All that Gothic 9783653997019, 9783631638873, 2014003857, 9783653042269

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction
Literary Gothic
American Gothic
Perversity in the Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Works Cited
From Scratch Once More or, Sam Lawson Restarts the American Gothic
Works Cited
From Faustus to Azatoth: H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch-House” (of Modernity)
Works Cited
Gothic Metalepsis and Ekphrastic Horror: Self-Conscious Reflection on the Ambivalent Cultural Status in Stephen King’s “The Road Virus Heads North”
Works Cited
(Post-) Colonial Gothic
Loveless Legacies: Gothic Mothers and Haunted Daughters in Postcolonial Literature
Works Cited
Reading (Post-) Colonial Terror within Gothic Aesthetics: The Conceptual Limits of Postcolonial Gothic in Canadian Aboriginal Fiction
Works Cited
Gothic Topographies
The Haunting of the House in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Introduction
Haunting as a discourse
The Narrative of Melancholia
The Yellow Wallpaper
Conclusion
Works Cited
Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf as a Modern Gothic Tale: A Cognitive Poetic Perspective
1. Introduction
2. Cognitive Poetics
2.1. Cognitive Poetics and narratology
3. The classical, the romantic, and the gothic
4. The novel
4.1. The gothic cityscapes
4.2. Harry as an outsider and a gothic flâneur
4.3. Harry and the Doppelgänger
4.4. The Steppenwolf’s evolution
5. Conclusions
Works cited
“Nature is the Church of Satan.” The Gothic Topography in Contemporary Scandinavian Horror Novels and Films
The topofocal tradition
The hostile landscape
Time and place
The wilderness as “the other”
Works Cited
Gothic Bodies
Antonia and the Male Gaze. Imaging Femininity in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk
Works Cited
Who's Afraid of Carmilla? Le Fanu's “Carmilla”: Gender and Power
Introduction
Carmilla – a gothic monstrous woman and her predecessors
Who is afraid of Carmilla? And why?
Works Cited
Grotesque Revived: Monstrosity in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus
Works Cited
Body out of (Human) Bounds: Lesbian Transformations in Contemporary Horror Fiction
Introduction: Gothic Transformations
(Dis)locating Lesbian Bodies
Pushing the Limits in Skin
Conclusion: Alternatives and Restrictions
Works Cited
The Supernatural
E. Nesbit and the Gothic Mode in Children’s Fiction
Works Cited
Gothic Subversions of Heterosexual Matrix in Sarah Waters’s Affinity
Works Cited
Floating Worlds, Splintered Narratives and Unstable Identities: The Spectral Return of the Gothic in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith
Works Cited
Non-Literary Gothic
Gothic Dispatches from War Zones
Works Cited
Gothic Elements in Vampire Films by Hammer Film Productions
Introduction: Hammer Film Productions and the New Monster
1. Setting
2. Time
3. Costumes and Props
4. Supernatural Elements
5. Damsel in Distress
6. Horror and Terror
7. Kitsch
Conclusion
Works Cited
Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets: The Old Gothic Monster vs. the New Villain
Works Cited
“I’ve seen bodies shining like stars”: Making a Case for Necrophilia in Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed
Works Cited
As Gothic As It Gets? E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire – A Gothic Film on the Gothic Nature of Film
I. Introduction
II. Shadow of the Vampire – A Gothic Film
III. Shadow of the Vampire on the Gothic Nature of Film
IV. Conclusion
Works Cited
Gothic Convention and the Aesthetics of Failure
Works Cited
Contributors

Citation preview

Agnieszka Łowczanin / Dorota Wiśniewska (eds.)

All that Gothic

Dis/Continuities Toruń Studies in Language, Literature and Culture Edited by Mirosława Buchholtz

Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the history, aesthetics and key themes of Gothic, the main issues and debates surrounding the genre along with the approaches and theories that have been applied to Gothic texts and films. The volume discusses a wide range of 18th and 19th century texts and moves into 20th century literature and film. It explores the cultural resonances created by the genre and raises a variety of issues, including the ways in which Gothic monstrosity mimics same-sex desire and social transgression. The texts included in the volume argue that Gothic film and fiction animated the darker shadows of the dominant culture.

Agnieszka Łowczanin specializes in British literature of the 18th and 19th century. She obtained her PhD from the University of Łódź (Poland) with a dissertation which focused on the deployment of death in canonical novels of this period and in Gothic fiction. Dorota Wiśniewska graduated from the English Institute, University of Łódź. She obtained her M.A. from the University of Toledo (USA), and her PhD from the University of Łódź. Her areas of scholarly interest include American Gothic fiction and horror film, pop culture and gender studies.

Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 www.peterlang.com Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

All that Gothic

Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

DIS/CONTINUITIES TORUŃ STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND CULTURE Edited by Mirosława Buchholtz Advisory Board Leszek Berezowski (Wroclaw University) Annick Duperray (University of Provence) Dorota Guttfeld (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Grzegorz Koneczniak (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Piotr Skrzypczak (Nicolaus Copernicus University) Reviewer: Agnieszka Salska

Vol. 4

Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Agnieszka Łowczanin / Dorota Wiśniewska (eds.)

All that Gothic

Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

The publication was financially supported by the University of Łódz´ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data All that Gothic / Agnieszka Łowczanin, Dorota Wiśniewska (eds.). pages cm. — (Dis/Continuities. Toruń Studies in Language, Literature and Culture ; Volume 4) ISBN 978-3-631-63887-3 1. Gothic fiction (Literary genre)—History and criticism. 2. Gothic revival (Literature) —History and criticism. 3. Horror films—History and criticism. I. Łowczanin, Agnieszka, 1970- editor of compilation. II. Wisniewśka, Dorota, 1972- editor of compilation. PN3435.A44 2014 809.3'8729—dc23 2014003857 ISSN 2193-4207 ISBN 978-3-631-63887-3 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-04226-9 (E-Book) DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-04226-9 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2014 All rights reserved. Peter Lang Edition is an imprint of Peter Lang GmbH. Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This book is part of the Peter Lang Edition list and was peer reviewed prior to publication. www.peterlang.com Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................... 7 I. Literary Gothic American Gothic :HURQLNDàDV]NLHZLF] Perversity in the Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe ........................................ 13 0DUHN:LOF]\ĔVNL From Scratch Once More or, Sam Lawson Restarts the American Gothic ........ 24 Wit Pietrzak From Faustus to Azatoth: H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch-House” (of Modernity) ..................................................................................................... 30 Zofia Kolbuszewska Gothic Metalepsis and Ekphrastic Horror: Self-Conscious Reflection on the Ambivalent Cultural Status in Stephen King’s “The Road Virus Heads North”37 (Post-) Colonial Gothic Dorota Filipczak Loveless Legacies: Gothic Mothers and Haunted Daughters in Postcolonial Literature ............................................................................................................. 47 Anna Branach-Kallas Reading (Post-) Colonial Terror within Gothic Aesthetics: The Conceptual Limits of Postcolonial Gothic in Canadian Aboriginal Fiction .......................... 63 Gothic Topographies Monika Kocot The Haunting of the House in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”........................................................................................................... 83 Krzysztof Kosecki Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf as a Modern Gothic Tale: A Cognitive Poetic Perspective........................................................................................................... 96 Yvonne Leffler “Nature is the Church of Satan.” The Gothic Topography in Contemporary Scandinavian Horror Novels and Films ............................................................ 110 Gothic Bodies $JQLHV]NDàRZF]DQLQ Antonia and the Male Gaze. Imaging Femininity in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk124 Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Tomasz Fisiak Who's Afraid of Carmilla? Le Fanu's “Carmilla”: Gender and Power ............. 138 Sara Tavassoli Grotesque Revived: Monstrosity in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus....... 147 $JQLHV]ND.RWZDVLĔVND Body out of (Human) Bounds: Lesbian Transformations in Contemporary Horror Fiction.................................................................................................... 159 The Supernatural -DGZLJD:ĊJURG]ND E. Nesbit and the Gothic Mode in Children’s Fiction....................................... 170 Barbara Braid Gothic Subversions of Heterosexual Matrix in Sarah Waters’s Affinity........... 184 0DUWD*RV]F]\ĔVND Floating Worlds, Splintered Narratives and Unstable Identities: The Spectral Return of the Gothic in Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith........................................ 192 II. Non-Literary Gothic Elisabeth Bronfen Gothic Dispatches from War Zones .................................................................. 211 Ewa Partyka Gothic Elements in Vampire Films by Hammer Film Productions.................. 225 Agnieszka Rasmus Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets: The Old Gothic Monster vs. the New Villain.. 235 .DWDU]\QD0DáHFND “I’ve seen bodies shining like stars”: Making a Case for Necrophilia in Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed ......................................................................................... 244 Elena Baeva As Gothic As It Gets? E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire – A Gothic Film on the Gothic Nature of Film.................................................................... 259 Agnieszka Izdebska Gothic Convention and the Aesthetics of Failure ............................................. 272 Contributors....................................................................................................... 283

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Introduction The aim of this monograph is to present an overview of the rich range of expression and form the Gothic has taken in Western culture since its emergence in late eighteenth century England. Though at first restricted to literature and to the Old Continent, the genre spread across the Atlantic, finding fertile ground for expression on the New Continent, on the one hand, drawing from the European gothic tradition and on the other, enriching it with new themes and strong local flavours. In the nineteenth century Gothicism appropriated a new body from folklore, the vampire, thus manifesting the genre’s confident indifference to the high vs. low culture dichotomy. Gothic fiction evolved into ghost and vampire stories, which became a territory for addressing the taboo, themes otherwise inappropriate for this era’s standards of propriety and decorum. Gothicism has always been a highly visual genre and its insistence on the marriage of image with emotion has granted it a permanent presence in cinema from its very beginnings in the early decades of the twentieth century. Gothic imagery and themes have been indispensable elements for cinematography, not only through numerous adaptations of classic gothic and vampire stories but mainly because of the genre’s aesthetic potential, its subversive ideologies and legacy of contestation. The title and the structure of this volume illustrate that Gothicism is deeply rooted in our culture and creative consciousness, crossing continents, taking on various forms and shapes and becoming a tool of expression for the fears that consume us. Its transcontinental, transgeneric and temporal transformations demonstrate its hybridity, and its undying, almost monstrous potential. Escaping easy categorisation, shrugging off definitions, but longing for modifiers – like postcolonial, urban, male, female, queer – Gothicism is blatantly ubiquitous, oozing into our reality in provocative guises. This collection of essays has been guided by the conception of gothic themes and provinces sketched out below, and represents an attempt, perverse as it may be, to put together a contemporary overview of gothic studies. The content of Chapter One – “American Gothic” – indicates that “gothic” has become firmly established as the name for one sinister corner of the American imagination and sensitivity; from the unresisted acts of perversity and insane violence in the tales of E. A. Poe, examined in this volume by Weronika àDV]NLewicz, to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories and their themes of the body, heredity and guilt, analysed by Marek :LOF]\ĔVNLIURP+3/RYHFUDIW¶VFUXGHREVHVVLYHVHQVDWLRQDOLVWSURVHLQWKH service of naming the unnameable addressed by Wit Pietrzak to the “Ekphrastic Horror” in Stephen King’s morbid tale “The Road Virus Heads North,” articuAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

lating his own apprehension concerning the cultural status of the genre discussed here by Zofia Kolbuszewska. Chapter Two – “Post- (Colonial) Gothic” – deals with texts which belong to this new-fangled category of postcolonial Gothic. The first article by Dorota Filipczak explores the familiar connection between Gothicism and colonialism while applying Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection to the relation between mothers and daughters in a short story “The Peace of Utrecht” by Alice Munro, associated with the so-called “Ontario Gothic,” and Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, The Autobiography of My Mother. Anna Branach-Kallas shows in her analysis of fiction by Tomson Highway, Joseph Boyden and Eden Robinson how postcolonial Gothicism, while allowing a move beyond the stereotypical interpretation of texts by Canadian Aboriginal writers, simplifies Indigenous aesthetics in response to the postcolonial awareness fashionable in academia today. Chapter Three – “Gothic Topographies” – with its analysis of such diverse examples as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Monika Kocot and contemporary Scandinavian horror film by Yvonne Leffler demonstrates that for the gothic effects to be attained, a literary or cinematic work should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space. These two dimensions reinforce one another to produce an impression of a sickening descent into disintegration. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s tale “The Yellow Wallpaper” reminds us in its combination of personal testimony and feminist fable, the imprisoning house of Gothic fiction has from the very beginning been that of patriarchy, in both its earlier and its expanded feminist senses. The novels and films that revolve around a morose and moody Scandinavian topography unearth an intricate liaison between setting and character, external environment and internal condition of human psyche. Finally, both physical and mental confinement is evident in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf – a novel organized around the chief metaphor of movement from centre to periphery and back to centre again, as Krzysztof Kosecki evidences in his article using the framework of Cognitive Poetics. Chapter Four – “Gothic Bodies” – encompasses essays that account for gothic genre in psychosexual terms. In today’s culture one’s self-concept has been increasingly constituted in images of the body. In the ongoing crisis of identity the gendered binary subject of patriarchy has itself become subject to deconstruction. As the essays collected in this chapter demonstrate, the gothic genre emerged with discourses of the body to provide a language for imagining the self in monstrous transformation, re-gendered, ungendered, and regenerated, as early as in the late eighteenth century. The analysis of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk E\$JQLHV]NDàRZF]DQLQIRFXVHVRQWKHUHSUHVHQWDWLRQDQGSHUFHSWLRQRI the classical ideal of feminine beauty and examines the way in which its imagAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

