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Carmilla

March 31, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the first lesbian vampire story?

Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels who came from the same tradition which produced Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. Indeed, he went to the same university – Trinity College Dublin. But his work is less well known, with one exception – the long story (or maybe novella) Carmilla which was to influence Bram Stoker when he came to write his classic Dracula. However, Carmilla (1871) is not only a vampire story – it’s a lesbian vampire story – plus all the usual trappings of the Gothic horror tale.

CarmillaThe setting is, as usual, a remote part of central Europe. Laura (the damsel to be in distress) lives with her elderly father in a castle situated miles from anywhere in the middle of a forest. As a youngster, she has a frightening nocturnal experience when she dreams she is visited in bed by a beautiful girl. Some years later a mysterious woman travelling with her daughter Carmilla has a coach accident nearby. She leaves the girl in their care and continues her journey.

Carmilla reveals to Laura that they have met before, and recounts to her an identical childhood dream. They agree that the experience was memorable and significant for both of them. Carmilla subsequently becomes passionately attached to Laura, acting towards her like a lover – but also displaying erratic mood swings. She insists on sleeping in a locked room, and doesn’t get up until the afternoon.

There is an outbreak of mysterious deaths in the district, and an ancient oil painting of a Countess Mircalla Karnstein turns out to be an exact likeness of Carmilla. Laura is flattered but also slightly disturbed by the sexual advances Carmilla makes towards her. She has another nocturnal attack – this time by a giant black cat.

Following this she begins to fall ill – but in a manner which she feels is not altogether unpleasant. Further nocturnal visions make her fear Carmilla is in danger, but when the servants go to check in the middle of the night, Carmilla is not in her room – which is locked.

Laura and her father then accompany a grieving neighbour to the old ruined estate of the Karnsteins, where he intends to avenge his niece’s death. En route he tells them the story of a mysterious woman who leaves her beautiful daughter Millarca in his care. Millarca exerts a malign influence on his niece, who dies. The story of course is a close parallel to that of Laura and her father.

The neighbour has traced back the history of evil in the locality to the Karnstein family, whose tombs they visit in a Gothic chapel. The grave of Millarca Countess Karnstein is opened, and even though she has been dead for one hundred and fifty years, her features are ‘tinted with the warmth of life’, her eyes are open, and she is still breathing. There is only one possible solution: she is despatched in the manner prescribed for all vampires.

It’s a marvelously condensed tale, full of thematic parallels, doubling, incidents which echo and repeat each other, and repeated motifs all centred on the principal theme of vampirism – which is why it can reasonably be described as a novella. Of course it has all the conventional features of the Gothic horror story – the remote castle setting, a motherless heroine who is threatened by evil forces, a mysterious and beautiful stranger with very sharp teeth, inexplicable deaths, locked doors, and transmogrification.

In order to understand some of the perplexing mysteries, it’s helpful if you know the rules governing vampires and their behaviour, but these have become reasonably well established in the last two hundred years:

they escape from their graves and return to them for certain hours every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace of disturbance in he state of the coffin or the cerements … The amphibious existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible lust for living blood supplies the vigour of its waking existence. The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons.

It is this aspect of ‘fascination’ which will be of particular interest to contemporary readers. The appearance of figures such as old men in tall black hats, a hunchback with a fiddle, and even a black servant with a turban and large white eye-balls are easy enough to fit into the iconography of the Gothic romance – but the overtly sexualised relationship between Carmilla and Laura is unusual, especially by nineteenth century standards.

Carmilla gets into bed with Laura, she is repeatedly kissing her, stroking her hair, and declaring both the passion that she feels and her belief that they destined for each other. Laura in her turn is excited by the magnetism between them, and also a little disturbed by it. Her description of their encounters is couched in distinctly orgasmic terms.

Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.

And the story is ripe for other approaches to interpretation. It is drenched with instances of ‘the double’ for instance. Almost every character is twinned with another. The two female lead characters appear to be the same age (Carmillia is of course one hundred and fifty years older) and they have identical and simultaneous dreams. Even the landscape and the architecture is doubled.

In the Oxford Classics edition (which also contains Le Fanu’s other tales of the supernatural) there are two other interpretations explored. One which sees the novella in terms of social anxiety regarding the decline of the protestant ‘acendency’ in Ireland, and another focussing on Le Fanu’s own insecurities with an ailing wife and unpaid debts. Whichever interpretation you wish to pursue, this is undoubtedly a significant text in the history of the Gothic horror story – and of vampires in particular.

Carmilla Buy the book at Amazon UK

Carmilla Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.347, ISBN: 0199537984


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Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

April 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) became very popular as soon as it was first published under its real title of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Since then it has been repeatedly adapted for the stage and the cinema – usually to provide a starring role for a male actor who can deliver a bravura performance playing both major parts. It has also entered popular culture as a symbol of the ‘dual’ nature of the human personality – with the potential for good and evil in a permanent state of tension, battling against each other in the same person.


Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – 1920 film version


Full length 1920 movie – with John Barrymore


Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde – critical commentary

The Novella

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a narrative of only 26,000 words in length – which is the same as some long short stories. But the composition has all the hallmarks of a novella, based on the usual criteria for distinguishing this literary genre that lies half way between a long story and a short novel.

The story is densely compacted, with all its elements focussed on the single issue of the mystery of the Jekyll/Hyde duality. There are no digressions, no extraneous characters, and not even any lengthy descriptive or atmospheric passages.

There is a consistency of mood and tone throughout the tale which contributes to its unity of effect. Once again, nothing distracts from

There is a unity of location throughout the drama, with particular focus on Dr Jekyll’s house and its symbolic division into quarters which are public and private, open and locked, known and secret. Although the action of the novel moves a little around the locality, almost all of it is centred upon the doctor’s rooms, and in particular his ‘cabinet’, which is an inner sanctum within the ‘dissecting rooms’ where he carries out his practice.

The recurring motifs in the story reinforce its central concern with the duality of human nature. Jekyll has a large cheval mirror in which he inspects his transformations. A mirror is designed to reflect the object before it, but of course it also produces a ‘double’. The austere Utterson is contrasted with his cousin Enfield who is a man about town.

Letters

Much of the plot hinges on documents and letters generated by the principal characters.

1. The story begins with Jekyll’s puzzling will which he has entrusted to Utterson.

2. Hyde writes a letter of reassurance to Jekyll.

3. Lanyon leaves behind a letter revealing what he knows of Jekyll.

4. Lanyon’s letter itself contains a letter written to him by Jekyll

5. Hyde writes letters to both Poole and Jekyll.

5. Jekyll leaves behind a confessional letter.

And almost like a reflection of the doubled and interlocking nature of the main narrative, these letters are sometimes contained within each other.

