Dracula lives. The fact that we later learn this “servant” is actually
the supernatural creature, Dracula himself, in disguise only underscores
the slippery, dangerous uncertainty of the Gothic world. In a less super-
natural, but still dangerous mode, trusted long-time servant Nelly Dean
in Wuthering Heights makes much of her longevity with and knowledge
about the people she serves in the Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Yet
her short-sightedness, petty resentments, and spitefulness contribute to
the personal tragedies of almost everyone who depends on her for guid-
ance. This Gothic element can be seen especially in the person of the
ancient, ever present khansamah. Most khansamahs, although mostly
upright men, were often suspected to be people with evil intentions, due
to their scruffy, unkempt appearance. Also the khansamah was almost
always the only inhabitant of the dak bungalow––a lone figure who was
cook, receptionist, and gatekeeper all rolled into one.
A somewhat menacing picture is drawn of the khansamah in Thirty
Eight Years in India, by William Tayler, who is portrayed as wily and
manipulative as well as enterprising (394). Some khansamahs would store
liquor and canned meats that they knew their Europeans visitors would
like, then charge their visitors a considerable amount, exploiting them for
a tidy profit. It would be apt at this point to take a look at the doomed
fowl chased by the knife-wielding natives in charge of the cooking at the
dak bungalow. There is therefore, a fair amount of bloodshed, even if it
is the blood of a hapless hen (Tayler 392–394). Therefore, it is easy to
see the space of the dak bungalow as a dark one. A similar savagery can
be found in European Gothic tales, such as the description of the were-
wolf devouring her hapless victim, a young girl in The Phantom Ship. The
supernatural beast is described as: “tearing off large pieces of the flesh, and
devouring them with all the avidity of a wolf” (292). The atmosphere is
dark, brooding, and violent in both cases.
It might be useful to note that Kelly Hurley, in “British Gothic Fiction
(1885–1930),” mentions the settings of Gothic writings as being “over-
charged with a fearsome and brooding atmosphere” (193). Here, the
210 N. PAI

Indian Gothic provides an interesting twist to the genre’s traditional land-

scape. The castles of Walpole and Stoker, the abbeys of Lewis, the manses
of Poe, Hawthorne, and the Brontës, are edifices imposing for size and
grandeur, while the dak bungalow is humbler and only consists of a few
rooms where sahibs can stay overnight. However the air of mystery in the
dak bungalow is no less than that in the castles of the Western Gothic,
because each room in the bungalow can have a different ghost story to tell.
While the average dak bungalow looked very ordinary and utilitarian, its
isolation and loneliness still predominated. In fact, it was more unnerving
to discover that a plain-looking bungalow could have so many horror sto-
ries to tell. In addition, as Kipling described, the dak bungalows have little
cemeteries in their compounds, adding to the eerie, melancholy, brooding
atmosphere. The dak bungalow and the khansamah, besides being real,
also figure in literary writings of the sahibs and the memsahibs. Fact and
fiction intermingle in these stories and produce a kind of writing that is
neither fully Indian nor fully Western. Legend and oral narratives about
the supernatural that come from the Indian quarter provide an authentic
touch to the Gothic tale the writer presents. At the same time, it is also
true that fact and fiction, in a sense, feed off each other.
Kipling, in the first part “My Very Own Ghost Story,” recounts the
various ways in which ghosts are described. He narrates how children who
have been pushed into wells to meet their death haunt well curbs and the
fringes of wooded areas and make high pitched wailing noises, begging
women to lift them up and carry them. He also tells of ghosts of women
who have died in childbirth and whose spirits still haunt villages. They
are said to hide in the crops outside the village and call out in a tempting
way to unsuspecting passers-by. People who answer their call will inevi-
tably meet their death. Surprisingly, none of these spirits haunt or harm
Englishmen or women at the dak. Since these women and children pri-
marily had dealings with their own little communities and villages, they
harm no one else. However, there are any number of white ghosts who
haunt houses and sometimes entire provinces (Kipling 32).
Kipling, being the insider/outsider to Indian society and culture that
he is, seems able to use native local belief and superstition to create a
Gothic atmosphere in his writing. Also the fact that the Indian country-
side had hardly any sahibs living in it made it seem like the dark unknown
to the sahib. To give an apt setting to his ghost story, Kipling uses myth,
local superstition, and beliefs held by the natives to further heighten the
suspense.
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 211

Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two at Simla,
not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syreedâk-bungalow on
the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very lively Thing; a
White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a house in Lahore;
Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on autumn evenings all the
incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice accident … The older Provinces
simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies along their
main thoroughfares. (Kipling 32–33)

It is, therefore, easy to see how the dak bungalow became a site for spir-
its and the supernatural to move about in freely. It is interesting to note
that India, being already a land where tales of the haunted or haunting
abound, also easily lends itself to stories of the supernatural haunting the
houses or spaces inhabited by the white sahib. The ingredients for a ghost
story are already present in local legends; and, therefore, it becomes easy
to weave a ghost story that rings true. Just as every village has a presiding
deity, every street, bungalow, hill station has a resident ghost or ghosts.
Local belief, legends, and folklore blend into fiction that deals with the
supernatural.
Rajika Bhandari, in The Raj on the Move: Story of the Dak Bungalow,
recounts many tales of suicide and death of traveling white sahibs in dak
bungalows. Many sahibs contracted an illness for which a cure could not
easily be found while traveling, and so these sahibs sometimes would be
found dead in their bed at the dak bungalow. These deaths, sometimes
repeated instances, made the dak bungalow an apt place for ghosts or
presences to make themselves seen.
Bhandari chronicles various dak bungalows and the ghostly activities
related with them. Michael Myers Shoemaker, a travel writer of the early
twentieth century, recounts his experience of staying at a dak bungalow
in Garhi, situated on the North West Frontier. He tried to find the door
in the middle of the night and could not, even though he knew where it
was when he went to bed. It had been moved around by a ghost who was
perhaps accustomed to having it in a particular place! His friends had to
sleep in a cold and damp dining room, the walls of which were marked
with what looked like faded blood stains. According to Shoemaker (qtd.
in Bhandari 56), in all likelihood, the place had been the site of the mur-
der of an Englishman. Shoemaker’s observations about the rest house at
Garhi having its ghosts and a sinister air similarly shows the deep-rooted
fear discussed by Patrick Brantlinger in “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the
212 N. PAI

Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880–1914”: that demonic native

forces were trying to wipe out the civilization embodied by the sahib and
his way of life.
Another relevant example is the story of a dak bungalow in Delhi, long
demolished to give way to the Mutiny Memorial opposite the Telegraph
office, being haunted by the spirit of a young British officer. He is said to
walk around in the vicinity of what was the dak bungalow with his severed
head in his hands. The tale goes that he shot himself when his affair with a
young woman went sour. Some versions of the tale state that she accepted
someone else’s offer of marriage; others say she was already married. This
news disappointed him so much that he killed himself. The young woman
is said to have died of grief when she learned that her lover had done away
with himself (Bhandari 56–57).
It is interesting to note that the incident described above has now
become part of local folklore even though the bungalow itself is no lon-
ger standing. As explained earlier, fact and fiction intertwine. The maxim
“Truth is stranger than fiction” holds true in this case. A real building
gives rise to a host of stories and slowly this becomes part of local belief.
The Indian Gothic, unlike its Western counterpart, can therefore be seen
as both lived experience and fiction. The anxiety faced by the sahibs on
account of what was generally seen as an undermining of their institu-
tions and authority, and of the purity of their racial stock, reveals a fear of
regression.
Even as the native can be looked at as the Other by the English, the
English colonists can be perceived as an outsider to India and, therefore,
also as the Other. The space of the dak bungalow is Indian, the inhabit-
ants are Indian, the guests are not. The dak bungalow, therefore, becomes
both Indian and Anglo-Indian. The dak bungalow is, also strangely, a
wholly British space because the guests were almost always white sahibs.
The ghostly presences are almost all white people. The dak bungalow
came into existence when the British, as part of their expansionist poli-
cies, began constructing rest houses for their officials so that they could
be sent to any part of the Indian subcontinent. The dak bungalow is
thus the border separating the native quarter from the space inhabited by
the Anglo-Indian. In this context, the veranda is a significant part of the
space of the bungalow. It is a middling space considered as neither inside
nor outside (Edmundson 107). It is also the space where the domestic
and the official met, where the sahibs met their native subjects to discuss
problems and solutions. Sleeping on the veranda, as Abdul does in “The
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 213

Dâk Bungalow in Dakor,” or the narrator and the general do in “Thrown

Away” by Kipling, shows these characters’ uncertain position as insiders/
outsiders in the two different worlds of the native and the British.
Another feature of the dak bungalow that reflects the instability of cul-
tural integrity in both Indians and British is that it is often the site of
deaths arising not just out of supposedly incurable diseases but also of
suicides. Unnatural deaths add to the air of the uncanny that pervades
these spaces, but these deaths are not those of irrational, savage natives
but of irrational, violent colonists. An entire township in interior northern
India goes by the name of Misrod, a place located about fifteen kilometers
from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh. Misrod comes from the name Miss Rod.
The Rod family stayed at the dak bungalow with their daughter. Major
Rod was an official of the British Crown and had been posted there to
negotiate with the state of Bhopal. Their daughter was depressed due to
a love affair that had just ended. One day, when her parents were away,
she ended her life by hanging herself in the bungalow. Local folklore has
it that the dak bungalow is still haunted by the ghost of Miss Rod, now
immortalized by the people of the place who called this township after
her. Ironically, this name seems to have been given because of the fact that
Miss Rod died rather than lived there (Bhandari 57), indicating anxieties
of both natives and sahibs.
The circuit house at Damoh on the Damoh-Jabalpur road is located
on a hill overlooking the town. Isolated, surrounded by thick forest, it
has an eerie atmosphere and is infamous for attracting people with self-
destructive tendencies. One tale is told of a certain Douglas family who
lived there for some time. General Douglas shot his family and himself
with a revolver. The story goes that the place was haunted by the ghosts of
a man and a woman even before the bungalow was built in 1899. The spir-
its did not approve of people of a different religion occupying that place
and resorted to frightening away people using tactics like making furni-
ture walk across rooms and objects fly in the air. The Douglas family were
only one family among a host of others who died at the circuit house. In
particular, room Number One was where most of the deaths took place.
Even today, bungalow staff report scenes where corpses are found hanging
from trees in the wooded area surrounding the bungalow (Bhandari 58).
This story is a blend of local belief and actual happenings on both native
and Anglo-Indian sides. The reason for the place attracting people with
suicidal tendencies lies in the fact that the place was haunted by ghosts
even before the bungalow was built. The native spirits in this case make
214 N. PAI

life difficult for the sahibs, as they are from a different culture and reli-
gious background. It is almost as if they have decided the area should be
out of bounds to sahibs. The place was, therefore, literally and figuratively
beyond the pale for sahibs then and for natives even now.
Unnatural deaths or suicides/murders also find a place in the literary
narrative. For instance, “Thrown Away” by Kipling has the Boy taking
leave and setting off for a thickly forested area with a canal rest house.
He commits suicide there, and his body is found after a few days by the
narrator. It is important to note that the Boy has no name. This could be
because Kipling is giving us a character type rather than telling us a story
of an individual. It could also be due to the fact that the Boy represents the
average sahib who is insecure about his standing in Anglo-Indian society
and in the eyes of the natives. This again brings us back to Brantlinger’s
theory of the anxiety faced by the sahib about his cultural identity being
at risk.
It would not be out of place to mention at this point, that the dak bun-
galow, besides being associated with death and suicide, was also associated
with insanity. It could be that the isolation and loneliness felt by the occu-
pants of dak bungalows while on their travels in an alien land, coupled
with the fact that they had very few people of their own race for company,
brewed in them a depression that later degenerated into insanity. Like
the natives who sometimes labeled these places as bleak enough to drive
people insane, the Anglo-Indian also looked at the space of the dak bun-
galow as one that was desolate and therefore sometimes a bit threatening
to mental health. Kipling, in his tale “My Very Own Ghost Story,” has
this to say about madness and ghosts, as well as the lot of Englishmen: “A
ghost that would voluntarily hang about a dak bungalow would be mad
of course; but so many men have died mad in dak bungalows, that there
must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts” (34). This assessment makes
the space of the dak bungalow a doubly menacing one.
Real life accounts by both men and women travelers of days and nights
spent in dak bungalows inspired a slew of fiction, including work by Rudyard
Kipling, Alice Perrin, and Mary Bithia Croker. Bhandari details various
stories, some believed to be true, where ghosts are seen or their presence
felt in some sinister way. Gerald Tait’s “A Ghost in Burma” details a real
life account of Peter Kane who, along with his friends—Paddy Greene,
the chief of the troupe; Tom Inglis; and John Alaistairs—was on a mission
to Burma and had orders to go along the China border. Kane was a rail-
way engineer and a novice from Britain. After long, hard days of crossing
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 215

mountainous terrain and thickly wooded areas on foot, they sighted a dak
bungalow atop a hill. They went towards it and decided to spend a night
there, although the accompanying natives refused to enter, claiming it was
haunted. A curious feature of the bungalow was a huge brick cube that,
on examination, Greene concluded was a relic from Sumeria, dating back
to three-thousand years before Christ. The small company wondered how
it could have gotten there. Later in the night a spine-chilling scream came
from Alaistairs’s room. A visibly petrified Alaistairs told his friends that he
had felt cold hands around his neck attempting to strangle him. Still, all
was dismissed till the following evening. Greene, who was relaxing on the
veranda, suddenly felt cold hands around his neck attempting to strangle
him. The next morning saw the corpse of Alaistairs carried out of the bun-
galow. This mystery remained unsolved, and all Greene could conclude
was that the cube might have been the platform of a sacrificial block and
its victims were the ones haunting the bungalow, thirsting for the blood
of any human who came to stay there (Tait 74–84).
As mentioned earlier, fact and fiction merge into one another in this
tale. In the above example, the framework is basically that of a story.
However, it is reported as a real-life account of an Englishman who served
in one of the various colonies that the British held. The title and subtitle
of the story read as follows: “A Ghost in Burma (A Story Based on Fact).”
The subtitle of the story insisting that it is based on fact seems overde-
termined, making one wonder whether the author is trying too hard to
deny that his experience is actually the result of an overactive imagination.
There is no doubt in Kane’s mind about what had really happened. He is
quick to inform the reader that there was an engineer among them who
was able to place the block as belonging to an ancient era. The Anglo-
Indian here is looking to validate his fears and anxieties through science as
his society knew it. There is no room for an alternative explanation from,
say, the native quarter. Since the, so-called, true stories have to do with
the supernatural, it becomes important to ask whether some part of them
may be imagined. At the end of the story, Peter Kane, who reports that
investigations were of no use, also states that nobody was ready to believe
that Alaistairs had been killed by a supernatural force. So they had to cite
fever contracted along the way as the cause of his death. Kane further adds
“You see, supernatural deaths are not popular with the powers that be”
(84). Clearly, the British authorities prided themselves on being rational
and scientific in their outlook and put any other reasons down as supersti-
tious and therefore trivial. So Kane and his companions had to concoct
216 N. PAI

a story and fictionalize a factual account of things. If one were to apply

the theory put forth by Brantlinger, one can see the death of Alaistairs as
being an appropriation of the sahib by a savage Other from the ancient
past. The anxiety that the sahib faced was the annihilation of civilization
by the savage, and the native was looked upon as the savage. The murder-
ous ghost becomes an uncanny personification of the sahib’s greatest fear.
The fiction that arose out of real-life incidents, however, sometimes
creates the perfect setting for a horror story in the dak bungalow, only
to show that the occupant has mistaken something mundane for a ghost.
Kipling’s “My Very Own Ghost Story” has the narrator checking into a
dak bungalow for the night and hearing strange noises from the room next
door. The noises resemble a game of billiards, with the whirr of billiard
balls. This goes on for some time, after which he falls into a deep sleep.
The next morning he learns from the khansamah that the place was actu-
ally a billiard room and was part of a building that the railway department
owned. One of the sahibs who worked in the railways had died there. Yet
the end of the story has the narrator disappointed when the whirr of the
ghostly billiard balls is revealed as the sound of mice scurrying around the
empty room (Kipling 32–40). The element of terror is brought about by
the absence of a ghostly presence and the presence of the sahib’s supersti-
tions and prejudices. Thus the Anglo-Indian’s insecurities about being
superior to the native were what really haunted him. His imagination has
run wild and created a terrifying picture out of a perfectly natural happen-
ing, revealing the delusiveness of pride in British superiority in its reason
over native superstition and irrationality.
“The Woman and the Child” by Gertrude Donaldson is another story
where suspense about a ghostly presence soon gives way to an unexpected
ending. A young memsahib with her little child is making preparations
to go to Rajpore. A local rani warns her against staying at the dak bun-
galow there. When the memsahib reaches Rajpore, it is already very late
in the night, and the only place where she can stay is at the dak bun-
galow. Disregarding the rani’s advice she stays there, though she has
been warned that it is haunted by a native woman who was jilted by an
Englishman after he falsely professed his love for her. This man had mar-
ried an Englishwoman. Some years later, the Englishman’s wife wanted an
ayah to look after her baby. The jilted lover of the sahib took employment
under the memsahib. On the way to the hills, the company stopped at
Rajpore. Here, the ayah seized the opportunity to kill the baby, abandon-
ing its corpse in the woods surrounding the dak bungalow. The ayah was
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 217

eventually hanged. The ghost of the jilted Indian woman is said to haunt
the bungalow, with a baby in her arms––its head rolled back to display a
slit throat. The rani warns the young memsahib that when a white child
is in the bungalow, the spirit of the native ayah can be seen with a dead
child in her arms.
Mrs. Levett, the young memsahib in the story, disregards this and halts
at the Rajpore bungalow. A little before dawn, she is awakened by soft
footsteps close to her bed. A pair of dark hands is seen reaching out and
picking up her child. She screams in terror and the figure drops the child
and hurries away. It is revealed that the night had played tricks on the
mind of Mrs. Levett. The shadowy figure was no ghost, but only a baboon
from the forest (429–433). The plot twist literalizes the colonists’ views of
natives as animalistic, savage, then undercuts that fear by showing that this
threat can be easily thwarted.
This tale is significant in that it shows that the native ghostly presence
is just a story. This story can also be seen as a reflection of the fact that the
British had nothing to fear from the native Indian. Kipling, in “My Very
Own Ghost Story,” explains that the native spirits never harmed or scared
a sahib, but the white spirits have “scared the life out of both white and
black”(Kipling 32). The above sentence from Kipling’s story runs counter
to the idea of the non-white woman being a destructive force. Here the
ghosts of the white people (sahibs and memsahibs) can be seen as frighten-
ing not only to their own race but also to the natives. Nevertheless, what
builds up an eerie atmosphere in the story is the atmosphere in and around
the dak bungalow as a dangerous space. On the other hand, the Gothic
is also used to debunk Imperialistic anxieties. The Gothic bungalow can
be seen as embodying the unnecessary worries of the white man/woman
regarding the natives and what they can do to them, whether it be literally
harming their children or figuratively harming British civilization by kill-
ing their future generations.
Mary Bithia Croker, a woman who spent fourteen years with her hus-
band in India, wrote a considerable number of short stories about life in
Anglo-Indian India, including dak bungalows. Two of her stories, “The
Dak Bungalow at Dakor” and “To Let,” are of special interest here as they
deal directly with ghostly presences. Both these stories are narrated from
the perspective of the memsahib. The ghostly sightings within the space
of the dak bungalow are used by Croker to comment on the British pres-
ence in India. Jerrold Hogle brings out the relevance of gender in Gothic
tales, writing: “the Gothic has long confronted the cultural problem of
218 N. PAI

gender distinctions, including what they mean for western structures of

power and how boundaries between the genders might be questioned
to undermine or reorient those structures” (9). Croker uses the British
women to critique the British presence in India, for it is the women who
need to halt at these ironically named rest houses who are the most dis-
turbed while staying the night there. Frequently, the ghosts that haunt
these dak bungalows are of British men who either died or were murdered
there by natives or others. Melissa Edmundson in her article “Bithia Mary
Croker and the Ghosts of India” explains the uses to which Croker puts
the ghostly presences:

Croker not only uses the ghosts as warnings of the negative effects of
empire, but she also establishes her female narrators as witnesses to these
ghosts. These women, therefore, become privileged critics of the English
imperial presence. (94)

When traveling in territory that is not strictly British, the ladies are literally
chased away by the haunted bungalow and its occupants. Consequently,
they feel like outsiders in a place where they and their men suppose them-
selves the masters. The supernatural beings of the dak bungalows con-
stantly remind them that what they believe to be the sahib’s space is not
under their control. In this way the Gothic, as recounted in tales by Anglo-
Indian writers, shows the instability of the sahib’s empire and of the colo-
nizers themselves. The memsahib’s experiencing and recounting the dak’s
hauntings, therefore, critiques the values of British Victorian civilization
on two levels. The memsahib’s displacement as a colonizer implies the
limited power of the society she represents, while her, a woman’s, ability to
relate this displacement, undermines one of the major foundations of that
culture, patriarchal supremacy. Perhaps more importantly, as the following
story illustrates, her identity combining Self (British) and Other (woman)
sometimes allows her to forge a link that validates the cultural Other.
In the story “The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor,” two women, Nellie and
her friend Julia, the wife of a police officer, decide to go to Chanda, a
faraway town. They are warned by an elderly lady at Karwassa, an Anglo-
Indian settlement, that there is a haunted and “unhealthy” bungalow at
Chanda. Melissa Edmundson emphasizes the significance of defining a
house as “unhealthy” in a Gothic context. Citing Robert Mighall’s A
Geography of Gothic Fiction, Edmundson explains that in Gothic writings,
a pronouncement of a house as sick or unhealthy implies that not just the
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 219

space of a house is afflicted, but that the entire lineage of a family is sick,
unhealthy, cursed (Edmundson 111).
The two women set off and at one point decide to take a different
route, choosing to go into the native world beyond the British pale. This
is when they face difficulties and are forced to stay at the bungalow for the
night. An old woman, a native, warns them, but they cannot understand
her language, which sounds alien to them. The caretaker refuses to allow
them in. However, they gain entry by breaking the lock and are soon set-
tling down to sleep. This is when they notice the man peeping through the
window. The description is particularly interesting, because the author’s
description of the native here seems to evoke Western Gothic.

It was the face of some malicious animal, more than the face of a man, that
glowered out beneath his filthy red turban. His eyes glared and rolled as if
they would leave their sockets; his teeth were fangs, like dogs’ teeth, and
stood out almost perpendicularly from his hideous mouth. (Croker qtd. in
Edmundson 93)

The man described here seems to be the equivalent of the werewolf that
one reads of in Western Gothic tales. The first novel to have featured a
female werewolf was The Phantom Ship by Fredrick Marryat. One chap-
ter features a widower with three children, who unknowingly marries a
beautiful young girl who turns out to be a werewolf. She devours two
of his three children. When she is tearing off the flesh of one of the dead
children, the widower Krantz shoots her dead. The only surviving child
narrates his life story and describes his stepmother thus: “instead of the
dead body of my mother-in-law, as we expected, there was lying over the
remains of my poor sister, a large white she-wolf” (292). Count Dracula
also takes the form of a wolf.
In “The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor” Nellie describes the caretaker as a
dog and Julia as a Cheshire cat. This native Indian portrayed as a threaten-
ing were-creature peering at them from the beyond the walls of security
is not the only manifestation of Gothic trouble for the women. Soon they
fall asleep. In the middle of the night Nellie is awakened by a radiant light
in the middle of the room where a young Englishman is seated at a table
writing. He seems to have a gun case with him. He, in stark contrast to the
caretaker, is young, good-looking, and pale. His hands are white and he
seems well dressed. Suddenly, a native servant is seen stabbing him from
behind (Croker 96–108). The ghost’s being at the center of the room is
220 N. PAI

significant because its placement symbolizes that this experience is central

to Nellie’s conscious mind. As Edmundson explains: “By moving British
ghosts to the ‘center’ of her supernatural tales, Croker is implicitly com-
menting on the dangerous instability of colony” (97). In spite of the ghost
being at the center of the tale, both physically and mentally, the women
do not gain a sense of cultural importance. Instead they feel fear, especially
because they see that the ghost colonist is being stabbed by the native.
The anxiety felt by Britain about gradually losing control of colony can be
seen here, as Edmundson writes: “The murder of the Englishmen and the
description of the animalistic qualities of the Indian caretaker, then, serves
as Gothic and political horror” (99).
It is important to note that both the frightening figures in the story are
natives. The white man’s ghost is portrayed as handsome and calm, while,
in sharp contrast, the native ghost and the peeping caretaker are perceived
as animalistic, violent, dangerous. The fact that one of the native Indians
actually stabs the sahib reaffirms the white man’s fear of destruction at the
treacherous hands of the savage. The Other, therefore, comes across as
a threatening figure, not only to the life of the sahib, but also to his cul-
tural and political pre-eminence. The sahib, with all his civilized attributes,
therefore, is not safe in India.
Julia refuses to believe her friend’s story of the ghost and opts to spend
one more night at the bungalow. She also sees the ghost on her night alone
there and asks a local woman about it. The woman says that the bungalow
is haunted by “devils,” which could mean either the Englishman or the
native, depending on one’s point of view. The women’s husbands come
to Dakor, where their wives tell them the story of the ghost. When they
do return to Karwassa they omit the ghostly presence part of their trip
and let Mrs. Duff know all the other details. What one notes is the fact
that Julia refuses to believe the story of the ghost when her friend tells her
and instead chooses to stay on one more night to see things for herself.
The Anglo-Indian woman as rational, relatively fearless, and adventur-
ous can be seen here. Yet the fact that she asks a local woman about the
ghosts the next morning is significant in that it shows how Gothic tales
open up “a space in which key elements of the dominant culture become
debated, affirmed and questioned” (Smith and Hughes 105). The image
of the British as a rational, scientifically inclined, progressive race is ques-
tioned here because Julia requires confirmation of what she saw from a
native woman. The ambiguity of who the devils are is also noteworthy,
they could be members of either or both races. For the women, or the
 THE INDIAN GOTHIC 221

memsahibs, the devil would be the native––both in the living khansama

and in the ghost stabbing the white man. For people like the native
woman, the devil could be the ghost of the sahib, the unnatural invader,
coming from the land of the dead to that of the living/from England to
their Indian homeland.
The women colonists’ participation in relating tales of the haunted dak
bungalow thus emphasizes this setting’s Gothic dislocation of a culture’s
social structure. Quite a few Anglo-Indian women wrote about their travels
and adventures while in India, stories that were, no doubt, inspired from
real happenings and real locations within the subcontinent. Interestingly,
their writings revealed the powerful influence that Gothic tropes of place
played in releasing British anxieties of colonization. Melissa Edmundson
beautifully sums up the role of the Gothic in these women’s writings:

Through their writing, especially their published works, women authors

were able to set themselves apart as privileged interpreters of empire and its
workings, while also using the supernatural as a way to describe both their
fascination with their Indian environment as well as their anxiety within a
foreign land. Their ghosts symbolically call into question the stability of
British (male) rule and women’s even more fragile status as female and colo-
nizer. (Edmundson 107–108)

Through both the fiction and travelers’ tales, the Anglo-Indian women
writers gave an insight into their adventures in the wilderness of the Indian
subcontinent; a detailed description about the natural surroundings;
and, in casting the dak bungalow experience in Gothic terms, provided
a way of dealing with anxieties over gender and race while in an alien
land. Ironically, as British colonizers, the memsahibs were Western Self to
Eastern Other. Yet, as females, they were Other to patriarchy’s Self. The
dak embodied their fluid state, as has been shown in the tales where they
were not merely haunted by Indian women, but haunted by or haunters of
other colonial and native women. For many a ghost of a memsahib is said
to haunt these bungalows in the towns and districts outside Delhi.
Edmundson sums up with her quotation of Andrew Smith and William
Hughes in Empire and the Gothic, as they attempt to look at Gothic tales
in the light of race:

Gothic tales, their contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences, provide

a dense and complex blend of assertion and doubt, acceptance and defi-
ance, and truth and falsity and in this way they provide a space in which
222 N. PAI

key elements of the dominant culture become debated, affirmed and ques-
tioned. (Smith and Hughes qtd. in Edmundson 105)

It is easy to see that the Self and the Other are demarcated by who is
looking at whom. The image of the British as being rational, sensible,
progressive, “superior” in culture, becomes a point of debate as all these
impressions undergo a change when read about in tales of the dak bun-
galow. Whether raising questions about the inherent legitimacy of British
Imperialism or trying to raise a chill by invoking the savage threat of the
native, stories of the dak bungalow reveal anxieties about cultural identity
in a Gothic liminal space where Self and Other meet.