ing by the male subject actually helps to unearth that era’s uncertainty about gender positioning. The figure of the vampire probably carries greater importance in today’s mythology than it ever did for Transylvanian villagers in centuries past, and this is because it encapsulates for a postmodern age a fantasy model of decadent aristocratic cruelty, as well as sexual transcendence. A good example of the distortion of the typical arrangement in which the man is exclusive oppressor of a female victim is Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's “Carmilla.” Tomasz Fisiak shows how the author skilfully deconstructs the gothic scheme by making a powerful, despotic female protagonist of a story which introduces to the gothic arena blatant eroticism and sexually transgressive female-female relations. Monstrosity, as Sara Tavassoli argues in her essay, has taken various shapes and forms since the development of the gothic genre. The discussion focuses on the body of Sophie Fevvers – the protagonist of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus – as a contemporary monster, whose feminine body, despite its beauty and attractiveness, shares a number of features with its old-fashioned ancestors. The last essay of thiV FKDSWHU ZULWWHQ E\ $JQLHV]ND .RWZDVLĔVND addresses the way in which contemporary horror fiction explores lesbian relationships and the way in which dramatic physical transformations enable protagonists to alter their bodies in unthinkable ways. Thus, via Paulina Palmer, .RWZDVLĔVNDGHPRQVWUDWHVKRZWKHFKDUDFWHUVLQ/7LPPHO'XFKDPS¶V&DUULH Richerson’s and Kathe Koja’s texts tackle the excessiveness they are supposed to signify in a hetero-patriarchal economy. Chapter Five – “The Supernatural” – deals with one of the most distinctive gothic tropes, the existence of which most unmistakably shakes the foundations of reality harnessed by reason. It commences with an article by Jadwiga :ĊJURG]ND ZKR VKRZV WKDW DIWHU WKH HLJKWHHQWK DQG HDUO\ QLQHWHHQWK FHQtury stories of children confronting the supernatural which aim to assert the rationality of reality, it is only in E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle that the gothic mode is used to undermine the ontological security of the rational world model. A completely different take on the supernatural is found in the fiction of contemporary British writer, Sarah Waters, whose two novels are examined in this chapter. Barbara Braid looks at Waters’s neo-Victorian Affinity, where a gothic plot and gothic motifs, such as doubles and ghostly visitations, are employed as subversive schemes aiming at a disruption of the gender norm prescribed by ZKDW%XWOHUWHUPHGWKHKHWHURVH[XDOPDWUL[0DUWD*RV]F]\ĔVNDH[DPLQHVFingersmith, exploring the way in which gothic tropes and conventions seep into its narrative resulting in an all-pervasive sense of ontological and epistemological vertigo, as narratives become splintered, identities unstable, and the fictional world rendered increasingly unpredictable. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Gothic, like the other popular genres, has been absorbed into postmodernism. It infected the media with its themes and iconographies, as Chapter Six – “Non-Literary Gothic” – aims to demonstrate. Elisabeth Bronfen discusses George Romero's zombie film Diary of the Dead as a gothic war correspondent’s narrative, in a tradition initiated by Ambrose Bierce's gothic stories about the Civil War. The article explores the continuity of this gothic sensibility in WWI poetry, as well as in Abel Gance's film J'Accuse, to evidence the resilient correspondence between war and zombie culture, and mediated re-enactments of war in literary and cinematic representations. The chapter again scrutinizes the world of the undead in an essay by Ewa Partyka entirely devoted to the vampire films created by Hammer Studios, which immortalized the nightly creatures for decades. In addition to all these now rather traditional features that Hammer vampires represent, E. Elias Merhige’s film Shadow of the Vampire, discussed in the essay by Elena Baeva, provides another perspective on the nightly creatures and their contemporary cinematic embodiments. It is concerned with the recent discourses of the Neo-Gothic which are conveyed in the film’s intertextuality and self-consciousness. A taste for the dead, on the other hand, informs Lynne Stopkewich’s 1996 film Kissed, as shown in an extensive and vibrant GLVFXVVLRQ RI D IHPDOH QHFURSKLOH E\ .DWDU]\QD 0DáHFND +HUH VH[XDO SUHIerences are seen as lingering between a gothic sensitivity and the “sensibility of American transcendentalism” rather than between pure horror and gore. While Merhige’s meta-film deconstructs the gothic and the medium film by showing how the fictional Murnau and his crew create and construct it for their production, the essay by Agnieszka Rasmus analyses Peter Bogdanovich’s selfreflexive Targets not only as a homage to the gothic film but also as a farewell to the classic gothic horror film as well as a response to the alterations that the genre underwent in the 1960s. The chapter closes with an essay by Agnieszka Izdebska who analyses the way in which the conventions of the mockumentary and of the aesthetics of failure overlap in contemporary horror films to create an illusion of authenticity, a stratagem which takes us all the way back to the fakery inscribed at the very beginnings of literary Gothicicm. The authors and editors hope that this volume, if it proves anything, proves that the gothic genre is serious, important and necessary, not only to those human beings who read and watch in order to think, but to those vast numbers of readers and viewers who do so to feel. The gothic fulfils one more valuable human function. Besides showing us where the taboo lines of our society lie, it emphasises the light, by marking out that place where the darkness takes over. $JQLHV]NDàRZF]DQLQ, 'RURWD:LĞQLHZVND Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Literary Gothic American Gothic

Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Perversity in the Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe Weronika àDV]NLHZLF] Stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) are well-known and can be called the epitome of gothic tradition in literature. Gothic writing is characterized by the ubiquitous presence of violence, crime, death, decay, abnormality, and madness; these elements also constitute the core of Poe’s fiction. They can be studied individually, but the aim of this article is to gather them under one term: perversity. With the notion of perversity as the main tool of the analysis, we will be able to unfold the numerous mysteries of Poe’s short stories and explain how perversity permeates the settings of those stories, dominates the relationship between the characters and, finally, controls the events presented in the plot. The analysis of the stories should be preceded by an explanation of the term “perversity.” In the most traditional context, perversity is regarded as any kind of abnormal sexual practices, and this type of perversity is also found in Poe’s tales. However, perversity can be discussed also in another context: something is described as perverse because it is deformed, corrupted and degenerate (sexual references are not obligatory). Poe studies the nature of perversity in “The Imp of the Perverse,” which begins as an essay, but ends as a short story; the narrator is “one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse” (Poe 361). The title of this work is the first attempt to explain the nature of perversity. One the one hand, “Imp” may be a clipping of the word “impulse” and this is how the narrator characterizes perversity: as an impulse that is inherent in the human mind, an impulse which leads a person to self-destruction. To clarify this idea the narrator conjures up the image of a person standing on the brink of a precipice. The person is at first terrified of the potential danger, but then the feelings of fear, anxiety and horror might blend and give rise to a new sensation. The person might actually begin to fantasize about falling down from such a height. “There is no passion in nature so demonically impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge” (Poe 360). The narrator explains that the thoughts about jumping into the abyss inevitably will be changed into action, due to the impulse of the perverse, because “we perpetrate them merely because we feel that we should not” (Poe 361). On the other hand, the “Imp” from the title might be explained in another way. The narrator frequently uses the phrase “Imp of the Perverse” interchangeably with “spirit of the Perverse.” As a result, “Imp” can be understood literally as an evil spirit, a demon, which is tempting a Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Weronika àDV]NLHZLF]

person to self-destruction and immoral behavior (the temptation can later serve as an excuse for one’s sins). The second part of the text explains how the narrator became a victim of his own Imp of the Perverse. After committing a thoroughly planned murder, the narrator is delighted by the thought that he will never be discovered or punished (he inherited some wealth from the dead man and this might suggest that the men were related, which makes the crime even more atrocious). Soon the thoughts about safety become the murderer’s obsession and he constantly repeats to himself “I am safe.” Finally, the man arrives at a conclusion that he will remain safe if he does not personally admit to the crime. Such conclusions almost instantly summon the Imp of the Perverse and a destructive thought is transformed into action. Seized by panic and fear of detection, the man attempts to subdue the thoughts about revealing the crime. Eventually, in the middle of a crowded street, the narrator reveals his secret, driven not by the feeling of guilt, but by the thought that confessing is exactly what he should not be doing. Consequently, he is sentenced to death and “The Imp of the Perverse” provides the first definition of perversity: as the inevitable impulse to self-destruction. A similar, but somewhat different approach is provided by the story “The Black Cat,” which is described as the tale “[that depicts] human nature shifting toward bestial behavior” (Fisher 52). In the beginning, the narrator defines himself as a gentle person extremely fond of animals. He had married a woman of a similar character and for several years they had a peaceful life together with their pets, including Pluto, a black cat. However, later the narrator’s character began to change due to “the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance,” viz. alcohol (Poe 312). The change was so great that the man began to mistreat his wife and his pets, with Pluto being the sole exception, but only until it bit his master. Enraged by the animal and influenced by alcohol, the narrator deliberately cuts out one of the cat’s eyes and feels no remorse for such an atrocious deed. The man describes his actions in the following way: And then came . . . the spirit of PERVERSNESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart. . . . Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? . . . It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself – to offer violence to its own nature – to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only – that urged me to continue . . . (Poe 313)

According to the man’s words, it is the perverse impulse of the human heart that should be blamed for the atrocity. Thus, even though the narrator understands that his deeds are a sin, it does not stop him from eventually hanging the cat, Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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because the spirit of perversity pushes him towards the destruction of his own character. On the night after the killing, the man’s house and all his belongings are consumed by fire. Nothing is said about the origins of the fire; it might not even be connected with the animal’s death. However, the lack of connection is highly unlikely, since an image of a cat with a rope around its neck appears on the wall near the man’s bed. Though at first he is struck by terror, the man quickly finds a rational explanation for the occurrence. Yet for the first time he seems genuinely moved by the events and he even takes home a cat almost identical to the previous one. He hopes that he will feel attached to the new pet, but instead he soon despises it as strongly as the previous one. His loathing has two sources: the cat is deprived of one eye (which is a reminder of how the first animal was treated) and the fur on its chest has white spots that at some point begin to remind the narrator about the gallows. Perhaps the fact that he sees things that do not exist is a sign of his progressing insanity or a premonition of his impending fate. The culminating point of the story is when the man, infuriated by the animal, attempts to kill it with an axe, but by a twist of fate kills his wife instead. He again feels little remorse for what his actions and walls the corpse up in the cellar; he is quite confident that no one will ever discover the body. Thus, when policemen come for an investigation, the murderer almost cheerfully invites them to the site of murder. There he is again seized by the Imp of Perversity and he knocks on the brick wall which hides his dead wife. The response to his knocking is a howl coming from behind the bricks. When the wall is taken apart, it is revealed that the corpse was entombed together with the cat. From the man’s perspective, the animal is the cause of the crime (since it was the original target of the axe), as well as the one responsible for revealing the hidden corpse. Thus, the protagonist identifies the cat as the sole source of evil that ruined his life. However, from the perspective of the reader, it is the man who is the only one responsible for the evil deeds. Although the narrator is under the influence of alcohol when he mistreats the first animal, later he feels no regret for his actions, which means that intoxication cannot be treated as an excuse for his sins. So the animal simply fulfills the role of a catalyst in the course of the events. Or it can be perceived as the symbol of justice, since the man will be sentenced to death (similarly to the protagonist of “The Imp of the Perverse”). Apart from justice, the cat can also represent revenge, because if the first cat had not been killed, none of the later events would have happened. In addition to representing justice and revenge, the black cat “may be seen as representing the main character’s conscience, which he would like to destroy but which comes back to oppress him, finally leading him to reveal his crime” (AmAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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per 48). Another insightful comment on the protagonist is provided by Dawn Sova: He details his love of animals since his early childhood but soon admits that he is awaiting a death sentence, and his earlier professions become suspect. His disdain for all living beings becomes evident. By the end of the story, the contrast between the narrator’s self-portrayal and the reality of his actions and his behavior mark him as ridiculous. (35)