The Double

Stevenson’s tale is part of the long and honourable tradition of ‘the double’ in fiction. This includes examples such as Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poe’s ‘William Wilson’, Dostoyevski’s The Double, Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, James’ ‘The Jolly Corner’, and Nabokov’s The Eye. In most of these cases there is deliberate ambiguity concerning the second person or identity. The story appears to be about two separate people who are completely unlike each other, or may be very similar. In some cases the first character feels a rivalry with, dislikes, or even wishes to kill the second. But they are in fact one and the same person.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a perfect example of this literary trope. Jekyll and Hyde are polar opposites. Jekyll is tall, upright, honest, and philanthropic. Hyde is small and misanthropic to the extent that he commits murder. They are like representations of the conscious and the unconscious mind – the Ego and the Id.

Almost every element within Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has a parallel or a double. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde are two aspects of the same man. Jekyll’s house has two entrances – one the respectable public front entrance, the other a partly hidden, secret, and locked rear entrance. Dr Lanyon leaves behind two letters. And the novella ends with two explanations in two letters for the mystery and how it came about.

For further discussion of this theme, see our tutorial – The Double

Narrative progression

It is often said that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a story told backwards, and it’s quite true that the novella ends with an account of how Dr Jekyll came to take up his dangerous experiments with drugs. But it would perhaps be more accurate to say that it is a story with a mystery, the explanation for which is delayed. The actual sequence of events is as follows.

1. Jekyll’s behaviour has become erratic and poses a problem for his friend Utterson.

2. Tension and mystery ensue in the search for Mr Hyde.

3. There is a dramatic finale when Hyde commits suicide.

4. The narrative ends with two explanations of the mystery and its origins.

The missing participles

The full title of the novella is Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It is hardly surprising that it has become more widely known in its truncated form as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde because the missing definite article (The) creates an unnatural gap or absence in the title. This might be a stylistic quirkiness on Stevenson’s part, because it is repeated in some of the chapter titles which similarly lack a definite article – Story of the Door, Search for Mr Hyde, Incident of the Letter, Remarkable Incident of Dr Lanyon, and Incident at the Window


Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – study resources

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Audiobook CD – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Audiobook CD – Amazon US

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Cliffs (study) Notes – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – York (study) Notes – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Spark (study) Notes – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – 1932 film version (DVD) – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Norton Critical edition – Amazon US

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Kindle edition

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – 2002 TV version (DVD) – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – 1981 film version (DVD) – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – 1931 & 1941 film versions (DVD) – Amazon UK

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – audiobook at LibriVox


Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – plot summary

Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeMr Utterson, a lawyer, has the disturbing task of dealing with the will of his friend Dr Jekyll, who in the event of his death or disappearance wishes to leave all his money (a quarter of a million pounds) to his friend Edward Hyde. Utterson learns that Hyde has bought his way out of trouble after attacking a young girl, using a cheque signed by Jekyll. Discomforted by suspicions of possible blackmail and wrong-doing, Utterson tracks down Hyde, but then Jekyll reassures him that all is well.

When another brutal and fatal attack is carried out on one of Utterson’s clients, the circumstantial evidence points to Hyde as the perpetrator, but when sought out he has disappeared. Jekyll reassures Utterson that Hyde will no longer be a problem, and shows him a letter to that effect from Hyde. However, the handwriting is similar to that of Jekyll.

After a period of relative normality, Dr Jekyll begins to cut himself off from Utterson and the rest of society, and their friend Dr Lanyon dies in odd circumstances, leaving behind a letter. Dr Jekyll’s butler Poole reports in alarm to Utterson that something is wrong with Jekyll. Utterson and Poole break into Jekyll’s inner rooms and find Hyde dead from cyanide poisoning.

Utterson then goes home to read both Lanyon’s letter and a signed confession from Dr Jekyll. These explain how Jekyll has experimented with ‘transforming’ drugs which have allowed him to turn at will into Edward Hyde and lead a double existence. Having explored the evil side of his own nature, he has become addicted to the drugs and no longer able to control the transformations. He has therefore committed suicide whilst in the persona of Edward Hyde.


Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – principal characters
John Gabriel Utterson a middle-aged lawyer
Richard Enfield his younger cousin, a man about town
Edward Hyde a savage, rancorous man who commits murder
Dr Henry Jekyll a respected man of medicine
Dr Hastie Lanyon fellow doctor and friend of Utterson
Sir Danvers Carew an MP and client of Utterson’s
Mr Guest Utterson’s head clerk
Poole Dr Jekyll’s butler

Further reading

Fred Botting, Gothic, London: Methuen, 1996.

Jenni Calder, RLS: A Life Study, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1980.

Paul Coates, The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction, London: Macmillan, 1988.

Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, London: Macmillan, 2003.

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) Penguin Freud Library vol.xiv, London: Penguin, 1985. 335-376.

Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, London: Harper Collins, 2005.

Wayne Koestenbaum, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration, London: Routledge, 1989.

Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic: Mapping History’s Nightmares, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary HistoryOxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siécle, London: Bloomsbury, 1992.


Film version

1931 film starring Frederick March

© Roy Johnson 2011


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Filed Under: 19C Horror, The Novella Tagged With: 19 C Literature, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Gothic horror, Literary studies, The Novella

Dracula – a study guide

February 10, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Dracula (1897) is not the first novel to deal with the myth of vampyres. It follows a tradition which includes Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), William Polidori’s ‘The Vampire’ (1819), James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847), Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla‘ (1872), and George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894). But it is undoubtedly the best known, perhaps because it combines just about every aspect and manifestation of the myth – blood lust, sexual deviation, the UnDead, murder, bats, wolves, imprisonment, madness, and infanticide.

It also has the classic settings of Gothic horror stories – a castle in Transylvania, a ruined abbey, dungeons, crypts, graveyards, and a lunatic asylum. To this mixture is added virgins in distress, pseudo scientific experiments, drugs, telepathy, and hypnotism. It also has to be said that the novel is built from a fascinating and complex series of separate narratives and contains memorably vivid scenes and characters. The story lends itself to a number of different interpretations, and its fame was enhanced by the German silent film classic Nosferatu made in 1922 – which you can watch in its full length version below.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula

Bela Lugosi as Dracula (1931)


Dracula – critical commentary

The novel attracts critical commentary on a number of recognisable themes, some of which overlap with each other.

The New Woman

Lucy and her friend Mina can be seen as examples of women who are prepared to take their destiny into their own hands. Mina has an independent career as a schoolteacher, and she is competent in shorthand. She uses a typewriter and can memorise train timetables. Although Lucy is something of a lightweight socialite at the start of the novel, she deals reasonably with her three proposals of marriage on a single day. They enjoy their friendship and dine out in a fashion which Mina actually likens to the appetites of the New Woman. Later in the novel when the gallant brotherhood of four men repeatedly exclude her from the pursuit of Dracula, it is she who not only persuades them otherwise but supplies the information that leads to his capture.

West Vs East

Modern studies of the post-colonial world have encouraged a view of the novel as a Victorian allegory of the Christian west fighting against the corrupt forces of the east. Many of the novel’s details support this view. The four blood brothers are all representatives of the western orthodoxy. Arthur Holmwood actually becomes Lord Godalming during the course of the novel; John Seward is a respected head of a medical institute. Quincy Morris represents the protestant new world, and Van Helsing the equally imperialist Dutch. All of them are Christians and several times swear religiously to overthrow the foreigner, the alien Dracula.