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 St. Bernard’s: Terrors of the Light
in the Gothic Hospital

Christy Rieger

When readers imagine medical experimentation in nineteenth-century

Gothic fiction, they are likely to think of the scientist working in an iso-
lated lab––a Dr. Frankenstein, a Jekyll, or a Moreau. One might expect the
same in Edward Berdoe’s novel St. Bernard’s: The Romance of a Medical
Student (1887), which Keir Waddington has recently called a “hybrid
Gothic novel” (258). In fact, the narrative does depict familiar images of
the sequestered medical man: scientists vivisecting dogs in the institution’s
vaults; a physiologist working in his domestic lab to find poisonous mush-
rooms that will kill his invalid wife without a trace. However, it primar-
ily depicts terror within the very public space of teaching hospital wards.
Exciting horror via the Gothic tropes of secret villainy and startling revela-
tions arguably poses a challenge for the author when the outrages in ques-
tion occur in plain view; and, indeed, the multiple generic strands in the
novel suggest a writer grasping for a form of representation that trades in
the mystery of the Gothic yet employs the detailed, documentary perspec-
tive of a social problem novel. I suggest that the text seeks to resolve this
difficulty via a reconfiguration of Gothic spaces. That is, it progressively
redefines the dungeon from physical location to residing in the psyche of
the hospital clinician. Governed by professional incentives that only a fel-

C. Rieger ()
Department of English, Mercyhurst University, Erie, PA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 225

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_10
226 C. RIEGER

low doctor knows, Berdoe’s medical researcher becomes trapped by his

inability to feel as he ignores the suffering of his current patients in order
to make the great discovery that will assure his and the hospital’s reputa-
tion. This interiorization of the dungeon is but one of the ways in which
the novel invokes yet reconfigures classic Gothic spatiality and landscapes.
Ultimately, St. Bernard’s suggests that readers must rethink how Gothic
medicine works if they are to reform hospital care.
The publication history and reception of the novel itself indicates that
it did have an impact on the public. Keir Waddington has noted that over
fifty periodicals reviewed St. Bernard’s after its initial publication in 1887
by the pseudonymous Aesculapius Scalpel. It went into a second edition
the next year, with The British Weekly claiming that this was a work “that
could not be ignored” (Waddington 261). While admitting that he obvi-
ously invented some scenes for dramatic effect, author Berdoe, who him-
self trained at the London hospital before working as a general practitioner
in Hackney, insists that the novel is “75 % stern reality” (9) in his explana-
tory sequel to the novel, Dying Scientifically: A Key to St. Bernard’s. He,
furthermore, seeks to verify his statements with reference to articles in the
mainstream and medical press. Unsurprisingly, England’s anti-vivisection
movement wholly embraced both the novel and its explanatory key.
This vocal support helps to explain why most critics have associated St.
Bernard’s with the anti-vivisection novels of the Eighties and thus tend to
emphasize its scenes of cruel and covert animal experimentation (French
323–5; Li 27–55; Walkowitz 210). Rather than focus on the mistreatment
of animals or show how the Gothic constitutes one genre woven into this
composite novel, this chapter builds on the insights of Manuel Aguirre,
who claims that “spatial coordinates elicit mental states” and “we need
to tackle the construction of physical and narrative space, the vocabu-
lary and morphology of fear” (2). Doing so means attending not only
to the Gothic physicality of the hospital alone, but also to its surround-
ing areas. Early chapters of the novel encourage such a spatial approach.
“In Student’s Lodgings,” “The Beadle and the Theater,” “Amongst the
Outpatients,” and “Walking the Hospital” all take the reader inside dis-
parate, sometimes shadowy, yet interdependent spaces of a great London
teaching hospital and its environs. Moreover, the novel sets up the Spanish
region surrounding Granada as an alternative space of healing. While
seemingly “barbaric” in terms of treatment provided in the field, the pro-
tagonist’s work here provides a model for the reform of the most advanced
British medical institutions. While one might see this section of the novel
 ST. BERNARD’S: TERRORS OF THE LIGHT IN THE GOTHIC HOSPITAL 227

as Berdoe lurching clumsily from Gothic tale to travel, or missionary, nar-

rative, the Spanish landscape may more profitably be seen as a Gothic
space with an integral relation to the chapters set in London.
In terms of the urban setting, the physical and affective structure of the
hospital in Berdoe’s novel parallels that of the castle in such Gothic nar-
ratives as Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) and Radcliffe’s Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794). The young heroine Mildred’s aunt makes an explicit con-
nection between the castles of Spain and London hospitals as she tells her
niece that “I can see ghosts of giant physiologists and vampire surgeons
guarding the treasures of their vermilion towers, and warning you off the
premises” (258). The term “giant” gestures to the eminence of physiol-
ogy (along with pathology) as specialties in Victorian research hospitals
(117) and invokes the Burkean sublime of the helmet and leg in Castle
of Otranto. “Vampire” suggests the parasitic nature of the surgeons, who
look for opportunities to try “the most difficult and dangerous operations
set down in books” on their unfortunate subjects (88). Just as Ruthven,
Varney, or Carmilla grow stronger as they prey upon the weak, the sur-
geons seek the special case that will augment their fame.
The most overt instance of a Gothic location that elicits a mental state
is that of the subterranean spaces beneath St. Bernard’s. In the student
chambers one evening, a medical student named Dobbs, himself an aspir-
ing writer, tells his classmates of the night in which he was accidentally
locked into the dissecting room located in one of the many vaults beneath
the main floor. He awakens from a disturbed sleep in the gloom, only to
see the accusatory finger of a corpse slowly rise and point directly at him
(46). Dobbs immediately frames the event as a form of supernatural retri-
bution familiar to readers of The Castle of Otranto or The Monk: “I thought
my imprisonment was all arranged by a higher Power, to let me know what
I was doing; and God knows I suffered shame and mental distress that
night” (46). In fact, he soon realizes that the pulley raising the arm of the
body had simply slipped. Dobb’s self-recrimination does not merely arise
from his dissecting work and, indeed, the narrator is quite explicit that
students must make these studies in practical anatomy in order to under-
stand the workings of the human body. Rather, Dobbs had been troubled
by the piteous cries of two victimized dogs in an adjacent vault, one that
he had “horribly mangled” (43), in conducting experiments under the
direction of physiologist Dr. Crowe. David Durant writes that the ruined
castles in Radcliffe’s fiction “are graphic symbols of the disintegration of a
stable civilization, their underground reaches are the hiding places for all
228 C. RIEGER

those forces which cannot stand the light of day” (524). Vivisection is that
force in St. Bernard’s, and its torture of living beings haunts the novel and
culminates in Dobb’s resolve to quit this line of work. Eminent lecturer
in physiology and pathology Crowe, however, has no such epiphany and
continues to house a menagerie of subjects for his gruesome work in the
vaults directly beneath his new laboratory.
Through locating the paranormal, secrecy, and imprisonment in
these spaces, Berdoe casts experimentation on animals as a source of the
uncanny in the urban hospital. He wants to horrify and ultimately to
enlighten his audience, a motive shared by other authors of the medical
Gothic. In this sense, St. Bernard’s may be seen as a direct descendent
of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Anne Mellor has described how
Shelley distinguishes between “good” observational science and a “bad”
invasive and manipulative science (89–102), and Berdoe inherits her ethi-
cal project as he praises close anatomical study yet condemns vivisection.
Several of his doctor-scientists also clearly echo Victor Frankenstein in
their psychological isolation, desire for glory, and insensitivity towards
the suffering of others. Looking forward, Berdoe’s novel also prefigures
H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) in its insistence that insen-
sibility to the suffering of animals degenerates into a callous disregard of
human pain.
Yet St. Bernard’s differs from these works in its construction of Gothic
space. Whereas Doctors Frankenstein and Moreau perform their unhal-
lowed experiments in an attic apartment, a secluded workshop in Scotland,
or a remote island, vivisection occurs within the institutional space of the
hospital itself. To be sure, these gruesome tests are performed underground
or in a private lab, out of the sight and hearing of the official daily opera-
tions of medical staff and patients. Nonetheless, this physical proximity of
vivisection to the very heart of institutional authority and power empha-
sizes its permeation of medical science. As the narrator reminds readers,
it is the “priests at the inner sanctum of science” (127) who conduct this
research. Unlike the doctors of Shelley and Wells, who are marginalized
by their peers and achieve what is only hypothetical to the scientists of
their day, Berdoe’s researchers perform experiments already described and
denounced in the periodical press. Thus Berdoe seeks, like other writers
of the medical Gothic, to horrify in order to enlighten. However, the hor-
ror lies not in how dreadful experimentation diverges from the ethos of
the medical establishment, but rather in how it seems to be the straightest
path towards its most prized goals.
 ST. BERNARD’S: TERRORS OF THE LIGHT IN THE GOTHIC HOSPITAL 229

If the vaults underneath the hospital contain the familiar Gothic motif
of supernatural retribution, then the public wards above ground signify
an equally terrifying form of uncontested power over confused, vulner-
able, and confined lower-class patients. The overwhelming authority of a
physician like Crowe, and his students who will perpetuate his specialty,
recalls the Gothic fortress of Walpole or Radcliffe as a site for the asser-
tion of patriarchal power over women, domestics, and peasants. Readers
of St. Bernard’s thus witness nurses who silence their misgivings when the
doctors tell sexist jokes to their male students, perform unnecessary pro-
cedures on patients, and allow the most inexperienced of pupils to graft
tissue and set bones. No matter how inept a student may be, medical esprit
de corps ensures that his superiors in a teaching hospital will extricate him
from difficulties (44). The narrator enlightens lay readers that instructors
invest so heavily in their pupils because in the future those students will
go into practice and need a consultant for a difficult case in an affluent
family. In a few years, the text explains, the “kindnesses shown to [stu-
dents] will be coming back in a steady flow of guineas” (59). This image
of medical researcher as hardened by years of scientific training would
certainly be familiar to many of the Berdoe’s readers by the late 1880s.
The narrative goes beneath and beyond this commonplace, however, in
its detailed explication of local and international contexts that shape the
elite male physician and his treatment of pupils, nurses, and the ill. The
narrator emphasizes that whereas the mostly ordinary sicknesses treated by
the general practitioner translate to referrals and increased cash flow, the
house-surgeon or faculty gynecologist disdains the typical case of mumps
or measles in favor of that which affords the opportunity for a new form
of higher surgery, trial of an untested drug, or observation of an unusual
disorder. They are motivated by the professional capital of prestigious
addresses at Congresses or publication in the Journal of Psychopathy and
need the proverbial haystack of patients supplied by the institution to find
the needle of the interesting case. St. Bernard’s may not pay the hospital
physician much, the narrator notes, yet for every “hundred cases that can-
not interest him, because of their frequency; the hundred and first is a
variant of the particular complaint on which he is writing his great mono-
graph” (56). Masculine power, then, both asserts itself down the hierar-
chical chain of command within the organization itself and is reinforced
horizontally via an international network of medical researchers. Berdoe’s
villains draw their authority from these two fields, not from ancient aris-
tocratic descent or the ecclesiastical power of counts and monks, as in the
230 C. RIEGER

works of Walpole, Lewis, and Radcliffe. All the same, the villains of St.
Bernard’s and older Gothic texts all seek to secure their reputation and
legacy through exploiting vulnerable bodies.
Within this context, women are an especially vulnerable population
amongst the sick. Those who have illnesses that function as confirmation
for a hypothesis or a demonstration of a rare condition undergo shame-
ful examinations before insensitive medical students. Gynecologist Dr.
Stanforth mocks women who seek to preserve their modesty before the
licentious medical students and refuses to treat any woman who does not
comply with his demands (174). Berdoe thus paints scenes where “lovely
contests between one weak, suffering woman (for [Stanforth] would never
permit a patient to bring mother or friend into his room), and this bril-
liant physician and his admiring, tittering students, made the gynecologi-
cal out-patient’s days the great fun of the place” (174). Carol Lansbury
has demonstrated how the identification of such vulnerable women with
vivisected or otherwise abused animals pervaded gynecological, porno-
graphic, and literary discourses in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury, which clarifies why so many Victorian women focused on the crusade
against vivisection at the expense of other issues of social reform. Berdoe’s
scenes of bodily exposure do not have quite the same graphic sadism as the
texts that Lansbury analyzes. Nonetheless, they do echo the convergence
of medical and sexual subjection that she studies and thus recall images of
sexually threatened women in early Gothic novels. Like Walpole’s Isabella
or Radcliffe’s Emily St. Aubert, these women lack the protection of an
influential mother, or mother figure, and find themselves subject to the
scrutiny and machinations of an all-male society. The alarm raised by the
potential rape or forced marriage of the classic Gothic heroine, however,
has now shifted to a contemporary concern for Berdoe’s readers. Women
readers and their loved ones are prompted to imagine shameful scenes of
exposure and embarrassment before crowds of callous young men.
Male or female, all those who are ill and receive treatment at the hospi-
tal may find themselves in a feminized position, for many patients remain
confined for longer than they expect and for reasons they do not under-
stand. St. Bernard’s claims that the hospital physician invests in diagnosis,
observation, and new surgical techniques, not the alleviation of the suf-
fering in the patient before him. In fact, the narrator asserts, “To cure the
disease, to cut short the malady—ah no, [that] too often was to extinguish
alike the discomfort and interesting course of phenomena that accompa-
nied it” (53). Moreover, the out-patient department of minor surgery, in
 ST. BERNARD’S: TERRORS OF THE LIGHT IN THE GOTHIC HOSPITAL 231

particular, houses clients who sense that their limbs provide practice for
novices and so endure “terror, nervous apprehension, shame and mental
distress” (58). An overall focus on physiology and pathology also means
that cure frequently gets deferred to an indeterminate future. One woman
writes a plaintive letter to her husband, in which she complains of being
kept six weeks in the hospital for a tumor: “I don’t like meself at all in this
place, and if the tumour ainn’t sune tuk out I shall bunk it, so I tell yer
straight … I beleaf I am only kep as a specimen, bekas my cais is curous”
(195).
This patient has a greater grasp of the institutional context that con-
strains her than most of her fellow patients. In this realm, the discrete
human body acquires value only in relation to a mass of work already
performed, for “the men of the hospital found that there was no road to
distinction at St. Bernard’s except that of novelty” (108). This emphasis
on the new provides an institutional context for what Meegan Kennedy
(327-51) identifies as “the ghost in the clinic.” She shows the persistence
of the old-fashioned eighteenth-century curious case in Victorian medical
case-studies that draw upon a Gothic narrative of mystery to provoke a
sense of horror and surprise in the reader. It is worth noting that Berdoe’s
hospital doctors use neither the older term curious nor adjectives such
as interesting or strange for their exceptional specimens. Before medical
students and amongst themselves, physicians repeatedly use the adjective
pretty, as in “this pretty little case.” This qualifier simultaneously aestheti-
cizes and diminishes the illness or injury in a manner that heightens the
authority of the consultant and belittles the patient’s ailment.
While the buried crypts, masculine control, and detention of feminized
subjects situate the space of the hospital within a Gothic tradition, the stu-
dent lodgings on Lindsay Street, “always held to be a kind of precinct of
the hospital” (15), constitute what Manuel Aguirre calls the “threshold”
space that exists between a “human domain of rational and intelligible
events” and the world of the “terrifying” and “chaotic” (2), the realm
of the Other. Aguirre argues that “the threshold is part of the other,” for it
always becomes a site that arouses wonder (5). “Hence its ambiguity,” he
claims, “it is already that which it delimits and isolates, and becomes what
it defines; or, to put it in different words, the Other takes over and ‘colo-
nizes’ its frontiers” (5). At first glance, the activity in medical students’
lodgings may appear antithetical to that in the hospital itself. These future
medical men are rowdy, hard-drinking lads seeking constant amusement,
not grave and distinguished physicians. Nonetheless, the nature of their
232 C. RIEGER

fun, which includes having their landlady fry up a portion of a corpse

for dinner, assumes a distinctly gruesome cast. Moreover, “In Students’
Lodgings” describes the nocturnal sprees in which the boys pillage signs,
doorknockers, and even barbers’ poles from neighboring London estab-
lishments (18–19). They then display their carefully labeled and numbered
finds in their rooms, with the capture of each item methodically recorded
in a register within this “museum of stolen curiosities” (19). This scene
establishes a continuity between these “larks” and the work in their future
careers, during which they likewise will seize what is desired from their
patients and display evidence of doing so as manifestation of their own
skill and daring for colleagues. Lindsay Street as a threshold space thus
both literalizes and parodies the accomplishments of fully-credentialed
medical men. As much as everyday Victorian readers may find the boys’
larceny and subsequent arrest for the music hall riot shocking, their law-
lessness effectively prepares them for a future in the hospital, in which, the
narrator asserts, “You can do things … it would be as much as your life
were worth to attempt outside” (130). The urban London hospital area is
now akin to the feudal castle in which the Gothic villain attempts to usurp
the rightful heir, steal property, or murder opponents. As Fred Botting
explains, however, these transgressions in Gothic writing “become a pow-
erful means to reassert the values of society, virtue and propriety: trans-
gression, by crossing the social and aesthetic limits, serves to reinforce or
underline their value and necessity, restoring or defining limits” (Gothic
5). In essence, then, Berdoe does not seek merely to chide the medi-
cal students for improper behavior. He, rather, depicts their crossing of
social limits to reassert a respect for the integrity of personal property and
bodies.
It is the professional façade of the attending doctor that prevents
patients from understanding which procedure crosses these boundaries
versus that which is really necessary. As the novel unfolds, the text increas-
ingly locates the dungeon within the consciousness of the medical man.
Like the subterranean vault, the motives of doctors remain hidden behind,
for instance, “the impenetrable and unhurried nonchalance of the house
surgeons” (51). One chapter epigraph that quotes Swiss physiognomist
Johann Lavater intimates that this Panopticon-like scrutiny is practically
a professional necessity in St. Bernard’s: “He alone is an acute observer
who can observe minutely without being observed” (57). Rebecca Stern’s
work on light and visibility in Gothic fiction shows how the use of light
in the genre is often associated with covert observation. In contrast to its
 ST. BERNARD’S: TERRORS OF THE LIGHT IN THE GOTHIC HOSPITAL 233

stereotypical association with terror, light does not merely illuminate in

order to dispel terror; rather, she notes, it often functions as an agent of
objectification, surveillance, and exposure. Specifically, she draws upon the
work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Kaja Silverman in her read-
ing of the red room in Jane Eyre. For Stern, Jane’s terror and lapse into
unconsciousness occur not because of a lack of illumination, but rather
arise from its piercing ability to objectify Jane herself, who becomes sub-
ject to a “hyper-objectifying scrutiny” (30).
Visibility similarly becomes an agent of disclosure and surveillance in
St. Bernard’s, but now the simple powers of the human senses or a beam
of light are amplified by technological instruments, such as “the binaural
stethoscope they [the surgeons] never appeared without” and “the gold
spectacles or eye-glass they usually affected” (51). In an ironic treatment
of the theme of visibility, Berdoe satirizes Dr. Wilson, whose specialty in
ophthalmology and attachment to his opthalmoscope render the eyes of
every hospital patient a potential object of “minute scrutiny” (63), of
sketches, and for display to colleagues, even when the patient in question
had entered the hospital for treatment of acute indigestion and had no
complaints about his eyes (63). Thus the patient’s very organ of visibility,
its sight clouded by belladonna drops, becomes a spectacle for the medical
staff that has, in effect, dis-abled a patient for its own professional ends.
In effect, this hospital floor reproduces the operation of visibility in Jane
Eyre’s red room. A searching and unfathomable gaze renders a subject
temporarily sightless and powerless. The narrator of Jane Eyre attributes
the terror that results to a child’s superstitious belief in ghosts. Berdoe
relocates that fear for a late-Victorian audience to new forms of medical
technology that serve the interests of the doctors more than patients.
The consequences of the scrutinizing yet impenetrable professional
stance for a physiologist such as Crowe are evident in the opening epi-
graph from Milton:

He that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts

Benighted walks under the mid-day sun
Himself is his own dungeon. (220).