The protagonist hopes to find external reasons for his actions, but as Sova points, he simply surrounds himself with a façade of lies. In “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Black Cat” the imp of perversity plays a crucial role. In both texts the imp is the factor that appears in the context of revealing a person’s crime. One man, driven by the imp, personally admits to the crime, while the other is too careless and allows the crime to be revealed. But in “The Imp of the Perverse” little is said about the motives which had made the narrator commit the murder in the first place, while in “The Black Cat” the spirit of perversity is introduced as the very motif of the crime (since the narrator explains how he was seized by the spirit of perverseness and killed the first cat). Thus, “The Black Cat” provides another reading of perversity: perversity leads to one’s physical self-destruction when a crime is revealed (the death sentence), but it also leads to one’s mental self-destruction (since perversity is the reason for the crime – the sin – in the first place). Another interpretation of perversity can be found in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The narrator/protagonist is a man afflicted by an unusual disease: his senses, especially hearing, are too acute (Roderick Usher from “The Fall of the House of Usher” is afflicted by the same disease, which is one of the several examples proving that Poe repeated certain motifs throughout his works). The (again) nameless man explains how he murdered an old man whom he had supposedly loved. The reason for the murder in this particular story is the old man’s eye described as vulture-like, “pale blue, with a film over it” (Poe 267). In order to get rid of the terrible eye, the protagonist plans to kill the other man. For some reason the narrator does not attempt to kill the man during the day, but he secretly visits his bedroom every night. Yet he does not kill the man in his sleep, because it is not the man he loathes, but his eye, and the eye is closed during the night. On the eighth night the old man suddenly wakes up and senses danger whose source he is unable to locate. The narrator opens a lantern (which he had carried every night) so that a single ray of light can fall on the unseeing vulture eye. The protagonist is simultaneously delighted by the old man’s fear and enraged by the hideous eye. Suddenly, thanks to the acuteness of his senses, the protagonist hears the frantic beating of the old man’s heart and this pushes him Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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to commit the murder. Finally, he is free from both the eye and the heart. He hides the victim’s dismembered body under the planks of the floor. The protagonist is calm even when three policemen pay him a visit early in the morning. The policemen find no evidence of the crime and the narrator feels so confident during the inspection that he places his chair above the hidden corpse. Soon, he grows irritated because of a ringing noise, which apparently only he is able to hear. The noise is becoming louder and the man is terrified that the policemen will hear it and somehow discover his crime. But soon he starts to suspect that they can already hear it and that they know about his deed. Agonized by the contradictory feelings, the murderer finally bursts out: “Villains! . . . dissemble no more! I admit the deed! – tear up the planks! – here, here! – it is the beating of his hideous heart!” (Poe 272). It is not said whether the heart was really beating or the man was simply going insane. Although the imp of perversity is not directly mentioned in this story, its presence can be easily noticed. In the beginning, the narrator claims that he loves the old man and says that he does not desire his wealth, which, as has been said, suggests a family relation. Then the narrator suddenly arrives at a conclusion: “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! . . .Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever” (Poe 267). The explanation about the eye is implausible. Was the eye truly so disgusting that it could impel a person to murder? Perhaps it is not the eye that the narrator finds so vexing, but what the eye signifies: external authority, conscience, judgment? “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the second story in which an eye troubles the narrator (the first one was “The Black Cat”). Thus, in Poe’s tales an eye evidently becomes the source of fear and hatred. The way in which the narrator explains his motivation for the crime suggests that the person he wants to convince is actually himself. Just like the narrator from “The Black Cat” who searched for an external explanation of his actions, the man in “The Tell-Tale Heart” blames the eye and fails to recognize the madness which has seized him (and which he tries to cover up with a crafty plan of murder). Amper described the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” with the following words: “He speaks excitedly, describes behavior that seems purposeless, and claims to hear things. In addition, the reason he gives for the murder seems insane. These factors lead most readers unhesitatingly to believe the narrator mad” (159). This madness, the lack of coherence in thoughts and actions, may be one of the symptoms suggesting that the man allowed himself to be dominated by the impulse of perversity and lost the ability to separate right from wrong. In addition, the man’s confession resembles the confession from “The Imp of the Perverse.” Both protagonists are beset with their own fears, and their own minds Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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become their greatest enemies. Tormented by contradictory feelings, both men do exactly what they should not: reveal their crimes. So, although the imp of perversity is not directly mentioned in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it appears in the story as the implicit reason for the protagonist’s physical and mental selfdestruction. The stories discussed so far all contained the recurring motifs of violence and crime as the key elements linked to the notion of perversity. Another element which allows the introduction of perversity into the plot is death, as in Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The narrator is a man fascinated with hypnosis (called “Mesmerism”), and he begins to think about mesmerizing someone on the verge of death. His friend, M. Earnest Valdemar, who is stricken with an incurable illness, agrees to help him with the experiment. Thus, when Valdemar is in death’s agony (Poe provides a range of vivid medical descriptions), the narrator arrives at the scene and successfully mesmerizes him. When the narrator asks Valdemar if he is asleep, the man replies: “Yes; – asleep now. Do not wake me! – let me die so!”; later his answers is: “No pain – I am dying!” (Poe 369). In the early morning, the narrator and the doctors expect Valdemar to die any minute. Very soon the patient’s appearance and condition undergo a striking change. When Valdemar is again questioned about being asleep, he answers: “Yes; – no; – I have been sleeping – and now – now – I am dead” (Poe 371). Although neither a pulse nor breathing are perceptible, the man is still alive, or at least suspended between life and death. The narrator and the doctors are shocked and terrified by the result of the experiment. However, that does not stop them from deciding that they should not wake the patient up from hypnosis. Thus, Valdemar is kept in the unnatural state for nearly seven months, during which his body shows no signs of decay. The readers do not learn why the narrator and doctor finally decide to wake Valdemar up. During the process the narrator asks the patient: “M. Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or wishes now?” (Poe 373). After a violent reaction of the body, a terrible voice coming from the patient’s mouth replies: “For God’s sake! – quick! – quick! – put me to sleep – or, quick! – waken me! – quick! – I say to you that I am dead!” (Poe 373). Everyone present expects that Valdemar will soon wake up and that this will save him from suffering. But once the body is free from mesmeric influences, it immediately begins to rot and becomes a hideous, shapeless mass. “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” presents the notion of perversity from a different perspective than the previous stories in which perversity was an impulse towards crime and self-destruction. In this text, perversity is an infringement upon one of the basic laws and mysteries of nature: death. As a result of the experiment, M. Valdemar is degraded to a mass of flesh and bones supAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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ported only by mesmerism; he is robbed of his free will and given no right to decide about his situation. Valdemar becomes a tool in a perverse experiment whose aim is to overcome the laws of nature and which “ends in even greater loathsomeness than simple death and decomposition as Valdemar is reduced to ‘detestable putridity’” (Sova 65). Acting against the natural order is the third type of perversity that appears in Poe’s stories. The last work chosen for analysis is “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In this story corruption and abnormality appear in the context of the natural environment, the House and the eponymous family. The story begins when the narrator arrives at the estate owned by the Ushers. He (the protagonist again has no name) was summoned by Roderick Usher, his childhood friend, who is ill and depressed. As the narrator comes closer to the mansion, he notices decaying trees, a black tarn and shadows of the “dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn” (Poe 76). The surroundings – devoid of vivid colors, movement and signs of life – disturb the man’s (and the reader’s) mind and soul. Every element of the description strengthens the feelings of gloom, melancholy and desolation. The readers can assume that the ominous atmospheres and disturbing landscape are an inherent part of the House of Usher. Thus, in this tale perversity is first manifested in the corruption of the natural environment surrounding the House. Other examples of the environment’s corruption appear at the end of the story. The culminating scene happens during an unnatural storm; the winds are described as violent and furious, and the clouds are so dense that neither the moon nor the stars can be seen. The storm is presented as if it were attacking the House; as if the heavens were infuriated with the events taking place in the House. At one moment, everything in the room begins to glow. The narrator explains the glowing is “an electrical phenomenon not uncommon” (Poe 91), but readers might wonder if the explanation is really as simple as that. Furthermore, in the final scene the moon finally becomes visible: it is full, setting, blood-red (a popular motif in Gothic fiction) and it shines through the fissure in the building. Such a rare moon appears in the sky to illuminate the collapse of the House, as if to emphasize its tragic end. Summing up, nature appearing in the story is corrupted, but its corruption is only a reflection of the corruption and wickedness of the House of Usher. The very sight of the building is disturbing, because the walls are bleak and covered in fungi, the windows resemble vacant eyes, and the whole House is reflected in the black tarn. The House is not decrepit, but its age is visible in the “crumbling condition of the individual stones” (Poe 79). Another disturbing element is a fissure extending from the roof to the very bottom of the House. Moreover, the atmosphere within the building is also oppressive. Gloom and sorrow permeate every room and even Roderick Usher, the master of the House, Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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complains that his illness and bad state of mind can be imputed to the building’s influence on him. Undoubtedly, the building is corrupted. However, just as the corruption of the natural environment is a reflection of the House, the House is a reflection of the family. The building’s appearance and interior are disturbing, because the House is influenced by the atrocities that have happened in it. The connection between the building and its dwellers is clarified by, for example, the fact that the House has its twin reflection in the tarn, while it is inhabited by the twin descendants of the Usher family, Roderick and Madeline. Moreover, the state of the building (its decay and fissure), resembles the state of the family: Roderick and Madeline, the last descendants, are both seriously ill and in bad mental condition. The long family line is thus coming to an end and the building, inhabited by the Ushers for generations, is also decaying. Finally, when Roderick and Madeline die, the House of Usher also collapses into the tarn; its end reflects the twins’ moment of death. Therefore, it is the Ushers who are the main source of perversity in the story; to analyze the family we need to take into account all the definitions of perversity presented in the beginning. Firstly, by following the hints left by the author and the comments of the narrator, a careful reader will discover that the family is not free from incestuous relationships. For example, the narrator says that the family has a direct line of descent, with no side branches, which can mean that the Ushers did not allow any “outsiders” to dilute the family’s blood. Another evidence for the unhealthy relationships in the family is the strange illnesses of the twins: Roderick suffers from too acute senses, while Madeline’s malady is the cause of her insensitivity to outside stimuli. Such rare diseases can be the result of incest: when too closely related people have a child, the child may be inflicted with various genetic illnesses, just like Roderick and Madeline. What is more, Roderick and Madeline also seem to be involved in an incestuous relationship. Roderick frequently calls his sister his beloved and sole companion, but at the same time her existence seems to be troubling him, which is not surprising if the two are in a sinful sexual relationship (and even the narrator describes Madeline’s presence as sinister). The possibility of incest also explains why the Ushers grieve so much about them being the last in the family. Could not Roderick or Madeline find a spouse and have a child? No, because the direct line of descent does not allow outsiders into the family. Incest is not the only instance of perversity present in the family; necrophilia is another possibility. One day, Roderick suddenly announces that his sister died because of her illness and with the help of the narrator he entombs the woman in one of the vaults beneath the house. In the culminating point of the story Madeline frees herself from the tomb and comes for her twin brother. There is “blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every porAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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tion of her emaciated frame” (Poe 95). Was Madeleine bruised by her struggle to get out of the tomb or did Roderick’s lust or hatred for his sister become so great that he could not refrain from violating her defenseless body? And perhaps it was for the purpose of granting himself access to her body that Roderick kept Madeline in the underground vault and did not bury her in the family cemetery. Perhaps Roderick is so frightened when Madeline emerges from her tomb not because she was supposed to be dead, but because he yielded to his sinful desires. In addition, the strange relationship between the twins may be also explained with the notion of doppelgängers. A doppelgänger is a shadow, a ghost or a double that resembles/ reflects a real person. Seeing or facing one’s doppelgänger is recognized in folklore as an omen of death. In the story, neither Roderick nor the narrator ever talk with Madeline. Perhaps they do not approach her because of her illness or maybe she is not a real person, only a doppelgänger. The impression that Madeline is only a shadow is strengthened by the fact that the only moment when she faces her brother is the moment of their death. The final evidence for the twins’ supernatural relationship are their complementary affliction: one has too acute senses, while the other is insensitive to outside stimuli. Whatever the relationship between the twins is, sexual or supernatural, Roderick is presented as the one who suffers the most. His illness, paired with the lust for his sister or fear of her (if he can sense her to be his “double”), trouble Roderick so greatly that the narrator is shocked with Usher’s looks and behavior. Roderick’s mental state is best expressed by his art: a tune whose lyrics describe the end of a splendid palace and its inhabitants, and a painting that shows an enclosed vault illuminated by some light without a source. The pieces of Roderick’s art are disturbing and somewhat premonitory of the events that await the Ushers. Perhaps Roderick’s troubled mind somehow foresees and anticipates the tragic end. One of the most horrifying events in the story is the moment when Madeline frees herself from the tomb. Apart from the previously mentioned explanations about her entombment, it is also possible that Madeline was entombed alive as premature burial was also a frequent theme in Poe’s works. The narrator does observe “a faint blush upon the bosom and the face” (Poe 89) when they place the woman in the vault. Amper compares the description of the vault to that of a prison, “[which] makes [the readers] think of Madeline as a prisoner–someone who is alive and cannot get out, rather than just a dead body” (80). And if Madeline had been entombed alive, Roderick must have known about it thanks to his illness, just like in the end of the story his acute senses register Madeline’s struggle in the vault. Why did Roderick entomb his sister in the first place? PerAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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haps because he wanted to get rid of her, either to free himself of the temptation of her body or to free himself from the doppelgänger. Regardless of his motives, Roderick fails and in the end dies. Death is perhaps the only available salvation if we consider all the atrocities that have happened in the House. “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be considered an epitome of perversity, since the notion is present throughout the whole tale: it permeates the natural environment, the House and the family. “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Facts in Case of M. Valdemar” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are only some of Poe’s tales which contain the motif of perversity. In the chosen works perversity is presented as an inherent human impulse towards physical and mental self-destruction, as well as an incentive to commit a crime and an infringement upon natural laws. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” perversity is hidden in the corruption of the natural environment, the household, and the people (in the motifs of incest, necrophilia and doppelgängers). Why should Poe use the theme of perversity so frequently? Perhaps, simply to follow the conventions of Gothic writing and to amuse and shock his readers. Or perhaps to find an explanation for his own self-destructive behavior, because “perversity [might] be an intellectual scapegoat, something we blame for behavior whose true source we wish to conceal” (Amper 152). Critical biographers of Poe have . . . identified connections between the tale [“The Imp of the Perverse”] and the many self-destructive choices Poe made throughout his life and in his interpersonal relationships, including his self-indulgence, his feuds with authority figures, his alcohol abuse, and his erratic treatment of both friends and colleagues. (Sova 84)

J. Gerald Kennedy explains that “[the] curious modernity (or postmodernity) of Poe’s writing derives . . .from more than his reliance upon sensation and violence. For example, his fascination with madness and perverseness . . . ” (6) and Jennifer Peltak adds that “Poe’s own . . . imp was rarely denied” (82). Such critical comments provide evidence that the Imp of the Perverse haunted not only Poe’s works, but also his private life. The last explanation for the frequency of the themes of perversity is connected with Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), in which Poe explains that every element used in the construction of a texts should work towards the achievement of a precise effect, for example, terror, humor, etc. The essay is related mostly to the creation of the poem “The Raven,” but also perversity can be perceived as one of the tools which allowed Poe to achieve Composition in his other works (“The Fall of the House of Usher” is a fine example). Nevertheless, Amper remarks that regarding Poe “theories have come and gone, Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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and today we are probably more unsure than ever” (47), which means that Poe’s writing is still open for interpretation. Perhaps the final perversity of Poe’s works is the way they influence the readers. The stories are full of terrifying and disgusting events, yet the reader feels some kind of excitement at discovering the horrible mysteries and witnessing the tragic ends. Excitement stemming from fear is also a kind of perversity. However, the skill of turning fear into excitement is something which makes Poe unique among other writers. Works Cited: Amper, Susan. Bloom’s How to Write about Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008. Print. Fisher, Benjamin F. The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print. Kennedy, J. Gerald. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print. Peltak, Jennifer. Edgar Allan Poe. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. Print. Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Print. Sova, Dawn B. Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2007. Print.

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From Scratch Once More or, Sam Lawson Restarts the American Gothic 0DUHN:LOF]\ĔVNL The name of Sam Lawson, a character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s New England novel Oldtown Folks (1869), is probably unknown to most scholars working in the vast field of American gothic fiction. Indeed, Oldtown Folks, the last in the series of Stowe’s novels focusing on the history of her native region of the United States, is not a narrative of horror but first of all an exercise in cultural nostalgia. “By popular reputation,” writes Charles H. Foster, “less a novel than a book of sketches of New England life” (Foster 173), it presents an ideal picture of Natick, Massachusetts, the hometown of the writer’s husband. In 1872, Stowe published a sequel to Oldtown Folks, a short story cycle entitled Sam Lawson Oldtown Fireside Stories, some of which are evidently gothic in character, though their gothicism is perhaps rather mild, more of the “sportive” than of the “horror” variety, to recall the once fashionable, late-eighteenth-century typology of the genre proposed by Nathan Drake (155-160). The connecting “human factor” in Sam Lawson Stories is the title character, a happy-go-lucky village jack of all trades, somewhat similar to Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle in his neglect of the family and household duties, but universally liked for his gift of the gab and cheerful spirits. In particular, Sam is a favorite authority figure for the local boys whom he teaches various necessary skills, as well as tells them stories of mystery and significance. The idiom of his tales is the New England dialect transcribed phonetically, which brings them as close to oral literature as it is possible for an actually written and printed text. Often referring to the past – both colonial and that of the early Republic – Lawson plays in his community the role of the traditional storyteller thus described by Walter Benjamin: Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn. And among the writers who have set down the tales, the great ones are those whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers. Incidentally, among the latter are two groups which, to be sure, overlap in many ways. And the figure of the storyteller takes on its full corporeality only for one who can picture them both. “When someone makes a journey, he has a story to tell,” goes the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions. (Benjamin, “The Storyteller” 144)

Stowe’s narrator is precisely such an honest man who remembers a lot, both from his own experience and from that of the others to whom he had a chance to Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

From Scratch Once More or, Sam Lawson Restarts the American Gothic 25 listen in different periods of his life. He is a living repository of useful knowledge, a transmitter of values which make the community’s foundation and determine its identity in a way that is accepted by all its members as a form of desirable entertainment. One of the listeners to Sam’s tales, a trans-gender authorial voice always making relevant comments in proper English, reminisces at the beginning of the opening narrative: In those days we had no magazines and daily papers, each reeling off a serial story. Once a week “The Columbian Sentinel” came from Boston with its slender stock of news and editorial; but all the multiform devices – pictorial, narrative, and poetical – which keep the mind of the present generation ablaze with excitement, had not then even an existence. There was no theatre, no opera; there were in Oldtown no parties or balls, except, perhaps, the annual election, or Thanksgiving festival, and when winter came, and the sun went down at half-past four o’clock, and left the long dark hours of evening to be provided for, the necessity for amusement became urgent. Hence, in those days, chimney-corner story-telling became an art and an accomplishment. Society was then full of traditions which had all the uncertain glow and shifting mystery of the firelit hearth upon them. They were told to sympathetic audiences, by the rising and falling light of the solemn embers, with the hearth-crickets filling every pause. Then the aged told their stories to the young; – tales of early life; tales of war and adventure, of forest days, of Indian captivities and escapes, of bears and wildcats and panthers, of rattlesnakes, of witches and wizards, and strange and wonderful dreams and appearances and providences. (Stowe 1-3)

Clearly, Stowe provides for her volume a significant background, listing a full set of the historical paraphernalia with a bent for the repertoire of the gothic, which seems to echo Charles Brockden Brown’s more condensed, yet similar “incidents of the Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness” (Brown 3) from the writer’s “Address to the Public” preceding Edgar Huntly. Consequently, the introductory paragraphs of the first of Sam Lawson’s Stories models this post-Civil War collection into a make-believe founding text of the regional or even national literature, a lens attracting all the inspiring components of the past and shedding them as the light of heritage upon the present. No wonder that under such circumstances Sam himself acquires a high cultural status: “A good story-teller, in those days, was always sure of a warm seat at the hearth-stone, and the delighted homage of children; and in all Oldtown there was no better story-teller than Sam Lawson” (Stowe 3). Like Hawthorne’s old Esther Dudley from the last Legend of the Province House, he is free to influence the minds of the young generation and expect his message to be passed on to the future ones. The opening tale of the cycle is called “The Ghost in the Mill,” which leaves no doubt as regards the convention evoked. Sam repeats to his audience a story, allegedly told to him by one Captain Eb Sawin, about a peddler named Jehiel Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Lommedieu who used to visit Oldtown and the neighboring towns perhaps still in the colonial times. All of a sudden, Lommedieu, who was supposed to marry one of the Oldtown girls, disappeared to be gradually forgotten by his customers. Some years after that, Captain Sawin lost his way home in a snowstorm and by accident found shelter in a mill that belonged to Cack Sparrock. The owner of the mill, who lives in relative seclusion, feels strangely uneasy with a company and his uneasiness grows even stronger when it turns out that another visitor materializes in the middle of the night. The other snowstorm guest is an Indian woman known as “old Ketury,” an obstinate heathen who enjoys the reputation of a witch. At some point, sitting near the fireplace, old Ketury starts looking up the chimney and when asked by the Captain what she sees there, she calls out, “’Come down, come down! let’s see who ye be’” (Stowe 19). At first, there appears a pair of feet, then come down the legs, the trunk, the arms, and, finally, the head of Jehiel Lommedieu, murdered by Cack Sparrock’s father and conveniently immured, with the help of his son, in the chimney passage. Cack, tormented by his conscience ever since, can now die in peace, having confessed his sin, while the mill is pulled down by the local men who discover on that occasion Lommedieu’s skeleton. Lawson concludes the story with a remark that once more brings to mind Hawthorne: “Now, my old gran’ther used to say, ‘Boys, says he, ‘if ye want to lead a pleasant and prosperous life, ye must contrive allers to keep just the happy medium between truth and falsehood.’ Now, that are’s my doctrine” (Stowe 23). This is, arguably, as close as Harriet Beecher Stowe could come to The Scarlet Letter’s classic formula of the “actual” and the “imaginary,” adjusted by her to the post-bellum mode of the local color mimesis. Yet there is more in “The Ghost in the Mill” than just a nod at Hawthorne. The quartered spectral body of Jehiel Lommedieu points to a transatlantic direction of the origin of the British gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, where the suit of armor of a superhuman size, which belongs to the ghost of Alonso the Good, also comes to the foreground piece by piece. Alonso, the legitimate lord of the title castle, killed by Prince Manfred’s father just like the Yankee peddler was killed by the Yankee miller, is the ancestor not only of Theodore, but also of Jehiel, even though his American grandson obviously bears very different social features. By using Walpole’s generic matrix as a hypotext, to borrow Gérard Genette’s handy umbrella term (Genette 429), Stowe made a gesture suggesting a second beginning – indeed, starting the American gothic once more from scratch by anchoring it, seventy four years after Brockden Brown’s Wieland, thirty three after Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, in the British prototype. While the antebellum gothicists either explicitly complained – like, again, Hawthorne – on the scarcity of American history, apAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