He is not only from what in the late nineteenth century was perceived as the eastern ‘edge’ of Europe (Romania), but he draws his inspiration and heritage from Turkey, which is still further east.

The Rise of Science

Dracula is drenched in references to the latest scientific developments and what we would now call new media. Both John Seward and Van Helsing are neuroscientists; they experiment with drugs, hypnosis, and telepathy in their dealings with both Lucy and Mina. The narrative includes a whole array of what were the latest technical developments at the end of the nineteenth century – the London underground, typewriters, a phonograph, shorthand and dictation, telegrams, and a camera. In the final stages of the chase to catch Dracula, Mina even acquires a portable typewriter in order to transcribe the contents of the various diaries and journals which record events.

Sex, blood, and sublimation

Lucy has three suitors who propose to her on the same day – John Seward, Quincy Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. In the central section of the novel, dealing with the aftermath of Lucy’s encounter with Dracula in Whitby Professor Van Helsing arrives and later mentions that he too is ‘in love’ with her. He proscribes blood transfusions as the only way of saving her. All four men in turn ‘give blood’ in a manner which is distinctly sexual by implication.

On each occasion attention is drawn to Lucy’s red lips, open mouth, pink gums, and white teeth – a clear image of the vagina dentata if ever one was in doubt. The experience of transfusion leaves the men depleted and exhausted, but brings life and colour back to Lucy’s cheeks. Van Helsing also observes that there might be possible jealousy between the suitors if they knew that their rivals had made this connection.

At one point Seward and Van Helsing also put Lucy in a bath of warm water to revive her, and although no reference is made to what she is wearing, it is reasonable to assume that she is not clothed. Moreover, throughout the whole series of treatments, they keep giving her drugs – morphine and opiates – which Van Helsing sometimes injects into her. Dracula takes in the blood of others in order to survive, and so does Lucy, but under medical supervision.

The climactic scene where Arthur takes the lead in killing Lucy is described in unmistakably sexual terms

Arthur took the stake and the hammer … placed the point over the heart … Then he struck with all his might … The Thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions, the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam… Arthur never faltered … his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, while the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it … And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still… Great drops of sweat sprang out on [Arthur’s] forehead, and his breath came in broken gasps. It had indeed been an awful strain on him…

And when Dracula visits Mina, the connection between them is even more sexualised.

With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension, his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast, which was shown by his torn open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink

It was once thought that semen was a condensed form of blood, and the reference to milk in the simile reinforces this connection, as well as suggesting that a form of forced fellatio is taking place in the scene.


Dracula – study resources

Dracula Dracula – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Dracula Dracula – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Dracula Dracula – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Dracula Dracula – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Dracula Dracula – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Dracula Dracula – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Dracula Dracula – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Dracula Dracula – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Dracula Dracula – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Dracula Dracula – full cast dramatisation BBC audioBook – Amazon UK

Dracula Dracula – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Dracula Dracula – encyclopedia entry at Wikipedia

Dracula Dracula – scan of the first edition

Dracula Dracula – Francis Ford Coppola’s film version – Amazon UK

Dracula Dracula – 1931 Tod Hunter film version with Bela Lugosi – Amazon UK

Pointer Buffy the Vampire Slayer – complete boxed set – Amazon UK


Dracula – plot summary

DraculaEnglish solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to visit Count Dracula, who has bought properties in London. He is hospitably received, but then is held prisoner in the castle, where he encounters three female vampires. Harker writes letters to his fiancée and employer asking for help, but Dracula intercepts them. Dracula then takes a boat journey to England. On the journey the entire crew disappear one by one. The ship is driven ashore at Whitby, Yorkshire during a violent storm.

Meanwhile, Minna Murray, Harker’s fiancee is in Whitby with her friend Lucy Westenra, who has had three proposals from different suitors on the same day. She eventually accepts Arthur Holmwood. The two young women witness the aftermath of the storm, and Lucy begins to sleepwalk, finally making a mid-night encounter with Dracula, who leaves his signature fang marks in her neck.

Dr John Seward, one of Lucy’s suitors, is in charge of a lunatic asylum located in the grounds of one of the properties that Dracula has bought. He is principally occupied with Renfield, a zoophagic patient who is violent and keeps trying to escape.

Word arrives in England that Harker is in a church hospice in Europe, recovering from a nervous collapse. Mina travels to see him and they are married.

Lucy begins to suffer from anaemia, and she is consulted by Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing, who perform repeated blood transfusions on themselves and Lucy’s fiance Arthur in order to keep her alive. Whilst she is recovering, an escaped wolf from London Zoo attacks the house. Lucy’s mother dies of fright, having left her estate to Arthur.

Despite further blood transfusions, Lucy dies too. Meanwhile Mina and Jonathan return to Exeter where Mr Hawkins makes them his inheritors, then suddenly dies. When Jonathan visits London for the the funeral he sees Dracula in Piccadilly, looking younger, following which there is an outbreak of attacks on young children in the London area. They report being abducted by a beautiful lady.

DraculaVan Helsing reads Lucy’s diaries and letters, then visits Mina and Jonathan in Exeter and reads the typed copies of their journals, which Mina has made. He then recruits John Seward to visit Lucy’s tomb, which turns out to be empty when they visit it at night. On returning in the daylight however, they find her there. He then recruits Arthur Holmwood and Quincy Morris, and the four men confront Lucy in her vampire mode outside the tomb. Next day they return in the daylight and Arthur drives a stake through her heart, following which Van Helsing cuts off her head.

The four men agree that they must locate Dracula and kill him, Van Helsing suggests that they exclude Mina from the group for her own safety. They visit Dracula’s house and locate some of the boxes of Transylvanian earth he has brought to England. Meanwhile, Mina is visited by Dracula at night.

Renfield is savagely attacked and dies, then the four men catch Dracula with Mina, who is now in his thrall. Dracula escapes, and the four men begin to purify the boxes of earth, to block off Dracula’s acces to a secure resting place. They break into his house at Carfax and two other properties on the Thames, and his house in Picadilly. They plan to kill him, but when he returns home he once again escapes.

Mina, still in Dracula’s thrall, is hypnotised by Van Helsin, and reveals that Dracula is on board a ship, presumably on his way back to Transylvania. The Gang of Four swear to track him down. First they once again exclude Mina from their plans for her own safety, but she argues that she will be valuable in the search, However, she makes them promise to kill her if Dracula’s influence over her should get worse. They agree, and embark on along journey which culminates almost where the novel began – on the Borgo Pass close to Dracula’s castle.

Van Helsin and Mina are confronted by the three female vampyres, who are driven away with Christian symbols back to the castle, Van Helsin follows and murders them in their coffins. Finally all the characters converge on the Pass where they intercept the cart containing Dracula in his box of earth trying to reach the castle before sunset. They capture the box, open it, and decapitate him.