As a gloss to the complete indoctrination of Crowe in the reigning sys-

tem of medical science, Milton’s lines suggest how the effects of his
training provide their own punishment. The insensitivity fostered by
the physiologist’s devotion to experiments conducted on living beings
234 C. RIEGER

makes him immune to the beauties of poetry, of romantic love, and

the Spanish landscape through which he travels as a tourist. He has
developed a cold materialist worldview that blinds him. Although this
is a metaphoric blinding, rather than the actual sightlessness of young
Jane or hospital patients, it appears to be a fit penalty for a man who has
devoted his life to a form of observation that excludes compassion or
reciprocity.
Critics tend to see the novel’s second half, in which Elsworth quits his
hospital program and travels south, as a mere escape for the hero from
“the corrupting influence of the hospital and London” (Waddington
251). Thinking about St. Bernard’s within the context of Gothic spatiality
and landscapes, however, gives the chapters set in Spain a more intelligible
role. A brief summary may be helpful to understand how central characters
move from London to Spain. Elsworth gradually becomes disillusioned
by his training at St. Bernard’s. He pursues adventure and a life of noble
healing when he leaves town on an evening in which his fellow medical
students do not merely carouse as usual, but riot in a music hall, smashing
its interior to bits. On that night he has a blinding epiphany akin to that of
St. Paul the apostle; he must leave St. Bernard’s and England altogether,
even though he initially lacks a destination. He eventually elects to prac-
tice medicine amongst the gypsy community of Granada, Spain. In doing
so, he follows the path forged by his literary hero, Browning’s Paracelsus,
a Renaissance physician and reformer depicted in the poem of the same
name. Shortly before Elsworth returns to England as a medical activist
in his own right, he meets tender-hearted Mildred, who travels with her
aunt. The young people and older woman then encounter Crowe, also
vacationing in Spain. Like Elsworth, and in opposition to Crowe, Mildred
seeks to reform the Victorian hospital into a more humane institution,
one modeled on the workhouse infirmary that seeks to heal and discharge
patients quickly. By the close of the tale, Elsworth and Mildred have mar-
ried and successfully raised funds for a group of hospitals and attached
nursing institutes located in the poorest districts of the capital. The couple
thus seeks to transform medical care by re-forming the Gothic landscape.
Decentralizing medical authority and detaching medical research from
healthcare means that the poorest patients will no longer serve as fodder
for experimental drugs and techniques. In essence, Berdoe demonstrates
that reform can only commence when physical spaces are no longer set up
for secrecy, isolation, and surveillance, but are designed instead for trans-
parency and comfort.
 ST. BERNARD’S: TERRORS OF THE LIGHT IN THE GOTHIC HOSPITAL 235

Unlike other works of the urban Gothic, such as Strange Case of Dr

Jekyll and Mr Hyde, St. Bernard’s does not confine itself to London but
sets several chapters within the Spanish countryside, which alternately
functions as a negative foil and an aspirant model for the English capital.
The rural neighborhood of Granada recalls characteristic Gothic land-
scapes, which are extreme in topography and lack of cultivation. Elsworth,
for instance, “had struck out a path for himself, through the trackless
forest to the unexplored country where lay, he felt and knew by the inner
light that guided him, the key to the true treatment of the hurts and trou-
bles of men’s bodies” (139). The hero does not practice medicine within
a hospital there, but works as an itinerant healer amongst the gypsies in
their own dwellings. In another, more negative, image that constructs
the Spanish natural world as Other to English scenery, Elsworth, on first
entering the country, meditates on the Spanish bullfight culture and how
the countryside reflects national tendencies, for “the very landscapes were
cruel; mountains and rocks had no softness” (153). Contributors to land-
scape studies have done much work on what Stephen Daniels calls “the
power of landscape as an idiom for representing national identity” (243),
and this passage clearly partakes of a larger discourse in which Continental
countries become sites of alterity. In choosing to work with the gypsies,
however, Elsworth makes his livelihood amongst a people who themselves
functioned as the Other of European civilization, and he gradually comes
to appreciate the finer traits of the Romany people who insist upon see-
ing him as one of their own, due to his olive skin and dark hair. Thus the
Victorian ideal of compassionate earnestness overwrites an English Gothic
tendency to cast the European continent as a space of Otherness, evident
in such works as Mysteries of Udolpho and Dracula.
Elsworth is not the only medical man to survey the Spanish landscape,
and the narrative consistently contrasts his evolving perspective with that
of the villainous Crowe. In his exile, Elsworth comes to realize that one
can only hope to “reach the heart of nature through the royal road of
love … The secret of Nature, as of the Lord, is with them who fear her”
(176). In contrast, Crowe’s devotion to vivisection and materialism has
resulted in his inability to appreciate beauty in the natural world, evident
in his deadened response to a spectacular sunset sinking below the towers
of Alhambra: “And he thought but of the spectrum of Frauenhofer’s lines,
of refraction and absorption of light. His curse was upon him, and fructify-
ing. To lose the sense of feeling another’s pain is, in its culmination, to lose
the sense of ever feeling pleasure oneself” (228). Viewing a landscape thus
236 C. RIEGER

becomes a litmus-test for the gaze of the medical man. Although ordinary
observers or patients may be unable to ascertain a doctor’s motivations,
how he responds to the natural world reflects his orientation towards the
bodies of humans and animals in his care. While an eighteenth-century
Gothic novelist such as Radcliffe attributes a Burkean passion for the
sublime to both innate propensities and familial models, Berdoe lays far
more emphasis on professional training as shaping the sensibility of the
onlooker, particularly that of the physician, for “the study of medicine
demands, perhaps, a more complete sacrifice of the whole man than any
other profession” (223). Counteracting this narrow perspective is respect
for the natural world, which plays a central role in Elsworth’s transforma-
tion into a model for the compassionate urban hospital physician. The
ethical center of Berdoe’s reformist impulse lies in this Victorian ideal of
respect for the natural world, which includes the bodies of humans, ani-
mals, and landscapes.
Largely, then, Berdoe represents a particular school of thought regard-
ing hospital practice in the late Victorian period, described by Richard
French as venerating a “personal, humane style of medicine” that opposed
vivisection (343). For this group, progress meant “using strictly inductive
and observational methods” (329) and sought evidence based on “clinical
casework, the postmortem, and microscopic anatomy” (330), not knowl-
edge provided by experiment (320). French does criticize this group for
what he calls its “naïve sanitarianism” that tended to confuse cleanliness
and moral health (343). This context surely informs the closing line of the
novel: “When the air and light of day are let in upon the foul accumula-
tion of scientific error which have lately been infecting their atmosphere,
their antiseptic influence will kill the bacteria of a science falsely so called”
(286). The light of public scrutiny, then, will dispel the unseen malevo-
lent forces that acquire a Gothic menace in the urban hospital. Although
Berdoe himself did not found the Society for the Protection of Hospital
Patients, in 1897, which proposed remedies to healthcare such as better
record-keeping and legal recourse for medical malpractice (French 385),
St. Bernard’s contributed to the public outcry that prompted its reforms.
Thinking about the novel within the history of Gothic narrative and its
long uneven mutation into horror today, to a modern reader the scenes
set in the brightly lit wards of the great teaching hospital seem most pre-
scient. Botting asserts that Gothic representation in contemporary films
and novels has moved “out of the darkness of dungeons and away from
the nether regions of city, family, or society … Horror [today] glares in
 ST. BERNARD’S: TERRORS OF THE LIGHT IN THE GOTHIC HOSPITAL 237

the over-illuminated pulse of surgical and virtual realities. Terrors of the

night are replaced by terrors of the light” (“Future” 140). The hospi-
tal in particular, he notes, can become a site of terror today because it
wrests control of dying from the patients, their relatives, and community
(“Future” 140). St. Bernard’s expansion of the Gothic landscape enables
Berdoe’s creation of a space of dissent from modern medicine. As Valdine
Clemens explains, the fundamental dynamic of the Gothic is that some-
thing “which has been submerged or held at bay because it threatens the
established order of things … [and] develops a cumulative energy that
demands its release and forces it to the realm of visibility where it must be
acknowledged” (4).
For Berdoe, this acknowledgement only constitutes a first step. Reform
means not simply documenting abuses or changing laws but, instead,
showing the process by which a medical man might cultivate a more
humane and humble perspective to be manifested towards living beings
and the natural world. Berdoe thus ultimately reconfigures the Gothic
landscape to bring about psychological and social change in late-Victorian
England.

WORKS CITED
Aesculapius Scalpel [Edward Berdoe]. Dying Scientifically. A Key to St. Bernard’s.
London: Sonnenschein. 1888. Kindle file.
———. [Edward Berdoe]. St. Bernard’s: the Romance of a Medical Student.
London: Sonnenschein, 1888. Print.
Aguirre, Manuel. “Geometries of Terror: Numinous Spaces in Gothic, Horror and
Science Fiction.” Gothic Studies. 10.2 (2008): 1–17. Web. 15 Sept. 2014.
Botting, Fred. “Future Horror: (the Redundancy of Gothic).” Gothic Studies. 1.2
(1999): 139–155. Print.
———. Gothic. New York: Routlege, 1995. Print.
Clemens, Valdine. The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of
Otranto to Alien. New York: SUNY P, 1999. Print.
Daniels, Stephen. Fields of Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Print.
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Literature 1500–1900. 22.3 (1982): 519–530. Web. 15 Sept. 2014.
French, Richard D. Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975. Print.
Kennedy, Meegan. “The Ghost in the Clinic: Gothic Medicine and Curious Fiction
in Samuel Warren’s Diary of a Late Physician.” Victorian Literature and
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238 C. RIEGER

Lansbury, Carol. “Gynaecology, Pornography, and the Anti-Vivisection

Movement.” Victorian Studies. 28.3 (1985): 413–37. Print.
Li, Chien-hui. “Mobilizing Literature in the Animal Defense Movement in Britain,
1870–1918.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 32.1 (2006): 27–55.
Print.
Mellor, Anne. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York:
Routledge, 1989. Print.
Stern, Rebecca. Gothic Light: Vision and Visibility in the Victorian Novel. South
Central Review. 11. 4 (1994): 26–39. Print.
Waddington, Keir. “Death at St. Bernard’s: Anti-vivisection, Medicine, and the
Gothic.” Journal of Victorian Culture. 18.2 (2013): 246–62. Print.
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Victorian London. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Print.
Nature Selects the Horla: How the Concept
of Natural Selection Influences Guy de
Maupassant’s Horror Tale

Sharon Rose Yang

The Gothic is repeatedly characterized as bringing the dark, the uncanny,

the unheimlich into everyday reality. In consequence, Pasi Nyyssönen
writes, “the characters of Gothic fiction are gradually led to acknowledge
the unreliability of their perceptions and finally to accept the existence
of the entities and aspects of reality of which they have been previously
unaware” (194). This illumination leaves them horrified, alienated,
robbed of their natural, social, and personal identities. So, holy men and
women, as well as venerable elders and relations, are revealed as lustful,
vicious, predatory, even demonic. The boundaries between life and death,
sanity and madness, safe and dangerous are erased by the invasion and
predation of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, demons, and sorcerers, or (in
later work) scientists on a supernatural plane or insanity on a personal one.
More relevant to the theme of this collection, in Gothic landscapes noth-
ing is as it seems, either reflecting, embodying, or even acting out threats
of disorientation, dismemberment, disillusionment. Eldritch castles and
monasteries, crumbling mansions, and jagged mountains are riddled with
secret passages and tunnels, caverns, or sealed rooms (often dungeons,
attics, or crypts) that threaten to burst free the terrible or seal us up in eter-
nal pain and terror. The characters of Gothic fiction are caught in the terror

S.R. Yang ()

Department of English, Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 239

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_11
240 S.R. YANG

of finding themselves adrift, unanchored from a world map of security

and hope. Kelly Hurley takes this proposition one step further, explaining
how Gothic’s incarnations of terror evolve to reflect the changing circum-
stances of human anxieties across time and culture: “the Gothic can serve
as a sort of historical or sociological index: if the genre serves to manage
a culture’s disturbances and traumatic changes, its thematic preoccupa-
tions will allow us to track social anxieties at one remove, in the register
of supernaturalism.” (197).1 Not surprisingly, The Origin of Species, one
of what Freud called the greatest psychic wounds to humanity (186–87),
became a powerful influence on late nineteenth-century Gothic literature.
The Origin of Species battered the undergirding of nineteenth-century
Western society’s identity and security, unseating humanity from its com-
fortable primacy in the earthly hierarchy, and implying that there was no
beneficent design to Nature’s laws. As Jennifer Devere Brody points out:
“[b]ecause evolutionary theorists had such an impact on Victorian cultural
classifications, writers across a range of disciplines grappled with new rep-
resentations of man’s place in this endlessly transforming world” (346).
Kelly Hurley nicely sums up why the Gothic genre became a particularly
effective mode to express how Darwin’s exploration of humanity’s similar-
ities to the rest of the animal kingdom destabilized human social, spiritual,
and physiological identity for nineteenth-century Europeans:

the proliferation of Gothic representations of abhumanness at the fin de

siècle may be partly attributed to the destabilizing effects of nineteenth-
century Darwinian science. The science understood species to be imperma-
nent, metamorphic, and liable to extinction. It assumed an uncomfortably
intimate relation between “animal” and “human,” since the latter was, as
Charles Darwin put it famously in The Descent of Man (1871), “descended
from a hairy, tailed quadruped […].” It posited that natural history (and by
extension human history) progressed randomly, moving toward no particu-
lar climax, so that bodies, species, and cultures were as likely to move “back-
wards” as “forwards,” degenerating into less complex forms. It destroyed a
comfortably anthropomorphic worldview; human beings were just a species
like any other, developed by chance rather than providential design, and
given the mutability of species, humans might well devolve or otherwise
metamorphose into some repulsive abhuman form. (195)

Five works in particular have drawn the most scholarly notice as prime
examples of how “later Gothic fiction is haunted by Darwinian revelation
of the world as ‘infinitely older, larger, wilder, and less anthropocentric’
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 241

than had been previously been supposed” (Clemens 4): Dracula (1897);
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); The Picture of Dorian
Grey (1891); The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896); and The Time Machine
(1895). Furthermore, these writings can be seen to embody fin de siècle
anxiety over humanity’s displacement, disorientation, and disillusionment
in several specific ways. On the one hand, a novel like Dracula shows us
that we are not at the pinnacle of earthly creation by exploring our weak-
ness in the face of a species that can dominate us, the vampire. Other
texts lower our self-estimation, not by showing another above us, but by
demonstrating our unsettling and unexpected proximity to the animals
we mistakenly believed far beneath us on the evolutionary ladder. The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and
The Island of Dr. Moreau demonstrate the horrifyingly easy destruction
of will and human intellect by the resurgence of the animal in us. Fears
of reverse colonization and hybridization in Moreau, The Time Machine,
and Dracula reveal doubt over Western culture’s power to resist, let alone
tame, not only foreign savages but also the primal savage buried disturb-
ingly close to the surface within civilized Europeans. Similarly, anxiety
about the inability of our civilized moral order, in general, to hold in check
the animal within are played out in Dorian Grey, Island of Dr. Moreau, or
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.2
Strangely, one Gothic powerfully pervaded by the anxiety caused by
Darwinian concepts and attendant fin de siècle anxieties, even predating
nearly all the above, has never been sufficiently studied in this context: Guy
de Maupassant’s “The Horla” (1886/7).3 In “The Horla,” the narrator
finds himself threatened with dissolution, loss of identity, and being unex-
pectedly cast psychologically adrift in hostile, horrific surroundings. Like
the characters of later fin de siècle Gothics, his landscape is far more terrify-
ing than any moldering crypt or castle, dark forest, or threatening cavern or
mountain––his Gothic landscape is the psychological and social world map of
the entire natural order in which he is embedded. The Horla, Maupassant’s
thing from beyond, opens a reality that obliterates all that the narrator
has believed about humanity’s ascendancy in creation, about humans top-
ping the Great Chain of Being as Christianity’s God-chosen species, the
Romantics’ imagination-powered transcendent creature, or the Victorians’
ascendant being through the power of will and intellect. In Maupassant’s
short story, the concept of natural selection is the devastating “aspect of real-
ity that [humans] are unable to accept” (Nyyssonen 194), The Horla is “the
entit[y]” (194) whose domination of the narrator uncouples humankind
242 S.R. YANG

from its worldview of pre-eminence and thereby, horrifyingly, turns the

social and psychological landscape of human existence into what Van Gorp
(15) calls Gothic’s “locus terriblis.” Studying “The Horla” in this context,
then, opens up a richer understanding of both this short story and of why
Darwin’s findings so deeply wounded many nineteenth-century psyches.
A summation of Darwin’s fundamental theories in The Origin of the
Species, how these ideas rewrote earlier conceptions of evolution, and the
responses Darwin’s conjectures evoked provide a necessary context for
grasping his influence on “The Horla.” Charles Darwin was not the first to
discuss the concept of evolution. Prior to Darwin’s publishing his conclu-
sions on evolution, a progressive, teleological interpretation of the concept
predominated. Though not holding identical views, his own grandfather
Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamark, Robert Chambers, and Georges
Cuvier (in applying this concept to natural order), and Herbert Spencer
and Auguste Comte (in applying it to civic order), saw evolution mostly
as a process of improvement. Further, there was a strong tendency to
conceive nature as functioning within the parameters of a beneficent, well-
planned order, whether under the auspices of divinity (Chambers, Palely)4
or in the form of an innate tendency in organisms (Lamark).5 What Darwin
did was synthesize the findings of others in geology, biology, physics, and
chemistry with his own ecological studies to draw conclusions that con-
fronted contemporary society with a frighteningly indifferent, amoral, and
brutal natural order.
Fairly early in The Origin of Species Darwin carefully places, if not throws
down, a gauntlet before those who believe that creation can only result
from the divine plan of an all-knowing, all-powerful Divinity:

In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist,

reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological
relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other
such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been
independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species.
(Origin 66)

Here, Darwin is exquisitely careful to imply rather than assert that God is
not necessary for the existence of species, softening his statement with “it
is quite conceivable” and “might come to the conclusion.” Nevertheless,
the overwhelming wealth of examples that he details supports a theory
that requires no God to explain natural order, implying that God could
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 243

be removed from the equation as unnecessary and irrelevant. Darwin does

briefly refer to his theory as not at odds with the existence of a “Creator”
(458). Still, he seems to suggest the requirement of a Creator is extrane-
ous when he writes: “It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expres-
sions as the ‘plan of creation,’ ‘unity of design,’ &c., and to think that we
give an explanation when we only restate a fact” (453). Darwin does not
explicitly reject the concept of a God-designed universe, but since the
terms he does reject, such as “plan of creation” and “unity of design,”
were frequently linked to a divine being, his implications are clear if not
strident.6
Treading on less sacrosanct ground, Darwin more directly undercuts
Lamarkian belief in an innate tendency to perfection. Darwin calls Lamark’s
theories of spontaneous evolution, “preposterous” for attributing evolu-
tion to “external conditions,” “habit,” and, especially, “the volition of the
[organism] itself” (67). Darwin counters with the extrapolation that old
species develop into new ones, sometimes into unrecognizable forms, over
enormous spans of time (252–54). As with divine intervention, Lamark’s
theory also comes under Darwin’s fire for failure to address sufficiently
why some species degenerate or become extinct or how new species can
appear (444).7
As unsettling as removing God or natural teleology as foundations of
creation might be, Darwin’s findings would be even more disturbing with
their insistence that the order of nature is entirely unconnected to human
needs or values: “Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that
of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by
her; and the being is placed under well-suited conditions of life” (Origin
132). The phrase “placed under well-suited conditions of life” is decep-
tive. For Darwin does not imply that nature is a doting mother, finding
the best environment for her offspring. Instead, organisms are “placed”
by nature in the sense that they will survive only if they have adapted or
mutated to fit into whatever ecological niche they find themselves (117).
If they do not adapt well or other organisms adapt better to that niche, the
“being” will lose its place––as a species or as an individual––and “will soon
be exterminated” (147). Darwin calls this fierce competition for survival
underlying natural order natural selection. Thus, drawing on his own and
others’ data, he defines evolution as a brutal battle for pre-eminence, with
the victors prevailing through the chance of developing traits that happen
to allow them to survive best in the environment where they find them-
selves. The losers face extermination, not on moral grounds, but because
244 S.R. YANG

they lack traits enabling them to destroy, predominate, or exploit others in

their particular environment.
Truly this is a nightmarish redrawing of humanity’s world map. Not
only does no God reward and honor the pious, the industrious, the
moral, and the wise; not only is the underlying principle of natural order
“insensibl[e]” (133), indifferent to its organisms; but the organizing prin-
ciple of this order is fierce, deadly competition. Equally horrifying, nature
possesses no innate tendency toward spiritual or intellectual perfectibility
cherished by humans. Organisms prevailing during one period may become
extinct at any time over the vast expanse of ages (458–60). Perhaps the
most frightening implication of natural selection is that humans cannot
escape this struggle for survival. Throughout The Origin of Species Darwin
reiterates that “all” (434) organisms are part of this process.8
How did Darwin’s audience respond to his assertions? Some resisted
his ideas. Bishop Wilberforce turned back to traditional religious values.
Others might not try to disprove Darwin’s perception of human involve-
ment in the struggle for food and mates, but they certainly disparaged
the view of humanity as no higher than the animals with which we are
supposed to share such drives. In Maupassant’s France, Charles Vignier
attacked “These dupes who found in Herbert Spencer the pretentious
drinking songs that mask their crass ignorance; these eternal twaddlers of
evolutionism who make the timid hypotheses of Darwin their sanctimo-
nious certitude” (qtd. in Vial 43).9 Similarly, in 1880 Jean Barois asserted
that only the belief that the underpinnings of creation are love and faith
gives our existence meaning and vivacity, whereas the dry facts of science
leave us gasping like fish for breath on dry land (qtd. in Vial 44).10
Still, not all reacted negatively to Darwin’s ideas. Charles Kingsley tried
to reconcile Darwin’s findings with belief in a supreme creator. Elizabeth
Gaskell could stress the efficacy of God’s power to heal human suffer-
ing in North and South and Wives and Daughters, while basing her admi-
rable male lead in the latter on Charles Darwin. Herbert Spencer and
later adherents of Auguste Comte drew on Darwin to buttress their hopes
that humans would prove to be the pre-eminent terrestrial organism by
social adaptation: recreating their societies as peaceful, industrious, and
knowledge-seeking by replacing superstitious beliefs on family, religion,
education, and government with empirically derived knowledge. Similarly,
Thomas Huxley, although still clearly pointing out he could not promise
human perfectibility, believed reason empowered by will could enable us
to transcend our tendency toward violence in competing to survive.11
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 245

Those who despaired at humanity’s displacement into a hostile world

order were eloquently represented by George Gissing:

I hate and fear “science” because of my conviction that for a long time to
come if not forever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it
destroying all simplicity and gentleness in life, all beauty in the world; I see it
restoring barbarism under the mask of civilization; I see it darkening men’s
minds and hardening their hearts. (qtd. in Appleman 547)

In a quotation especially relevant to this study, J. A. Symonds’s letter to

Robert Louis Stevenson reveals how the Gothic genre reflected the social
and psychic distress created by Darwin’s reshaping the landscape of natu-
ral order:

Physical and biological Science on a hundred lines is reducing individual

freedom to zero, and weakening the sense of responsibility … Your Dr.
Jekyll seems to me capable of loosening the last threads of self-control in
one who should read it while wavering between his better and worse self. It
is like the Cave of Despair in the “Faery Queen.” (142)

It is this kind of anguished hopelessness that Maupassant’s narra-

tor expresses in “The Horla” when he realizes humanity is inescapably
caught in the brutal process of natural selection, or Survival of the Fittest
as Spencer termed it: “Premature destruction? All human terror springs
from that! After man, the Horla! … without any doubt––he [Horla] is not
dead––Then––then––I suppose I must kill myself!” (Maupassant 271)12
That Maupassant should have been influenced by the intellectual and
spiritual repercussions of natural selection is not difficult to demonstrate.
In the 1861 version of The Origin of Species, Darwin traces the intercon-
tinental development of the debate on evolution through the exchanges
of scientists in England, France, Germany, and the United States (“An
Historical Sketch” 19–27). Andre Vial similarly points out this interna-
tional interest: “The century was shaken with the activity of the milieu
in which he [Maupassant] lived: the palpable influence of transforma-
tionist doctrine and its debates since 1830, during the academic assault
of Cuvier and of Geoffry Saint-Hiliare” (276).13 Michael Lerner notes
that Maupassant’s intellectual circle especially seized on such ideas (192),
while Vial writes that Maupassant possessed an “unceasing preoccupation
with the evolutionary development of living beings” and “that he always
carried an intense interest in all aspects of natural history” (276).14 In
246 S.R. YANG

fact, Maupassant himself asserts his passion for following the currents of
contemporary science. In a letter to an admirer he claims that his main
companions in Paris were both artists and scientists, declaring that “I
adore science” (qtd. in Steegmuller 236). Vial further concludes that
Maupassant’s study of Sir John Lubbock and interest in Herbert Spencer
clearly indicates a strong familiarity with Darwin’s theory that survival or
extermination depended on how effectively an organism or a species could
adapt to its environment (276). In addition, Michael Lerner (160–61)
and Trevor Harris (68, 152–55) join Vial (45) in linking Maupassant with
Zola in Naturalisme’s Darwinistic world view of humanity controlled by
the same drives as the rest of the animal kingdom for food, territory, and
propagation.
Although these scholars note Darwin-influenced naturalism in many
of Maupassant’s works, none pick up on the powerful resonance of The
Origin of Species in “The Horla.” This short story is not, however, merely
a blueprint for natural selection. Rather, Maupassant delves into the psy-
chic hopelessness engendered by Darwin’s ideas. Undercutting the illu-
sions of traditionalists and progressivists alike concerning natural selection,
Maupassant’s depiction of an individual’s mental and spiritual agony at the
prospect of being supplanted gives eloquent voice to the maddening dis-
orientation of late nineteenth-century western civilization created by the
terrifying redrawing of its world map of natural order.
The text of “The Horla” opens with a diary entry that subtly reveals
not only humanity’s superficial perception of creation but the precarious-
ness of our comfortable position in a world ordered by the principles of
natural selection. However, in order to recognize and interpret this subtle
allusion, the reader must turn first to a passage from The Origin of Species:

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabun-
dance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly
singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly
destroying life; or we forget how largely these songsters, or their eggs, or
their nestlings, are destroyed by birds and beasts of prey; we do not always
bear in mind, that though food may be now superabundant, it is not so at
all seasons of each recurring year. (116)

Traditional views of nature as “bright with gladness” are based on a naïve

world image of the natural relations binding humanity to the complex
forces struggling with each other for limited food supplies or against each
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 247

other as predator and prey. God’s eye is not on the sparrow; the hawk’s
is, and for dinner. Yet the hawk is no villain. Its chances for survival are
as precarious as the sparrow’s, by failing to feed on the sparrow the hawk
will die. Predator and prey are equally at risk. In fact, as the hawk is no
villain, the sparrow is no innocent victim. The prey is also a predator;
these small birds “mostly live on insects or seeds.” Equally important,
nature itself is no comforter or provider of security: food is not “super-
abundant” all year round, due to climactic cycles, and so predator and
prey suffer when seasonal changes kill off their sources of nourishment.
The diminishment of one organism affects the well-being of predators up
the food chain. However, human minds too used to seeing the world as
divinely ordered by God, or even a Romantic Natural Supernatural, do
not squarely perceive the severity and complexity of this competition for
survival. Consequently, the destructive horror lurking beneath the surface
of innocence and beauty would hit them as a disturbing juxtaposition of
reality against traditional perceptions.
The opening passage of “The Horla” echoes Darwin’s depiction of the
superficially innocent perspective blinding humanity to the actual savage
struggle underpinning natural order. The narrator innocently perceives a
landscape of superabundance:

What a lovely day! I have spent all morning lying in the grass in front of my
house, under the enormous plane tree that shades the whole of it. I like this
part of the country and I like to live here because I am attached to it by old
associations, by those deep and delicate roots which attach a man to the soil
on which his ancestors were born and died, which attach him to the ideas
and usages of the place as well as to the food, to the local expressions, to the
peculiar twang of the peasants, to the smell of the soil, of the villages and of
the atmosphere itself.
I love my house in which I grew up. From my windows, I can see the
Seine which flows alongside my garden, on the other side of the high road,
almost through my grounds, the great and wide Seine, which goes to Rouen
and Havre, and is covered with boats passing to and fro. (Maupassant 249)

Nature is all innocence, security, and beauty to this narrator before his
experience with the Horla “engrain[s] in [his] mind the truths of the bru-
tal struggle for survival” (Darwin 116). The grass and the shade of an
“enormous plane tree” create an idyll in which nature exists to lull him into
childish delight, a comfy crib in which to nap gently. He even expresses
his identity in a metaphor that portrays nature as his tender comrade; he
248 S.R. YANG

is attached to the country by “deep and delicate roots which attach a man
to the soil on which his ancestors were born and died.” This bond with
nature bespeaks a world map of nature and humanity beautifully merging;
man and his ancestors are attached to the natural world through their
delicate roots in the soil. He joys in a comfortingly eternal connection of
humanity and the natural world. Similarly, human culture and nature itself
are part of that seemingly endless tradition: language (local expression and
the peculiar twang of the peasants speaking that language) merges with
the smell of the soil to provide a secure definition of this natural world and
the narrator’s place in it. Food is a particularly expressive symbol of this
bond; the produce of nature physically ingested after being modified by
the taste and intellect of human culture.
Maupassant clearly casts his narrator’s delighted complacency as an
expression of humanity’s sense of a privileged bond with both the divine
and the natural:

On the left, down yonder, lies Rouen, that large town, with its blue roofs,
under its pointed Gothic towers. These are innumerable, slender or broad,
dominated by the spire of the cathedral, and full of bells which sound
through the blue air on fine mornings, sending their sweet distant iron clang
even as far as my home; that song of the metal, which the breeze wafts in my
direction, now stronger and now weaker, according as the wind is stronger
or lighter. (249)

In this landscape, the pointed Gothic towers and the dominating spire of
the cathedral thrusting skyward are a monument to humanity’s belief in
God’s ascendancy and a hope of our reaching divine grandeur through the
intellect and hard work by which we engineered and built them. Further,
the narrator portrays nature and human creativity working in conjunc-
tion to please his senses; the blue air of fine mornings and breeze wafting
the sweet distant iron clang for his listening pleasure. Again human and
natural creation merge, as he enjoys the visual pleasure of a blue roof and
blue air. Nevertheless, Maupassant embeds in his narrator’s encomium to
human and natural bonds a hint that nature may not be quite so concerned
with humanity as the narrator thinks; the bell’s music fades and grows
louder “according as the wind is stronger or lighter.” Nature does not
serve humanity’s pleasures, rather human pleasure and even the efficacy
of products of human technology (musical bells) depend on the chance
conditions of nature. That this narrator lacks the perception to recognize
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 249

the true relationship between nature and humanity shortly becomes clear.
Not only does he fail to consider his and the music’s dependency on the
climactic conditions producing breezes, but his immediate conclusion on
the sweetness of all conditions, “What a delicious morning it was!” (249),
is belied as the story progresses. The delusive comfort the narrator attri-
butes to the physical landscape is stripped and his whole world becomes
Gothic’s “locus terriblis” (Van Gorp 14).
The two following paragraphs brutally undercut the narrator’s pro-
nouncement, but the reader can only recognize this situation when
approaching the conclusion of “The Horla.” After dubbing the morning
as delicious the narrator continues happily:

After two English schooners, whose red flag fluttered in space, there came a
magnificent Brazilian three-master; it was perfectly white, and wonderfully
clean and shining. I saluted it, I hardly knew why, except that the sight of
the vessel gave me great pleasure. (249)

The narrator’s perception of the vessel embodies the limitations of his

traditional psychic and social landscape of natural order. From a distance
above the river, with no sight of cargo or passengers, the narrator perceives
this vessel as “magnificent,” “perfectly white, and wonderfully clean and
shining.” The beauty and purity that he perceives lead the narrator to
greet the vessel with a cheerful salute. However, readers nearing the end
of this story, or who consider the scene retrospectively, cannot help but
wonder if the narrator would have greeted the vessel with so much plea-
sure had he been able to see that what appeared so delightfully pristine
bore to him the agent of his destruction: the Horla. Only later, does the
narrator see that this seemingly lovely, inspiring schooner actually intro-
duced to his environment a being that would prey horribly on him. Only
at the conclusion does the narrator, and perhaps the reader as well, realize
that the instinctive salute actually acknowledges the superior who will sup-
plant humanity. Thus, the narrator’s misperception of the schooner bear-
ing the Horla parallels a misperception of his false world map of nature
defined by abundance and singing birds. Within four days of sighting the
Horla-bearing ship, the narrator’s misguided joy at his place in creation
shifts to: “I have had a slight feverish attack for the last few days, and
I feel ill, or rather low-spirited” (249). As the tale progresses, and the
narrator comes to see better the Horla’s effect on him and its implica-
tions for humanity’s place in the natural order, this vague despondency
250 S.R. YANG

will grow into a ferocious anxiety and, ultimately, into despair. In fact,
the narrator’s emotional response to discovering the true implications for
humanity strikingly represents the thoughts of many Europeans wrestling
with their displacement from evolutionary ascendancy. Thus, the schooner
bears a creature that, as Savolainen and Angelis assert about Dracula, is
“the epitome of conflict.” And the text, by embodying this conflict set off
by natural selection’s redrawing the boundaries of the natural order, gives
readers a “monster” that is a “reminder” of the “birth of something new,
ideologically speaking” (221) that they find too spiritually and intellectu-
ally unsettling to face. “The Horla” and the Horla force humans to follow
the narrator in confronting the fact that humanity has no privileged place
in the struggle for survival.
One frequently cited passage from The Origin of Species eloquently con-
veys a landscape of relentless, brutal, impersonal relationships amongst
species in natural selection: “The face of Nature may be compared to a
yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together
and driven inwards by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck,
and then another with greater force” (119). The narrator’s struggle with
The Horla disturbingly reconfigures humanity’s psychological and spiri-
tual landscape by portraying humanity as just one more of these organisms
caught in the savage competition to wedge itself into the face of nature
and survive. The following passage is an especially powerful illustration:

My arm-chair was empty, appeared empty, but I knew that he was there, he,
and sitting in my place, and that he was reading. With a furious bound, the
bound of an enraged wild beast that springs at its tamer, I crossed my room
to seize him, to strangle him, to kill him! (Maupassant 265)

On first perusal, the violently aggressive response of the narrator to his

competitor puts him in the same league as any wolf hunting a deer, ants
battling ants, or birds struggling for seeds and mates detailed by Darwin.
The human acts with “a furious bound of an enraged wild beast” with the
intent “to strangle” and “to kill.” Interestingly, the niche that this human
fears to lose to the Horla is clearly presented in terms of intellectual supe-
riority. The sense of being supplanted is driven home by the term “sitting
in my place [emphasis added].” Further, the action that the Horla takes
over in that place is “reading,” an act of not only mental but interpre-
tive power. The narrator even refers to himself here as “the wild beast”
and the Horla as “the tamer,” effectively conveying the displacement of
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 251

humanity by using an image of our previous control of the animal king-

dom to portray the Horla’s relationship with us. Maupassant continues
to emphasize humanity’s displacement by the Horla a few lines later with
curious word choice: “I should be able to hold him in my clutches and
crush him against the ground! Do not dogs occasionally bite and strangle
their masters?” (265–66). Dogs certainly may bite, but do they strangle
masters? Strangling is clearly the action of a human, or at least a higher
primate. This phrasing is especially telling about the place of humans in
nature; it does not merely portray us as acting like what had traditionally
been defined as lower animals (dogs bite), but portrays human actions as
equivalent to, not higher than, the actions of other animals; strangling
and biting become the same when humans face their “master.” Indeed,
in “The Horla,” Maupassant will even take aim at two major tenets for
asserting human precedence, our singular possession of intellect and will.
Martin Tropp points out that “Schopenhauer’s ideas [on the power
of the will] had a profound effect upon a wide range [of] writers and
thinkers in the late nineteenth-century, from Tolstoy to Turgenev to Zola
and Freud.” The will, as “the unique way man knows himself,” enables
humans to set themselves at the height of creation (120–21). Not surpris-
ingly, then, Thomas Huxley saw reason and will as humanity’s hope to
transcend being crushed by our innate participation in the struggle to
survive: “Fragile reed as he may be, man, as Pascal says, is a thinking reed:
there lies within him a fund of energy operating intelligently and so far
akin to that which pervades the universe, that it is competent to influence
and modify the cosmic process” (“Evolution and Ethics” 109). Intellect,
empowered by the will, enables us to rise highest in earthly creation and
not remain victims of incessant, brutal competition. However, the strug-
gle of Maupassant’s narrator with the Horla to wedge a space into the face
of nature alarmingly undermines the human certitude of preeminence by
exposing human will and reason as flimsy protections.
In fact, reason and will, which are supposed to raise us above the animal
within and without, are exactly the traits that enable the Horla to surpass
humanity. Maupassant brings this point home:

Ah! the vulture has eaten the pigeon; the wolf has eaten the lamb; the lion
has devoured the sharp-horned buffalo; man has killed the lion with an
arrow, with a sword, with gun-powder; but the Horla will make man what
we have made of the horse and of the ox; his chattel, his slave and his food,
by the mere power of his will [emphasis added]. Woe to us! (267)
252 S.R. YANG

Our intellect elevates us above the animalistic struggle for survival? Hardly.
Yes, we have used intellect to create technology enabling us to conquer
the animals (arrows, swords, gun-powder), but our use of technology is
still part of that cycle of destroying for food and predominance. Our tech-
nology functions to the same end as vultures eating pigeons, wolves eat-
ing lambs, and lions eating buffalo; our killing the lion is depicted as just
another link in the chain of destruction, much as our ability to strangle is
comparable to a dog’s ability to bite (265–66). Even more bitterly ironic,
our “superiority” now no longer even tops creation’s hierarchy, for the
Horla now preys on and controls us. We are no better than animals in
comparison to the Horla, becoming “his chattel, his slave and his food.”
And what is the deciding factor that gives him predominance over us?
Again bitter irony: “his will.” This jab at the hope of our mastering our-
selves and the world is trenchant. Maupassant agrees that perhaps will is
a deciding factor in gaining ascendancy in the struggle for survival, but it
is a modification insufficiently developed in human beings. The hope that
Huxley shared with others is beyond attainment.
Ironically, reason, humanity’s alleged salvation, leads the narrator to the
unavoidable conclusion that there is no salvation for his species. The nar-
rator realizes that his careful, rational plan to kill the Horla and his exercise
in extraordinary will power to resist the creature to implement it are miser-
ably inadequate because he relies on methods that would destroy a human
but are useless against a creature not subject to our corporeal weaknesses:
“Dead? Perhaps? – His body? Was not his body, which was transparent,
indestructible by such means as would kill ours?” (271) Horrifically, rea-
son does not elevate us above the struggle for survival but forces us to
admit that we have lost our niche to a superior competitor, that our value
is ephemeral in the universe’s vast scheme: “After him [mankind] who can
die every day, at any hour, at any moment, by any accident, came the one
who would die only at his own proper hour, day, minute, because he had
touched the limits of his existence!” (271).
This passage also undercuts any hope of the will empowering the intel-
lect. The narrator may have the will to resist the Horla’s command to
release him from the burning building, but recognizing that his deathtrap
for the Horla has failed causes a total collapse of will into despair: “No––
no––without any doubt––he is not dead––Then––then––I suppose I must
kill myself” (271). More painful still, Maupassant forces all humanity to
confront the effect of admitting our ephemeral value in the vast scheme
of creation: “Premature destruction? All human terror springs from that!
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 253

After man, the Horla” (271). This cry rivals Conrad’s “The horror! The
horror!” in expressing the damage to the human psyche from recognizing
our imprisonment in the Darwinian natural process. In Maupassant’s eyes
the thinking of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and others cannot bring hope,
but only the recognition of humanity’s unimportance. Ultimately, reason
only teaches us the failure of the will. This realization transforms the sto-
ry’s opening landscape of civilized order, peaceful sailing ships, and tamed
nature into a Gothic setting of insecurity, instability, threat, and despair.
Maupassant gives voice to anxieties engendered by natural selection by
drawing on two additional concepts discussed in Origin of Species: under-
mining the traditional human-centered teleology of evolution; and por-
traying the ability of invasive species to supplant natives. In the case of
the first concept, Darwin drastically alters the contemporary psychological
world map by undercutting his colleagues who view evolution as the story
of humanity’s ascent to pre-eminence. Instead, he perceives ascendance
solely in terms of eliminating one’s competitors:

The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten
their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of
nature; and this may account for that vague yet ill-defined sentiment, felt by
many palaeontologists, that the organisation of the whole has progressed.
(343)

Huxley carries this point a step further in clarifying that survival of the
fittest implies no superior moral development, merely that the triumphant
species is “the best adapted to the changed conditions”; thus, “lichens,
diatoms, and … microscopic organisms” would certainly be humanity’s
superior in a renewed ice age (“Evolution and Ethics” 107). This com-
petition is indeed ruthless and relentless. Darwin’s nature is “daily and
hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slight-
est; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
silently and insensibly working … at the improvement of each organic
being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life” (133). In
addition, Darwin points out that although some species may have traits
enabling them to help one another to survive, competitors do not so
much cooperate with as exploit each other (116, 127, 135). The ultimate
relationship between species is a fierce competition in which today’s victor
may become tomorrow’s victim or slave. Thus, if the development of all
species is “a great tree,” with each species that has ever existed represented
254 S.R. YANG

by the tree’s appendages, then there is no permanent existence, let alone

dominance, for “from the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch
has decayed and dropped off; and these lost branches of various sizes may
represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no
living representatives, and which are known to us only from having been
found in a fossil state” (171–172).
Still, though throughout the 1859 The Origin of Species, Darwin repeat-
edly emphasizes that this “struggle for life” is “universal” (115), apply-
ing to “every species” (125) or “all organisms” (115, 127), he does not
explicitly state the prickly ramifications for humanity implied by the terms
every, all, and universal, until his 1872 edition.15 Even there, he somewhat
diverts readers from considering too closely the probability of humans
becoming “lost branches” by applauding Herbert Spencer’s assertion of
humanity’s higher development (49–50). However, Guy de Maupassant
brooks no such distractions. Instead, he eloquently expresses the anxieties
of a humanity that must someday become “a limb or branch [that] has
decayed and dropped off” (171):

A new being! Why not? It was assuredly bound to come! Why should we be
the last? We do not distinguish it any more than all the others created before
us! The reason is, that its nature is more perfect, its body finer and more
finished than ours, that ours is so weak, so awkwardly constructed, encum-
bered with organs that are always tired, always on the strain like machinery
that is too complicated, which lives like a plant and like a beast, nourish-
ing itself with difficulty on air, herbs, and flesh, an animal machine which
is a prey to maladies, to malformations, to decay; broken-winded, badly
regulated, simple and eccentric, ingeniously badly made, at once coarse and
a delicate piece of workmanship, the rough sketch of a being that might
become intelligent and grand.
…Why should there not be one more, once that period is passed which
separates the successive apparitions from all the different species? (267–68)

Yes, in a landscape where nature “daily and hourly scrutinis[es]” to “reject

… that which is bad” and to “preserve … and add … up all that is good,”
what place is there for a humanity with so many weaknesses of the flesh
and soul? And nature is doing this work insensibly, so how can our pain
at her rejection, or our indignation or disbelief at her selecting another
over us, change our status? Maupassant takes the implications of Darwin’s
metaphor expressing the transience of any species’ reign and brings its sig-
nificance excruciatingly home. As our species is just another organism in
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 255

the “universal struggle for life” (Origin 115), just another “lost branch”
or “decayed … limb” (172), there can be no redress for the pain of real-
izing a better adapted organism will fill our niche.
The process of the Horla’s arrival and usurpation of human dominance
reflects a careful reading of the second concept, depicting a landscape in
which natives to a particular environment are often overrun by immi-
grants, especially if those immigrants have “widely ranged” and competed
for survival frequently or if the natives have been isolated (347). These
immigrants succeed when they are more flexible in adapting to new cir-
cumstances concerning climate, food, mating, and outright fighting for
territory (152–59). The clash between natives and immigrants is again
an example of the inexorable, amoral, brutal essence of natural selection:
“when by sudden immigration … many species of a new group have taken
possession of a new area, they will have exterminated in a correspond-
ingly rapid manner many of the old inhabitants” (325). The description
of an “epidemic” of the extraterrestrial Horlas “raging” in San-Paolo
(Maupassant 266), overwhelming the weaker human population, echoes
Darwin’s description of immigrants exterminating natives. The Horla’s
arrival in Europe to prey on humans brings its threat even closer to home
for Maupassant’s European audience.16 In this respect, the Horla is, for
this audience, Pasi Nyyssönen’s “entit[y]” that reveals “the unreliability
of their perceptions” (194) of human superiority and a beneficent natural
order to recreate their entire world as one of Gothic instability, threat, and
hostility.
Disturbingly, the Horla does not merely emulate but surpasses Darwin’s
immigrants in terms of pre-eminence. Darwin had concluded from his
experiments and studies that although immigrant seeds could remain via-
ble for a long period under adverse conditions, there were limits to their
endurance. He finally concluded that though seeds might migrate around
the Pacific islands via the roots of dislodged trees, icebergs, and the car-
casses of dead birds or the evacuations of live ones, cross-Atlantic travel
from the New World to Europe was beyond their capabilities (354–59).
The Horla, then, far outclasses all terrestrial organisms. It not only crosses
continents but planetary space as well! Once again, the Horla dwarfs
us even more impressively than humanity has perceived itself dwarfing
“lower” organisms. In comparison to the Horla’s interplanetary, perhaps
even intergalactic, travel, our sailing mighty schooners and “magnificent
Brazilian three master[s]” (249) are reduced to the level of Darwin’s
driftwood and the intestinal tract of birds. In fact, Maupassant words the
256 S.R. YANG

Horla’s extraterrestrial origins as one more testimony to human inferior-

ity. We can perceive “neither the inhabitants of a star nor of a drop of
water” because “our eyes … are unable to perceive what is either too
small or too great, too near to us or too far from us” (250). Thus, we had
lived in a psychological landscape in which we estimated our species so
high only because we could neither perceive that which is above us (“too
great,” “too far from us”), nor can we recognize our actual proximity to
the organisms we consider lower (“too small,” “too near to us”).
In discussing competing organisms, especially encroachers on natives,
Darwin points out that the species that are the most similar will be in the
fiercest battle for survival. Logically, species that require the most similar
food, shelter, and climatic and geographical conditions are likely to com-
pete the most intensely to fill a niche that can support only a limited num-
ber of inhabitants (Darwin, 127). With such demanding competition for
limited ecological resources, “individuals having any advantage, however
slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving” (130–31)
and prevailing (153–54, 237, 323, 325, 336). Indeed, humanity seems
to share many characteristics with the Horla: the ability to reason; to
exert will; and to dominate and exploit other creatures or the elements of
Nature. Unfortunately for us, the Horla’s powers of incorporeal invisibil-
ity, interplanetary travel, absorption of nutrition, superior will, and itself
being a work of art, completely outclass the “broken-winded, badly regu-
lated, simple, and eccentric, ingeniously badly made” (268) organism that
is a human.
In addition to observing that one species will “exterminate” or drive to
“extinction” less successful competitors, Darwin also notes that the domi-
nant one may also exploit its less successful competitors. The struggle
may be between a “parasite and its prey” (122). Significantly, the narrator
describes the Horla’s preying on him very much in the terms of a parasite
living off its host: “Last night I felt somebody leaning on me and suck-
ing my life from between my lips. Yes, he was sucking it out of my throat,
like a leech” (254). Linking of domination with parasitism is vital, for
this parasite is not weakly dependent on the host but is its controller. In
fact, the Horla’s exercise of hypnotic power over the Brazilians as “human
cattle” and the narrator as “chattel, … slave, and … food” (266–67) pow-
erfully recalls Darwin’s description of ants keeping aphids and slave ants
in herds. The slave ants’ blind obedience in following the dominant ants’
commands to care for young, transport the ruling ants, and perform gen-
eral acts of heavy labor (Origin, 236–47), certainly seems echoed by the
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 257

narrator’s pronouncement that “the Horla will make of man what we have
made of the horse and of the ox” (267). Subservient aphids, slave ants,
and humans are no more than beasts of burden or a means of sustenance
for their superiors. In fact, the Horla’s power to dominate and exploit
humans not only parallels but improves upon the ants’ power to milk
aphids for nourishment. Where ants stroke the abdomens of aphids to
make them secrete a liquid nutritious to ants, (Origin 237), the Horla
not only feeds off humans but plays on the human psyche to control its
source of nourishment. When its source strays too far, the Horla creates in
its creature a false but touching source of anxiety that can only be allevi-
ated by returning to the Horla: “I felt that painful wish to return which
oppresses you when you have left a beloved invalid at home, and when
you are seized with a presentiment that he is worse” (De Maupassant
262). Adeptly, the Horla “take[s] advantage of the instincts of others, as
each [species] take[s] advantage of the weaker bodily structure of others”
(Origin 237).
This ploy is particularly unsettling to a psycho/social landscape based
on human ascendancy, especially in light of Huxley’s assertions that com-
passion and altruism were what separated humanity from “our brother …
the wolf” (“Ethics” 110–11). However, according to Maupassant, these
traits are only Darwinian “instincts” that leave us vulnerable to the exploi-
tation of a shrewder being. For the superior Horla, our compassion and
altruism are avenues to dominate us, to cloud reason (the narrator knows
there is no invalid) and to subvert will (he cannot bring himself to venture
beyond the parameters the Horla sets).
In fact, only this extraterrestrial Horla can achieve the supreme spiritual
and intellectual state humanity claims as our salvation from the struggle
for survival, elevating it beyond us:

But the butterfly, you will say, a flying flower? I dream of one that should
be as large as a hundred worlds, with wings whose shape, beauty, colors,
and motion I cannot even express. But I see it––it flutters from star to star,
refreshing them and perfuming them with the light and harmonious breath
of its flight! And the people up there look at it as it passes in an ecstasy of
delight! (268)

As butterfly and flying flower the Horla seems soul incarnate. With
“shape, beauty, colors, and motion” beyond human description, the
Horla becomes an expression of the Platonic Good, the Neoplatonists’
258 S.R. YANG

soul approaching and communing with God, the Romantics’ soul inspir-
ited by Imagination to fuse with the Natural Supernatural. The Horla, the
being beyond our expression, the unknown secret, the being “too great”
and “too far from us” is all that humanity has aspired to become. The first
bitter irony is that to this ideal being humanity is no more than “chattel,
slave[s], food” (267). But Maupassant’s harshest blow to any who would
hope that spirituality, will, or intellect are the keys to escaping the cosmic
struggle, is the fact that this ideal being is still, itself, part of the struggle.
The Horla feeds on and destroys us and plant life, just as we do cattle and
plants. Even so, the Horla is mortal. Although this being has “touched the
limits of his existence,” that existence will one day end in death (271). In
illustrating through the Horla that “Natural selection will not necessar-
ily produce absolute perfection” (Origin 233), Maupassant firmly closes
the door on any hope of our escaping, let alone transcending, the brutal
natural plan.
“The Horla,” however, is not merely an assault on scientific thought.
Though Maupassant decidedly rejects the foundation for Darwinian pro-
gressivists’ belief in human advancement, he also makes clear that the
spiritualism of past traditions is no more of an asset. The view of a benefi-
cent, omniscient God, whose ways may be strange and unknowable to
humans but are ultimately for our own good, loses all credence in the
world of “The Horla.” True, the narrator constantly notes that religion
has expressed a vague awareness of the horror that is the Horla. However,
he also insists that no religions have been able to define it, providing
nothing more definite than: “chimeras,” “devils,” “fantastic animals,” and
“monstrous flowers” “bristling” in cathedral decoration (253); a monk
who is vaguely aware of great and terrifying powers beyond humanity
but cannot define or explain them (253–54); or “doctor of philosophy
and theogony” Herrmann Herestauss’s arcane “treatise on the unknown
inhabitants of the ancient and modern world” (264).
In the light of modern thought, religion and philosophy offer no assur-
ance or even understanding, let alone defense. They merely underscore
the limitations of human understanding:

One might say that man, ever since he began to think, has had a foreboding
fear of a new being, stronger than himself, his successor in this new world,
and that, feeling his presence, and being able to foresee the nature of that
master, he has, in his terror, created the whole race of occult beings, of
vague phantoms born of fear. (264–65)
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 259

The application of Darwin’s findings on natural selection has been the

true ultimate fear of humanity; the “foreboding fear of a new being …
[our] successor in this new world,” or our devils and divinity have only
been misguided attempts to deny the reality of our unimportance. To
comfort ourselves, we insist that our adversaries are evil, while good/God
protects us. In “The Horla” the narrator movingly conveys the agony of
recognizing beliefs in our special place in a human-centered divine plan
are delusions:

Oh, my God! My God! Is there a God? If there be one, deliver me! Save
me! Succor me! Pardon! Pity! Mercy! Save me! Oh, what sufferings! What
Torture! What horror! (263–64)

If there is a God, the narrator can be delivered, but he is not delivered.

The implications are obvious. Equally unmistakable is the torture, suffer-
ings, and horror of living in a universe where the prime mover is a nature
that, as an intricate interweaving of physical laws, can only act “insensi-
bly” (Origin 133)––a fate far worse than a landscape filled with vampires,
ghosts, demons, and evil religions that can be vanquished by faith and
blessed talismans.17
Scientists, then, may seem to be on the right track by undercutting a
faith in the spiritual. Dr. Parent, as a mesmerist and a student of the find-
ings of “English scientists and … doctors of the Nancy school” (257),
shrewdly deduces the inadequacy of seeing humanity threatened by evil
“spirits, … fairies, … gnomes, [and] ghosts” or protected and esteemed
by “the legend of God” (257). He astutely sums up the solipsism of such
views of our place in creation by quoting Voltaire: “God made man in
His own image, but man has certainly paid Him back in his own coin”
(257). Nevertheless, Maupassant insightfully insists in “The Horla” that
many scientists, social and otherwise, have not come to recognize the true
limitations of the human race, either. Instead, they merely replace their
faith in an all-powerful God with the equally deluded faith in the power of
intellect, will, and knowledge to justify human ascendancy.
At one point, when Maupassant’s narrator asserts that because “I have
seen! … I can doubt no longer … I have seen it!” (Maupassant 261), he
seems to reflect what George Levine describes as “the peculiar sanction
that ‘observation’ had through most of the [nineteenth] century as the
almost sacred source of all knowledge” (236). The narrator’s attempts
to determine the Horla’s food requirements further suggest a belief that
260 S.R. YANG

useful and valid knowledge comes from direct observation. Referring to

his actions as an experiment, the narrator, after a casual observation of
nourishment touched by the Horla during the night, sets up tests in which
he provides different combinations of liquid and solid food to determine
whether there is a Horla, as well as his visitor’s preferences. He even
attempts to protect his data from contamination from his own interfer-
ence. Covering bottles with muslin and marking his face and hands with
lead ensure he would have observable evidence whether he or the Horla
had been imbibing the nourishment (255–56). However, Maupassant
actually subverts his character’s belief in the “dominance of observation”
(Levine 236), demonstrating a Victorian to modern “shift from a belief in
observation as authority to deep distrust of it” (Levine 235).
Significantly, Maupassant’s work actually asserts that humans cannot
make objective observations, not merely from a failure of intellect but a
lack of will:

Decidedly everything depends on place and surroundings. It would be the

height of folly to believe in the supernatural on the Ile de Grenouillière …
but on top of Mont Saint-Michel? … and in India? We are terribly influ-
enced by surroundings (260).