From Scratch Once More or, Sam Lawson Restarts the American Gothic 27 parently indispensable as the genre’s trait, the Civil War, a bloody boundary line strongly separating “before” from “after,” seems to have provided a writer from the region that, having won, also suffered heavy loss of life and resources, with a second chance to establish a vernacular mode of writing already established more than half a century earlier upon different, rather ahistorical assumptions. Incidentally, it is quite striking that, just as in Edgar Huntly, a witness to the late rebirth of the American fiction of horror in Sam Lawson Stories is an aged Native American woman: Stowe’s old Ketury is almost a double of Brockden Brown’s Old Deb, like her New England “cousin” a stigmatized outcast shunned by the rest of the humankind, both white and red. Also in some other stories included in the volume there are ghosts aplenty: from a dubious one, rooted in an epistemological ambiguity bordering on Jane Eyre (1847) in “The Ghost in the Cap’n Brown House” to quite genuine revenants haunting ships in “Tom Toothacre’s Ghost Story” and “A Student’s Sea Story” where the last spectral presence is benevolent, saving a sailor’s mother from sickness and premature death. Certainly, the invasion of full-blown specters in the Victorian times was not the same as at the turn of the nineteenth century, yet even at the moment when the gothic became identified in the United States almost exclusively with the popular culture of dime novels and pulp magazines, their belated appearance in American literature should not be ignored, particularly that it was continued by other women writers for whom Stowe was a mentor. The best example in this respect is Mary E. Wilkins Freeman whose ghost stories, such as “The Vacant Lot,” “The Wind in the Rosebush, “A Gentle Ghost,” “The Southwest Chamber” or “The Lost Ghost,” made the climax of the New England domestic gothic, pointing backward at Stowe as well as Hawthorne, and forward at H.P. Lovecraft. Perhaps the author of At the Mountains of Madness (1936) owed most to Poe, but on the other hand, many of his tales of the fictitious Arkham region and “real” Providence stem also from the subdued mimetic horror of Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Annie Trumbull Slosson. The second of Sam Lawson’s Stories, “The Sullivan Looking-Glass,” definitely a gothic one, too, deserves special attention against the background of the whole collection. At first, Sam is not eager to tell it to the boys, since it belongs to skeptical Aunt Lois who believes it contrary to her usual sober rationalism and thus guarantees, as it were, its truth value. However, since Aunt Lois is not willing to remember something that may disturb her peace of mind, the master story-teller has no choice and eventually accedes to repeated requests of the audience. The main protagonist of the tale is wise and beautiful Ruth Sullivan, adapted daughter of General Sullivan, who is in danger of losing her lawful inheritance because the general’s wicked nephew makes an unsuccessful attempt Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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to hide his last will. As apparently simple as it is, “The Sullivan Looking-Glass” brings into play and combines together two crucial motifs, in fact both of the Hawthornian provenance. One is the issue of relations of Americans with their “old home”: the general (notably in the US history there was one of that name, a hero of the War Independence) travels to Britain to claim an inherited estate (somewhat like in Hawthorne’s unfinished Ancestral Footstep), while the other, of the mysterious veiled lady endowed with the gift of prophecy, suggests an affinity with Priscilla from The Blithedale Romance (1852). In contrast, however, to Hawthorne’s clairvoyant, Stowe’s Ruth, allegedly “born with a veil over her face,” which, according to Sam, metaphorically signifies the “gift o’ seein’” (Stowe 42), can see not so much across time, but rather across space, as she proves able to visualize a room on the other side of the Atlantic, where the missing document has been placed. It seems that in the 1870s Stowe could already afford to downplay the nationalist agenda of the antebellum decades and make intertextual references to British literature (that is, The Castle of Otranto) as a model for American fiction, as well as address American-British blood associations in the context of property ownership. Just in case, perhaps, General Sullivan dies of apoplexy about six months after moving to the old country, and Jack, the nephew, who follows him as his heir, drowns on his way off the Irish coast, but at least for some time the soldier of the Revolution is allowed to enjoy his English mansion. By the way, the appropriately patriotic tone – after all, Sam Lawson is a genuine Yankee – sounds in the penultimate story, “Fireside Talks of the Revolution,” focusing on the battle of Concord and Lexington as a family memory. Charles H. Foster is certainly right when he claims in his classic study of Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism that “Oldtown Fireside Stories … is a good deal more than postscript or appendix to Oldtown Folks” (Foster 204), even though he prefers not to notice its gothic strain. First of all, the marvelous realism of Sam’s tales is a starting point in the development of a peculiar variety of the American fiction of horror, combining the romantic heritage of Irving and Hawthorne with a mimetic convention of representation favored by the Atlantic Monthly edited by William Dean Howells. Second, by its apparently idyllic, nostalgic atmosphere Stowe’s picture of New England before the Civil War, published soon after it, actually works as a disguise of the region’s “facies hippocratica,” to apply to the battlefields of Pennsylvania and Virginia the language used by Walter Benjamin to interpret the literature of the devastated Germany after the peace of Westphalia. The Hawthornian undercurrent of allegory, barely visible in Stowe, will grow much stronger in the melancholy fiction by her disciples: Wilkins Freeman, Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke, Alice Brown, and Slosson. “If the object becomes allegorical,” writes Benjamin, Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

From Scratch Once More or, Sam Lawson Restarts the American Gothic 29 “under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secured, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power” (The Origin, 183-184). Natick/Oldtown, gone forever in 1872, with many of its sons fallen at Gettysburg, in the power of Stowe also remained in her novel and stories “eternally secured.” Works Cited: Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1985. Print. ---. “The Storyteller. Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. 143-166. Print. Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1984. Print. Drake, Nathan. “On Gothic Superstition,” Gothic Documents. A Sourcebook 1700-1820. Ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, 154-160. Print. Foster, Charles H. The Rungless Ladder. Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1954. Print. Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Print. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories. Ridgewood, NJ: The Gregg Press, 1967. Print.

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From Faustus to Azatoth: H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch-House” (of Modernity) Wit Pietrzak Lovecraft’s entire oeuvre is structured along a typological axis, motifs recur from tale to tale with next to no difference except for the characters. The locale is predominantly New England, with the imaginary Arkham as a central venue for the supernatural occurrences. The protagonists’ professions are frequently students or professors of anthropology, mathematics, natural history, possibly detectives or random people from the upper-classes who dabble in the esoteric arts only to find out about the existence of secrets far beyond their human capacity for understanding. The supernatural beings that the characters encounter form a complete and unified pantheon of ghastly gods (Botting 159): Azathoth, Yog-Sottoth or Shub-Niggurath, of whose existence the doomed investigators learn from the cursed Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred or Unaussprechlichen Kulten by von Juntz. The moment Lovecraft’s dramatis personae become involved with the secret cults and aeon-old mysteries, their lives or at best their sanities are inevitably forfeit. In these respects “The Dreams in the WitchHouse” (1932) is no different. The short story has a rather occluded origin. When Lovecraft first finished the draft of what at an early stage was entitled “The Dreams of Walter Gilman,” he was so uncertain of its literary merit that he sought out some of his colleagues’ opinions about it. Although on the whole the response he elicited was encouraging, it was Arnold Derleth who seems to have taken issue with the story. Derleth must have lambasted Lovecraft’s work quite openly, since the latter seems rather disturbed by the trenchant feedback he had received. In a letter to Derleth, Lovecraft writes, “I hardly thought the miserable mess [‘Dreams in the Witch-House’] was quite as bad as you found it,” adding that “the whole incident shews me that my fictional days are probably over. At any rate, I must take that long vacation which I said long ago that I needed” (483). Partly due to Derleth’s acrid criticism, Lovecraft withheld the publication of the short story. However, ironically enough, a year after it was written, “Dreams in the WitchHouse” was submitted by none other than Derleth to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales, who accepted it. Following Derleth’s initial impression, a number of critics have poured scorn on the story; they include one of Lovecraft’s leading commentators, S. T. Joshi, who disparages the work as “overwritten and predictable” (111). It was Michel Houellebecq who gave the story full credit, counting it among Lovecraft’s late masterpieces which seek to explore the notion of “total knowledge” that may be gleaned from a joint investigation of the then novel quantum mechanics and folklore tales (76). It is partly from the premise Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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first laid down by Houellebecq that the present analysis departs in that the French novelist observes that “Dreams in the Witch-House” belongs to the Lovecraft canon in a large measure due to its unparalleled imaginative juxtaposition of science with magic. This interconnectedness of ostensibly disparate realms of knowledge makes the short story, as it is argued here, an important achievement not only in the horror tale genre but also in the broader discussion of modernity in general and modernism in particular. The plot of “Dreams in the Witch-House” strikes a familiar note. The main character, Walter Gilman, is a first-year student at the University of Miskatonic, Arkham; he steps onto the path to his perdition when he chooses to “connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic” (Lovecraft 140). Unsurprisingly too, he meets his gory death from the bizarre creature Brown Jenkin, a familiar of the eponymous witch, Keziah Mason. Several sentences should suffice to get the gist of the story, however, far more would be needed to account for its air of tremulous anxiety and underlying sense of dread that percolates from the pages out through the world about us. As a horror tale, “The Dreams in the Witch-House” seeks to keep the reader’s attention with its occasionally verbose passages, evoking the terrifying nature of Gilman’s undertaking. Yet the tale, as indeed do the others by Lovecraft, breaks through to a larger level of accomplishment in its criticism of modernity’s passion for ever greater comprehension of the nature and origin of the universe. Therefore it is here argued that Walter Gilman, in his Faustian yearning for knowledge more profound than any man’s, becomes a revenant figure of criticism of modernity. Marlovian Faustus, a key reference figure for Gilman-like heroes of Lovecraft’s, gladly signs his pact with Mephistopheles wherein he pledges his soul to Lucifer in exchange for twenty-four years during which the devil is to divulge to him all secrets of the universe. Mephistopheles is obliged “To give me whatsoever I shall ask, / To tell me whatsoever I demand” (Marlowe 170). Faustus cannot be content with earthly attainments: “his bills hung up for monuments,” for he still is merely “a man” (Marlowe 162). Even though he is severally visited by the good angel who counsels Faustus to “repent; God will pity thee,” the doctor replies: “My heart’s harden’d, I cannot repent” (Marlowe 180). The allure of unequalled greatness precipitates Faustus into further consort with Mephistopheles and closer to final doom. Similarly, in Lovecraft’s tale, Gilman has an inkling that at the end of his path there lie suffering and death; in spite of that, however, he carries on with his studies: the university doctor “would have made him take a rest – an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?” (Lovecraft 149). Disregarding the peril, Gilman will not discontinue his quest. The place of Mephistopheles at the side of Gilman is taken by Keziah and her eerie familiar Brown Jenkin, while the ultimate sultan of all abhorrent entities, also referred to as the devil, is Azathoth. It is before his throne that Gilman is to be taken in order to “sign the book of Azathoth in his own blood and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far” (Lovecraft 150). The pact with the devil mirrors that of Faustus’s who also has to prove himself worthy to sign Lucifer’s contract. Although in Lovecraft it is never clear whether Gilman has put his signature in the dark book, the point remains that he exerts himself tirelessly to seek out the exact knowledge this pact would afford him. He refuses to acknowledge the presence of Keziah in his everyday life or the fact that he seems to travel to the realm of Azathoth during the night. When offered a crucifix, Gilman lets “the cheap metal [object] hang idly from a knob on his host’s dresser” (Lovecraft 162). He is poised to receive the horrid wisdom of the witch even at the cost of his life. Unlike Faustus, Gilman does not attain the preternatural knowledge of the universe prior to his violent demise. Neither is he vested with the capability to travel whenever he might so please to the unknown dimensions. It is these failures that mark Gilman as a profoundly modern character in that despite his numerous attempts to reach out beyond the human realm, he is thwarted in the process. Helen of Troy does not strut before Gilman, who can only sigh after Yeats from “No Second Troy”: “Was there another Troy for her to burn?” in a profoundly modernist angst over the by-gone order and lost beauty. There is no Troy, no glory of the mighty mage or a brilliant scientist but only the fate of a ravished student who hankers after what will eventually bring him to ruin. Lovecraft manages to infuse his tale with an authorial anxiety which will later appear in another devil-obsessed writer, Thomas Mann. The main character of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn, signs the pact with the devil who promises that Adrian will overcome the debilitating artistic difficulties of his times, that indeed he will overcome not only his entire cultural epoch but also time itself, proving himself a genius. It is the promise which Mann describes in his novel that proves an irresistible allure for the numerous Faustuses of modernity. Beside classical witch myths, Lovecraft also explores an insatiable thirst for achievement similar to Leverkühn’s. He endows Gilman with a Faustus/Leverkühn-like propensity to surpass human limitations in search for the elusive knowledge of reality. Gilman desires to become the one to open new doors for human science, doors which will lead through the half-forgotten folklore to spaces and universes hidden from even the most enlightened of minds. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Gilman, similarly to many a character from Lovecraft’s tales, may thus be argued to represent a modernist quester. What he yearns for is the understanding of such fields of knowledge that may allow him to finally conceive or reconceive a complete picture of the universe. The definition of the modernist quest that strikes a pertinent note here is supplied by Wyndham Lewis. In his first novel Tarr (1918), Lewis has his eponymous character assert that “everything we see – you understand, this universe of distinct images – must be reinterpreted to tally with all the senses and beyond that with our minds . . . the eye alone sees nothing at all but conventional phantoms” (309). The desire to show forth the world in its totality, reveal the underlying pattern of reality, characterises Tarr as much as it does Gilman. Whereas the former relies on the artistic devices only, the latter reposes his trust in science and the occult. Nevertheless, both strive to reach beyond the outer veneer of reality and capture the unchangeable image of the world. Gilman, however, comes to pay a far greater price for his single-mindedness than Tarr. Just as in the case of Faustus, who wants to overcome the sublunary sciences perceived as “mercenary drudge. . . . [t]oo servile and illiberal for [him]” (Marlow 163), as a result no better than mere speculations, Gilman’s desires to leap beyond his achievements in science lead to his death. Obsessed with the characteristically modernist “celebrations of technology as extending human capacity” and instigation of scientific progress “alongside human evolution generally” (Armstrong 159, 176), Gilman like Leverkühn does not relinquish his studies in mathematics, knowing that it is solely through combining science with folklore, myths and olden tales that he can reach the summits. Lovecraft’s infatuation with disciplines as diverse as folklore studies and quantum mechanics is by no means uncharacteristic of modernist writers, especially those descending from the American line. William Carlos Williams directly affiliates his poetics with an engagement with technology in its various guises: “To make two bald statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant” (Williams 54). Similarly to Williams, Pound sees the modern machine as the best example of a catalyst for the pressures which unite form and function, which has been developed as a result of centuries of improvements (Pound 57-70). Indeed, it is Pound’s insight into the nature of the modern machine that helped him develop the ideogrammic method (Byron 222), thus contributing substantially to the creation of one of the structural models for his Cantos. International examples can be cited as well: Wyndham Lewis famously extolled industry and machinery as having “exploded in useful growths, and found wilder intricacies than those of Nature (Lewis, ManiAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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festo 203); the Futurist movement saw the machine as the face of the future; the Bauhaus used machine as a model for utilitarian and anti-elitist art. All of the above may serve as examples of fellow visionaries for a Lovecraftian investigator cum artist in that the characters of Lovecraft’s later tales never shun scientific novelties, their propensity for ancient tales notwithstanding. However, Lovecraft’s protagonists clearly differ from the above-mentioned modernist avant-garde artists in one respect. Unlike the modernists who revel in the revolutionary, desiring over and above to MAKE IT NEW, Gilman discovers that the search for hidden universes is in fact a deathly endeavour. He lines up with the infamous Doctor Caligari in anticipating the mental breakdown and degeneration of humanity under the tyranny of the modern society. It is thus no wonder that Gilman in many respects epitomises biological pessimism. Echoing Max Nordau’s insight, Gilman evokes the “prevalent feeling [of] imminent perdition and extinction” (Nordau 3) of man who will annihilate himself as a result of his unquenchable thirst for exploration of ever further ridges of the unknown. This is the other pole of the modernist entanglement with technological and scientific progress; beside the unchecked optimism that stirred the imagination of the artists of the early decades of the twentieth century, there was a simultaneous outburst of criticism directed against “the machine.” The opposition was aired not only from trenchantly traditionalist positions such as W. B. Yeats’s but it also came from the thinkers and artists willingly embracing the new, such as Fritz Lang, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, although obviously their reasons for disparaging the new were markedly different to those of the Yeats camp. It appears that the figure of Walter Gilman represents indirect criticism directed against the modernist acceptance of development. His incessant desire to gain contact with Keziah, the resultant pact with the evil divinities and his frantic involvement with advanced mathematics may be taken to represent a collective modernist hankering after the knowledge of a more primal order of things. Einstein in physics and Freud in psychology brought to view in language “new phenomena – and even if many of those phenomena were of a type that nobody previously could have imagined – they were not, after all, phenomena that hadn’t been before our eyes all along” (Panek 177). The feat of discovery on the part of Einstein and Freud respectively was rather that they gave a means of expression to notions which had lacked terms for enunciation. By inference the achievement of Eliot’s Waste Land is that it identifies the fragmentation of man’s barren existence in the world and seeks to bestow a unifying principle of myth on it. In Ulysses, Joyce compels our attention to the discontinuous processes which comprise human psyche, revealing that order rests on the framework we choose so as to make sense of our experience of the real. It is against Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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beliefs in the powers of human mind like Eliot’s and Joyce’s that the narrator in “Dreams in the Witch-House” implicitly inveighs when describing Gilman’s deepening abandon: As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? (Lovecraft 142)