Dracula – film version

There have been many film adaptations of the Dracula story – but F.W.Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is the first and most famous. It’s now regarded as a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema, along with works such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Bram Stoker’s widow Florence understandably but foolishly tried to defend her husband’s copyright to the story. She even went to the extent of buying up and destroying copies of the film. Murnau was forced to change the names of the characters, and to transpose the location from England to Germany. Some characters are missed out altogether – but the essence of the story remains the same, and the visuals are spectacular, much enhanced by the performance of Max Schreck as Count Orlok.


Principal characters
Jonathan Harker a young solicitor
Peter Hawkins an Exeter solicitor, his employer
Wilhelmina (Mina) Murray Jonathan’s fiancee then his wife, an assistant schoolmistress
Count Dracula a Transylvanian aristocrat
Lucy Westrena Mina’s friend, a socialite
Dr John Seward head of a lunatic asylum, suitor to Lucy
Quincy P Morris an American bachelor, suitor to Lucy
Arthur Holmwood
(later Lord Godalming)
engaged to Lucy
Renfield a zoophagic lunatic patient in Seward’s asylum
Professor Abraham Van Helsin a Dutch pysician and lawyer

Literary criticism

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Glennis Byron, Dracula: New Casebook, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999.

Christopher Frayling, Vampires: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, London: Faber, 1991.

Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire, London: Routledge, 1994.

William Hughes, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Reader’s Guide, London:Continuum, 2009.

Rob Lathom, Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Masterpiece, Brighton: Desert Island Books, 1993.

Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Si&eactue;cle, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1763 to the Present Day, London: Longmans, 1980.

Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Find Si&eactue;, London: Virago, 1992.

Montague Summers, The Vampire, 1928, London: Studio editions, 1995.


Trivia and parallels

When Harker arrives at the castle, Dracula makes his meals, waits on him as a servant, makes his bed, keeps him up at night talking, and even wears his clothes. Are these hints of the ‘Double’?

Lucy Westrena has three offers of marriage – and Dracula has three ‘brides’. The three suitors all become ‘blood-providers’ in the transfusion experiments on Lucy. The three female vampires are blood-providers for Dracula.

Dracula climbs up and down the wall of the castle to reach Harker’s room – and Harker in turn climbs up and down the wall to reach Dracula’s room.

Harker writes letters asking for help to escape from the castle – but Dracula intercepts the letters, then forces him to write a parallel set of false letters describing his departure from the castle.

Jonathan Harker is a solicitor, and acts as a conveyancer for Dracula’s purchases of property around London. Dracula has his castle, and establishes a property portfolio in England. Arthur inherits his title when his father dies, and then also inherits Lucy’s legacy because of an ‘entailed property’ clause in the family will. Jonathan Harker inherits the solicitor’s business from Mr Hawkins.

© Roy Johnson 2011


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Filed Under: 19C Horror Tagged With: Bram Stoker, Dracula, English literature, Gothic horror, Literary studies, The novel

Frankenstein: a study – page 1

June 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the romance, the double, the psyche

Although Frankenstein is constructed from many of the basic elements of the romantic novel, Mary Shelly seems to have raised her ‘ghost story’ (1) well above the level of mere occasional entertainment for which it was intended. Her importation of mythical strains and psychological insights which, however inchoate or unconsciously expressed, leave the novel still speaking meaningfully and tantalisingly to us today, long after serious interest in most supernatural horrors and Italianate castle-wanderings has faded.

FrankensteinThe notion that her achievement is somewhat ‘accidental’ is suggested by the fact that the standard elements of romanticism are used in such a haphazard fashion. Some of them contribute to the strengths of the story, whilst others create its major weakness. But what elevates the novel, quite apart from its sheer narrative vigour, is the expression she gives to features of the conscious and the unconscious mind which lie deep beneath the surface of the story.

The most obvious of the standard elements of romanticism are The Romantic Hero, Nature, Sentiment, The Macabre, and Death. Frankenstein doesn’t have just one romantic hero – it has three. And yet this triplication is well enough controlled to constitute a strength in the narrative rather than a double redundancy. First there is the outer narrator – Walton, a self-educated and ambitious man, a disappointed poet who has inured himself to great hardship in order to undertake a dangerous journey of exploration. He feels solitary, lonely, and yearns for a friend, declaring to Frankenstein his ‘thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind’. His declaration falls on fertile ground, since Frankenstein has had a close friend (Clerval) but lost him – one of the many ironic parallels and reversals in the novel.

Frankenstein himself is of course the central romantic hero – another intelligent and well-educated man who, out of noble if dangerous ambition to act in a God-like manner – creating life – brings misery, isolation, and eventually death upon himself and others.

We tend to forget Walton for most of the narrative, but the third hero is present from his ‘birth’ onwards in almost symbiotic relation to his creator. And the Monster is quite pointedly similar to the other two. He is sensitive and well-educated, and initially well disposed towards his fellow men. But he too feels a painful yearning for a ‘friend’ – in his case a mate – and because Frankenstein has both made him repulsive to other humans and refused to create a female companion for him, the Monster feels doubly excluded: ‘I am solitary and abhorred’. His acts of revenge set him eternally apart from society, and although we know that he still entertains high aspirations and delicate sentiments, his tragedy is to be doomed and self-destructive – just like his creator.

These three figures share in varying degrees one of the standard requisites of the romantic hero – an unfulfilled or incomplete relationship with the opposite sex. Walton is a twenty-eight year old bachelor whose only contact with women is that via correspondence with his ‘beloved sister’ – the chaste version of this phenomenon.

Frankenstein on the surface seems to be more healthy. He has an enthusiastic regard for Elizabeth, his ‘more than sister’ – the blue-eyed, high-born orphan who in the earlier version of the story was his cousin (2). But it is significant that Frankenstein puts a long delay on his marriage to Elizabeth, he never consummates it, and as Robert Kiely rather wittily points out, if Frankenstein labours for two years trying to create life ‘we may wonder why he does not marry Elizabeth and, with her co-operation, finish the job more quickly and pleasurably’ (3)

The monster is the more pitiable case. He longs quite explicitly for a mate with whom he can reproduce his own kind, but he too comes no closer to a sexual connection with Woman than the typically romantic union-through-death when he murders Elizabeth.

FrankensteinAnother common feature of the romantic hero is shared by Walton, Frankenstein, and the Monster. All of them are powerful egoists who claim that their sensitivity and suffering is greater than that of others. Walton claims that he is different from ordinary mortals because of his solitary self-education, but he puts it in typically self-aggrandising form: ‘I have thought more, and … my day dreams are more extended and magnificent’.

Frankenstein takes this sort of claim merely as a starting point for himself. As soon as his troubles get under way he frequently claims to be the most accursed and tormented of all mortals. When Justine is about to be hung (for a crime for which he is indirectly responsible) he suggests that his pain is greater than hers:

The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forgo their hold.

Egomania reaches a high point in Frankenstein, but it is outstripped by the Monster in the soliloquy on his creator’s death: ‘He suffered not … the ten thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine’ and ‘Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine’.