In other words, we cannot be objective because we have not the strength

to detach ourselves from the influence of surroundings. Perhaps the
most interesting way that Maupassant establishes humans’ inability to
make objective observations because they are part of the system they
observe is in his narrator’s response to the recognition of his own hor-
rible place in the struggle for survival. True, he seems to verge on objec-
tivity in recognizing that the Horla is supplanting humans, as Norsemen
supplanted weaker Europeans, or humans the animal kingdom. There
even seems objectivity in his stating our physical and aesthetic inferi-
ority to the Horla (250, 268, 271). However, the savage fury of the
Narrator’s continued attempts to rend, strangle, attack, and burn the
Horla, coupled with the terrible despair of his surrender to extinction,
reveal an entirely subjective reaction to being a loser in the struggle for
survival. Maupassant is not only recording the limitations of the human
intellect to know, but is also portraying the despair this failure brings
humanity.
Perhaps the most eloquent expression of this anxiety comes early in the
text:
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 261

How profound the mystery of the Invisible is! We cannot fathom it with
our miserable senses, with our eyes which are unable to perceive what is
either too small or too great, too near to us, or too far from us––neither the
inhabitants of a star nor of a drop of water; nor with our ears that deceive us,
for they transmit to us the vibrations of the air in sonorous notes. They are
fairies who work the miracle of changing these vibrations into sounds, and
by that metamorphosis give birth to music, which makes the silent motion
of nature musical … with our sense of smell which is less keen than that of a
dog … with our sense of taste which can scarcely distinguish the age of wine!
Oh! If we only had other organs which would work other miracles in our
favor what a number of fresh things we might discover around us! (250)

Our senses “cannot perceive” but “deceive us,” are “less keen” and
“can scarcely distinguish.” The “profound” “mystery of the Invisible” is
beyond our grasp because the senses we do possess can detect such a nar-
row band of experiences that we are as “miserable” as our senses. For
all our insistence on providing controls, directly observing phenomena,
and only basing conjecture on verifiable evidence, the majority of experi-
ence is beyond us: the limitations of human observation put not only “the
inhabitants of a star,” but those in “a drop of water” beyond our true
knowledge. The only possible way we could truly observe reality would be
“with other organs,” but we are so limited that such would need to “work
miracles” for us. With painful irony, Maupassant concludes that with these
organs “what a number of fresh things we might discover around us.” The
narrator, even with limited human organs of perception, does discover a
“fresh thing” around humanity, but that fresh thing will devour, exploit,
and supplant us. All we can discover in this new intellectual landscape is
the horror of our own inferiority, the despair of our fate to remain caught
in the brutal process of natural selection.
Even more devastating evidence for despair is Maupassant’s revela-
tion that our defective perceptions hinder our ability to use successfully
what knowledge we do have. We are no equals to those up in the stars
because even when we share powers with them, we lack the insight to
use those powers effectively. Like the Horla, humans can bend the will
of other humans to their own. The narrator’s description of Dr. Parent’s
control of a woman he has hypnotized strongly recalls the way the Horla
treats the narrator: “She was under the power of a strange will which had
entered into her, like another soul, like another parasitic and dominating
soul.” (264). Nevertheless, a comparison of the Horla’s power with Dr.
262 S.R. YANG

Parent’s shows humans to be silly and superficial. Despite Dr. Parent’s

grandiose claims of the magnificent possibilities for a human hypnotist, he
does not use this tool to probe the secrets of the universe, to communicate
with higher beings, or to establish human parity with those beings; he
merely uses his power as a parlor trick. His instance of enlarging human
insight and perception consists of enabling a hypnotized Madame Sable
to view the actions of the narrator behind her, as if she were looking into
a mirror instead of at a calling card. His formidable exercise of will is to
send her to beg for money that she does not actually need (257–60). The
Horla, in contrast, uses the power of hypnotism in a much more pragmatic
Darwinian way: preventing his food source from straying by planting sug-
gestions of guilt (262); or depriving that human of the ability even to
command being carried beyond the Horla’s control (263–64). Despite a
self-perception of grandeur, we humans, lacking the scope of the Horla’s
power, can only use our knowledge and abilities for childish tricks; our
estimation of our intellectual pre-eminence is no more than an embarrass-
ing delusion.
Similarly, the narrator’s attempts to determine if the Horla exists and
what it feeds on may be accurately performed, but he does not think of a
way to use that knowledge to resist the challenge of this invading organ-
ism. Thus, Maupassant forces his audience to see that in the process of
natural selection our knowledge is no sign of our superiority. The knowl-
edge human intellect holds is only as valuable as our ability to apply it,
which is indeed limited. The conclusion to which this realization leads
the narrator again emphasizes the insecurity of such a world view: “Is
the world coming to an end?” (264) Cleverly, Maupassant laces even this
observation with painful irony for humankind. No, the world itself is not
coming to an end, only a world in which humans may continue to delude
themselves into believing they have a special place. After all, the Horla still
exists—and still needs to feed.
“The Horla” has been interpreted as depicting the madness, the dis-
solution of self that Maupassant felt with the increasing degeneration of
his brain due to syphilis.18 Indeed, the narrator expresses madness in his
obsession with a being no one else around him recognizes, in his fear of
losing his will, and in his violent attempts to destroy the ineffable thing
that seems to have siphoned off both will and hope. Even his descrip-
tions of the Horla are phantasmagorical, defying anything catalogued by
empirical evidence. Yet the text clearly implies that the Horla is more than
just a madman’s delusion: servants suffer similar draining when the narra-
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 263

tor is not in the house (261); and a newspaper account documents distant
but parallel attacks to the narrator’s own (266). In fact, the narrator’s
most irrational behavior seems to come after he has had to accept the real-
ity of the Horla; this is when he plots violent assaults on his enemy and in
executing one such attack takes the lives of his innocent servants. It is the
Horla’s existence that reveals humanity does not hold the highest place in
the struggle for survival which drives the narrator into anger, despair, and
madness.
Writers like Charles Kingsley tried to comfort humanity with a belief that
God and Darwinism were not mutually exclusive; others, such as Comte,
Huxley, or Spencer completely rejected the traditional views of social and
divine hierarchy as delusive superstition and hopefully placed their faith
in the intellect’s ability to perceive and the will’s ability to implement
that perception into human perfectibility. In “The Horla,” Maupassant
insisted both views failed to square with the new reality: the first with the
implications of natural selection instead of God ordering the universe; the
second with the deficiencies of human intellect and spirituality. Perhaps
Maupassant’s tale most powerfully conveys humanity’s limitations by por-
traying our inability to apply what knowledge we do have. In this context,
the narrator’s madness seems less an individual’s problem than a symbol of
the horror in discovering the world map that had given humanity stability,
value, and direction is unveiled as delusion.

NOTES
1. Annette Kuhn describes Gothic as “a cyclical genre that reemerges
in times of cultural stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its read-
ership by working through them in displaced (sometimes super-
natural) form,” qtd. in Hurley 194 (2003). Tzetan Todorov writes
that Gothic “identif[ies] points of epistemological stress” (qtd. in
Hurley 204). Valdine Clemens (1999) looks at the Gothic’s pre-
sentation of terrors as a process of Jungian individuation that
“reveal[s] something that has been previously rejected or unac-
knowledged by consciousness, and so indirectly indicat[es] a means
of readjusting one’s attitude” (3). Hurley (2003), in contrast to
Clemens, does not see the Gothic’s addressing cultural concerns as
only therapeutic, arguing “modernist Gothic did not just manage
cultural anxieties … [but] aggravated them, delineating the fluid
264 S.R. YANG

and chaotic form of the modern abhuman subject with both hys-
terical nausea and speculative interest” (206).
2. For fear of the vampire dominating us, see Auerbach (1995),
93–94; fears of reverse colonization, see Arata (1997), 462–70;
Krumm (1995), 542, 548–50; Punter (1980), 253, 255–56, 263;
and Williams (1995), 13. For fears of hybridization in The Island of
Dr. Moreau and The Time Machine, see Jones (1995), 147–53,
Devere Brody (2003), 347–52; Krumm (1995), 548–50, Vial
(1966), 279. Concerning destruction of the will and reason in
humans through the resurgence of the animal in us in The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Grey, The
Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Time Machine, see Auerbach (1995),
91–92, Hurley (2003), 196–99, Clemens (1999), 4, 138–47;
Punter (1980), 244–52; Jones (1995), 168–70; Tropp
(1999), 90–109; Wilt (2003), 8–10; Devere Brody (2003), 345–47.
Relating to general fear of blurring the boundaries between animals
and humans in Dracula, see Punter (1980), 259–63; and Clemens
(1999), 158–59. For fears about the weakness of our civilized,
moral order in Dorian Grey, Island of Dr. Moreau, or Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde, see Punter (1980), 255–56 and Clemens (1999), 158–59.
3. Pascale Krumm (1995) touches on connections between Darwin’s
writings and “The Horla” but does not delve into Darwin’s heavy
influence on the short story. Jennifer Wolter (2004) makes two passing
references to Darwinian competition (280, 283) but not the pervad-
ing influence of Origin of Species. Instead, she focuses on Maupassant’s
“naturalistic” study of the supernatural and madness à la Zola.
4. For example, Robert Chambers (1994) argues that studying geol-
ogy and astronomy rather than relying solely on the Bible in no
way diminishes God:

To a reasonable mind the Divine attributes must appear, not dimin-

ished or reduced in any way, by supposing creation by [scientific] law,
but infinitely exalted. It is the narrowest of all views of the Deity, and
characteristic of a humble class of intellects, to suppose him acting con-
stantly in particular ways for particular occasions. It, for one thing,
greatly detracts from his foresight, the most undeniable of all attributes
of Omnipotence. It lowers him towards the level of our own humble
intellects. Much more worthy of him it surely is, to suppose that all
things have been commissioned by him from the first, though neither is
he absent from a particle of the current natural affairs in one sense, see-
NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 265

ing that the whole system is continually supported by his providence.

(156–57)

For a general discussion of this worldview of evolving, see Levine

(1988) 28–33, 42–43,50–54, 84–85, 112–18; Beer (1985)14,
40–41; Appleman (1979) 530–31; De Beer (1979) 3–10; Secord
(1994) xiv–xii, xxxvii–xli, xiiv–xiv; Millhauser (1979) 27–31.
5. For Lamark, see Lamark (2002) 240–46; Hofstadter (1979) 392–
93; Applemen (1979) 547; de Beer (1979) 4–5; Beer (1985) 23–28,
37; and Burrow (1985) 32, 37.
6. See also Levine (1988) 84–118 and Beer (1985) 79–103 on
Darwin using indefinite language to dispute God’s involvement in
creation.
7. See also Beer (1985) 23–28, 37.
8. See also 115, 123, 127, 434, and 455 in Origin. All quotations are
from the 1859 edition unless otherwise noted.
9. All translations from French are my own. The original quotation
reads: “ces jobards qui ont trouvé dans Herbert Spencer, les scolies
prétentieux dont masquer leur crasse ignorance; ces rabâcheurs
d’évolutionnisme qui font des timides hypthèses de Darwin leurs
béates certitude.”
10. The original quotation:

“au termes de la bataille qu’il a vaillamment menée et où s’affrontérent

les fidèles de ces deux vérités, doute de l’efficacité de la science et con-
state qu’il existe des êtres, des êtres qui vivent, qui aiment—des êtres
qui sont aimés! auxquels l’erreur est mille fois plus nécessaire que la
vérité, pour cette raison qu’ils l’assimilent entièrement, qu’elle les fait
vivre! tandis que la vérité les laisserait mourir d’inanition, comme des
poissons tirés sur la terre ferme”

11. In “Evolution and Ethics” Huxley (1948) writes:

I see no limit to the extent to which intelligence and will, guided by

sound principles of investigation, and organized in common effort,
may modify the conditions of existence for a period longer than that
now covered by history. And much may be done to change the nature
of man himself. The intelligence which has converted the brother of
the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do
something towards curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized man.
(110)
266 S.R. YANG

12. There are two official versions of “The Horla,” one published in
1886, the other in 1887. One significant difference between the
two is the earlier version’s framing device. The reasons for my
focusing on the version without the frame will become clear as this
essay progresses and in footnote eighteen. Biographer Francis
Steegmuller calls “Letter from a Madman” (1885) “the first,
crude, almost completely undramatized version of “Le Horla”
(383). All quotations from “The Horla” are from the translation of
the 1887 version in Classic Ghost Stories.
13. “Dans cette action du milieu sur l’être vivant, l’influence est sen-
sible des doctrines transformistes et de ces débats qui, depuis 1830,
depuis l’assaut académique de Cuvier et de Geoffroy Saint-Hiliare,
ont agité le siècle” (276).
14. “sa préoccupation sans cesse croissante de l’évolution des êtres
vivants” and “l’intérêt extrême qu’il porta toujours aux chose de
l’histoire naturelle” (276).
15. For a deeper discussion of this point see Levine (1988) 20, 24–55,
84, 86–115 and Beer (1985) 39, 59–63, 68–72, 116.
16. The direction of the Horla’s earthly migration is subtly ironic: like
Darwin’s data and consequent conclusions, the Horla comes from
the New World to the Old, literally as well as figuratively, illustrat-
ing that humans are not the height of creation. The Horla’s passage
from South America to Europe symbolizes that the knowledge
Darwin brought back deprives us of power rather than empowers
us.
17. Maupassant’s study of nature in Darwinian terms also undercuts
the Romantic view of nature as a nurturing, uplifting force that can
cleanse us of the spiritual corruption of traditional religious and
social constraints. In an especially telling instance, the narrator
seems to find a peace and inspiration in the purity of nature right
out of Wordsworth or Rousseau:

I thought of all this as I walked by the side of the water. The sun shone
brightly on the river and made earth delightful, while it filled me with
a love for life, for the swallows, whose agility always delights my eye,
for the plants by the riverside, the rustle of whose leaves is a pleasure
to my ears. (262)

Unfortunately, the narrator’s escape is brief. The power of the

Horla is greater than any illusions of nature’s comfort and beauty:
 NATURE SELECTS THE HORLA: HOW THE CONCEPT OF NATURAL SELECTION... 267

“By degrees, however, an inexplicable feeling of discomfort seized

me. It seemed as if some unknown force were numbing and stop-
ping me, were preventing me from going further, and were calling
me back” (262). The reality of human subservience to a superior
organism, to being part of nature’s cycle of struggle not nature’s
special darling, cannot be permanently escaped in Romantic
Natural Supernaturalism. Like the God to whom the narrator calls
for “succor” and “mercy,” this world view is illusory; the reality of
our true place in creation is spiritually “numbing.”
18. See Krumm (1995) and also Martin Calder (1998), “Something in
the Water: Self as Other in Guy De Maupassant’s Le Horla: A
Barthesian Reading.” Interestingly, in an earlier version of the short
story, the narrator is presented as an inmate in an asylum under review
by mental doctors (Wolter 283–84). However, by rewriting and pub-
lishing “The Horla” with that frame removed, Maupassant deliber-
ately chooses to eliminate evidence indicating that the narrator is
insane. He takes away vital support that the narrator and his horrific
discoveries can be dismissed, symbolically or literally, as a delusion.

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———. “Darwin on Changing the Mind.” In Appleman 529–55. Print.
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———. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1995. Print.
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Darwin. London: Penguin, 1985. 11–48. Print.
———. Introduction. Burrow 11–48. Print.
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Chambers, Robert. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other

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———. The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of
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 Ruins of Empire: Refashioning the Gothic
in J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984)

Alex Watson

INTRODUCTION: RUINS IN THE GOTHIC AND BALLARD

Since Horace Walpole pioneered the Gothic genre with his 1764 vision of
the disintegrating Castle of Otranto, ruins have been an essential and per-
vasive aspect of the landscape of Gothic literature. To take a handful of just
the most famous examples, we might recall: the crumbling castles of Ann
Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); the dilapidated estate of John
Melmoth’s uncle in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820); the
splintering architecture of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of
Usher” (1839); the moldering Whitby Abbey in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897); or the ancient desert ruin in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Nameless
City” (1921). These decaying structures have been interpreted in numer-
ous ways: as embodiments of the Gothic’s rejection of neoclassical values1;
metaphors for the collapse of feudal power in the wake of the French
Revolution2; symbols of Imperial anxiety3; symbols of legal4 or patriarchal
oppression5; or reminders of neglected cultures, histories, and traditions.6
Although he is not normally considered a Gothic author, the science-
fiction writer and memoirist J. G. Ballard shares the genre’s preoccupation
with images of ruin; from the wrecked automobiles of his “Crashed Cars”

A. Watson ()
Graduate School of Languages and Culture, Nagoya, Japan

© The Author(s) 2016 271

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_12
272 A. WATSON

exhibition of 1970 and his notorious novel Crash (1973) to the deserted
suburbs, crashed bombers, abandoned hotels, and shattered psyches that
frequent his short stories. In his early, hard science-fiction World trilogy—
The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal
World (1966)—environmental catastrophes create exotic ruined land-
scapes in which characters confront their most destructive desires. In High
Rise (1975) tenants decimate their modern, high-convenience apartment
block and descend into an orgy of violence. And in Hello America (1981),
characters living in 2114 AD explore a North America ruined by ecologi-
cal collapse. In this chapter, I do not want to use such examples to position
Ballard as a straightforward creator of Gothic fictions. Rather, I wish to
ask what his fixation with ruins as mirrors of the psyche—a central aspect
of Gothic landscapes—can tell us about his writing’s meaning and histori-
cal significance.
Famously, the emergence of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century
coincided with a vogue for ruins. At the time, English noblemen would
construct artificial ruins in their gardens, ruins became a popular theme
for artists such as Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Hubert Robert and Giovanni
Battista Piranesi, and for “graveyard poets” such as Robert Blair, John
Dyer, and Edward Young.7 As Anne Janowitz points out, the ruin became
an important image “just as England, in its represented form as ‘Britain,’
was emerging as a dominant nation-state, and launching a global empire”
(2). Ruins encountered at home served British nationalism by providing
exemplifications of a distinctive national history. And ruins discovered
abroad aided British Imperialism by locating foreign places in a distant
cultural past, thereby legitimizing invasion as a necessary step in bring-
ing an ancient country into modern history. Nevertheless, as Janowitz
observes, the eighteenth-century ruin was a paradoxical symbol: “at the
same time, ruin imagery cannot help asserting the visible evidence of his-
torical and Imperial impermanence” (4).
In this chapter I argue that by redeploying the image of ruin—an
image central to the culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British
national identity and empire—Ballard invites us to reconsider this complex
motif from a unique psychological and historical vantage point. Most obvi-
ously, as I will show, Ballard’s fascination with ruin is a product of his trau-
matic childhood experiences in war-torn China, experiences that Ballard
describes in his autobiography Miracles of Life (2008) as providing him
with an acute awareness of the precariousness of the present: “the sense
that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment,
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 273

and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept

aside into the debris of the past” (Miracles 58). Yet, Ballard’s keen sensi-
tivity to how easily the world can be torn apart or thrown away is also a
distinctive response to a profound reformulation of global power, as the
overtly hierarchical and Imperialist style of nineteenth-century European
capitalist hegemony yielded to the apparently more libertarian ethos of
twentieth-century American consumer capitalism. To demonstrate this,
in the next section, I consider the text in which Ballard deploys ruin most
overtly as a metaphor for personal and historical trauma and transition—
his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984). In the conclusion, I
consider the significance of the novel’s refashioning of the Gothic image
of ruin for our understanding of Ballard’s writing.

RUINS IN EMPIRE
Empire takes place during the Second Sino-Japanese War (July 7, 1937–
September 9, 1945), a military conflict provoked by the Empire of Japan’s
attempt to colonize large parts of the Republic of China, resulting in the
death of an estimated one million Japanese and twenty million Chinese
(Feng 10–27). But the novel also shows how the War brought to an end a
longer period of British economic and political involvement in China’s east
coast. Ballard recounts the story of a young British boy, Jamie Graham,
who is separated from his parents in Shanghai after the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor. After a brief period of scavenging for food in the city, Jim
is interned in Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center, a Japanese concentra-
tion camp. At the end of the War, Jim survives a long march to Nantao,
before being reunited with his parents. While Ballard bases the novel on
his early experiences, it is not strictly an autobiography. Unlike Jim, for
instance, he lived with his parents and younger sister at Lunghua. The
novel’s plot forms a frame for Ballard’s lengthy descriptions of Jim’s wan-
derings through a series of ruined landscapes: drained swimming pools;
abandoned aerodromes; crashed Japanese aircraft; Chinese burial mounds
and burial grounds; children’s coffins decked with paper flowers float-
ing across the Yangtze river; sunken freighters; disused canals; destroyed
stockyards; the empty houses of the former international settlement; the
deserted Chapei Ceramics work; and the burned-out shell of an English
country club.
In keeping with Gothic ideas of the sublime and picturesque, Ballard
aestheticizes these ruins, admiring the “immense pathos” of the throttle
274 A. WATSON

and undercarriage levers of an abandoned Zero fighter, or the “derelict

beauty” of a group of bombed aircraft (221). Just as the eighteenth-century
theorist of the picturesque William Gilpin described ruins as sources of
“that soothing melancholy, on which the mind feeds in contemplation
of the ruins of time” (182), so Ballard locates ruins’ poignant, dejected
elegance in their capacity to stimulate a troubling yet often consoling con-
frontation with the past. For instance, after the declaration of the end
of the war, Jim abandons the group of British expats staggering back to
Shanghai and returns to Lunghua. The decaying camp reveals to him his
loss of even his recent past: notice boards display “fading camp bulletins”
(238), “faded magazine cuttings” remain “pinned to the wall of his bunk”
(239), “[his former neighbor] Mrs. Vincent had torn down the curtain
of his cubicle” (239), and the prisoners’ former lockers “had been looted
by the Japanese” (238). The eerie unfamiliarity of these changes encapsu-
lates Jim’s sense that he has been “banished … forever” from “the secure
world of the camp” (128). However, as this example demonstrates, while
Gilpin and others tended to focus on encounters with famous ruins sev-
eral hundred years old, Ballard explores recent ruins of unique personal
significance.
Ballard relishes ruins’ disruptive aesthetics, describing a landscape
resembling “a panorama displayed on a cinema screen” (146) exposed
by the bombing of the proscenium arch of Lunghua assembly hall and
a banner for a pirated Chinese version of Gone with the Wind (1939)
atop Nanking Theatre, on which are displayed the “partly dismantled
faces of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh … above an almost life-size rep-
lica of burning Atlanta … barely distinguishable from the fires still lift-
ing above the tenements of the Old City” (41). In the association these
images create between ruin and cinema, Ballard highlights how ruin-
ation transforms real landscapes into fantastical montage. According to
Ballard, “War … is the ultimate Surrealist dislocation” (qtd. in Baxter
128); armed conflict dissolves the world into surrealist fantasy, expos-
ing society’s fragility. Ballard’s celebration of creative deconstruction is
implicit in eighteenth-century discourses. As an example of the sublime,
for instance, Edmund Burke imagines London being destroyed by disas-
ter, remarking “what numbers from all parts would croud [sic] to behold
the ruins” (77). Yet Ballard goes far further than Burke in lauding the
transgressive potential of sites unencumbered by the norms weighing on
encoded, regulated space. While Burke is careful to insist that “no man
is so strangely wicked as to desire to see [London] destroyed by a con-
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 275

flagration or an earthquake”(77), Ballard eagerly envisions the sculptor

George Segal’s plaster-casts of prominent art patrons as “figures from
some future Pompeii” (Atrocity Exhibition 17) or opines that “the hydro-
gen bomb was a symbol of absolute freedom” (43) via the mouthpiece
of the character Tavern in “The Terminal Beach” (1964). The Burkean
sublime of the late eighteenth-century Gothic ultimately reaffirmed the
proto-Imperial British subject by ultimately placing destruction at a dis-
tance. Ballard, however, is far more radical, celebrating catastrophe as a
means of self-transcendence. In so doing, Ballard’s images of ruin doc-
ument and embrace a profound shift in national identity, a transition
caused by Imperial decline. In part, the ruins in Empire are a reflection
of Jim’s fractured psyche, in a manner recalling Walpole’s or Radciffe’s
use of collapsing castles as metaphors for their protagonists’ troubled
consciousness. However, whereas the anxieties of central characters in
these earlier Gothic fictions are the result of the collapse of feudalism and
the emergence of new bourgeois mentalities, Jim’s cognitive dissonance
is sparked by the final implosion of the British Empire during the Second
World War. When Jim first returns to his home in Amherst Avenue after
having been separated from his parents, he looks at his reflection in a
cracked mirror, and contemplates “the star-like image of himself that
radiated from the centre of the mirror … pieces of himself seemed to
be flying across the room, scattered through the empty house” (44). In
an inversion of the mirror stage, Jim’s shattered reflection denies him
a stable, continuous ego, instead offering a fragmentary vision of self-
hood. This incoherent sense of self embodies his bewilderment at the
War’s eradication of his privileged English expatriate childhood. As the
War progresses, Jim begins to find a peculiar comfort in fantasies of self-
dissolution, imagining himself as a wounded Kamikaze pilot, who falls to
his death among the burial mounds and pagodas: “[p]ieces of his flying
suit and parachute, perhaps even of his own body, would spread across
the paddy fields feeding the prisoners behind the wire and the Chinese
starving at the gate” (158). In these dark reveries, Jim delights in the idea
of transgressing not only his national identity (from British to Japanese)
but his very selfhood, becoming part of a constant cycle of ruination and
regeneration that both destroys and enables existence. When Jim returns
to Amherst Avenue for the last time, after he has escaped from Lunghua,
he is unable to identify with the surroundings that formerly helped struc-
ture his identity and is haunted by the sensation that “his soul had died
at Nantao, even though his body had survived” (240). Jim is ruin and
276 A. WATSON

ruinist; symbol of obliteration and spectator to his own destruction. In

this sense he represents a mid-twentieth-century revision of the earlier,
late eighteenth-century Gothic subject.
Yet for Ballard, ruins are sources of liberation as well as lamentation. In
particular, Ballard celebrates ruin as a stimulus for psychological renewal.
In interview, Ballard remarked on the positive effects of catastrophe in his
early novels:

The geophysical changes which take place in The Drought, The Drowned
World and The Crystal World are all positive and good changes … The
changes lead us to our real psychological goals, so they are not disaster sto-
ries at all. (Goddard and Pringle 42)

In Ballard’s view, the breakdown of social order entailed in ruination pro-

vides a space for subversion and the exertion of new forms of personal
autonomy. According to Valdine Clemens, Gothic narratives can be thera-
peutic: “in frightening us out of our habitual ‘wits,’ Gothic fiction can
actually shock us into using them in more viable ways” (1). In keeping
with this observation, Jim’s traumatic experiences cause him to adopt new
strategies for engaging with the world. However, Ballard is not sentimen-
tal enough to believe that trauma results in self-improvement, insisting
that it leads to an altered, but not necessarily “better,” self. When Jim
returns to Amherst Avenue after the house has been abandoned and he
has been separated from his family, he takes full advantage of his liberation
from routine and parental authority: “he did something he had always
longed to do: mounted his cycle and rode through the formal, empty
rooms” (47).
Likewise, Ballard describes how the energy and danger of the Japanese
invasion galvanized the chaotic city of Shanghai: “War always invigorated
Shanghai, quickened the pulse of its congested streets. Even the corpses
in the gutters seemed livelier” (39). Nonetheless, as Ballard’s grim refer-
ence to the dead lining the street indicates, his celebration of the trans-
formative power of destruction is held in check by his awareness that ruin
registers trauma. When Jim discovers “a Chinese teapot three stories high
built entirely from green bricks” resembling “a punctured globe of the
earth” at the gates of the former Chapei ceramics works, Ballard interjects:
“These strange dislocations appealed to Jim. For the first time he felt able
to enjoy the war” (97). Here Jim’s blasphemous appetite for such ruined
environments not only demonstrates his ecstatic sensitivity to the poetry
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 277

of disintegration, it is also a survival tactic, tempered by Ballard’s recogni-

tion that ruins remain sites of tragedy.
While Jim learns to enjoy this world of constant, peculiar transforma-
tions, the adults he encounters frequently find such flexibility an anathema
to their most deeply held feelings about themselves. The narrator claims
that Jim’s unofficial guardian in Lunghua, Dr. Ransome, “resented Jim for
revealing an obvious truth about the war, that people were only too able
to adapt to it” (163). Only adults are sufficiently sentimental to experience
war as tragedy; children can more easily accommodate themselves to such
turmoil, because their sense of self is less tied to the order of the world that
preceded it. In Miracles, Ballard recalls that, during his childhood:

I felt fairly skeptical about the adult world and the notions of good sense
and decisive thought promoted by my parents and teachers. War, I knew,
was an irrational business and the sensible predictions of architects, doctors,
and managing directors had a marked tendency to be wrong. (Miracles 81)

For Ballard, ruin exposes the disparity between the world and socially
ordained explanations of it. Ballard inhabits a Gothic mental landscape,
aware that authorized metanarratives disguise a more threatening, yet
exhilarating, reality. On his return to Lunghua, Jim uncovers a discarded
copy of Life magazine in which is printed Joseph Rosenthal’s famous
1945 photograph of five United States Marines and a United States Navy
corpsman raising a US flag atop Mount Suribachi, during the Battle of
Iwo Jima in World War II. The boldness and gallantry eulogized in this
image contrasts sharply with the decimated landscape of Lunghua and
the brutality and moral ambiguity that characterize Jim’s experiences: “[t]
he Americans in these magazines had fought an heroic war, closer to the
comic books that Jim had read as a child” (249). The irony is, of course,
that the veracity of this photo has been hotly contested: it most likely
depicts the second flag-raising that occurred on that day, and rumors have
circulated that it was staged.8 By demonstrating how easily reality can be
dismantled, ruins highlight the disconnection between the glamorizing,
Manichean official narratives of conflict and its actual lived reality. Just as
the eighteenth-century Gothic ruin registers a collapse in conventional
modes of understanding, so Ballard’s landscapes express a sense of psycho-
social fracture. Ruins also embody Jim’s sense of cultural alienation as
a British boy growing up in China. His fascination with the disruptive
power of unruly locations reflects the inconsistency of his own identity, as
278 A. WATSON

an ostensibly “English” child who has never been to England, living on

the other side of the world from his supposed homeland and existing in
peculiar juxtaposition to his Chinese surroundings. As Jim cycles around
after being abandoned by his parents, he observes: “[b]odies of Chinese
lay everywhere, hands tied behind their backs in the centre of the road,
dumped behind the sandbag emplacements, half-severed heads resting on
each other’s shoulders” (55). The leisureliness of Jim’s cycling explora-
tions contrast jarringly with the gruesome sights he witnesses. In such
descriptions, the Chinese themselves are cast as ruins; both remainders of
a formerly coherent society obliterated by historical trauma and an active
principle of destabilization that threatens to overwhelm the observing self.
When Jim witnesses a Chinese execution, Ballard interjects:

The Chinese enjoyed the spectacle of death … as a way of reminding them-

selves of how precariously they were alive. They liked to be cruel for the
same reason, to remind themselves of the vanity of thinking the world was
anything else. (40)

With such comments, Ballard aligns the Chinese with the same entro-
pic force of ruination that fascinates and disturbs him. For Ballard, both
ruins and the Chinese exemplify a bleak yet sophisticated skepticism
towards attempts to explain away disaster. In keeping with this perspec-
tive, Ballard’s depictions of ruined China often contain a Gothic sense
of underlying menace. He describes, for instance how “[t]he long train
of Chinese funeral kites undulated along the street, head nodding as it
bestowed its ferocious smile on the European houses” (9). The Cheshire-
cat-like grin the kites confer on the European settlements hints at the
destabilizing threat the country represents to Western identity and
supremacy; here China temporarily frames and contains Europe, not the
other way around. Ballard’s fear that the foreign Other might contaminate
and envelop the Western Self is an anxiety that animates numerous Gothic
exotic narratives, from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor (1805) to
Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (1994).
By representing China as a ruin, Ballard could be said to view the coun-
try through a colonial lens. During the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, stories and images of Chinese ruins were created by such figures
as the architect William Chambers, the ambassador Lord Macartney, the
illustrator William Alexander, and the photographer Robert G. Sillar. In
so doing, such figures projected a European construction on to China.
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 279

However, as the Chinese art historian Wu Hung recently pointed out,

“there was not a single case in pre-twentieth century China in which the
ruined appearance of an old building was purposefully preserved” (13),
since Chinese architecture used primarily timber constructions that would
disintegrate entirely without recurrent restoration. Although many of
these individuals admired China, their portrayals of Chinese ruins aided
British Imperialism by unnaturally locating the nation in a previous stage
of Enlightenment stadial history.
In keeping with examples of earlier British Imperial culture, Ballard
exoticizes China, envisaging the canal-side village huts and dwell-
ings rebuilt from bricks from the destroyed Chapei ceramics works as a
“vision of a magical rural China” (97). Here Ballard reveals a fascina-
tion with foreign, vanishing modes of life. Moreover, in keeping with
the Enlightenment stadial narrative implicit in many eighteenth-century
Gothic fictions, he locates twentieth-century China in an earlier stage of
historical development, likening “[t]he shabby, single-story houses hud-
dled against the walls of a ceramics factory” in a town on the river two
miles south of Lunghua to “the medieval dwellings … clustering around
a Gothic cathedral” (259). Unlike the Japanese or American characters
whom Jim encounters, such as Sergeant Nagata or Basie, Ballard never
depicts the Chinese as individuals. As if to underscore their relative lack
of importance, Ballard even compares a group of Chinese people running
away from an explosion to “ants escaping from a broken flowerpot” (260).
Like many hostile Gothic representations of the foreign Other, Ballard’s
images of China and the Chinese people as ruins appear to consolidate
a Western Imperialist world view, assigning the country and its people a
lower position in a global hierarchy of race and culture.
However, the idea that Ballard’s figuration of the Chinese and China
as ruins is a straightforwardly Imperialistic example of Gothic exoticism is
complicated by the fact that, around the same time in which the novel is
set, Chinese writers and artists had begun to use the ruin as a symbol of
China. In an essay that has become extremely famous in China, Lu Xun
characterized the collapse of the ruined Leifeng Pagoda in Hangzhou in
1924 as a sign of the rigorous renovation required to modernize what
he saw as his antiquated, traumatized country, insisting that “[w]e need
destroyers that bring reforms” (qtd. in Foster). In addition, as Hung
has documented recently, “by the 1930s and ’40s, images of architec-
tural ruins, in particular war ruins, had become an essential component of
Chinese popular art and visual culture” (Hung 146). The trope of China
280 A. WATSON

as ruin was utilized in the popular cartoons of Feng Zikai (1898–1975),

Wang Shaoling’s watercolour drawing Ruins of the Commercial Press after
the Battle of Shanghai (Lu zhan hao de Shangwu Yinshugauan yiji, 1932),
and Wu Zuoren’s oil-paintings Bombing of Chongqing (Congqing da hon-
gzha, 1941) and Life Cannot Be Destroyed (Buke huimie de shengming,
1941). In these fascinating examples of inversion via translation, the
Imperial image of the colonized space as ruin was appropriated by the
partially colonized as a metaphor for national resistance. Given the ubiq-
uity of ruin motifs in Chinese representations of the Sino-Japanese War, it
is myopic to consider Ballard’s analogous depictions without reference to
these examples. Instead, they point to an alternative indigenous Chinese
Gothic visual culture from which Ballard draws inspiration.
In fact, Ballard’s depiction of China as a ruin has many compelling
parallels with these contemporaneous Chinese representations. One cru-
cial similarity is their shared focus on a child stranded within ruins. For
instance, in his ink painting Shadows of Ghosts in an Empty Room (Kongshi
guiying tu, 1946), Situ Qiao depicts a dead baby in a deserted house, lying
on the now-skeletal body of his mother, as a metaphor for the anguish of
the Japanese lootings and massacres in Hunan province––just as in Western
Gothic specters and decomposing bodies register broader historical trau-
mas haunting the present. And in his black and white photograph Bloody
Saturday (1937), Wong Hai-Sheng (also known as Wang Xiaoting) docu-
ments a Chinese baby crying within the bombed-out ruins of Shanghai
South Railway Station, after an accidental bombing of civilian buildings
on Saturday August 14, 1937 (See Fig. 1). The link between these local
representations and Ballard’s descriptions is supported further by the vast
circulation of this latter image. According to Hung, “[i]t is estimated
that 1.36 billion people saw the picture, making it the image with the
most exposure from wartime China”; it was even printed in a November
1938 issue of Jim’s beloved Life magazine. In addition, the first chapter
of Ballard’s sequel to Empire, The Kindness of Women (1991), shares the
same title as the photograph. In both Empire and these Chinese examples,
the image of the child lost in ruins conveys China’s particular vulnerability
and the sense of the Japanese invasion as an unprovoked holocaust. At the
same time, Ballard’s ambivalent representation of ruin as both tragedy and
opportunity echoes what Hung identifies as “the twin theme of suffer-
ing and survival” explored in such Chinese representations (Hung 144).
Moreover, as Hung describes, in Chinese visual culture of the time, “the
focus of representation shifts from documentation to experience and from
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 281

Fig. 1 Bloody Saturday, (ARC Identification 535557) 1937 Wong Hai-Sheng/

Wang Xiao-Ting US National Archives Catalog, College Park, Maryland

the physical to the psychological”; faux-European Chinese photographs

of picturesque scenes were replaced with images that utilized ruin as a
metaphor for “a nation with a wounded … psyche” (Hung 140, 144). By
presenting visions of ruined landscapes as manifestations of the personal
trauma caused by radical historical transformation, these Chinese artists
created Gothic landscapes. And in his documentation of recent ruins cre-
ated by the Sino-Japanese conflict and his use of ruin as a metaphor for
the traumatized psychology of both Jim and the Chinese, Ballard is closer
to these indigenous Chinese Gothic examples than to standard Imperialist
representations.
The inadequacy of considering Ballard’s engagement with this Chinese
Gothic tradition as a univocal Imperialist gesture is demonstrated further
by his refusal to ignore Chinese suffering. As well as revealing an Imperial
anxiety, the aforementioned image of the billowing funeral kites wrapping
themselves around the European settlement in Shanghai encapsulates how
the lives of the Chinese threaded through those of the Westerners, existing
in greater proximity to disaster and tragedy. Moreover, when he links the
Chinese people to ruination, Ballard often reveals a qualified admiration
282 A. WATSON

for their determination to survive. Ballard describes how Chinese scrap-

dealers turn the rusting shell of the Japanese aircraft that crashed into
Lungua Airfield into a treasure trove:

With the tireless ability of the Chinese to transform one set of refuse into
another, they stripped the metal skins from the wings and retrieved the tires
and fuel tanks. Within days they would be on sale in Shanghai as roofing
panels, cisterns and rubber-soled sandals. (147)

In one sense, the scrap-dealing demonstrates a shocking lack of sentimen-

tality, in another, a laudable ability to improvise in the face of disaster.
The complex status of the Chinese is demonstrated further by one of the
final scenes in the novel, in which a crowd gathers below the steps of a
Shanghai club, and a group of American and British sailors emerge, urinat-
ing down the steps in a chorus line:

Fifty feet below them, the Chinese watched without comment as the arcs
of urine formed a foaming stream that ran down to the street. When it
reached the pavement the Chinese stepped back, their faces expressionless.
Jim glanced at the people around him, the clerks and coolies and peasant
women, well aware of what they were thinking. One day China would pun-
ish the rest of the world and take a frightening revenge. (278–9)

Ballard’s warning of terrifying Chinese reprisal reveals a colonial anxiety

about the Chinese reversing their subordinate status. Yet the reader is
left in little doubt about the unwarranted humiliation and extreme mis-
ery the Chinese people suffer at the hands of Western powers. Ballard’s
figuration of China as ruin draws on both Imperialist and indigenous rep-
resentations. Just as earlier Gothic had given voice to the repressed and
oppressed, he creates an ambivalent portrayal that at once confirms and
challenges colonial attitudes.
The ideological complexity of Ballard’s use of the ruin motif in Empire
is compounded by his deployment of ruin as a metaphor for the end of
the British Empire. In a vivid incident in Empire, Ballard returns to the
same image of the drained swimming pool that features so frequently
in his science-fiction, describing the pool at Jim’s parent’s house in the
International Settlement:

During the night the swimming pool had drained itself … The once-
mysterious world of wavering blue lines, glimpsed through a cascade of
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 283

bubbles, now lay exposed to the morning light. The tiles were slippery with
leaves and dirt, and the chromium ladder at the deep end, which had once
vanished into a watery abyss, ended abruptly beside a pair of scummy rubber
slippers. (46)

Such an incident acts as an omen of the impending breakdown of the

British Empire; an uncanny indication that Jim’s family’s privileged
but precarious existence amidst the turmoil of the Japanese invasion of
China will soon come to an end. For Ballard, ruins manifest geopolitical
power relations at the level of tangible everyday experience. By attend-
ing to them, we can understand our own position within these complex
macro-structures. In his presentation of decaying images of the landscape
as embodiments of the psychological dissolution caused by wider socio-
political change, Ballard participates in the Gothic. For him, even the tini-
est details of everyday life manifest global power-relations; subtle forms of
personal or environmental neglect can be auguries of broader geopolitical
decline.
In like manner, Ballard represents the Imperial delusions of the British
as a form of ruin. With a mixture of delusion and defiance, the British
prisoners at Lunghua attempt to regain symbolic control of their sur-
roundings by fashioning crudely-painted signs inscribed “‘Regent Street’
… ‘Piccadilly,’ ‘Knightsbridge’” (130). Ballard describes them sustain-
ing themselves via “relics of an imaginary London—which many of the
Shanghai-born British prisoners had never seen” (130–1). The batheti-
cally ruined status of this world not only signals the childlike unreality of
the internees’ desire to regress to a past so as to anaesthetize themselves to
the present, but also shows that the Britain to which they seek to retreat is
and always has been a fantasy. Just as Jim’s experiences of China highlight
his dislocation, so these fragments of “a strange, inconceivable England”
(131) underscore his lack of a coherent cultural identity. Bewildered and
intrigued by the names of the London cricket ground, river, and theatre,
he asks himself: “[w]hat, conceivably, were Lords, the Serpentine and
the Trocadero?” (131). His fellow internees live ruined lives, struggling
to hold on to an illusion of order among desolation and chaos. Ballard
describes Jim submitting to Latin drills almost out of pity: “the homework
helped Dr. Ransome to sustain the illusion that even in Lunghua Camp
the values of a vanished England still survived” (149). In so doing, Ballard
articulates and reworks the same tension between the old and the new that
animates the Gothic.
284 A. WATSON

In Miracles, Ballard depicts the post-War England that greeted him on

his return from Lunghua Camp as a ruin:

England seemed derelict, dark and half-ruined … Large sections of London

and the Midlands were vast bomb sites, and most of the buildings still
standing were ruined and desolate. London and greater Birmingham, like
the other main cities, had been built in the 19th century, and everything
seemed to be crumbling and shabby, unpainted for years, and in many ways
resembled a huge demolition site. (Miracles 122)

Such architectural degradation manifests a nationwide sense of ruination.

Ballard describes how a country with a claim to being the most powerful
in the world at the beginning of the century now found itself near its mid-
point in a condition of social and environmental degradation, struggling
to find comfort in the past: “we had suffered enormous losses, exhausted
and impoverished ourselves, and had little more to look forward to than
our own nostalgia.” For Ballard, the lives of the English were inhibited by
their failure to recognize their own ruination. He asks rhetorically: “did
the English pay a fearful price for the system of self-delusions that under-
pinned almost everything in their lives?” (127). In particular, the English
class system represented a social structure that was at once an agent of
ruination, enervating the English population, and something requiring
ruination, so as to allow their liberation:

It was clear to me from the start that the English class system, which I
was meeting for the first time, was an instrument of political control, and
not a picturesque social relic … Everything about English middle-class life
revolved around codes of behavior that unconsciously cultivated second-
rated-ness and low expectations. (Miracles 125–26)

In such examples, Ballard turns the Imperial image of ruin against itself,
transforming it from an emblem of British global power into a means
of critiquing the country’s social and political inheritance. In his view,
the new form of consumer capitalism advanced in America provided pre-
cisely the form of constructive ruination that the English required. He
describes how America offered a sense of optimism and possibility oth-
erwise absent in the England of the late forties: “[t]he only hope came
from Hollywood films, and long queues, often four abreast, formed out-
side, the immense Odeons and Gaumonts that had survived the bomb-
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 285

ing” (Miracles 123–24). In the same way that the fear and terror evoked
by Gothic landscapes manifests the cognitive dissonance produced by the
negotiation between the old and the new, so Ballard’s ruined landscapes
manifest the trepidation and excitement stimulated by the death of the
British-dominated past and the emergence of an American future. In
Empire, Ballard records American consumer culture’s increasing allure via
Jim’s fascination with the “style and magic” of the “geegaws” circulated
as a second currency by the American prisoners at Lunghua (“comic books
and copies of Life, Reader’s Digest and Saturday Evening Post; novelty
pens, lipsticks and powder compacts; gaudy tiepins, cigarette lighters and
celluloid belts; fairground cuff links and Wild West buckles” (169). Ballard
makes clear the link between America’s burgeoning cultural power and its
growing military might, describing Jim’s enthusiasm for B29 bombers,
which “summed up all the power and grace of America” (175). Ballard
also registers American incipient ascendancy in Empire’s closing lines, with
the image of the “paper flowers” of “a child’s coffin … shaken loose by
the wash of a landing craft carrying sailors from the American cruiser”
(279). Here Ballard’s elegiac image is distinctively, if subtly, Gothic in
its juxtaposition of past and future. The presence of the American ship
implies the inauguration of a new historical order. But the fluctuating,
returning journey that the flowers make across the tide attests to the capri-
cious yet repetitive movement of history: “[t]he flowers formed a waver-
ing garland around the coffin as it began its long journey to the estuary
of the Yangtze, only to be swept back by the incoming tide among the
quays and mud flats, driven once again to the shores of the city” (279).
America’s global rise remains a continuation of the same pattern of tragic
yet creative destruction that characterizes all periods of human history.
Indeed, Ballard’s description of the coffins returns the reader to the nov-
el’s opening lines: “Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other
like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city
all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese bund” (3).
Ballard’s repetition of this image at the beginning and the ending not only
signals the centrality of ruin within the novel, and his oeuvre more gener-
ally, but embodies his rejection of cathartic metanarratives of nation and
progress in favor of a cyclical view of history as a constant process of ruin
and regeneration. In so doing, Ballard places his reader within a Gothic
mental landscape; an environment constantly collapsing and regenerating
as a result of the conflict between old and new.
286 A. WATSON

CONCLUSION: BALLARD’S RUINS OF MODERNITY

In this chapter, I have argued that Ballard’s writing is marked by a pre-
occupation with ruin. For Ballard, ruin is a perennial, amoral, principle
of entropy operating within human personality and history that demon-
strates the disjunction between our environment and the order we seek to
apply to it. In his attention to ruins’ aesthetics and his representation of
them as manifestations of the protagonist’s psychology, Ballard’s ruins are
recognizably Gothic landscapes. Yet Ballard departs from Gothic conven-
tion in representing recent ruins with a clear autobiographical significance
and in placing greater emphasis on celebrating ruins as emblems of cre-
ative destruction and vehicles for psychological growth. For Ballard, the
fragmentary condition of ruins also mirrors the threat China poses to the
coherence of the Western self. Yet his depiction of China as a ruin is not
straightforwardly Imperialistic, and his psychological, documentary focus,
along with his stress on ruins as symbols of Chinese vulnerability and sur-
vival, aligns him more closely with indigenous, anti-colonial representa-
tions. In fact, drawing on what Janowitz describes as the ruin’s assertion
of “historical and Imperial impermanence” (Janowitz 4), Ballard’s ruins
document the abrupt effects of the decline of British power and the rise
of America.
Curiously, many recent critics have found fault with attempts to link
Ballard’s writing to an autobiographical or Imperial context. For Iain
Sinclair, works such as Empire had a reductive effect on readers’ responses
to Ballard by encouraging them to find a simplistic moral message in the
author’s characteristic preoccupations: “[t]he love of madness, rage, the
charge towards millennial meltdown that Ballard had espoused and incu-
bated, could be heritaged as ‘warning’”(Sinclair 18). Similarly, Luckhurst
warns that “the security of the Imperial sub-text can close the enigmatic
gaps that constitute the space of the novels” (44). In contrast, Ballard
himself traces his own preoccupation with disaster to his wartime experi-
ences. In Miracles, he writes “[t]he memories of Shanghai that I had tried
to repress had been knocking at the floorboards under my feet, and has
[sic] slipped quietly into my fiction” (251). Far from reducing his work
to sentimental epithets, exploring these themes enables us to trace com-
plex ambiguities and anxieties within it. While Luckhurst is right to warn
against, “a retrospective reading of the prior science fiction as encrypted
autobiographical performance” (155), to neglect this aspect of his work
completely is to diminish its richness. Rather, recognizing Ballard’s works’
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 287

complex relationship with its own historical context enriches our under-
standing of both. And placing his writing within a Gothic frame helps use
to recognize this by illuminating his complex negotiation with histori-
cal change. In his well-known comments, Fredric Jameson cast Ballard’s
works as “exemplary illustrations of the ways in which a dying class––in
this case the cancelled future of a vanished colonial and Imperial destiny––
seeks to intoxicate itself with images of death” (152). In so doing, Jameson
acknowledges how Ballard’s visions of disaster stem from his experience
of the disintegration of British Imperial power. Jameson describes insight-
fully how Ballard envisages history almost as a physical or geological
force, independent of human intervention, which can overpower human
attempts to control it, claiming that “Ballard’s work is one immense
attempt to substitute nature for history, and thus a kind of dizzying and
ecstatic feeling of inevitable natural eschatology for that far more trou-
bled sense of collective historical death which someone so steeped in the
British colonial experience must of necessity feel” (272–76). By identify-
ing that sense of eschatology pervading Ballard’s writings, Jameson rightly
emphasizes Ballard’s preoccupation with the end of British global domi-
nance. However, by describing Ballard’s celebration of the exhilaration
of destruction as a mask for post-Imperial longing, Jameson misses how
Ballard both laments and celebrates change and destruction, mourning as
well as willing the Imperial implosion he experienced in his childhood in
Shanghai. Here Ballard is a creator of Gothic fictions in the sense that he
presents the frightening and exciting interchange between the individual
psyche and a corroding but regenerating environment as a metaphor for
the dialectical nature of socio-political transformation.
Crucially, Ballard regards the post-war period not as a break from the
ruination he witnessed in the Second World War but as a perpetuation
of it by different means. In Miracles, he claims that “[i]n many ways my
entire fiction is the dissection of a deep pathology that I had witnessed
in Shanghai and later in the post-war world, from the threat of nuclear
war to the assassination of President Kennedy … to the violence that
underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the century”
(Miracles 145). Ballard’s claim that later political and cultural events are
an extension of the destructive dynamism that powered the Second World
War indicates that he detects a Gothic spirit of ruin and regeneration at
work within modernity itself. In his classic All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
(1982), Marshall Berman argued that:
288 A. WATSON

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adven-

ture, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and,
at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything
we know, everything we are … it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity:
it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of
struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. (15)

In like manner, Ballard’s ruins are an emblem of modern capitalism’s

unity within disunity, revealing both the lucrative opportunities disinte-
gration offers for redevelopment and renewal and the devastation that
awaits all those customs, traditions, polities, and peoples who do not heed
the coercive exigencies of competition. In this sense, Ballard’s writing
alerts us to how our contemporary reality generates and distributes ruin
at an unprecedented pace. Economic “development” hollows out Detroit
car factories, evacuates Rhonda valley coal mines, and levels Gujarat vil-
lages, while new technologies provide us with front-row tickets to the big-
gest human and natural disasters: from 9/11 to New Orleans; the 2008
crash to Tohoku. Ballard shows us that every modern subject exists within
a Gothic landscape of perpetual social and psychological transformation.
Importantly, what makes Ballard’s response to the ruining impact of
modernity distinctive and rich is its fundamentally Gothic ambivalence.
As in many Gothic works, such ambiguity enables Ballard to recognize
the revitalizing effect of catastrophe at the same time as acknowledging
its devastation of cultures and identities. Gregory Stephenson argues
that Ballard’s entire oeuvre is a celebration of transcendence, in terms of
“exceeding, escaping the limits of the material world, time and space, the
body, the senses and the ordinary ego-consciousness.” For Stephenson,
far from being nihilistic, Ballard’s work represents “an affirmation of the
highest humanistic and metaphysical ideal: the repossession for man of
authentic and absolute being” (38). While Stephenson is right to detect a
swaggering, almost Romantic, element in Ballard’s writing, he is wrong to
completely deny its agitated, sorrowful, even maniacal qualities. If Ballard
celebrates the new forms of psychological exploration made possible in
the modern world, he also sounds a note of trepidation. By ignoring this
elegiac tone, critics such as Stephenson, Sinclair, Luckhurst, and even
Jameson, reduce Ballard’s work to an empty celebration of the liberating
effect of violence and rapid social change for its own sake. Instead, consid-
ering the Gothic landscape of Ballard’s ruins enables us to recognize the
 RUINS OF EMPIRE: REFASHIONING THE GOTHIC IN J. G. BALLARD’S... 289

dynamism and destructiveness—the fundamental moral complexity—of

capitalist modernity.