Gilman is becoming more and more obsessed with the urge to reach out through the veil and pierce the outer film of the visible all the way to the essential reality. His single-mindedness evokes the modernist wish to overcome the available modes of perceiving the world regardless of the price that will have to be paid eventually. Only having entered modernity can an appraisal of its dangers be attempted. That is why Lovecraft’s tales of mystery deliberately revive the Faustian figure of an insatiable investigator; it is in this character that the inherently modernist nature of an artist is apprehended: the blind drive towards achieving the goal, the unshakeable faith in one’s mental capacity, and the belief that at the intersection of the mystical and scientific worlds there lies the path to elucidating the essential reality. When it dawns on Gilman that he has interfered with powers far surpassing his comprehension, it is already too late for him, just as Faustus’s pleas that “time may cease, and midnight never come” (Marlowe 203) are now to no avail, as Faustus must fall into the hands of Lucifer and his ilk. Thus from the recesses of the Gothic genre there emerges a powerful criticism of modernity and high modernism in particular. Typically for such tales it is the repressed, the abject, the unwanted that returns with a vengeance in order to challenge the “bourgeois modes of social organisation and economic and aesthetic production . . . self-discipline and regulation of its individuals;” as a result of this opposition to civilizational order “excess emanates from within, from hidden, pathological motivations that rationality [is] powerless to control” (Botting 12). The sweeping desire to overcome the intellectual, scientific and moral stasis, which underlies modernism’s claim to a new order, is revealed to be a precarious step towards self-destruction. All in all, Walter Gilman’s hideous death seems a fair price for his ambitious as well as perilous undertaking. Still, modernity holds deep within itself greater devilry than heinous death and the once blissful angel of illumination may choose to collect his debt in an unlikeliest way, as Mann’s modern(ist) Faustus, Adrian Leverkhün, came in the end to know so well.

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Works Cited: Armstrong, Tim. “Technology: ‘Multiplied Man.’” A Concise Companion to Modernism. Ed. David Bradshaw. London: Routledge, 2003. 158-178. Print. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Byron, Mark S. “Philosophy: Eighteenth Century to the Present.” The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. 221-223. Print. Houellebecq, Michel. H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. San Francisco: Believer Books, 2005. Print. Joshi, S. T. Ed. Icons of Horror and the Supernatural. An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007. Print. Lewis, Wyndham. “Manifesto.” Modernism. An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 201-206. Print. ---. Tarr. New York: Penguin, 1982. Print. Lovecraft, Howard Philips. Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2008. Print. ---. “The Dreams in the Witch-House.” At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971. 139-177. Print. Marlowe, Christopher. “Doctor Faustus.” The Plays. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2000. 153206. Print. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Print. Panek, Richard. The Invisible Century. Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004. Print Pound, Ezra. Machine Art and Other Writings. Ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Print. Williams, William Carlos. “The Wedge.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos. Volume II. 1939-1962. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 2001. 51-90. Print.

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Gothic Metalepsis and Ekphrastic Horror: Self-Conscious Reflection on the Ambivalent Cultural Status in Stephen King’s “The Road Virus Heads North” Zofia Kolbuszewska I actually have the picture described in this story, how weird is that? My wife saw it and thought I’d like it (or at least react to it), so she gave it to me as a . . . birthday present? Christmas present? I can’t remember. What I can remember is that none of my three kids liked it. I hung it in my office, and they claimed the driver’s eyes followed them as they crossed the room (as a very small boy, my son Owen was similarly freaked by a picture of Jim Morrison). Stephen King

This article presents a reading of Stephen King’s short story “The Road Virus heads North” (2002, first published in 1999 in the collection 999 ed. by Al Sarrantonio) in the perspective provided by the tradition of the monstrous Gothic ekphrasis. King’s text can be designated as ekphrastic horror due to the role played in the story by the representation of a monstrous living picture that metaleptically violates ontological boundaries and invades the reality of the story’s protagonist. Not only does a metalanguage emerge from the verbal representation of the picture that “mirrors the production of other cultural signifying systems” (Smith viii), such as, for instance, culture’s differentiation into high and low, but King’s ekphrasis also demonstrates the best-selling author’s ambivalent attitude towards his own cultural status. The story self-reflexively intimates the author’s unarticulated misgivings about being a popular culture star and his desire to acquire the recognition accorded a canonical writer by the high culture. The main character of King’s story, Richard Kinnel – a horror fiction author suffering at the moment from a writer’s block – buys a psychedelic painting entitled “The Road Virus Heads North” at a yard sale in a small town in Massachusetts: “[t]he painting was a watercolor, and technically very good. Kinnell didn’t care about that; technique didn’t interest him (a fact the critics of his own work had duly noted). What he liked in works of art was content, and the more unsettling the better. This picture scored high in that department” (King 289). As Françoise Meltzer points out, “it is the portrait of itself that literature paints when it conjures up a version of the painted arts” (1). Indeed, the complications of the relationship between the writer and the picture demonstrate that contrary to Kinnell’s declaration the reflection on the content of a work of art necessarily leads to the reflection on its form, technique and circumstances of its creation Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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because, as Mack Smith emphasizes, ekphrasis functions as a matrix of discourses functioning in a particular culture. Moreover, the ekphrastic representation of the psychedelic picture Kinnell has bought reveals anxieties concerning the form, technique and the cultural and social context of King’s writing. The man who painted the psychedelic art piece had apparently burnt all his pictures but the “The Road Virus” and committed suicide afterwards. The painting depicts a fiendish blond grinning young man behind the wheel of a muscle car [high performance automobile] on the Tobin Bridge over the Mystic River in Boston presented against the backdrop of the sky that is “a bruise-colored mass of yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink.” (King 290)

The teeth of the young man look like filed to points and remind Kinnell of cannibal’s fangs. The words “The Road Virus” are written across the car’s back deck. On his way back home, Kinnell, also heading north, makes a horrible discovery. He notices that the landscape depicted in the painting changes every once in a while: And the Tobin Bridge was gone. So was the Boston skyline. So was the sunset. It was almost dark in the painting now, the car and its wild rider illuminated by a single streetlamp that ran a buttery glow across the road and the car’s chrome. (King 298)

The picture keeps changing. It represents places visited by the blond thug on his way to the writer’s house, his trip punctuated by cruel murders of those who have had anything to do with the painting depicting him. The writer’s attempts to throw away or destroy the picture prove unsuccessful. Each time it appears back on the wall in Kinnell’s house, intact. At the end of the story the fiendish blond assassin is approaching the writer hiding in his bedroom. Kinnell hears the car engine drone and sees the painting depict the driver’s seat splattered with blood, conspicuous in the open car door of the Grand Am Pontiac parked in the driveway in front of the writer’s house. King’s story that features a living picture taps into the contemporary resurgence of the interest in the myth of Pygmalion and references the theme of the demonic interstitial (in-between) status of the simulacrum inherent in this myth (Stoichita 3). The demonic status of the monstrous painting points to King’s anguished sense of being poised between the popular, low culture and the high culture. On the other hand, it is also possible to consider King’s text as descending from the tradition of what Kerry Powell designates as “magic-picture mania,” that is, a Gothic fascination with the conception of the “living” work of art considered a monstrosity (148-151). Yet, it is still another debate concerning the notion of art’s monstrosity that merits attention in this context. The controversy

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in question pertained to the problem of imitation and bringing about likeness in the processes of both creation and procreation. If in Renaissance “the prohibition against images had played a specific role in the dissemination of stories of monstrous birth attributed to the mother’s imagination” which, it was believed, inscribed the resemblance to the image on the fetus (Huet 166), it is the Romantic painter’s “feminine aspect that allows such a strong affinity for forbidden images and lifelike representations. [This] represents a new instance of parental singularity, benefiting the father who has openly appropriated the feminine in his art” (Huet 67). As Marie-Hélène Huet points out, in Romantic view art, breaks the laws of nature by asserting in no uncertain terms that procreation is the responsibility of a solitary father. The genesis of art excludes the maternal in favor of a male fecundity whose progeny, the portrait, discloses both art and the hidden monstrosity behind art: its unnatural birth. (163)

Thus, “[t]he Romantic portrait at once exceeded and betrayed the concept of classical mimesis. . . . The canvas does not simply mirror the living, it seems itself to be alive, fantastically and fatally” (Huet 168). Furthermore, it is compelling that the title of King’s monstrously alive eponymous picture, “The Road Virus Heads North,” should refer to a virus. By virtue of the employment of the term taken from medicine and epidemiology, the text situates itself in the long tradition of debates linking gender, forbidden images, pitfalls of representation, and the tension between art and nature. Paracelsus, who was interested in the questions of generating monstrosity and the monstrosity of generation also claimed that “the propagation of serious epidemics such as the plague is an effect of imagination, and more particularly of women’s imagination” (Huet 131). Interestingly, the gendered paragonal perspective also sustains the relationship between the verbal and the visual inherent in the conception of ekphrasis. Defined by James A. W. Heffernan as “verbal representation of visual representation” (3), ekphrasis turns on “the commonly gendered antagonism . . . between the verbal and visual representation” (7) and reveals “a profound ambivalence toward visual art, a fusion of iconophilia and iconophobia, of veneration and anxiety” (7). W. J. T. Mitchell discusses the ambivalent encounter of the visual and the verbal in the device of ekphrasis in terms of three phases. “Ekphrastic indifference” arises from the commonsensical conviction that ekphrasis is impossible due to the incommensurate character of the two media, the difference of their inherent properties and modes of perception (152). This stage of the process of verbal representation of visual representation is followed by “ekphrastic hope,” Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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where the impossibility of ekphrasis is transcended metaphorically or in imagination (152); where “the doctrines of ut picture poesis and the sister arts are mobilized to put language at the service of vision” (153). “Ekphrastic fear” appears when anxiety about a possible collapse of a difference between the verbal and the visual representation becomes conspicuous thus making the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis realized literally and actually (154). Mitchell points out that it is in Lessing’s Laokoon that one of the most influential expressions of ekphrastic fear can be found (154). It bars “free exchange and transference between visual and verbal art” (155) because Lessing’s fear of “literary emulation of visual arts” can be construed as that of castration (155). On the other hand, the ambivalent character of the utopian aspect of ekphrasis, the ekphrastic hope, is brought out by the fact that texts encounter their semiotic others in ekphrasis and attempt to overcome this otherness. The “otherness” of visual representation from the standpoint of textuality may be anything from a professional competition (the paragon of poet and painter) to a relation of political, disciplinary, or cultural domination in which the “self” is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject, while the “other” is projected as a passive, seen and (usually) silent object. . . . Like the masses, the colonized, the powerless and voiceless everywhere, visual representation cannot represent itself; it must be represented by discourse. (159)

In all texts classified as belonging to the ekphrastic horror the uncanniness of the representations of living paintings can be traced back to the literalization of the classical definition of ekphrasis as “prosopopeia,” or rhetorical technique of envoicing a silent object. Ekphrasis “speaks not only about art objects but also to and for them” (Heffernan 6-7). It, [s]tages – within the theatre of language itself – a revolution of the image against the word, and particularly the word of Lessing, who decreed that the duty of pictures was to be silent and beautiful (like women), leaving expression to poetry. In talking back to and looking back at the male viewer, the images envoiced by ekphrasis challenge at once the controlling authority of the male gaze and the power of the male word. (Heffernan 7)

Investing an artifact with life is tantamount to the eruption of the other, associated with the feminine, into the social space organized in accordance with Laca-nian law of the Father, thus questioning its hierarchies. “The Road Virus Heads North” can thus be considered to reveal anxieties and contradictions riving contemporary American culture, problems arising out of unavoidable confrontations with otherness, non-privileged and nonhegemonic points of viewing history, society and its structures, transformations in understanding gender identity, as well as ways of producing and interpreting meaning in the reality depending on and saturated with simulacra. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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King’s short story dramatizes Kinnell’s writer’s block. He had gone down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England conference titled “The Threat of Popularity.” You could count on PEN to come up with such subjects, Kinnell had found; it was actually sort of comforting. He drove the two hundred and sixty miles from Derry rather than flying because he’d come to a plot impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to work it out. (King 288)