It is the interplay, the correspondences, and the conflicts between these three typically romantic heroes which gives the novel so much of its richness. The romantic mise en scène on the other hand tends to be rather commonplace except where Mary Shelley has the confidence to exaggerate it as a form of dramatic heightening. The Rousseauesque location of Geneva in which Frankenstein is raised seems nothing more than a conventional background, and the rural idyll of de Lacey’s cottage and its surroundings where the Monster is educated is somewhat schematic, a setting dictated by the notion of ‘natural man’ being expounded at that point in the story.

Frankenstein

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011


Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK


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Frankenstein: a study – page 2

June 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the romance, the double, the psyche

The level of romantic conventionality dips even lower however in those passages which are not much more than a travelogue along the Rhine and through England to the Orkneys. This is perhaps the weakest point in the whole novel: there is almost no thematic connection between these travels and the plot: they stand out as fairly clearly descriptions for their own sakes, inserted to fit the conventions and as reflections of Mary Shelley’s own travels.

Where she succeeds magnificently in exploiting romantic topography is in those passages where she is prepared to heighten and exaggerate. Some of the most vivid scenes in the novel are set in the glacial wastes of the Arctic:

the ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a distance, as the islands split and cracked in every direction

This may have been achieved with the help of Coleridge, but she has the inventiveness and the eye for symmetrical composition to cast the other important confrontation (between Frankenstein and the Monster) in a similar setting – on the Mer de Glace:

The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds

Some of the other romantic elements of the novel are similarly ‘mixed’ in the effectiveness of their contribution to it. Sentiment in the novel is couched in conventional terms of high-pitched emotions, crying, fainting, and illnesses. Walton’s early letters establish the tone of excitation as he sets out on his northern exploration: ‘It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart’, and as soon as Frankenstein boards the ship he brings with him emotions set an even higher level of fevered anguish:

tears trickle[d] fast between his fingers, – a groan burst from his heaving breast … the paroxysm of grief that had seized the stranger overcame his weakened powers, and many hours of repose and tranquil conversation were necessary to restore his composure’



Boris Karloff in the 1931 film version of Frankenstein


Frankenstein falls ill on more than one occasion – after the creation of his Monster, and following the death of Clerval.There is a fairly conventional longing for death and contemplation of suicide, and much of the action is forwarded in a state of nervous excitation: ‘My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance, but then a resistless, and almost frantic, impulse, urges me forward’.

Even the Monster is pray to this use of Sentiment. Sometimes his feelings are justified: he weeps with sadness when he realises that he has been excluded from society. At other he joins the convention of sympathetic tears – contemplating the lot of the American Indians at the hands of the Europeans, ‘noble savages’ like himself. And he too comes almost unaided to the romantic conclusion that the only escape from the pain he suffers will be in death.

There is also no shortage of the conventional macabre. Mary Shelley follows the Romantic-Gothic formulas here. Frankenstein makes his studies at the outer limits of ‘anatomy’: ‘I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body’ and he assembles his Monster from unconventional ‘materials’:

I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay … I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame.

Children and beautiful young women are murdered, an innocent girl is hanged, and the Monster, as one would expect, is frighteningly horrible. But it is to Mary Shelley’s credit that she does not overdo this aspect of the narrative: in fact there is perhaps less of the macabre than one might expect in a tale of this kind, which is possibly one further reason for us still taking it seriously almost two hundred years after it was written.

FrankensteinFrankenstein

 

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011


Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK


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Frankenstein: a study – page 3

June 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the romance, the double, the psyche

Death too, as a convention, is observed without being too much exaggerated, even though there are a total of eight deaths in the story. Frankenstein’s mother dies of scarlet fever. Then the Monster murders William, Clerval, and Elizabeth: these are the most obviously dramatic and gruesome. The other deaths appear to follow as natural consequences: Justine’s execution (an injustice of society); the destruction of the female Monster (a ‘necessity’); Adolphe Frankenstein (grief at the sad progression of events); and Victor Frankenstein (terminal exhaustion in pursuit of the Monster). But there are sufficient hints in the text concerning responsibility for these deaths to indicate a possible interpretation of it.

The novel then contains many of the basic elements of the romantic novel and the Gothic horror story, but they are mixed in such a rich and densely patterned manner that a variety of readings are possible. The common interpretations are usually based upon either biographical evidence drawn from the life of Mary Shelley and her husband (4) or upon Promethean readings which the sub-title invites, the Faust legend, or the Satan-and-Adam possibilities which are suggested by the literary experience which both the Shelleys and Frankenstein and his Monster share in their readings of Milton (5).

There is also an interpretation which takes the novel as a critique of Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father, a cautionary tale on scientific experimentation (that is, the pursuit of pure reason) taken to extremes. This seems to be supported by Frankenstein’s own words to Walton: ‘Do you share my madness? Have you drank also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me … and you will dash the cup from your lips!’. But this possibility is undermined by the remarks which conclude his tale: ‘Yet why do I say [all] this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes [of scientific discovery] yet another may succeed’. There is also the possibility of seeing the novel as a cautionary ‘punishment of the outsider or the man who has gone too far’, with Walton as the man who turns back and lives to tell the story. But these seem rather hard on the Monster and leave the complexities of relations between Frankenstein and his monster unexamined.

What then is to be made of this curious relationship, along with the astonishing number of parallels, echoes, and inversions which surround it. A reading of the novel as an exploration of the Double or Doppelganger theme may well be supported with the observation that Mary Shelley dedicated the novel to her father, the author of Caleb Williams, one of the first novels to examine this notion.


Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks’ 1974 spoof version of Frankenstein


Both Frankenstein and the Monster are very similar: they complement each other, exchange roles, and perform similar acts – whilst all the time seeming to be in violent opposition to each other. Both are intelligent and well educated, and both start out with the impulse to be good – Frankenstein as a dutiful son, and the Monster in his efforts to help the de Lacey family. Yet both end up as murderers, haunted and hunted by each other.

The Monster kills William, Clerval, and Elizabeth. Frankenstein feels himself (with some justification) responsible for these murders: ‘I not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer’. And he is indirectly responsible for four other deaths: Justine is hanged because he keeps silent about his own creation; Adolphe Frankenstein dies broken by ‘the horrors that were accumulated around him’ – all of which are ultimately attributable to his son; the female Monster is destroyed by Frankenstein: ‘I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being’; and ultimately Frankenstein kills himself in his relentless pursuit of the Monster.

Just as Frankenstein curses the Monster almost as soon as he has finished making him, spurning his own creation (his ‘son’) so the Monster ends by cursing him, quite conscious that their respective roles have been reversed: ‘Slave … you have proved yourself unworthy of my condescension. Remember that I have power … You are my creator, but I am your master – obey!’. There are other similar reversals in their individual destinies. Frankenstein, who sets out to create life, ends by destroying it. And the Monster, who ‘ought to be [Frankenstein’s] Adam … am rather the fallen Angel!’.