NOTES
1. “Gothic style became the shadow that haunted neo-classical values,
running parallel and counter to its ideas of symmetrical form, rea-
son, knowledge, and propriety … ruins testified to a temporality
that exceeded rational understanding and human finitude,” Botting
(1994) 30.
2. “[T]he ruins [of Gothic fiction] appear suddenly so full of signifi-
cance in that they express the collapse of the feudal period,” André
Breton qtd. in Baldick and Mighall (2012) 267–87. See also 276.
3. According to Laura Callanan (2006), in Imperial Gothic narratives
of the mid-nineteenth century, “ruins become central to the cre-
ation of a uniquely frightening atmosphere” that evokes “increasing
fears regarding the colonial uprisings and bloodshed” (137).
4. “The metaphor of the law as a Gothic castle in ruins does not signify
some past glory to which we desire to return, but a sense that at
their core, judicial institutions are (and have been since time imme-
morial) dark and disturbing, and all too often, terribly unjust,”
Marshall (2011) 151.
5. “Gothic narratives enabled their audiences to conform and explore,
and simultaneously to deny … that ‘the Law of the Father’ is a
tyrannical paterfamilias and that we dwell in his ruins,” Williams
(1995) 24.
6. “Gothic in general is strewn with ruins, endlessly attentive to the
‘other’ stories that can be told about national and cultural monu-
ments,” Punter (2002) 105–24. See also 122.
7. See, for instance, Michael Makarius (2004), Ruins.
8. See, for instance, Hal Buell, ed. (2006) Uncommon Valor, Common
Virtue: Iwo Jima and the Photograph that Captured America.

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 Gothic Landscapes in Mary Butts’s Ashe
of Rings

Roslyn Reso Foy

When the Gothic novel emerged in the eighteenth century, it appeared

as a reaction to the economic and political conditions prevalent in society
at the time, in which “early forces of industrialization were producing
vast changes in the ways people lived and worked. Rural patterns of life
were being broken up by enclosure of land and by the labor demands
of urban-centered industry” (Punter 413). Karl Marx argued that under
capitalism man is further alienated from the natural world. The Gothic
then addressed such issues of alienation, which were not only external
but also internal. Disillusioned with the social climate and rationalistic
ideas of the Enlightenment, society turned to the supernatural and the
fantastic for answers. Or, as Fred Botting observes, “Uncertainties about
the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominate Gothic
fiction” (5). The crumbling manor house and separation from an ancestral
past reflected the dissolution of a way of life, and the genre appealed to
the human sense of longing for return to a natural world that offered a
sense of permanence.
Similar fears and anxieties about loss of a particular way of life and
about the nature of human personality arose during the Modernist
period. Mary Butts (1890–1937), a British modernist who grew up in a

R. Reso Foy ( )
Department of English, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

© The Author(s) 2016 293

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2_13
294 R. RESO FOY

house surrounded by the mystical, Gothic, and magical paintings of the

Romantic poet William Blake (her great-grandfather was Thomas Butts,
one of Blake’s patrons), sought answers in her fiction for the disruption
of her own way of life and that of her contemporaries. Her childhood
also nourished ideas of the supernatural she believed to be present in the
natural world as she struggled as a young woman to assert her formidable
intellect in a world dominated by men. Before her early death at forty-six,
she published six novels, three volumes of short stories, an autobiography
of childhood, uncollected poetry, two pamphlet-length essays and numer-
ous reviews. Although Butts’s work was published alongside that of the
major figures of High Modernism, most of whom she knew personally,
her work has been overlooked for numerous reasons. She was a difficult
and flamboyant personality, addicted to opium. She experimented with
heroin, cocaine, and indulged in alcohol. She was a free spirit in an age
reeling from the effects of World War I, shocking everyone who knew her,
even the bohemians with whom she intermingled. She also dabbled in the
occult (in fact, spent time at Aleister Crowley’s Abbey in Cefalu, Italy),
became fascinated by the ghost stories of M. R. James, found solace in the
natural world of her family’s home in Dorset, England, and kept a diary
from 1916 until her death in 1937. Most critics agree that her personal-
ity affected subsequent reaction to her work, and her only child refused
to release her papers until 1998 when she finally turned them over to the
Beinecke Library at Yale University. With a background immersed in a
sense of the sacredness of nature and in mysticism, and with landscape as
a central character in much of her work, Butts’s appropriation of elements
of the Gothic in her first published novel appears somewhat obvious in
retrospect.
The Gothic landscape of Mary Butts’s first novel Ashe of Rings (1925,
written in 1917) locates the source of power in the ancestral home and its
surrounding Rings Hill (a set of prehistoric mounded circles reminiscent
of Butts’s own Badbury Rings near her family home in Dorset, England).
Butts sets out to contrast the power of the natural landscape (the sublime)
with that of the “civilized” world of the city. The sacred land becomes a
reminder of a lost world, while at the same time emphasizes the terror
behind the return to a past closely connected to the awesome power of
primal nature.
Each age has its own sense of terror, its own fears, and its own explo-
rations into the human psyche, as the inner landscape of the mind
attempts to connect with the outer landscape of the world in which it
 GOTHIC LANDSCAPES IN MARY BUTTS’S ASHE OF RINGS 295

exists, confirming a sense of loss and the disintegration of a prevailing

set of beliefs about the world. Since the Gothic is a “hybrid form,” as
Fred Botting has noted (44), it is a form in flux, and it metamorphoses
along with contemporary investigations into the nature of evil and terror
by developing imaginative expressions of such elemental fears. With the
onslaught of World War I and the horror of its repercussions, new con-
cerns and terrors seized a generation left alone and lost. Sigmund Freud
had by this time introduced the concept of the unconscious. The idea of
an inner life not fully comprehensible to reason or external reality offered
an expansion of that reality with the supernatural and the fantastic as alter-
native expressions of a new form of reality, a new landscape of the mind.
As World War I ripped through the fabric of social hierarchies, the fear of
racial degeneracy and of return to a barbaric past intertwined with inter-
ests in breaking taboos. Just as the period of the Gothic’s birth had been
one when science and industrialization were creating vast changes in the
everyday lives of people, the stability of their work and their play, World
War I, similarly, introduced frightening changes to long-established social
structures and hierarchies.
For Mary Butts, in Ashe of Rings, such concerns are paramount.
Conflating the primal enchantment of the ancestral home and its sur-
roundings with witchcraft and the supernatural, Butts recasts the Gothic
in a modernist struggle to combat chaos and loss. In this novel the Gothic,
the fairy tale, and the occult all blend with elements of autobiographical
detail. As a result, this conflation offers a new generation of the hybrid
Gothic literary form.
Such uneasy negotiations among the present, past, and future, must
somehow be reconciled, not necessarily through the agency of rational or
scientific thought. The modernist Butts heroine, like the Gothic heroine,
finds herself inside an irrational world. Yet, instead of being terrified by
the irrational, Butts’s heroines hearken to a past where the irrational is the
norm. In so doing, they draw power and strength from a racial heritage
that utilized the supernatural to combat the purely rational. In effect, the
irrational landscape of the mind expands and clarifies the rational world
in a way that scientific positivism and purely logical thinking cannot. A
disintegrating ancestral home and family, a primal connection to a set of
prehistoric mounded circles extending the landscape and reflecting the
decay of the family and its heritage, a predisposition of the heroine toward
the supernatural and the mystical all combine to create a perfect literary
landscape for a modern Gothic.
296 R. RESO FOY

Loosely basing her novel on her own family’s past, Mary Butts appro-
priates the tradition of the Gothic genre and turns it into what she calls a
“war-fairy-tale,” or, in other words, a modernist horror story. The novel
exemplifies a desire to sort out her personal sense of loss along with the
general sense of loss for those damaged by war or revolution raging not
only in Europe but also within the hearts and souls of the characters them-
selves. The plot of Ashe of Rings traces the fortunes and misfortunes of its
heroine Vanna Elizabeth Ashe from conception to young womanhood.
Anthony Ashe, an aging patriarch, seeks a young wife to beget an heir.
He selects a woman from the village, who is thirty years his junior, for her
childbearing abilities. Since Melitta, his new wife, is not a blood member
of the ancient Ashe family, the manor home never accepts her but “like a
hive of bees, had enclosed her, not with honey, but with wax as though
she were some insect trespassing” (27). The house and the loyal butler
protect their own, and Melitta remains an outsider even after the birth of
her daughter Vanna Elizabeth, the true and natural heir to Rings, its magic
and its mystery.
David Punter has noted that “the Gothic was the archaic, the pagan,
that which was prior to, or was opposed to, or resisted the establishment
of civilised values and a well-regulated society” (6). In the course of her
novel Mary Butts explores the pagan past of the Ashe family and its ritu-
alistic protective devices, devices that do indeed set them outside “well-
regulated society.” Melitta, Anthony’s wife, eventually has an affair with
a younger man on the sacred grounds of Rings Hill, and after the birth
of a second child, Valentine Evelyn Ashe, Anthony dies giving Melitta the
freedom to marry the man with whom she has defiled the sacred estate.
The remainder of the narrative focuses on Vanna (exiled from her ide-
alized, ancestral home and her past by her mother) as a young woman
living in London “the year before the end of the war, when there was
very little to eat; and along with the strengthless food and the noises at
night friendship had lost its generosity and passion turned à rebours” (57).
Vanna shares a flat with the evil Judy Marston who, along with the deper-
sonalized city, is a metaphor for war and all it represents. Vanna and Judy
struggle over the soul of Serge, a white Russian émigré and artist who
exists somewhere between desire and death. Vanna resolves that to save
Serge’s soul she must travel to Rings to escape the city, to introduce him
to the sacred and healing forces of Rings Hill (“a precinct like Eleusis”),
and to reclaim her rightful inheritance. Judy attempts to foil her plans,
and the plot becomes complicated with ritual animal sacrifice, witchcraft,
 GOTHIC LANDSCAPES IN MARY BUTTS’S ASHE OF RINGS 297

conjuring of infernal spirits, and an attempted rape of the heroine. As a

fairy-tale, however, all is resolved and Butts offers the prescribed happy
ending, coming full circle to the family home and mirroring the magic
circle of the enchanted Rings Hill.
Through the agency of birth and race, Vanna realizes the necessity of
returning to Rings, to her primal origins, in order to combat the power
of evil inherent in Judy; for Vanna this is what Butts identifies as “a ten-
sion of life and a sense of living in at least two worlds at once” (Afterword
232). Appropriating the Gothic doubles figure in the characters of Vanna
(the good and authentic) versus Judy (evil, femme fatale, alter ego), Butts
maneuvers her narrative through the supernatural realm and makes it
immediate and real. Fearing the dissolution of a way of life, especially in
an England in the throes of losing its social identity, Butts’s heroine turns
to her ancestors and her land for solutions. Evil immolates itself upon the
memory of a sacramental past that is closely aligned with the heroine and
her natural world of Rings Hill.
The family home, then, is both a place of terror and of safety––a stark
contrast of the power of the natural landscape with that of the “civilized”
world of the city. As Linda Bayer-Berenbaum observes, “[t]he aim of the
supernatural in Gothic literature is to become as natural as possible, an
extension of nature; therefore, in the Gothic context, a more fitting term
might be transnatural” (33). In Butts’s joining of the natural and super-
natural as one, she unites Gothic conventions with the occult to explore
contemporary terrors and to suggest that only an authentic heir, an initi-
ate of the sacred past and its mysteries, can combat the malevolent forces
of the present––be they war, metaphors for war, threats to one’s past,
or destruction of one’s racial heritage. By moving into the closed world,
both literally and metaphorically, the heroine reveals and explores her own
inner world and recognizes that she must draw strength from her past
to battle the fears of the present. Indeed, she must situate herself firmly
within that transnatural world.
It is interesting to note that the concept of the city, representing the,
so-called, civilized world, continues the narrative of the Gothic horror
that Sara Wasson explores in her study of urban Gothic of World War II:
“To a generation who had seen the slaughter of the Somme, the Second
World War seems dread repetition, humanity locked into a cycle of vio-
lence. This structure typifies Gothic anachronism, in which horrors from
the past return” (11). By noting this extension of the Gothic horror of
war, Wasson prolongs the Gothic fascination with the landscape of the
298 R. RESO FOY

metropolis versus the landscape of war, just as Mary Butts anticipates and,
in a sense, prefigures the continuation of such Gothic narratives before her
death in 1937. Wasson’s study reinforces many of the same observations
and investigations of the Gothic during the turmoil of war and illustrates
“a continuity between the two combats, a way in which the First World
War never quite ended on a certain imaginative plane” (11). She also notes
that wartime Gothic narratives can tame the Gothic “by building it into
stories of familial and national stability” (23), themes that consumed much
of Butts’s own narratives. Mary Butts’s Ashe of Rings then can be seen to
serve as a precursor to what is to follow for males and females caught in
these shocking wartime conflicts—both external and internal.
Inverting the traditional Gothic role of submissive, terrorized victim,
Butts’s females, good or evil, refuse to become prey, and in this sense
Butts modernizes the Gothic through their determination and strength.
The heroines’s social equals may slip into whining about their losses, but
Butts’s females are prepared to employ their primal past and their social
heritage to assist in the struggle against contemporary terrors and the
horror of war itself. By placing the forces of both good and evil in the
hands of women, Butts examines empowerment from both ends. Vanna
is the female Gothic heroine, while Judy becomes the traditional Gothic
villain––both women in positions of competing authority. Curiously, Butts
recognizes and reinforces the notion that good will triumph, yet Judy
also has a supernatural past from which to draw strength. The irrational/
supernatural becomes a source of empowerment for women who ratio-
nally understand its potency. Bayer-Berenbaum notes that “Gothicism
allies itself with revolutionary movements because it cannot tolerate any
restriction of the individual” (43), and Butts’s females are distinctly indi-
vidual––even revolutionary and unrestricted in the assertion of their own
authority. In the blending of independent spirit and primal supernatural
origins, Butts’s females speak out loudly against the purely rational and
identify it as a limited resource. True strength for the Butts females lies in
deeper origins.
The Gothic for Mary Butts then metamorphoses into a modern form
that allows the heroine a different type of strength. Although the tradi-
tional Gothic romance appears to offer women substantial potency and
respect, the heroines generally wind up in the protective embrace of mar-
riage and family. The Butts heroine, instead of waiting to be rescued or
struggling to combat evil then falling into the arms of a male protector,
while relying upon her innocence for salvation, strikes back by calling up
 GOTHIC LANDSCAPES IN MARY BUTTS’S ASHE OF RINGS 299

primitive forces within herself and drawing on her own authentic connec-
tion to her supernatural heritage. She knows where her strength origi-
nates, and she is intensely aware of her power.
By invoking her primal past, by drawing on her sacred role of pagan
adept, priestess, and goddess, by establishing her genuine connection to
the land(scape) itself, Butts’s heroine, Vanna in Ashe of Rings, finds a way
to begin healing her wounds and offers to assist those who have lesser
strengths from which to draw. Never uncertain about her source of magic,
Vanna, in response to her attempted rape, undresses, melds her body
with the sacred stone (her sanctified altar) on Rings Hill, and prays to her
ancestors and their own magical strength, “Florian and Ursula, my father
and mother in Ashe” (188). The mystical three rings and the ruined tower
nearby stand at the core of the pagan rituals and activities of the past,
such as the crucifixion of Florian Ashe by his wife’s relatives, and various
exploits of Ursula, a great-great-grandmother who introduced the family
to magic and witchcraft and who delivered her children on Rings Hill––“a
place of evocation. Where the word is made flesh … where the shapes we
make with our imagination find a body” (150). Vanna fights, not only to
survive, but also to maintain a tradition, a sense of place and of self that
is vital to her existence, and strives to preserve a legacy for a particularly
English way of life. The Butts heroine reverts to the pagan and the magical
forces of her past and her sacred Rings to help redefine and restore, what
David Punter has noted about her Gothic heroine counterpart, a “fire, a
vigour, a sense of grandeur which was sorely needed in English culture”
(6). Problematically, this vigour struggles to recall a racial heritage based
on a specific social hierarchy, yet, in spite of such elitist longings, Butts
does look to a future where women recover their autonomy and take con-
trol in a newly modern world. The role of the female in a position of
authority as a genuine heir prefigures and affirms the independent spirit
of the modern woman; the Butts female finds herself poised between two
worlds.
In 1977 Ellen Moers’s Literary Women defined the term Female Gothic
as “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that,
since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic” (90). Her defini-
tion opened the door to speculation about gender politics in assessing the
Gothic in general. Mary Butts’s Ashe of Rings contributes to such specu-
lation by refusing to reinforce the reliance of her heroines on patriarchal
structures. In one sense Vanna Ashe not only inverts the Gothic stereotype
of the female as victim, she also exposes a weakness in the male character
300 R. RESO FOY

of Serge who becomes the center of the struggle between Vanna and Judy,
white versus black magic. In establishing Vanna not only as heroine but
also as protective savior, Butts reverses the entire concept of power struc-
ture between the genders. By allowing the female characters to draw upon
their supernatural pasts, they negotiate a position of authority, both good
and evil. The Russian artist Serge, drawn to the erotic yet evil and destruc-
tive forces of Judy, allows himself to follow Vanna to her sacred precinct.
Once away from the corrupting influences of city life, Vanna attempts to
work her magic on Serge, but Judy soon follows, having also ensnared
Vanna’s cousin, the war-torn Peter Amburton. Judy manipulates Peter,
has him attempt the rape of Vanna on the sacred Rings Hill, and convinces
him to sacrifice his dog in order to desecrate the place of enchantment
and to call up the infernal forces alive on Rings Hill. Judy fails because
she seeks control through evil; her consciousness connects with the dark
elements of the past. In spite of the fact that the Rings seem to participate
with her witchcraft, ultimately her efforts are thwarted because she is an
outsider who embodies the chaos and confusion of the external world.
Peter recognizes the power of the elemental forces that he and Judy have
summoned and in fear tells her: “I won’t touch that stone. It’s alive––we
woke it up earlier. I remember. The dog’s blood turning into a white poi-
son and moving the stone. Oh, God!” (189). Once more, the land itself
denies any productive contact with an inauthentic; it serves to promote
and protect only a designated, true initiate and creates terror for those
who fail to comprehend the value and power of the landscape itself, in this
case, the Rings.
Earlier, Judy had also drawn blood from Serge in her attempt to initiate
him into the blood ritual/sacrifice of her own private cult. Judy’s second
drawing of blood ensnares his soul in spite of Vanna’s efforts:

There rose, over the back of his head, a distorted face, crimson, the mouth
open and wet. It closed down on him, snatching at his eyelids. The teeth bit
down between eyes and nose. Fingers raked his throat. He was sobbing as
he tore her off, his tears meeting blood blinded him. (119)

In her 1921 The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Margaret Alice Murray dis-
cusses various accounts of witch covens who draw blood “at the admission
of the neophyte” (4), thereby possessing them body and soul. Although
Vanna struggles to combat these forces and successfully defeats Judy’s
authority over her own soul, Serge is finally caught in Judy’s spell, her
 GOTHIC LANDSCAPES IN MARY BUTTS’S ASHE OF RINGS 301

sexuality, and the reality of her pain. He is both attracted to and repulsed
by her actions in the way that humans are attracted to and repulsed by war
and evil.
The mix of desire and revulsion explains not only the horror of war and
its spiritual destruction but also examines the ancient history of human-
kind and its drive toward death and annihilation. Vanna’s words to Serge
clarify Butts’s point:

Consider the war. Have you known anyone who loves the war as Judy loves
it? Stoop then and wash. She dips her tall, white body in the blood and rolls
it in her mouth, and squeezes it out of her hair. She is a delicate woman of
good family; I know nothing in her history to account for it.
Am I clear? There is a war. There is Judy and her kind. The individual
state bred the general state, that bred the catastrophe. Oh, I know tribal
instincts and heroism, and a love of a row … Other people conduct a war,
and suffer in it; get a man’s job out of it or physical death. People like Judy
live on the fact of it, and get spirit-nourishing food out of the ruin of so
much life. (149)

Both Peter and Serge are reluctant participants caught up in the spell
of Judy’s madness. Peter’s war sickness, his association with Judy––who
refers to him as a “shell-shocked lump of carrion” (116)––and his overall
weakness suggest he is one of the lost in this generation. Serge, on the
other hand, enjoys his suffering and believes that “life has turned evil”
(225). He retains a foot in both realms, good and evil, and the novel takes
on another significance by commenting on the hazards of sexuality in the
modern era. For Serge, Judy’s erotic evil is more real than the goodness
that Vanna represents. When Vanna speaks to Serge about a “lost room”
at Rings that no one has found again and that “[o]nly once in a while we
walk straight into it,” Serge tells her, “I’m sorry, I can’t live in fairy tales.”
And Vanna thinks, “All men were like this” (96). Like a “weak drawing”
in Serge’s demented and distorted view, goodness seems merely illusion,
while pain and suffering are real and true, reflecting the actuality of his
Russian heritage and the war-ravaged society. Vanna, unlike her estranged
mother, understands the darkness behind the veil to which Serge refers. As
a true priestess of her heritage, she recognizes the forces of good and evil
always present in the world, but, unlike Judy’s, Vanna’s power is love and
authenticity. She is the true adept whose healing must come through the
magic of Rings, which has crowned her its heir and which helps make the
veil between the visible and the invisible world occasionally transparent.
302 R. RESO FOY

In a brief Marxist, cultural chapter on Mary Butts in 1985, Patrick

Wright observed that her writing is a “writing full of panic at the realiza-
tion that the world it craves can, for very good reasons, no longer exist
anywhere but in texts; and in bizarrely Gothic, cranky and hallucinatory
texts at that” (106). Mary Butts’s heroines (and Mary Butts herself) may
be elitist in their struggle to preserve a privileged past but, by shifting
the realm of power to the female, Butts locates the Gothic in twentieth-
century thought and validates the growing interest in female emancipa-
tion. By rejecting the late Victorian and Edwardian views of women’s
roles, Butts’s heroines assert themselves from a “natural” position of con-
trol and strength. No longer the submissive commodity of male hege-
mony, the Butts female, with the assistance of a very real supernatural
past, recognizes her capacity for power and authority. Ashe of Rings adds
a work of fiction to the list of modernist texts affirming characterizations
of women who are no longer validated through their preordained roles
of domestic servant. Indeed, the modernist female character asserts and
identifies herself within her world of changing values and attitudes.
Thus, in its hybrid form, the Gothic emerges in this novel as a mod-
ernist response to social and cultural turmoil. The moral confusion and
doubt of the nineteenth century has been recast in a modern exploration
of human frailty and evil. Many modernists were searching for a spiritual-
ity to assist them in the quest to repair and renew their own souls and to
redefine their existence. Mary Butts herself sought what she believed was
a reconnection with the numinous throughout her entire life via experi-
mentation with drugs, magic, and the occult, including her previously
mentioned association with Aleister Crowley. Familiar also with the ghost
stories of M. R. James and the work of Montague Summers, Mary Butts
was well informed on how elements of the supernatural and the prevail-
ing social fabric could weave themselves into narrative. By incorporating
and culling from Gothic conventions, Butts then offers a way to negotiate
between what she believed was the ability to live in two worlds at once,
the external world of conscious reality and the equally real inner world of
the unconscious and the supernatural.
This connection is evidenced in David Punter’s observations on the
relationship between the Gothic and Sigmund Freud’s theories on the
psychological. Quoting Freud, Punter states that such an approach is
“nothing but psychology projected into the external world” (qtd. in 409).
Although Mary Butts eschewed the work of Freud and Jung, she never-
theless had read their work and, whether consciously or unconsciously,
 GOTHIC LANDSCAPES IN MARY BUTTS’S ASHE OF RINGS 303

was influenced by it. In The Crystal Cabinet, her autobiography of child-

hood, Butts states that “without the Rings [Badbury Rings], I know what
would have happened to me––whirled away on the merry-go-round of the
complex and the wish-fulfillment and the conditioned reflex, with Jung
and Pavlov, Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell, in all the consciousness of
my group. On those rocking-horses I might have pranced for ever” (265).
Butts, in fact, spent a good deal of her life searching for a way to maintain
the ability to “live in two worlds at once,” and the supernatural magic of
the natural world surrounding her family home offered her a way to do so.
In Ashe of Rings one of the characters comments that “I think we are
spectators of a situation which is the mask for another situation, that
existed perhaps [in] some remote age, or in a world that is outside of
time” (44). The ideas behind fairy tales, the occult, and the Gothic serve
as a means of disentangling and interpreting mystical and psychological
occurrences that not only permeate the life of Butts’s characters but also
influenced her own life and thought. In fact, many of Butts’s texts break
through the boundaries of civilized, societal codes by infusing the heroine
with special powers, usually supernatural. Butts hearkens to a pagan past
where involvement with the supernatural blurred the line between man
and God. Fighting for her place in what had become a crumbling patriar-
chal structure, Butts’s heroine in Ashe of Rings regains possession of her
home and her past after having been disinherited by the questionable birth
of her brother Valentine. The house, however, never accepts his authority,
and the reconciliation between Vanna, Valentine, and Melitta becomes
possible.
Although I have argued that Mary Butts inverts and redefines the
Gothic heroine in Ashe of Rings, the fairy-tale ending inevitably leads
this newly-defined heroine back to the somewhat unrealistic forgiving
bosom of familial reconciliation, a seeming relapse into traditional Gothic
convention. Indeed, in the introduction to The Female Gothic, Juliann
E. Fleenor asserts that the “Female Gothic is historically defined by the
culture in which it has existed and continues to exist. The thread of con-
tinuity established in all Gothics is that they all represent an androcentric
culture. Women have been subordinate to men and have existed in the
private world of the family while men have existed in the public world”
(16). Yet, I maintain that although this modernist Gothic heroine may
find solace in family acceptance, she returns to their arms not as an inno-
cent needing protection and identity, but as the rightly established and
proven head of the Ashe family. In spite of the fact that Vanna is reconciled
304 R. RESO FOY

with her family, it is through her own sense of position and place that she
usurps traditional patriarchal authority and sets herself up as undeniable
heir in full possession and knowledge of her control. She is a woman of
the world who understands that at this moment she is the pivotal center of
her race and her heritage. Mary Butts contends that it is through women
rejoining with their primal origins that they recall and assert authority. In
fact, the questionable birth of Vanna’s brother Valentine is subsumed by
her power and the clear understanding that she, the female heir, is the true
Ashe of Rings.
Mary Butts, as does the Gothic, destabilizes traditional boundaries in
Ashe of Rings. Rather than idealizing femininity, Butts transforms the
feminine into a modern autonomous being. In his preface to the 1992
reissuing of Mary Butts’s short story collection From Altar to Chimney-
piece, the poet John Ashbery identifies her stylistic features as character-
istics that “make her seem our contemporary” (xii). Just as Butts’s style
has, in a sense, prefigured the late twentieth century, her appropriation of
the Gothic looks both backward and forward as she harnesses the Gothic’s
power within her own modernist imagination. Although the tradition of
landscape in Gothic literature generally creates a sense of isolation and
despair, the role of landscape in Ashe of Rings, inverts that tradition and
joins its protagonist to the land itself, to its mysteries, its primitive forces,
accepting the true heir to its ownership. Only she can comprehend its
power and recognize that by uniting her inner landscape with that of the
external landscape, she secures her place as a force to be reckoned with.
Mary Butts, like her female characters, lived life on her own terms and
attempted to redefine the role of women, just as she redefines and trans-
forms the Gothic for the twentieth century.