The writer’s fatal confrontation with the monstrous picture can be interpreted as, among other things, an encounter with unbridled, overwhelming monstrous power of creativity and inspiration. This monstrosity manifests itself as the visual; through forbidden images. It might seem, therefore, that the indestructibility of the psychedelic painting “The Road Virus Heads North,” murderous attacks of the Road Virus, and the abrupt stopping of the narration as a formal device ending the story, should testify to the victory of the visual over the verbal, thus clearly demonstrating the impossibility of overcoming the writer’s block. Yet, the verbal report about the invasion and irruption of the living image into the writer’s world paradoxically demonstrates the way out of the impasse. However, one might observe that the story relies on the verbal representation of precisely the victory of the visual over the verbal. The ending of the story appears to corroborate such interpretation: what he saw as the door clicked open and the motorcycle boots crossed the room toward where he lay, naked and with his hair full of Prell, was the picture hanging on the wall over his bed, the picture of the Road Virus idling in front of his house with the driver’s-side door open. The driver’s-side bucket seat, he saw, was full of blood. I’m going outside, I think, Kinnell thought, and closed his eyes. (311)

Nevertheless, what the encounter with the monstrous picture suggests is that, on the contrary, the writer is in control of his material – i.e. horror, that is traditionally associated with the feminine abject, the repulsive, irrational and the sensual – inasmuch as he gets reconciled with the fact that the horror will overpower and control him. Strikingly, the only way to overcome the writer’s block is for the author to give in to the visual, that is, to the female gendered power of imagination gone wild and to tap into the inexhaustible energy of the popular culture that represents the cultural unconscious. He needs to “[go] outside,” into the open of the power field of the popular culture visual “wilderness” gendered feminine by the aesthetic tradition descended from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in order to leave the limitations of his privileged position as male and as an agent who wields the verbal. It must be noted that the story dramatizes the problem of a clash between the protagonist and the otherness of the popular culture. Kinnell is privileged in twofold manner in the Symbolic order: as a man and the writer of horror, who Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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subjects the abject to the power of the verbal. He is confronted with the otherness of the energy of the popular culture and its imaginary, which in King’s story is represented by the monstrous painting. As a man the author is supposed to be in control of the other, the abject in the patriarchal social system, and as the writer he is expected to control the abject, the other, through mediation, by means of verbal representation. However, “The Road Virus” manifests the indestructibility, vitality and wild energy of the low, popular culture and its imaginary that spreads like contagion. Its representatives are treated with contempt or with condescension by the participants of the so called high culture, from whose point of view the popular culture’s alternative fashioning of identity is often regarded as effeminate. In “Mass Culture as Woman,” a chapter in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Andreas Huyssen observes that, Contrary to the claims of champions of the autonomy of art, contrary also to the ideologists of textuality, the realities of modern life and the ominous expansion of mass culture throughout the social realm are always already inscribed into the articulation of aesthetic modernism. Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project. (47)

The critic further emphasizes that the association of women with mass culture and their concomitant exclusion from the realm of the “high culture” – although not unfamiliar in earlier historical periods – gained ground during the nineteenth century. He points out that, It is indeed striking to observe how the political, psychological, and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities. (47)

Huyssen concludes the chapter “Mass Culture as Woman,” by stating that “the gendering of mass culture as feminine and inferior” continued long into the twentieth century and did not lose power until fairly recently (62). It is worth noting that, paradoxically, by engaging a living picture and by alluding to the cannibal-like teeth of the blond muscleman, King’s text manifests its participation in a network of intertextual references that place his writing in the literary canon of high-culture. By virtue of its classification as a text that belongs to the genre of ekphrastic horror “The Road Virus Heads North” invokes Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890). It is in the preface to this novel that the reader finds a brief ironic reference to Caliban in the context of the referentiality and performativity as norms determining different ways of defining verisimilitude of representation. Wilde sarcastically observes that the nineteenth-century’s suspicion of realism is like the rage of Caliban seeing his Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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face in the mirror while the century’s suspicion of romanticism resembles the anger of Caliban who does not perceive his face in the mirror (3). Thus, not only does this intertextual reference in the King’s short story thematize the question of referentiality and performativity and the ever unresolved opposition between correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth, an opposition inherently characteristic of ekphrasis as metalanguage, but, owing to the role Caliban plays in The Tempest (1610), it also draws the reader’s attention to the problems of cultural otherness, cultural imperialism, attempts at harnessing nature for the benefit of civilization and the abject as civilization’s invincible residue. In King’s text these issues are embodied in the character of the blond assassin and in the eponymous term “virus.” In alluding to the cannibal/Caliban, King’s text confirms its position in the respectable canon of cultural treasures such as The Tempest by Shakespeare, or The Portrait of Dorian Gray. King’s Caliban is emblematic of the otherness of a savage associated with the wilderness and uncivilized uncouthness of the other who does not participate in the high culture. The association with the otherness of nature is reinforced by the reference to the name of the car – “The Road Virus.” It evokes the biological aspect of the invincibility of nature as construed from the perspective of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The malicious virus is still in part beyond the control of civilization and like medieval plagues generates anxiety, while bespeaking the vision of unbridled wild, uncontrollable energy and vitality of the uncontrollable popular culture. The image of the young cannibal in the psychedelic living picture can be considered an expression of a tension between Kings desire for canonical recognition and his awareness of his interstitial status. The blond owner of the Road Virus car can also be interpreted as emblematic of cultural wars in America, the wars self-reflexively included by the popular culture in its imaginary. King’s status as a bestselling author is reinforced by the intertextual link between his writings and William Shakespeare’s oeuvre. However, the playwright did not make a distinction between high and low art. He was a hero of the Elizabethan culture before the process of dissociation of sensibility, diagnosed by T. S. Eliot, set in. Shakespeare was a hero of popular culture. By virtue of associations with the playwright King’s cultural status as a popular writer is also confirmed. Therefore, paradoxically, the affinity with Shakespeare claimed by King entails the horror writer being poised between the high and low culture. Such positioning accounts for his sensitivity to the surge of cultural transformations registered by the popular culture imaginary and explains a stunning interlacing of and a tension between conservative construction of tradition (represented by the canon) and almost leftist social sensibility manifesting itself in his texts. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Works Cited: Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashberry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Print. Huet, Marie-Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Print. King, Stephen. Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. New York: Scribner, 2002. ---.“The Road Virus Heads North.” Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. New York: Scribner, 2002. 287-311. Print. Mitchell, W. J. T. “Ekphrasis and the Other.” Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. 151-181. Print. ---. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Print. Meltzer, Françoise. Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Print. Powell, Kerry. “Tom, Dick, and Dorian Gray: Magic-Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction.” Philological Quarterly 62.2 (1983) : 147-170. Print. Smith, Mack. Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998. Print. Stoichita, Victor. The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock. Trans. Alison Anderson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Print. Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Books, 2000. Print.

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(Post-) Colonial Gothic

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Loveless Legacies: Gothic Mothers and Haunted Daughters in Postcolonial Literature Dorota Filipczak Gothicism, with its impending doom, has been associated with colonialism ever since the haunting (or contaminating) threat of the abjected other was first acknowledged. Encounter with the cultural other threatened the unity of imperial subject and generated fear which, while denied on the level of colonial propaganda, descended underground into fiction where the irrational could speak uninhibited. Colonialism was based on idealization of whiteness and self-restraint as a weapon against racial and moral contamination often projected on the colonized, or simply, on members of a different culture. Even early Gothic novels, which did not really venture outside Europe were classified as saturated with “spiritual orientalism” of “the British Protestant imagination” (Duncan 24). The way the early Gothicists such as Walpole, Lewis and Radcliffe exaggerate the strangeness of Catholic rites or the importance of a setting other than British points to the fascination and abhorrence of different emotional and cultural expressiveness. In Wuthering Heights (1847) and Jane Eyre (1847), the novels that had enormous impact on postcolonial literature written by women, the other who ruins the integrity of the English house is racialized and gothicized at the same time. Heathcliff, a dark foil to the white civility of Edgar Linton, is unrestrained in jealousy, passion and anger. This makes him similar to colonial constructions of the indigenous other as “homo emotionalis” (Okoth 139), whose extreme version he becomes. The way he refuses to be tamed, but turns into a vengeful oppressor of the civilized order can aptly illustrate imperial anxieties. Catherine Linton née Earnshaw, a proper English girl of respectable origin, finds herself shadowed by a foundling from the streets of Liverpool, one of the ports through which the racially other subject entered England in order to stay (Rich 121). The word “Gipsy” used with reference to Heathcliff was a standard term marking ethnic difference regardless of its origin (Makdisi 211). Read against colonial literature, Catherine's plight is not uncommon, for in imperial discourse the woman becomes a carrier of the English ethos, and her body, an extension of her country, should be defended at all costs from the invasion of inferior races (the motif is only too familiar from A Passage to India, 1924, by E. M. Forster). The plight of Catherine's sister-in-law Isabella is an illustration of what happened to an English lady if she gave herself to a barbarian of unknown origin as a result of nostalgia for a Byronic hero. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Catherine and Isabella suffer their oppression (emotional, or physical as in the latter case) at home. Thus the familiar space is gothicized and, in each case, turns into a prison, this being a frequent mark of Gothic fiction by women in general, to which I shall return later in postcolonial context. A striking feature that has not drawn enough critical attention is the absence of the mother in the moment when the two female characters make their choices. Catherine loses both parents at an early age and finds a maternal figure in Nelly Dean who transmits traditional feminine values connected with propriety. Isabella’s parents die of fever so her mother is not around when Isabella decides to marry Heathcliff, defying her brother’s wife. The absence of the mother who leaves the narrative relatively early or does not enter it at all is another important factor begging for attention. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre grows up as an orphan like Catherine Earnshaw. Her Creole foil, Bertha Rochester, haunts Jane Eyre with the very combination of features that Heathcliff embodies. She is animalistic, not to say beastly; her expressiveness mars the propriety of her image, making her a Gothic apparition. She eventually accomplishes the destruction of “the great house” and consumes herself in the fire that is like an incursion of apocalypse upon the ordered world. The combination of Gothicism and colonialism is much more obvious in Jane Eyre due to a later fictional prequel to the novel written by Jean Rhys. Rewriting Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys continues the motif of domestic occlusion in which women are tormented by the aftermath of their own desire. Antoinette, who yields to the worldly charm of an unknown gentleman, finds herself ruthlessly oppressed, which reverses the binary opposition between the indigenized other and a civilised woman in Wuthering Heights and its counterpart in Jane Eyre, where Rochester presents himself as a victim of a rich Creole heiress so as to gain Jane’s compassion. Rhys pays a special attention to the relationship between later Mrs. Rochester and her mother, making her desire the companionship of the mother who clearly does not love her, and then making her hopelessly flee this loveless legacy when all Rochester can see in her is the madness and miscegenation running in the family due to oversexed, unrestrained, and racially impure women. The legacy of the Brontë sisters is reflected in postcolonial literature by women from different parts of the former British Empire. In my article I will deal with a short story “The Peace of Utrecht” from a collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) by Alice Munro, a celebrated Canadian writer from Ontario, and The Autobiography of My Mother (1995), a novel by Jamaica Kincaid, who was born on Antigua, but resides in the USA. In these two texts the main problem is the mother whose legacy the daughter rejects, while being imprisoned by it at the same time. Thus the daughter is haunted by the memory or the Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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construction of the mother who inspires dread and anxiety rather than positive emotion. I will start my analysis by engaging with the phrase “Gothic Mother” (195). Alice Munro uses it explicitly in her short story about two daughters reminiscing about their mother who is dead when the narrative opens, and the daughters are trying to cope with their failure to love her. Di Brandt, another Canadian writer, states that "the classic site of the mother's body in the Western culture" is the cemetery (19). Like Luce Irigaray referenced by Coral Ann Howells in the analysis of Munro’s story (19-30), Brandt sees the mother as a foundation sacrifice of patriarchal success. In “The Peace of Utrecht” we do not see the burial ground because the mother continues to be buried alive in the house that turned from her shelter into prison, where, guarded by one daughter, in absence of the other, she struggled to survive socially despite Parkinson’s disease. The story is played out exclusively between women, with men strangely absent from the scene or, simply, marginal. The father of two daughters Helen and Maddy is never mentioned in the text. Helen, who escapes from her mother’s suffering into a financially secure marriage, never mentions the name of her husband, and refers to him only once. Maddy, the elder of the siblings, is shown in an unfathomable relationship with a married man, Fred Powell, whose wife is, quite significantly, an invalid, just like Maddy’s mother used to be. This, understandably, prevents the man from committing himself to Maddy. In each case the emotional condition of the daughter shows that she is not able to form a relationship with a man. Both daughters lack the ability to mark out the boundary between themselves and the mother, who keeps resurfacing even if the guilt for her incarceration and the shame at her illness have been repressed. The “Gothic Mother” from “The Peace of Utrecht” can be interpreted through Kristeva’s concept of abjection (Kristeva 5-11). In my view it allows for a more nuanced reading than Irigaray’s concept of matricide (Anderson, Feminist Philosophy 115-116), even if the concept of abjection springs from the same conviction of the mother being sacrificed to ensure the survival of patriarchal order. The concept of abjection has garnered a great deal of attention from critics interested in Gothicism, for Kristeva, like Freud, whom she follows and refigures, sees the emergence of identity as a process fraught with violence, and threatened with horror. The subject in process has often been termed as a “Gothic subject,” for example, by Martin and Savoy (61) because of its precarious status. Anchored firmly in the symbolic, it is continually threatened with the fall into the non-verbal semiotic whose liberating power it courts at the same time. Kristeva discusses the primal unity with the maternal body and the effort of the subject to break away from the maternal through the autonomy of language: Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Dorota Filipczak The child can serve its mother as token of her own authentification; there is, however, hardly any reason for her to serve as go-between for it to become autonomous and authentic in its turn. In such close combat, the symbolic light that a third party eventually the father, can contribute helps the future subject . . . in pursuing a reluctant struggle against what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject. (13)

Kristeva does not always sex the child; at other times she makes a clear distinction between a boy and a girl. What is crucial for my analysis of the two postcolonial texts is the insoluble dilemma faced by a female subject – either to stay on the side of the mother and remain with the horror of abjection, or choose autonomy traditionally associated with male subject only. The former option entails sorrowful continuity with the negative legacy women face; the latter results in violent discontinuity. By relegating the mother to the realm of abject, the daughter tries to keep herself uncontaminated by its horror. According to Kristeva girls can access the maternal semiotic more easily because of their physical identification with the mother’s body. At the same time this relation to the semiotic posits a great risk to their life and sanity. I would like to use Kristeva’s dramatically Gothic images to refer to the relationship between mother and daughter: For a woman the call of the mother is not only a call from beyond time or beyond the socio-political battle . . . this call . . . generates . . . madness. After the superego, the ego founders and sinks. It is a fragile envelope, incapable of staving off the irruption of this conflict, of this love which had bound the little girl to her mother, and which then, like black lava had lain in waitfor her all along the path of her desperate attempts to identify with the symbolic paternal order . . . death quietly moves in. (qtd. in Adams 157)