The Monster starts out hunting Frankenstein with revenge as his motive, but then it is finally Frankenstein who becomes the hunter, pursuing the Monster with the same motive – with the additional ironic twist that the Monster leaves ‘clues’ to his whereabouts, as if luring Frankenstein to his death. And just as Frankenstein does die as a result of this mad pursuit, the Monster vows that he will go out the same way: ‘I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame’. Both find rest only in death.

There are many other instances where they repeat, echo, or reflect each other – either directly or in mirror-inversion. Frankenstein is slight, ‘gentle’ with ‘fine and lovely eyes’ but a feeble disposition: the Monster is eight feet tall, powerful, violent, with ‘watery eyes’. Even though the novel is one of the earliest examples, this is in the classic tradition of the Double story.

Frankenstein and his Monster are like contradictory parts of the same person. The Monster is the active, physical side of Frankenstein (the scholar) but also more obviously the ‘evil’ side. He performs acts almost on Frankenstein’s behalf (to carry out his subconscious wishes) daring to do what Frankenstein can not. As Masao Miyoshi has observed ‘The common error of calling the Monster ‘Frankenstein’ has considerable justification. He is the scientist’s divided self.’ (6)

FrankensteinFrankenstein

 

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011


Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Frankenstein: a study - page 3 Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK


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Frankenstein: a study – page 4

June 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the romance, the double, the psyche

For all the apparent antipathy between the two, Frankenstein feels himself closely linked to this other self. Immediately after his act of creation Frankenstein takes flight from the Monster, but still feels under its influence: ‘I imagined that the monster seized me: I struggled furiously, and fell down in a fit’. His meetings with the Monster are significantly private: nobody else is present on the Mer de Glace, in the Orkneys, or in his wedding chamber (Elizabeth is dead). That is, these are not so much ‘meetings’ as communings between the two battling parts of the one Self.

And when Frankenstein finally decides to pursue the Monster he swears ‘to pursue the daemon who caused this misery until he or I shall perish in mortal conflict … Let the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony, let him feel the despair that now torments me’. This is a very suggestive ambiguity, for Frankenstein is himself the person who has caused (that is, created) all the misery; he is feeling despair and agony, both in his own Self and as the Monster; and he will perish in the conflict between his two Selves.

The results of the pursuit which takes place are couched in similar terms. After months of searching and three weeks traversing the Frozen Ocean, he has his first sighting of the Monster:

Oh! with what a burning gush did my hope revisit my heart! warm tears filled my eyes, which I hastily wiped away, that they might not intercept the view I had of the daemon; but still my sight was dimmed by the burning drops, until, giving way to emotions that oppressed me, I wept aloud.

Quite apart from the watery-eyed similarities between them, we might be forgiven for reading this as Frankenstein’s being glad to be reunited with his Monster, and in one sense he is, for only moments after dying on Walton’s ship the Monster takes his place in the cabin. The evil Self in Frankenstein has triumphed over his good Self and finally usurped it.

And one could push this reading further. Perhaps Frankenstein and his Monster can be seen as one and the same person – just like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dostoyevski’s Golyadkin and his Double, and Poe’s two William Wilsons. It is significant that Frankenstein repeatedly falls ill or disappears in some way at those junctures when evil is to be performed by the Monster. This reinforces the notion that the Monster is Frankenstein’s evil Self and adds the suggestive possibility that Frankenstein commits these acts himself, and has to invoke the Monster as a form of self-justification.


Francis Ford Coppola’s 1994 version of Frankenstein


Frankenstein is ill for some time after the creation of the Monster, which gives it the opportunity to murder William. He is adrift in a boat (‘every thing was obscure’) and thinking of the possible murder of Clerval when his evil Self does the job for him. And he is conveniently absent from the bedroom when Elizabeth is murdered. In other words, fictional credibility for Frankenstein’s innocence is created whilst letting an apparently independent other Self commit the crimes.

But do Frankenstein and the Monster in fact exist independently? Almost not – for nobody else in the novel ever sees Frankenstein and the Monster together at the same time. The Monster appears to have an independent existence at the de Lacy cottage, but this whole episode is told to Frankenstein by the Monster during their interview on the Mer de Glace – at which nobody else is present.

That is, it could be seen as an invention of Frankenstein’s. He tells this tale to Walton in self-justification. He is riven by evil passions and in guilt over what these have led him to do, he has invented the fiction of an autonomous Monster to justify himself to the outside narrator.

But even if nobody else in the novel actually sees the Monster (there are only various ‘reports’ of his doings) surely Walton is a witness to its independent existence? Not really, Frankenstein gives up the ghost and dies on board. In Walton’s words ‘his voice became fainter … and his eyes closed forever’ [my emphasis]. This is almost immediately followed by ‘again there is the sound as of a human voice, but hoarser: it comes from the cabin where the remains of Frankenstein still lie’. The Monster and Frankenstein are one and the same person: the evil Self has merely triumphed over and replaced the good Self.

One could even argue that for good measure Mary Shelley has added a reflection of the good Self in the divided Frankenstein in the character of Clerval, a man who does no wrong and acts like a conscience to Frankenstein. As Frankenstein sinks morally in this story, he remarks that ‘In Clerval I saw the spirit of my former self’ and has to get rid of him in order to work on the creation of the female Monster, something about which he feels guilty.

FrankensteinFrankenstein

 

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011


Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK


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Filed Under: 19C Horror Tagged With: English literature, Frankenstein, Gothic horror, Literary studies, Mary Shelley

Frankenstein: a study – page 5

June 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the romance, the double, the psyche

However, the Frankenstein-Clerval-Monster conjunction immediately suggests yet another step in this interpretation – a reading of the novel based on the classical Freudian trinity of the Ego, the Super-Ego, and the Id as the structure of human consciousness itself. It is certainly not difficult to see that the three characters correspond closely to the three Freudian categories.

Both Clerval and Frankenstein’s father act as representatives of the Super-Ego. Indeed Freud’s view is that the father is the origin of an individual’s Super-Ego. The two characters are present as a reminder to Frankenstein of what is good, proper, and socially desirable. Frankenstein himself represents the Ego – the pursuer of his own wishes and ends, the experimenter who uses reason even whilst feeling guilty about it. Freud defines his concept in just these terms: ‘The ego represents what may be called reason … in contrast to the id, which contains the passions’ (7). The Monster, as Id, certainly contains passions – the often irrational, unconscious urges fuelled by libidinal energy which are essentially amoral, but which it should be noted can be just as easily the source of good impulse as bad ones.

Freud’s basic notion is that these three components of consciousness represent different types of morality which are in potential conflict with each other:

From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, it may be said of the id that it is totally non-moral, of the ego that it strives to be moral, and of the super-ego that it can be super-moral and then become as cruel as only the id can be.

In this Freudian reading, the novel expresses the tragedy of conflicts within an individual consciousness. Frankenstein is riven by the competing forces of his social conscience (his Super-Ego), his conscious desires (his Ego), and his unconscious wishes (his Id). It will not be difficult (bearing in mind the Double reading) to demonstrate the competition between Frankenstein and the Monster as dramatic representations of the Ego-Id conflict – but first it is necessary to produce a reason, or an origin for the essential divisions which break Frankenstein apart.