WORKS CITED
Ashbery, John. Preface. From Altar to Chimney Piece: Selected Stories by Mary Butts.
Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1992. Print.
Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda. The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature
and Art. London: Associated UP, 1982. Print.
Botting, Fred. Gothic. Routledge: New York, 1996. Print.
Butts, Mary. Ashe of Rings. Afterword. London: Wishart, 1933. Print.
———. Ashe of Rings and Other Writings. Afterword. Kingston, NY: McPherson,
1998. Print.
———. The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns. Manchester, England:
Carcanet, 1988. Print.
 GOTHIC LANDSCAPES IN MARY BUTTS’S ASHE OF RINGS 305

Fleenor, Juliann, ed. Introduction. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden, 1983.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. New York: Anchor, 1977. Print.
Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to
the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. Print.
Wasson, Sara. Urban Gothic of the Second World War: Dark London. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
Wright, Patrick. On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary
Britain. London: Verso, 1985. Print.
 INDEX

A Battlestar Galactica, 87, 97n23

Aguiar, Sarah Appleton, 155, 156 Bayer-Berenbaum, Linda, 297, 298
Aguirre, Manuel, 226, 231 Bernard, Kenneth, 21, 28, 39n2,
39n3, 40n9
Berthold, Dennis, 21, 28, 32, 39n3,
B 40n7, 40n8
Ballard, J. G. Biesen, Sheri Chinen, 47–68
All That Is Solid Melts in Air, 287 Bloody Saturday (1937), 280, 281
Burning World, The, 272 Botting, Fred, 1, 9, 14n2, 15n4,
crash, 272, 288 15n8, 61, 67n15, 72, 76, 86,
“Crashed Cars”, 271 94n4, 95n14, 96n15, 97n23,
Crystal World, The, 272, 276 108, 109, 114, 149, 150, 172,
Drowned World, The, 272, 276 175, 195, 205, 232, 236,
Hello America, 272 289n1, 293, 295
Miracles of Life, 272 Boyd, Ailsa, 134
Ruins of Empire, 271–89; Chinese Brantlinger, Patrick. See Gothic,
Gothic, 280, 281; Graham, Imperial
Jamie, 273; Imperial delusion, Bremner, Christina, 208
283; Jameson, Frederic, 287, Brody, Jennifer Devere, 240, 264n2
288; Japanese invasion and Brown, Charles Brockden
occupation, 276, 280, 283; Alcuin, 30
Qiao, Situ, 280; Shaoling, Belles Lettres Club, 30
Wang, 280; Sinclair, Ian, 286, Edgar Huntly, 9, 11, 21–42;
288; Xun, Lu, 279; ZiKai, Clithero, Edney, 32, 34, 36;
Feng, 280 Deb’s Hut, 38; frontier, 23, 27,

© The Author(s) 2016 307

S.R. Yang, K. Healey (eds.), Gothic Landscapes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33165-2
308 INDEX

Brown, Charles Brockden (cont.) Collins, Patricia Hill, 158

29, 31, 32, 36, 39; Indian captivity, Comte, Auguste, 242, 244, 263
21; landscape painting, 11, 23, Conway, Kathlyn, 148, 149, 166n3
27–9; Native Americans, 9, 32, Cooper, L. Andrew, 4, 15n4, 15n5, 55
34, 36, 38, 42n22; Selby farm, Crowley, Aleister, 294, 302
36–8; utopia, 23, 27, 29, 30, Cuvier, Georges, 242, 245, 266n13
37, 39; wilderness, 9, 21, 23,
24, 26, 29–34, 36–9
Friendly Club, 30, 41n14 D
On a Taste for the Picturesque, dak bungalow
28, 29 Bhandari, Rajika, 208, 211–14; Raj
travel narrative and, 29 on the Move: Story of the Dak
Brown, Marshall, 112, 113 Bungalow, The, 208, 211
Burroughs, Augusten Croker, Mary Bithia Croker, 214,
Running with Scissors, 170, 172, 217–19; “Dak Bungalow at
184; hauntedness, 186; Dakor, The”, 217–19; “To
house symbolism, 184; Let”, 217
sexual relations, 188; Donaldson, Gertrude, 216;
terror of self, 184 “Woman and the Child, The”,
Butts, Mary 216
Ashe of Rings, 13, 293–304; Ashe, Edmundson, Melissa, 212, 218,
Melitta, 296, 303; Ashe, 219, 221, 222; “Bithia Mary
Valentine, 296, 303, 304; Ashe, Croker and the Ghosts of
Vanna, 296–301, 303, 304; India”, 218
Marston, Judy, 296; Serge, English as Other, 212
296, 300, 301; war-fairy-tale, Indian as Other, 201, 203, 206,
296; women’s power to 212, 218, 221
redeem, 299, 302–4; World insanity, 214
War I, 294, 295 isolated space, 201–3, 208, 213
background of, 294 khansamah, 204, 208–10, 216
Wright, Patrick, 302 Kipling, Rudyard, 208, 210, 211,
213, 214, 216, 217; “My Very
Own Ghost Story”, 208, 210,
C 214, 216, 217; “Thrown
Calder, Martin, 267n18 Away”, 213, 214
Chambers, Robert, 242, 264n4 rest spot, 202, 207, 208, 211, 212,
Clarke, Graham, 26 214, 218
Clemens, Valdine, 4, 7, 9, 14n1, 14n2, Roberts, Emma, 207; Memsahibs
15n5, 15n8, 32, 67n15, 93n1, Abroad, 207
127, 178, 237, 241, 263n1, similarity to Gothic edifices, 7
264n2, 276 Tait, Gerald, 214, 215; “Ghost in
Clewell, Tammy, 153 Burma, A”, 214, 215
 INDEX 309

Tayler, William, 209; Thirty-Eight Looking East from Denny Hill

Years in India, 209 (painting), 24
threat to colonial order, 202, 221 Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail
unhealthy house, 218 Wolcott Ellsworth (painting),
Daniels, Stephen, 5, 235 24, 26, 27
D’Aries, Anthony Ellis, Kate Ferguson, 8, 9, 15n11, 62,
Language of Men, 170, 189–91, 63, 67n15, 136
193–5; language and memory, Ellis, Markman, 175
170, 189–95; linguistic Eugenides, Jeffrey
alienation and inefficacy, 193; Virgin Suicides, The, 12, 107–9,
technological mediation of 112, 115, 116; American
memory, 173, 190–2; Vietnam, dream, 107, 109; asphyxiation
189, 192–5 party, 115–17; Detroit, 12,
Darwin, Charles 107–9; elm trees, 117, 118;
Descent of Man, The, 240 fish-flies, 112–15; GM, 111,
evolution not teleological, 242, 243, 114, 115; Lisbon sisters, 107,
253 110, 113, 118; Mrs Havisham,
God unnecessary, 242, 243, 247, 122
259
landscape as brutal competition, 251
natural selection, 243–6, 250, 253, F
255, 259 Federalists and Republicans, 22
Origin of Species, The, 240, 242, Fedorko, Kathy, 140n3, 140n6,
245, 254 142n13, 142n18
participation in international female gothic thriller
scientific community, 245 domestic imprisonment, 49
precipitating anxiety, 241, 257 espionage thrillers, 50, 58
Davidson, Cathy, 30 femme fatale, 51, 61, 65
Davison, Carol Margaret, 31, 32, Gilda, 51, 62, 67n16
39n4 heroines, 49, 51, 54–7, 59, 61–3, 65
Derrida, Jacques, 170, 192, 197n6, homme fatale, 48, 51, 55, 56, 59, 62,
206 64, 65; definition, 63; domestic
Dracula, 6, 57, 59, 171, 176, 182, tyrants, 48, 56, 62, 64; Nazis as,
196, 203, 209, 219, 235, 241, 48; war anxieties, 64
250, 264n2, 271 Jamaica Inn, 47–50, 54, 55, 65
Jane Eyre (film), 47–9, 51–5, 57,
59, 62–6
E My Name Is Julia Ross, 47, 51, 56,
Earl, Ralph 59–64, 67n13
Daniel Boardman (painting), 24, 25 naïve Gothic ingenue, 49, 51, 55, 65
Houses Fronting New Milford Green Notorious, 47, 50, 51, 56–66
(painting), 24 post-war anxieties, 59
310 INDEX

female gothic thriller (cont.) 121, 203–5, 213, 215, 217,

Rebecca (film), 47–51, 53–5, 59, 61, 221, 222, 240, 241, 253, 254,
62, 66n7 263n1, 275, 286, 293; colonial,
Spellbound, 47, 50, 56–9, 63, 66 205, 221; failure of American
The Stranger (1947), 47, 51, 56, dreams, 109; post World War I,
59, 62, 64–6 109; post World War II, 109;
Suspicion, 47, 50, 55, 56, 59 Victorian, 13, 58, 204, 240, 241
working women, 11, 51, 60, 63 expression of sexuality, 6, 9, 140n4,
Wuthering Heights (film), 47–9, 51, 153, 171, 293, 301
54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 65, 66 graveyard poets, 272
film noir heroines, 49, 51, 55, 56, 59, 63, 65,
characters, 51, 53, 55, 64 131, 132, 230, 295, 298, 299,
lighting, 52, 53, 55 303
nature, 52 historical sources, 5, 8, 47, 48, 56,
plot, 63, 71 64, 72, 109, 110, 123, 160,
settings, 51, 55, 56, 64, 65 169, 175, 189, 191, 192, 195,
Fleenor, Juliann, 15n11, 303 196, 202, 240, 245, 272, 273,
The Female Gothic, 303 278–81, 285–7
Fliegelman, Jay, 22 Imperial, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14n2,
Fontaine, Joan 15n12, 204, 211, 289n3
her observations on films, 52, 53, imprisonment, 8, 49, 54, 62, 63,
55, 56 149, 150, 227, 228, 253
roles, 55, 56 Indian, 12, 201–22 (see also dak
bungalow); Chhatrapati Shivaji
Terminus, 202; Victoria
G Terminus, Mumbai, 202
Garde-Hansen, Joanne, 173, 191, 192 memoir and, 12, 169–97
Gilbert, Sandra M., 15n11 memory and, 12, 58, 108, 113,
Gissing, George, 245 120, 122, 169–73, 175–7, 178,
Goddu, Teresa, 15n12, 166n1 179, 182, 184, 186, 189, 190,
Godwin, William, 14n13, 30 192, 193, 195, 196, 203, 297
Goho, James, 22, 39n4, 42n22 natural, 3, 5, 8, 13, 48, 85, 112,
Gothic 117–19, 221, 235–7, 239–42,
American, 2, 6, 8–10, 14n2, 15n11, 245, 248, 253, 255, 287, 288,
15n12, 22, 31, 34, 38, 58, 293, 294, 296, 297, 302, 303
107–9, 119, 121, 148, 166n1 novel, 12, 14n2, 48–50, 52, 62,
challenge to traditional order, 7 67n15, 71, 76, 84, 89, 92,
Chinese (see Ballard, J. G., Ruins of 110, 127, 141n8, 181, 201,
Empire) 204, 225, 230, 236, 272, 293
endurance of, 13, 255 racism, 9, 15n12, 112, 148, 204,
expression of anxieties, 4, 5, 8, 13, 205, 212, 295, 297, 299
22, 23, 29, 35, 39, 48, 49, 56, reaction to Enlightenment, 4, 279,
58, 61, 64, 81, 108, 109, 114, 293
 INDEX 311

relation to literary theory, 7 natural, 3, 5, 8, 13, 22, 33, 48,

social corruption, 116 85, 112, 113, 116–19, 163,
supernatural, 2–4, 6–8, 48, 54, 127, 216, 221, 235–7, 239–67,
129, 130, 171, 209–11, 218, 287, 288, 293, 294, 296,
220, 221, 227, 229, 239, 297, 302, 303
293–5, 297, 298, 302, 303 places of healing, 12, 147–66, 226,
Transnational, 9, 10 234, 296, 299, 301; Badbury
Gothic landscapes Rings (Ashe of Rings), 294,
aesthetics of, 11, 14n2, 40n8, 303; convent (Paradise), 12,
71–99, 121, 274, 286 147–66; Granada (St.
American frontier, 27 Bernard’s), 226, 234
American landscape painting, 11 ruins, 13, 54, 55, 61, 74, 84, 86,
architecture, 1, 3, 6, 61, 86, 94n3, 87, 91, 271–89; Badbury
97n22, 125, 134, 186, 201, Rings, 294, 303; Detroit,
202, 204, 271, 279 288; Shanghai, 273, 274, 276,
castle, 2, 3, 6–11, 13, 15n11, 21, 280–3, 285–7
48, 49, 52, 53, 55, 59, 62, savage places, 11, 36, 42n21,
71–99, 120, 136, 149, 169, 142n12, 213, 216, 217, 220,
173, 201–3, 207–10, 227, 222, 241, 247, 250, 260
232, 239, 241, 271, 275, sublime, 3, 8, 11, 28, 34,
289n4 71–89, 93, 95n10, 96n20,
China, 214, 272, 273, 277–80, 282, 97n22, 98n28, 129, 185, 187,
283, 286 195, 202, 227, 236, 273–5,
dak bungalow, 12, 201–4, 206–19, 294; Burke, Edmund, 72–6,
221, 222 89, 95n10, 185, 274;
hospitals (see St. Bernard’s: The definition, 86; Price, Uvedale,
Romance of Medical Student) 73–5, 78–80, 87, 89–91,
imprisonment, 8, 49, 54, 62, 63, 95n10; Robinson, Sidney K.,
149, 150, 227, 228, 253 74; ugliness, 75–7, 85–9,
Indian (see dak bungalow) 95n10
locus terriblis, 242, 249 subterranean spaces, 227; Paradise,
memory, 12, 58, 108, 113, 120, 12, 147–66; St Bernards, 227
122, 169–80, 182–96, 203, suburbs/suburban, 12, 63, 107–24,
297; dream and, 178–80, 182; 189, 192, 272; Running with
geographies of, 169, 173, 177, Scissors, 170, 172, 173, 184;
182, 184, 193; ’Tis, 170, 173, Virgin Suicides, The, 12, 107–9,
176, 178, 179 112, 115, 116
mindscapes, 3, 122, 152, 165, 176, wilderness, 9, 21, 23, 24, 26,
191, 207, 228, 245, 247; 29–34, 36–9, 40n10, 204,
“Horla, The”, 13, 239–67; 221
Ruins of Empire, 13, 271–89; World War II, 47, 48, 51, 53, 56,
’Tis, 170, 173, 176, 178, 179, 60, 63, 114, 277, 297
181 Gubar, Susan, 8, 15n11
312 INDEX

H L
Haggerty, George, 8, 15n4, 15n8 Lacan, Jacques, 8, 15n10, 233
Hanson, Helen, 51, 66n4 Lamark, Jean-Baptiste, 242, 243,
Herrington, Susan, 86, 94n3, 94n9 265n5
Hinds, Elizabeth Wall, 31, 39n4, Lanchester, John, 88, 90, 91
39n5 Lansbury, Carol, 230
Hitchcock, Alfred, 11, 47–68 Lawson-Peebles, Robert, 21, 28,
Hoeveler, Diane Long, 15n11 39n3
Hogg, James, 171, 173 Lerner, Michael, 245, 246
The Private Memoirs and Confessions Levine, George, 259
of a Justified Sinner, 171 Lewis, Joseph H., 47, 56, 60
Hogle, Jerrold, 8, 109, 115, 202, 217 Lewis, Matthew, 76, 77, 87, 89,
Holloway, Karla, 160, 166n6 181
Hunt, John Dixon, 94n2, 95n12 Monk, The, 76, 87, 181
Hurley, Kelly, 2, 4, 133, 142n15, 204, Lloyd-Smith, Allan, 1, 8, 9, 29
209, 240, 263n1, 264n2 Lorde, Audre, 161, 165
Huxley, Thomas, 244, 251–3, 257, Lorraine, Claude de, 72
263, 265n11 Lovecraft, H.P., 271
Lueck, Beth, 21, 28, 39n3, 40n8,
40n10
J
James, Henry, 84, 85, 95n13
Turn of the Screw, The, 85 M
Jane Eyre (novel), 7, 47–9, 51–5, 57, Maupassant, Guy de
59, 62–6, 84, 233 “Horla, The”, 13, 196n3, 239–67;
Jefferson, Thomas Horla and Origin, 242, 245,
Notes on the State of Virginia, 23 246, 250, 253, 255–9, 264n3;
utopianism, 30 Horla as supernatural, 239,
Jung, Carl Gustave, 7, 15n9, 302, 303 247, 258, 260, 264n3;
humanity displaced by the
Horla, 241, 245, 251;
K inadequacy of human will and
Kennedy, Meeghan, 231 intellect, 251; inadequacy of
Kingsley, Charles, 244, 263 religion, 258, 259; inadequacy
Kleinman, Arthur, 155, 166n3 of science, 245, 246; writing
Kristeva, Julia, 3, 15n11 and publication history, 226,
Krumholz, Linda, 154, 164 241, 264n3
Krumm, Pascale, 264n2, 264n3, love of science, 244
267n18 madness, 239, 262, 263, 264n3
Krzywinska, Tanya, 91, 92, 97n22 worldscape undermined, 13
Kuhn, Annette, 263n1 McGregory, Jerrilyn, 150, 151, 159,
Kutchen, Larry, 28, 39n3 164
 INDEX 313

Mellor, Anne, 228 P

memory boom, 174, 176, 184–7, Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 9
192, 196 Phantom Ship, The, 209, 219
Mendelsohn, Daniel, 172, 174 picturesque
Mighall, Robert, 218, 289n2 beautiful, 28, 40n8, 71–5, 78–80,
Miles, Robert, 72, 78, 83, 94n4, 83, 84, 86–8, 90, 91, 93, 94n7,
180 98n28
Miller, Angela, 24 Brown, Charles Brockden, 27–9,
Miller, Kiri, 91 34, 40n8, 84
Mishra, Vijay, 72, 94n4 Edgar Huntly, 29, 32, 34
Moers, Ellen, 184, 299 Gilpin, William, 27–9, 33, 73–5, 78,
Mogen, David, 29, 39n4 80, 90, 94n8, 274; A Dialogue
Mori, Aoi, 149 Upon the Gardens of the Right
Morrison, Toni Honourable The Lord Viscount
illness narratives, 147–9, 154–6, at Stow in Buckinghamshire, 27;
158, 160, 162–4 “Essay on Picturesque Travel”,
Paradise, 12, 147–66; convent, 28
12, 147–66; disallowing, landscape painting, 27–9, 74
The, 153, 155; haven, 152, Poe, Edgar Allan, 84, 85, 88, 118,
153, 155; healing ceremony, 141n6, 186, 210, 271
159–62, 164; illness, 12, “Fall of the House of Usher, The”,
147–66; Morgan, Soane, 85, 88, 271
158; New Fathers, 154, 158, Punter, David, 1, 3, 8, 9, 14n1, 14n2,
165; Ruby, 147–50, 152–8, 15n4, 15n5, 34, 35, 61, 67n15,
164; Sempruch, Justyna, 138, 149, 150, 165, 171, 175,
149, 152, 157, 159–60; 176, 206, 207, 264n2, 289n6,
Seneca, 155–7; Sosa, 293, 296, 299, 302
Consolata, 158–64;
Sweetie, 155–8
R
Radcliffe, Ann
N Italian, The, 78, 79, 179, 181
Norton, Rictor, 72, 76, 95n14 Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 79–81, 83,
Nyyssonen, Pasi, 239, 255 271
picturesque tourism, 83, 87, 90
“Romance of the Forest”, 80, 83
O Sicilian Romance, A, 79, 81
Other, 8, 9, 13, 60, 72, 84, 87, 94n3, terror and horror, 95n14
96n20, 97n22, 112–15, 139n2, Rebecca (novel), 47–51, 53–5, 59, 61,
148, 153, 162, 164, 165, 189, 62, 66n7, 86, 88
204–6, 212, 216, 218, 220–2, Robinson, Sidney, 74
231, 235, 241, 267n18, 278, roman noir, 47–50, 56, 60, 61
279, 301 Rosa, Salvatore, 27, 34, 72
314 INDEX

S U
Saunders, Scott, 29 uncanny, 150, 156, 169–72, 174,
Savoy, Eric, 14n2, 31, 108, 109 177, 179, 180, 184, 185, 187,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 7 193–5, 197n5, 213, 216, 228,
Selznick, David O., 55, 57, 66n7 239, 283
serie noir, 50, 56, 61 ’Tis, 170, 179
Shelley, Mary unheimliche. See uncanny
Dr. Frankenstein, 193, 196n4, 228
Frankenstein (novel), 7, 62, 96n20,
178, 228 V
Shoemaker, Michael Meyers, 211 van Gorp, Hendrick, 14n2, 242, 249
Spencer, Herbert, 242, 244–6, 253, Van Upp, Virginia, 63, 67n16
254, 263, 265n9 Vial, Andre, 244–6, 264n2
St. Bernard’s: The Romance of video games
Medical Student Alan Wake, 92
Aesculapius Scalpel, 226 Dead Space, 89, 90, 99n31, 99n32
Berdoe, Edward, 225–34, 236, electronic landscape, 88, 98n26
237 Fallout, 91
doctors, 13, 226, 228, 229, 231–3, Grand Theft Auto, 91, 99n37
236; abusive to patients, 226, Kingdom Come Deliverance, 91
228, 229, 231–3, 236; photorealistic, 88
inhumane, 236; vampires, 227 Resident Evil 4, 89
Dr. Crowe, 227–9, 233–5 Secret World, The, 92
Dr. Stanforth, 230 Silent Hill, 89, 97n22
Dr. Wilson, 233 System Shock 2, 90, 99n33
Elsworth, 234–6 Vignier, Charles, 244
Granada, 226, 234, 235 Vonnegut, Kurt, 174, 183
Mildred, 227, 234 Slaughterhouse-Five, 174
subterranean spaces, 227
vivisection, 228, 230, 235, 236
Stern, Rebecca, 232, 233 W
Stevenson, Robert Louis Walpole, Horace, 2, 51, 62, 76, 77,
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 179 88, 90, 92, 96n16, 169, 179, 202,
Symonds letter, 245 210, 227, 229, 230, 271, 275
Castle of Otranto, The, 62, 227
Wells, H.G.
T Island of Dr. Moreau, The, 228
Tavinor, Grant, 91, 97n24, 98n29, Time Machine, The, 241
99n33, 99n35, 99n37 Wester, Maisha, 15n12, 148, 150
Tawil, Ezra, 21, 28, 39n3 Wharton, Edith
Todorov, Tzetan, 263n1 Bowen, Charles, 129, 130, 134,
Tompkins, J.M.S., 78, 83 135, 137
Tropp, Martin, 251, 264n2 Custom of the Country, The, 12,
Truffin, Sherry, 9, 10 125–43
 INDEX 315

de Chelles, 135, 136 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin, 133

The Decoration of Houses, 134 Wolstenholme, Susan, 129, 140n6
French Ways and Their Meanings, 134 Wong, Hai-Sheng/Wang, Xiaoting.
Howells, William Dean, 138, 141n7 See Bloody Saturday (1937)
Marvell, Ralph, 128, 133 Wuthering Heights (novel), 47–9, 51, 54,
Moffat, Elmer, 132, 133, 135–7 55, 57, 61, 62, 65, 66, 84, 85, 209
New York aristocracy, 128, 131, Wyler, William, 47, 49
133, 134, 142n13
nouveau riche, 125, 133, 136, 138,
139, 139n1 Y
Saint-Desert, 135, 136 Yagoda, Ben, 172, 189, 196n1
Spragg, Undine, 127, 128, 138
“Telling a Short Story”, 126
Undine, 12, 125–43 Z
Wall Street, 125, 136 Zinsser, William, 174