This passage can throw light on the relationship between a “Gothic Mother” and a haunted daughter in postcolonial fiction. The maternal, identified with the black lava, speaks only too clearly about the horror of formlessness and the collapsing of boundaries, which makes it impossible for a girl to escape her mother who lies in wait much like a Gothic prowler and demands that the daughter merges with her. The very image of lava is a clear import from exotic landscape with all negative undertones of emotional eruption that is steeped in the binary opposition between culture and nature, nature threatening to overthrow paternal or colonial order. The image of black lava draws on the colonial catalogue associating an indigene with darkness, chaos, emotional excess and contamination. All this is projected on the mother. The scenario of “The Peace of Utrecht” reiterates the violent, primal separation from the mother, which, according to Kristeva, takes place in the moment of birth. Yet in “The Peace of Utrecht” the separation never becomes complete. The configuration mother-daughters seems to be the only pattern available, even Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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after the mother’s death, much as the daughters have been trying to abject the mother in deeds and memories. The story opens when the younger of the siblings, Helen, who broke away from the mother by getting married, returns to her home town some time after her mother’s funeral, which she conspicuously failed to attend. She arrives flanked by her two children, a daughter and a son, thus achieving her authentification as a proper mother, this being a protection against her former self locked in the family home, “lying around” and “waiting to be picked up” (Munro 201). Helen's feeling of reluctance and uncanniness as she parks her car and braces herself to enter home is an anticipation of what she calls "continuing disaster," reflected in her illusion that she can hear her mother calling "Who is there?" (Munro 198). The question really refers to Helen’s ability to define herself, or rather to a lack of it. It follows the scene in which Helen catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and studies the difference between the girl she last saw in the reflection and her image of a “Young Mother,” a phrase that cannot but be juxtaposed against the “Gothic Mother” of the story. Both women are identified by the positive or negative potential of their social roles and do not exist as separate individuals. Helen’s glimpse into the mirror reiterates the famous Lacanian mirror stage. The daughter, who is haunted by her mother upon entering the empty house, has to recognize herself in the mirror for what she is now, a woman safely anchored in a patriarchal scenario, which makes her belong to a man at the cost of severing the ties with her mother. While Helen replicates exactly the model that her mother introduced: marriage, propriety and two children, Maddy, the elder sister, seems to be frozen in a stage of juvenile contestation evident in her public image. Helen’s unspoken comment points to Maddy’s emotional immaturity: “she . . . may even have chosen to live without time and in perfect imaginary freedom as children do, the future untampered with, all choices always possible” (Munro 196). The above shows that the daughters’ inability to define themselves as emotionally secure individuals is intimately connected with their dependence on the construction of femininity that implies acting out particular roles without the complications of autonomy involved. The motif of women being clothed in particular roles returns in the short story twice after Helen nearly stumbles upon her old self lying around, ready to put on. During the only party that Maddy takes Helen to men and women play a game which consists in men trying to match discarded items of clothing on to their proper owners (starting “decorously” with a shoe). The game is a surrogate and reversal of sexual intimacy which is never manifest openly in a small town atmosphere of repression and taboos. Helen wishes no part of this, and finds a refuge in the car, the only space that gives her an impression of freedom from the discomfort of her return. In another scene Helen visits the aunts, one of whom draws her into a private conversation conAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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cerning the details of her mother’s death. The conversation takes place in an isolated room where all of a sudden Aunt Annie demonstrates to Helen her mother’s clothes which she has dutifully repaired and taken care of wanting to give them to Helen after the funeral. With horror Helen recognizes the familiar items of her mother’s wardrobe; as Howells puts it, referring to Irigaray, Aunt Annie insists on “the bodily encounter with the mother” (22). The “Gothic Mother” comes back to haunt her daughter. Aunt Annie tries to keep Helen imprisoned in the “continuing disaster” of home. Now Helen is invited to put on the role of the “Gothic Mother,” and identify with the scenario her mother was contained in. But the clothes are only a pretext to divulge the story of the mother’s final flight from hospital, ending in her being captured, brought back and placed in the bed with a wooden board nailed to it. The story within a story completes a series of images connected with imprisonment. Upon her entering home after years of absence Helen notes how the suffocating smell of flowers is locked in the closed room, how sunlight is trapped there, and how her mother, who used to enjoy walking in the garden in sunlight, must have struggled in “the house of stone.” The last phrase brings grave to mind, just like the board across the bed brings to mind the coffin. The mother is buried alive, first in the house, and then in hospital because the daughters are ashamed of her horrible illness, and refuse to grant her the little autonomy she desires. In fact, the “Gothic Mother” can be juxtaposed to Mrs. Rochester imprisoned in the attic of the country house for fear of “sad notoriety” she might attract. Like Mrs. Rochester she tries to flee her confinement. In each case it is a family member who turns from a guardian into a guard. Interestingly, the name of the mother is never mentioned; the same goes for the name of the father; thus the story acquires a value as an exposure of a Gothic secret that can be explained in the context of Kristeva’s parable about the formless engulfing maternal from which the daughter wants to dissociate herself. Let us examine the circumstances that lead up to the situation we find when the story opens. When Helen confesses to Maddy that she is getting married and will leave the house, Maddy says in response: “Our Gothic Mother . . . I don’t keep trying to make her human any more” (Munro 195). The fact that their mother is gradually divested of humanity makes it easier for the daughters to “deal with” her, as they put it. Belonging no longer with people but reduced to the abject, the mother becomes truly Gothic, and suffers a Gothic fate – “we grew cunning,” Helen says, “we . . . took all emotion away from our dealings with her, as you might take away meat from a prisoner to weaken him till he died” (Munro 199). Maternal pleas for love remain unanswered. When adolescent, the daughters are bothered by convention and propriety. Parkinson’s disease disfigures the mother's face and ruins her ability to speak; she can only rely Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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on the daughters for translation, but they are too embarrassed to act as interpreters. The daughters refuse to associate themselves with the story of failure; they desire to be separate, to forget by repressing the maternal, to achieve a success by not being like the mother. Unfortunately the mother’s disease points to what may happen to her daughter. This comes only too true in the last scene of the story which contains the only sincere conversation between the sisters carried on in the relaxed atmosphere of the kitchen where Maddy is making salad in a glass bowl. Maddy tries to explain why she left the mother in hospital to die: “I couldn’t go on . . . I wanted my own life . . . suddenly she lost her grip on the bowl, either because her hands had begun to shake or she had not picked it up properly in the first place” (Munro 210). The glass bowl that shatters in the final scene can symbolize the shattering of bond between the sisters, or else Maddy’s hands begin to shake to indicate that she, too, will fall ill with Parkinson’s disease. The reader is immediately reminded of Helen’s dreams of her mother in which she thinks to herself: “she is all right, only that her hands are trembling” (Munro 200). In this instance Helen conspicuously fails to interpret the incident for what it might be, because she does not want to be brought back to the nightmare of Parkinson’s disease. The only emotion that the story is filled with is the acute sense of embarrassment connected with the fact that the mother did not live up to the image of perfection, but became a “Gothic Mother with the cold appalling mask of the Shaking Palsy” (Munro 200). Helen, the narrator, realizes during the family visit that she does not connect emotionally with her sister. They cannot discuss the past without facing difficult emotions, but they are not ready to face them. “No exorcising,” Maddy says; this implies lack of sincerity about the shared pain and embarrassment. The story ends with Helen encouraging Maddy to follow in her footsteps, leave the home town and take life in her own hands. “But why can’t I, Helen? Why can’t I?” (Munro 210) is the only reply Maddy offers. This indicates Maddy will waste away in “the house of stone” the way her mother did. The story is full of images of occlusion. First, it is the brick house bringing to mind Protestant pioneers in Canada, then it is the image of hospital from which the mother wanted to flee. Finally, there is an oppressive house of two maidenly aunts whom Helen visits three times in the story, and where eventually she is told the truth about her mother's death. Munro states that the part of the country she comes from is “absolutely Gothic” (Howells 13). Most of the social and family effort in “The Peace of Utrecht” goes into suppressing the secret that is only too painful to share or endure. Also, there is an attempt to deal with emotional chaos by sorting out everyday mess, as if emotions could be defused in this way. Helen notices that the everyday routine of her two aunts is connected Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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with cleaning the house in the morning and using up worn up rags for rugs later. Maddy says that the only occupation that could keep the mother quiet was sorting things at home and arranging them into piles. In both instances activities are an attempt to regain control over one's own life by setting house in order. The Peace of Utrecht, which gave the title to the whole story, refers to the war of Spanish succession; the notes on the subject are found by Helen in a drawer crammed full of loose pages. She recognizes her own handwriting. One of the results of the Peace of Utrecht signed in 1713 was that England strengthened her rule in Canada, thus reducing the position of the French and their influence. The date was decisive in the process of charting Canada as predominantly English (Grabowski 84). New perspectives for settlement were opened up, and settlement meant culturally specific codes, which the respectable brick house in Munro’s story transmits and illustrates. There is a long tradition behind it in Canadian literature, to mention only Margaret Laurence in whose short story cycle A Bird in the House (1970) the brick building is a synonym of Protestant work ethics and order as contrasted with the wooden shacks of Métis, descendants of the French and Amerindians; thus it underscores the British privilege as contrasted with deprivation projected on the French and ethnic others under the English colonial rule. It is interesting to see that the Gothic secret of the story is the mother who ends up sacrificed by the daughters. Yet far from being the beneficiaries of this sacrifice the daughters are still associated with abjection. “No peace is made,” as Howells puts it (23). In Jane Eyre blind Rochester can eventually find consolation in Jane’s arms. In Wuthering Heights young Catherine marries Hareton thus putting an end to family feud now that Heathcliff’s contaminating influence no longer threatens racial purity and emotional balance of the house. In each case the Gothic qualities are put to rest, but the repressed returns in postcolonial fiction where personal happiness is only too often exposed to the horror which cannot be eliminated from “the great house.” I deliberately use the image from Derek Walcott's “Ruins of a Great House” to draw attention to the secret disrupting the idyll founded on colonial order. The persona from the poem ponders upon a plantation house in the Caribbean, and becomes aware of the fact that “some slave is rotting in this manorial lake” (Walcott 20), i.e. somebody was sacrificed to ensure the stability of European order and the propagation of poetry. Walcott’s image of “the great house” could be taken to stand for any other colonial house such as the brick house in “The Peace of Utrecht,” presumably erected by descendants of Protestant settlers eager to keep madness and hell at bay due to restrictive garrison mentality that lingers on in the minds of Helen and Maddy, apparently liberated sisters from Munro’s story, whose names, as Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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one of the critics suggested, are directly connected with hell and madness (Howells 20). I have brought Derek Walcott into my text for a reason. The Autobiography of My Mother, a novel by Jamaica Kincaid, which I am going to deal with next is dedicated to him, and bears many affinities with Walcott’s poetry. But this time a black Creole islander from Antigua sharing her story with a black Creole islander from St. Lucia describes the aftermath of colonization by showing the female legacy in Caribbean history where the story of black women is often marginalized and suppressed. Kincaid’s novel, like Munro’s story, is an attempt to “deal with the mother” on the part of her only daughter, Xuela, who starts her narrative in the following way: “My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind” (3). This refrain, even if recast in a different phrasing, recurs throughout the novel, especially in the decisive moments of Xuela’s life, since what determines the life of Xuela is not so much the occasional presence of her formidable father as the poignant absence of her mother, as evident in the title of the novel. The “bleak, black wind” cannot but provoke associations with “black lava” from Kristeva’s imagery. It is also a suggestion of melancholy and imminent death, as well as elemental power that threatens to destabilize, if not destroy the female subject. Xuela's family story brings together the different strands of Caribbean history. Her mother was a Carib; she belonged to the few indigenous people who survived colonial extermination on Dominica, where the novel is set. Her father was a descendant of a Scotsman, who had been a trader of rum, and his mother was of the African people. Kincaid deliberately emphasizes the distinction between man and people, for “one of them came off the boat as part of a horde, already demonized, mind blank to everything but human suffering” (181). The descendants of slaves and slavers meet in the body of the father, who is black, but has red hair, and the face that Xuela compares to the map of the Middle Passage. Alfred Richardson, for this is his name, gets his share of suffering when his father sails to England on board the ship called John Hawkins and is lost at sea. Interestingly, John Hawkins personifies British colonial history (Oxford Companion 459-460). He was the designer of ships which defeated Spanish armada thus checking the power of Spain in the colonies. He served as viceadmiral in the battle, and was knighted for it. His fame which also involved bringing the first shark to England (Capuzzo 150) was accompanied by notoriety he gained selling slaves at huge profit. Derek Walcott mentions him in “The Ruins of a Great House”: “I thought next/ Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake,/ Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed/ In memory now by every ulcerous crime” (20). Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Xuela was born to the black man who dissociated himself from his slave ancestors; he became rich, and his position of the guardian of the law allowed him to decide about the fate of the poor. To use a comment from Wide Sargasso Sea, one of the intertexts of this novel, “one unfortunate's loss is always a clever man’s gain” (Rhys 14). Alfred Richardson was notorious for his cruelty to the blacks and his cleverness in business. So as not to be bothered with a newlyborn infant he handed her over to a woman who laundered his clothes. “That I was a burden to him, I know,” Xuela says, “that his soiled clothes were a burden to him, I know” (Kincaid 4). Symbolically, her father consigns Xuela to belong with the soiled clothes, which is a comment on her condition. The laundry woman is the first foster mother in Xuela’s life. She is not “unkind” but Xuela admits she cannot love her because she does not know how. Xuela learns all the possible emotions: anger, fear, even compassion but not love. The first sentence she speaks is spoken in English even though she is surrounded by French patois. Her first sentence is: “[w]here is my father?” (Kincaid 7). The choice of language signifies her attempt to place herself on the side of the victors, rather than with impoverished descendants of French colonizers and the blacks or indigenes. Significantly, the first words Xuela learns to read are “British Empire,” because its map is the only item adorning the classroom where she starts learning as the only girl among boys, a surrogate son, until her father fathers a son by a new wife he soon acquires. Xuela is brought back home after her father remarries, but she immediately realizes that her stepmother rejects her because she might bring back the memory of her dead mother. Also, as a potential heiress, she is a threat to the children the new wife will bear. The new wife addresses Xuela in French patois in private while addressing her father in English. This shows a distinction she makes between the master of the house and his daughter brought up among the servants. The significance of English language or French patois is fraught with political undertones as evident in Wide Sargasso Sea where Rochester ignores and despises the complexity of French patois by relegating it to the realm of servitude and inferiority. The Gothic secret of the “great house” becomes evident at night when the father enjoys his new wife, and Xuela is in with her dead mother who visits her in her dreams. She sees her mother descending a ladder. Her mother is barefoot, and the only part of her body Xuela can see is her feet with the hem of her white dress above them. Much as Xuela yearns to see her mother's face, it is not possible. The incompleteness of the dream image suggests the plight of the Carib people who are only a trace in the Caribbean colonial history. The mother is faceless and virtually bodiless; thus there is no way Xuela could identify with her. Her only emblems are her feet, an important detail, for Xuela will roam across the island restlessly, while looking for her identity, while Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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claiming her independence. From the point of view of the other people Xuela belongs with the mother: “When they looked at me, they saw only the Carib people. They were wrong but I did not tell them so” (Kincaid 15-16). To seal the identification with the Carib, her father’s new wife offers Xuela a necklace as a gift. The act that could be treated as maternal in different emotional circumstances is quickly seen through. Xuela wraps the necklace around the new wife’s shaggy dog, and the dog dies very soon, which signifies that Xuela was meant to follow the fate of her mother and her people but only due to her cleverness inherited from the father she identified the gift for what it was, not as a pharmacon to heal the relations in the family but as a poison. Unable to get rid of Xuela, the new wife tries to remove her from her sight, which happens when Xuela’s father sends her to the man who was his partner in business and to his wife, the only woman in the narrative who harbors warm feelings towards Xuela and elicits her compassion. The release from the machinations of evil stepmother does not signify improvement even though at first glance it seems that Xuela walks into an idyll. Man and wife who live in a picturesque house with a carefully tended garden take her under their wing like foster parents. The reader is never told what business connected Xuela’s father and Jacques. It is for Xuela to work out what service her new mother expects from her. This becomes clear when the protagonist is confronted with another gift. Again, as in fairy tale, there is a sinister meaning to it. This time Xuela is offered a beautiful dress which her foster mother used to wear when she was young. The dress, another feminine gift, is hard to resist; and it is not a poisoned garment, at least, not literally. The scene brings to mind its fictional predecessor, that is, Wuthering Heights where Catherine Earnshaw is ingeniously alienated from her position and context by accepting the clothes that turn her into a lady and prevent her from running into the moors with Heathcliff, much to the joy of her brother and his wife who see in Catherine the chance for the change of their own status by connecting themselves with a much richer and respectable family. Xuela shrinks from the offer indicating a change of status, guessing quite rightly that the nonverbal message with Jacques hovering on horizon can only signify that she will be offered to him as a younger version of Madame LaBatte, his childless and protective wife. The scene cannot but bring to mind Aunt Annie flaunting the Gothic Mother’s clothes in front of Helen, and encouraging her to be transformed. Xuela takes the dress but refuses to wear it, thus rejecting the manipulation implicit in it. But Mme LaBatte does not relent. She begins stitching “a garment from beautiful old cloths she had saved from the different times in her life . . . a shroud made of memories” (Kincaid 77-78). The image brings to mind Auntie Lou and Aunt Annie relentlessly repairing Helen’s mother’s clothes, Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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converting them into garments saturated not only with memories, but transmitting the sense of guilt, and the desire to emotionally blackmail the other woman into accepting the image that will imprison her in somebody else’s past and life. Both scenes rely on tactile and visual message. Both rely on circumlocution for the message directed to the recipient of transformed fragments is always nonverbal, and therefore difficult to deal with by means of open communication. Xuela is quick to see the message of the elaborate garment offered to her by Mme LaBatte: “she wanted a child I might have; I did not let her know that I heard that, and this vision she would have, of a child inside me, eventually in her arms, hung in the air like a ghost. . . this ghost of me with a child inside me” (Kincaid 77). Xuela’s language shows that she realizes that there is a price to pay for the warmth and care of Lise LaBatte. Her new foster mother assumes that Xuela will stop feeling separate, and will fall back into the physical union with her; she masquarades as the mother because she realizes the trauma Xuela has been suffering from. The fact that Xuela describes herself as “this ghost of me with a child inside” indicates that she knows she will be drained of her personhood, for the only aspect that is interesting in her for Madame LaBatte is the child Xuela might conceive by Mr LaBatte. This recalls the Old Testament precedents in which the wife of a patriarch, e.g. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, used her bondswoman to conceive by her husband to ensure the survival of patrilineal family. The descendants of settlers in the Caribbean made use of the sexual and reproductive resources on a similar basis, apparently justified by biblical precedents which (they thought) encouraged themto hold Adam’s dominion in Caribbean Eden. Xuela refuses the offer of the garment that is poisoned with Mme LaBatte’s desire to physically prey on her body. Yet she accepts Jacques’ advances solely for sexual pleasure. She seeks to support herself by arriving at self-definition: “My name is Xuela Claudette Desvarieux. This was my mother's name” (Kincaid 79). She is at the same time inscribed into her mother's history and willing to move out of it. [I]n the place of the Desvarieux is Richardson, which is my father's name, but who are these people Claudette, Desvarieux, and Richardson. To look into it, to look at it would only fill you with despair; the humiliation could only make you intoxicated with self-hatred. (Kincaid 79)