First film version of Frankenstein – 1910 by J. Searle Dawley


The simplest explanation seems to be straightforward Oedipal rivalry coupled with sexual fear and guilt. To begin with, Frankenstein’s father is considerably older than his mother – a man of ‘upright mind’ [my emphasis] ‘who had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. One does not need to labour the point that Adolphe Frankenstein represents throughout the novel a public rectitude and standard of correctness from which his son steadily falls. Moreover, his father repeatedly urges marriage upon him – something which Victor fears. And if the son has sufficient reason to feel rivalry with him for the attention of the younger mother, he has later even further evidence of his father’s sexual potency with the arrival of two younger brothers – Ernest and William.

But his parents wanted a daughter as well, so one is supplied by the adoption of Elizabeth – the sister/cousin figure on whom Frankenstein’s sexual fears and desires are ultimately focussed. She becomes a central source of anxiety for him: he is attracted to her, but takes great pains to avoid and then put off marriage to her – a marriage which his mother wished for on her death bed.

Thus one does not have to go far in search of the origin of Frankenstein’s psychological conflicts, or his mental association of sex and death. The object of his unconscious sexual desire (his mother) is removed before he can transfer it as a conscious desire onto someone else (Elizabeth). Moreover, his mother’s death from scarlet fever was contracted from Elizabeth herself. She has ‘killed’ the object of Frankenstein’s desire – and will ultimately die herself as a result.

Frankenstein therefore has subconscious reasons for every one of the murders which follow – even the most shocking and paradoxical. In William’s case it is sibling rivalry and the fact that the boy is a reminder to Frankenstein of his father’s sexual potency. Both Adolph Frankenstein and Clerval are Super-Ego figures, constant reminders of what is correct social behaviour. It is Elizabeth’s case which is most complex: at one level she represents the threat of sexuality which Frankenstein fears, at another she is an object of forbidden desire (as his sister/cousin), and at a third she is the ‘murderer’ of his mother.

The progress of Frankenstein’s psychological tragedy thus runs as follows. Following the death of his mother by a disease caught from his fiance, Frankenstein leaves home, his father, Clerval, William, and Elizabeth – all of whom are to die. Knowing that neglect of his friends and family is wrong and that his father would disapprove, he ‘creates life’ on his own. It is not difficult to see the Monster as an image of Frankenstein’s secret sexuality: ‘it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs’ – especially when the description of the Monster itself is suggestively close to what might be the implement of Frankenstein’s sexuality, complete with its appurtenances and products:

Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath: his hair was of lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness.

The Monster is thus simultaneously a phallic image, a representation of Frankenstein’s conscious sexual guilt and fear, and an embodiment of his Id – the unconscious irrational impulses, the amoral libido-fuelled forces which can act either for good (creation) or evil (destruction and death).

FrankensteinFrankenstein

 

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011


Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK


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Filed Under: 19C Horror Tagged With: English literature, Frankenstein, Gothic horror, Literary studies, Mary Shelley

Frankenstein: a study – page 6

June 3, 2011 by Roy Johnson

the romance, the double, the psyche

Immediately the Monster has been created, Frankenstein falls into a guilt-induced dream which wonderfully combines all his sexual anxieties – conscious and unconscious:

I saw Elizabeth in the bloom of health … I embraced her: but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death: her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms.

Here we have his desire for Elizabeth, his vision of her as a source of disease, the association of disease and death with sexuality, his notion of Elizabeth as his mother’s killer, and the Oedipal desire for his mother herself – all in one brief tableau.

The dream is so disturbing that Frankenstein awakes – and is described in almost exactly the same terms as the Monster – ‘a cold dew covered my forehead … and every limb became convulsed’ – whereupon the Monster appears to him – ‘He held up the curtain of the bed … and his eyes were fixed on me’ which is another stunning image of the Monster as Frankenstein’s sexual guilt. One notes that it is then Frankenstein who runs away from the Monster – that is, releases it to perform his unconscious wishes. Frankenstein himself falls ill, and is nursed back to health, back to social normality by his ‘conscience’, his Super-Ego figure, Clerval.

The id-Monster is now at liberty as an amoral force, but with explicitly sexual impulses. Since he is ugly (which is Frankenstein’s notion of sexuality) and knows he will never be loved by a woman, it is a mate he requires of Frankenstein: ‘I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself’. He also knows that if this ‘passion’ is not gratified it will turn from a desire for ‘the interchange of … sympathies’ into a wanton destructiveness. That is, the unconscious libidinous impulses of Frankenstein’s he represents will, if not properly gratified, turn from positive creative ones into something negative and destructive.


The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) dir James Whale


Following his illness, Frankenstein receives a letter from Elizabeth telling him that his father’s health is still ‘vigorous’ that another daughter-figure (Justine) has been adopted by the family, and that William is ‘tall of his age, with sweet laughing blue eyes’ ans ‘already one or two little wives‘ [her emphasis]. As if that wasn’t enough, she concludes with a list of local marriages as a hint to Frankenstein. The communication is almost a catalogue of his worst psychological fears.

There follows the murder of William – the removal of Frankenstein’s sibling rival, and the accusation of Justine who is convicted on the evidence of possessing a portrait of Frankenstein’s mother. Here is an interesting case of psychological transference. Frankenstein would ideally remove Elizabeth, but the similarly adopted daughter is substituted. Justine is killed in the same way that Elizabeth will be (by strangulation) and Frankenstein is responsible for her death: he leaves the court in a hurry when he might have revealed who the true killer was – his own Id.

The battle between Frankenstein’s Ego and Id then moves into its next phase. The Id has been released: it even justifies the nature of its claim during the interview on the Mer de Glace. Frankenstein at first agrees to create a female Monster, but before he can do so he has to fight against further counsel from the Super-Ego. His father suggests that he should waste no more time and marry Elizabeth. Frankenstein’s reaction is telling: ‘to me the idea of an immediate union with my Elizabeth was one of horror and dismay’. He takes flight from this threat by travel abroad – knowing that marriage awaits immediately on return. Another representative of his Super-Ego (Clerval) travels with him – ‘how great was the contrast between us’ – but is shaken off (despite his entreaties) in Scotland – so that Frankenstein can again do his work in secret.

The psychological battle within Frankenstein now rises to its peak. Freud summarises the process in these terms:

we see this same ego as a poor creature owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the super-ego’

He knows that he is doing wrong in performing further experiments, and he also fears the consequences – for sexual reasons: ‘one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children’. It is easy to see how Frankenstein (himself afraid of sexuality and procreation) feels threatened by the creative potential of the id-Monster.

He refuses to create a mate for the Monster, who then turns his libidinous energy into a negative direction. And even this is expressed in directly sexual terms: ‘I shall be with you on your wedding night’. This will undoubtedly be the climax of their struggle in more senses than one.

The Id is now gaining ascendency over the Ego, but before its power can become effective the Super-Ego’s hold must be weakened. Clerval, as its closest representative, is murdered, after which Frankenstein falls into another two month swoon, exhausted by the psychic conflict taking place within himself. During the swoon he raves ‘I called myself the murderer of William, of Justine, and of Clerval’. One notes how well the Double and the Freudian interpretation of the narrative dovetail at this point.

FrankensteinFollowing Frankenstein’s rescue by his father (a late rallying of the Super-Ego) he can put off his marriage no longer: ‘My father … talked of … Elizabeth … but these words only drew deep groans from me’. But his Ego cannot face the sexual consequence of the marriage: the Id takes his place instead, but having now become a permanently negative force the result is that combination of sexuality and death which the Id represents. The Ego politely leaves the bed chamber to let the Id do its work, the outcome of which is represented in unmistakably sexual terms:

she was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.

Only now that she is dead is Frankenstein able to embrace her ‘with ardour’ – just as he embraced his dead mother in the dream – before seeing the Monster grinning and pointing at the corpse. The scene as an image of Frankenstein’s fear of sexuality is quite clear. And the Id is now triumphing over the Ego. As Freud puts it:

Eros and the death instinct struggle within [the id] … It would be possible to picture the id as under the domination of the mute but powerful death instinct, which desire to be at peace and (prompted by the pleasure principle) to put Eros, the mischief-maker, to rest.

The battle appears to be over, but there is one further stage to go. The forces of the Super-Ego have their representative on hand. Immediately after recovering from his second swoon of the night, Frankenstein invokes the murder of his father, who ‘might even now be writhing under [the Monster’s] grasp. That is, the Super-Ego’s last hold must be shaken off. And it is: Adolphe Frankenstein dies on the next page – in his son’s arms.

The Id has finally triumphed. The amoral forces which contain that element of sexual desire which Frankenstein fears have been thwarted in finding their natural outlet and have simply become destructive. Detached completely, and freed from the possibly compensating influence of the Super-Ego, they go on to destroy the Ego itself. Frankenstein is lured into the mad pursuit across the northern wastes and ends up dead, leaving the Id-Monster to continue on his own journey in the same direction of utter negation:

I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames.

In both the Double and the Freudian readings of the novel, it is the Monster who triumphs in the end. The force of evil in Frankenstein overcomes the force of good; the irrational impulses of the unconscious trample over conscious desire and social conditioning. Seen in this sense, the novel is a cautionary tale, recommending that these anarchic and irresponsible forces should be recognised within the individual. After all, if they are not recognised they will be left free (as the Monster is) to do whatever evil they wish. Frankenstein’s tragedy is that his sexual fears and guilt, and his unconsciously evil impulses are repressed – that is, transferred onto the Monster – when he ought to have recognised them in himself. Karl Mannheim has argued that the romantic tried to rescue ‘repressed irrational forces [and] espoused their cause’ (8) – and in the light of similar tales written (Poe’s, Dostoyevski’s, and Stevenson’s heroes too are all overthrown by their psychological doubles) there seems no good reason why a psycho-analytic reading which claims Frankenstein as an expression of conflict within the individual psyche should not be added to the long list of possible readings. The only mystery remaining, at which we might marvel, is how this wonderful tale came to be written by a young woman barely out of her teens.

Frankenstein

 

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Notes

1. Mary Shelley’s own introduction to the novel. Oxford University Press edition (2011) which reprints the 1831 text. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

2. James Rieger (ed), Frankenstein, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974, which reprints the 1818 text.

3. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England, Harvard University Press, 1972.

4. Kiely gives an account of this reading, combining it with the Frankenstein/Shelly as Prometheus reading.

Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London: Gollancz, 1972, which also covers exhaustively the biographical readings of the novel.

6. Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self, New York: New York University Press, 1969.

7. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. All subsequent quotations are from this edition.

8. Cited in David Punter, The Literature of Terror, London: Longman, 1980.

© Roy Johnson 2011


Frankenstein – study resources

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – York Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Spark Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Cliffs Notes for students – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon US

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1994 Robert de Niro film – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Frankenstein – 1931 original film with Boris Karloff – Amazon UK

Frankenstein Young Frankenstein – 1974 Mel Brooks spoof – Amazon UK


More 19C Authors
More on literature
More on the novella
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Filed Under: 19C Horror Tagged With: English literature, Frankenstein, Gothic horror, Literary studies, Mary Shelley

Late Victorian Gothic Tales

May 14, 2011 by Roy Johnson

mystery, weirdness, supernatural, and horror

For reasons much debated amongst literary historians, there was a revival of the Gothic horror story at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the space of just a few years we have Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G.Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The horror story was also a popular ingredient of the popular mass-circulation magazines which were launched around this time. Robert Luckhurst’s collection Late Victorian Gothic Tales is drawn from these sources, and it aims to show the range of stories by mixing examples from well-established authors with no less chilling takes from lesser-known writers.

Late Victorian Gothic Tales Henry James believed that a horror story should not rely on the traditional trappings of midnight spookiness in ruined abbeys and graveyards for its effect. He thought that the mysterious and the macabre we all the more effective for taking place in the full light of day. His story here – Sir Edmund Orme – has a ghost who appears on the Parade at Brighton on a sunny afternoon. And true to James’s ever-inventive spirit, even though the ghost is of somebody long ago dead (as a result of a gruesome suicide) it turns out to be a force for good. It is a ghost of ‘retributive justice’ which appears to check that an injustice is not repeated.

Oscar Wilde performs the miraculous feat of making a horror story funny. His Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime offers an amusing critique of palm-reading (Cheiromancy as it was known then) which was in vogue at the turn of the century. Lord Arthur singularly fails to act out his destiny, which is to commit murder, despite sending a poisoned bon-bon to Lady Clementina and an exploding clock to the dean of Chichester.

In what he himself described as an ‘unpleasant story’, Rudyard Kipling manages to combine drunkenness, torture, and a contemporary case of a man turning into a rabid animal under the curse of a leper. This was one of his earliest Plain Tales from the Hills which made him famous as an author of Empire.

Arthur Conan Doyle follows a similar pattern in both stories that represent his contribution to the supernatural – his personal belief in which actually contributed to a decline in his literary reputation He has one story of an oblique form of sexual mutilation, and another in which an Egyptian mummy attempts to murder a series of Oxford undergraduates.

What’s clear from this collection is that Gothic horror is a formula sufficiently adaptable to work effectively in any circumstances. Ruined castles, vampires, and coffins in subterranean vaults are not the real essentials. They might help create atmospheric effects, but the basics elements of horror remain existential anxieties – such as predestination, the burden of inheritance, fighting uncontrollable forces , and the threat of death.

Late Victorian Gothic Tales Buy the book at Amazon UK

Late Victorian Gothic Tales Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011


Roger Luckhurst (ed), Late Victorian Gothic Tales, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.326, ISBN: 0199538875


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Filed Under: 19C Horror, Short Stories, The Short Story Tagged With: Cultural history, Gothic horror, Literary studies, The Short Story

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