Much like Maddy and Helen from “The Peace of Utrecht,” Xuela wants to dissociate herself from the family history, which is, to a large extent, though for different reasons, the history of the defeat and failure. At the same time she cannot define herself in historical vacuum; her fate will be to alternately repress the loveless legacy and return to it. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Though Xuela’s main motive for having an affair with Mr LaBatte is her curiosity about sexual experience and then her desire for pleasure, she soon becomes pregnant much to the joy of Mme LaBatte who expects her to bear a baby by Jacques and give it to her. Yet Xuela seems determined never to give birth, which probably springs from her fear of becoming like the mother whose fate was to die in childbirth. “[B]ecause I no longer had a future, I began to want one very much” (Kincaid 82). She steals some of the money Jacques keeps in his treasure house and seeks the help of a woman called Sange Sange, whose nickname, “blood” immediately explains Xuela’s intention. She has an abortion and nearly dies as a result of it, but when she eventually recovers, she feels she has her life in her own hands. Nobody, including her father, learns about her whereabouts after she disappeared from the “great house” of her protectors. Only Mrs. LaBatte realises what happened; she welcomes Xuela in tears and mourning, but it is another non-verbal message that Xuela rejects on her way out of imposed scenarios; “it was me she wanted to consume” (Kincaid 94), Xuela says, which places Mme LaBatte in the role of a vampire. Xuela leaves the house of her “protectors” and sets out on a journey during the night for she does not want the sight of Mme LaBatte “to haunt her” as she puts it, for the rest of her life. It is interesting that the first stop on her way is the place called Massacre, which is only too familiar from the conversation between Mr. Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea. The Gothic secret of the place is spelled out by Xuela in the following way: “It was at Massacre that Indian Warner, the illegitimate son of a Carib woman and a European man, was murdered by his half-brother, an Englishman named Philip Warner, because Philip Warner did not like having such a close relative whose mother was a Carib woman” (Kincaid 87). This hearkens back to the beginning of Xuela’s life. Her first independent journey starts with the memory of another Carib mother who brings to mind her own mother, and Xuela’s fate in the household of her father, whose new wife tried to kill his progeny by a Carib woman. Also, the name of the place suggests the massacre of the indigenous Carib inhabitants by the colonizers, the foundation sacrifice of European order in the Caribbean. Xuela notices that the church at Massacre is shrouded in black and red as if on Good Friday. This symbolically intimates that no resurrection will take place. Xuela’s new beginning repeats her entry into life as a product of the fateful meeting between those who arrived and the indigenes, an encounter which could only result in death. Xuela refuses to be sacrificed; she decides to identify with the father for fear of associating herself with the abject maternal body: “I had never had a mother, I had just recently refused to become one, and I knew then that this refusal would be complete” (Kincaid 96-97). To a certain extent Xuela resembles her grandfather and father, who left their progeny by nameless women all over the Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Caribbean, but refused to father them. Incidentally, her own mother was an orphan left on the doorstep of the nunnery. Xuela describes how she rids her womb of the burden of pleasures, and passages about annihilating potential children turn her into a killer mother, a vampire or an ogre: “I would bear children in the morning, I would bathe them at noon in the water that came from myself, and I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole all at once” (Kincaid 97). Xuela takes revenge for the fact that she was denied love and autonomy, and her revenge makes her return to the realm of the abject in a different way. She becomes a truly “Gothic Mother,” haunted by her own mother, unable to arrive at self-definition, trying to regain control over her life by destroying the fruit of her sexual joys. In fact, if passages about the torture she invents for her potential children are juxtaposed to the way she sees the fate of the Carib people, only similarities can be detected. Xuela says, “I would walk them to the edge of a precipice. I would not push them over, I would not have to” (Kincaid 97). And this is how she visualises the fate of the few Carib people, “my mother’s people were balanced precariously on the ledge of eternity, waiting to be swallowed up in the great yawn of nothingness” (Kincaid 198). Xuela has now absorbed the colonial perspective inherited from the father who placed himself on the privileged side of the color bar despite the fact that he belonged with both worlds. Xuela has attracted attention of postcolonial critics, one of whom sees her progress through life as a “bitter victory” (Gass 75). Her relationship with her husband Philip whose authority she undermines (Gass 72) is an inversion of the relationship between Antoinette and Rochester in Wide Sargasso Sea. Yet, if Xuela is a victor rather than a victim it is because, like her father, she dissociated herself from the victims, but the legacy of her mother’s defeat still inhabits her, and, like Kristeva’s lava, threatens to engulf her if she is not careful. J. Brooks Bouson emphasizes Kincaid’s ambivalence towards her own mother, who elicited from her the feelings of despair or even revulsion (141). Thus through Xuela Kincaid tries to extricate herself from her own “black lava.” Let me turn to one of the latest interpretations of Kristeva’s abjection in an article by Pamela Sue Anderson, who asks a question whether Kristeva manages to transcend the story of original matricide that founds the social contract, “Does Kristeva have the means to achieve a refusal of the logic of sacrifice in order to create something new without the sacrifice of the mother[?]” (“The Weakness” 10). Anderson draws the reader’s attention to the way culturally informed versions of Christianity mask the violence against women by encouraging them to embrace self-sacrifice wilfully. The two analyzed texts show that their main characters are careful enough to reject such scenarios. Helen remembers that whenever Aunt Annie and Auntie Lou offered a story of a young person sacrificing her life to care for an ailing parent, “Maddy would quote impiously the Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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opinions of modern psychiatry” (Munro 196). Helen, too, refuses to take responsibility for her mother, which is clear from her comment on the third and last conversation with Aunt Annie, “Is this the last function of old women . . . making sure that the haunts we have contracted for are with us, not one gone without?” (Munro 209). The two aunts who are figures of contrast for Maddy and Helen stand for traditional family values, and censor women who fly in the face of convention. While Maddy and Helen refuse to comply with traditional selfsacrifice, they do not manage to solve the problem of their mother through ethical care that would not devastate either of them emotionally. They lock her up in the house; they lock her up in memories which perpetuate the image of “continuing disaster” (Munro 191). The care that they might have given to the mother is never given in order to avoid traditional self-sacrifice. Xuela, in turn, is quick to recognize how culturally generated oppression of coloured women in the Caribbean can easily deprive her of freedom, and she is as ruthless as Maddy and Helen in wanting her own life. Born into a loveless legacy, she is unable to care for a child she might have because she was abandoned physically by her mother who died, and abandoned emotionally by her father. In both texts women refuse to relate to the other. Helen and Maddy withdraw themselves from the scene of their mother’s suffering emotionally and literally. They are absent just like their father who is completely absent from the story. Xuela’s response to the emotional challenges is similar to her father’s absence. The problem is that in neither case does it resolve or abolish the original scenario. The maternal remains a Gothic secret locked up in postcolonial “great house.” The question remains how a female subject, caught in the drama of abjection, is supposed to achieve wholeness without rejecting the ethics of care for the others on the one hand, and falling into the trap of self-sacrifice on the other. Can the maternal be refigured to move beyond idyllic, but utopian visions of togetherness in Luce Irigaray’s images of communion between mothers and daughters? Can Kristeva’s abjection be reclaimed as positive energy, and not “black lava” which can only be kept at bay by the intervention of the third party, the paternal signifier, which, even in its absence, regulates the bond between Gothic mother and haunted daughter by censoring the maternal abject? Works Cited: Adams, Alice Elaine. Reproducing the Womb: Images of Childbirth in Science, Feminist Theory and Literature. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994. Print. Anderson, Pamela Sue. A Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Print. ---.“The Weakness of our ‘Messianic Power’: Kristeva on Sacrifice.” 1-29. The author kindly allowed me to quote from her text submitted for publication. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Bouson, J. Brooks. Writing Memory: Writing Back to the Mother. Albany: SUNY Press, 2006. Print. Brandt, Di. Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1993. Print. Capuzzo, Michael and Mike Capuzzo. Close to the Shore: A True Story of Terror in an Age of Innocence. Chicago: Thorndike Press, 2001. Print. Duncan, Ian. Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print. Gass, Joanne. “Jamaica Kincaid's Revision of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.” Jamaica Kincaid and Caribbean Double Crossings. Ed. Linda Lang-Peralta. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006. 63-78. Print. Grabowski, Jan. Historia Kanady. :DUV]DZD3UyV]\ĔVNLPrint. Howells, Coral Ann. Alice Munro. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Print. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Plume, 1997. Print. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Print. Makdisi, Saree. “Versions of the East: Byron, Shelley and the Orient.” Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture 1780-1834. Eds. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 203-236. Print. Martin, Robert K. and Eric Savoy. American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009. Print. Munro, Alice. “The Peace of Utrecht.” Dance of the Happy Shades. London: Vintage, 2000. 190-210. Print. Okoth, P. G. “The Creation of a Dependent Culture. The Imperial School Curriculum in Uganda.” The Imperial Curriculum: Racial Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience. Ed. J. A. Mangan. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. 135-146. Print. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: Penguin, 1997. Print. Rich, Paul B. Race and Empire in British Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print. The Oxford Companion to British History. Ed. John Cannon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Print. Walcott, Derek. Collected Poems 1948-1984. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992. Print.

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Reading (Post-) Colonial Terror within Gothic Aesthetics: The Conceptual Limits of Postcolonial Gothic in Canadian Aboriginal Fiction Anna Branach-Kallas Uniformly garbed in sky-blue denim shirts and navy denim coveralls, the boys marched out into a long, white passageway that smelled of metal and Javex – everything here smelled of metal and Javex – where lines of Indian girl strangers were marching in the opposite direction. But there was his sister Josephine, hair now cropped at the earls like all the girls, as though someone had glued a soup bowl to her head. He waved surreptitiously at her but, just then, one of the innumerable doors that lined this tunnel swallowed her. Ghost-pale, tight-faced women sheathed completely in black and white stood guarding each door, holding long wooden stakes that, Champion later learned, were for measuring the length of objects. Tomson Highway 55 The hallways were filled with ghosts. They stood watch over their families. Some of them watched me with strange, sad eyes. When I came back to my body, the nurse had called the doctor and they were watching me curiously. They said I had been walking around and around the bed. Eden Robinson 267 Another explosion lights the darkness. Arms stick up from the pool of water, some with fingers curled like they are grasping something I cannot see. A few bare feet stick straight out of the water as well. I wonder what has become of the boots. The sky flickers as if full of lightning, and when I look I see that the water is more a stew. Beside the limbs, rotted faces peek over at us. I see the eye sockets are empty and their lips have pulled back from their open mouths so that they look like they’re screaming. Joseph Boyden 64

The term postcolonial Gothic has recently gained some popularity in the academia, in Canada in particular. Although postcolonialism and the Gothic seem to belong to very different historical and cultural traditions, they seem to share a common interest in questioning post-enlightenment ideas of rationality (Smith and Hughes 1). Postcolonialism, similarly to the Gothic, which has been usually associated with irrational affects, passionate desires, and monstrosity, explores the binary opposition between the human and the non-human, characteristic of most colonial encounters, and seeks to revalidate other than Cartesian ways of understanding and being in the world. Using conventional Gothic tropes, postcolonial Gothic fiction alerts the reader to colonial tensions and anxieties. SigAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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nificantly, the role of ghosts is crucial in both the Gothic and postcolonialism. According to David Punter, Gothic fiction is “history written according to a certain logic: a logic of the phantom, the revenant, a logic of haunting,” whereas the very structure of the term post-colonial, with its focus on the “aftermath” of colonialism, reveals an implicit threat of return and uncanny repetition (“Arundhati” 193). The experience of settlement in the new colonial home, which both resembles the Mother country and is entirely different from it, proves a source of anxiety and ambivalence. Thus, Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the way the heimlich comes to be unheimlich, central in Gothic criticism, proves crucial in the (post)colonial context as well. Taking into account the fact that the rise of the Gothic novel in Europe coincided with British expansion in North America, it is not surprising that early Canadian writers used Gothic tropes to record colonial experience. These literary figurations of European settlement show a desire to construct the land as empty, by erasing the presence of Indigenous peoples or by attempting to tame their disturbing otherness by means of stereotypical tropes, such as violence, sex, nature, orality, and mysticism (see Goldie). The encounter with the other is deeply unsettling to the settler for it reveals the concealed uncertainty and illegitimacy of the settlement experience. As Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte suggest, when early Canadian writers used Gothic tropes to “generate terror or dread, it was frequently to textualize a form of white history that cast colonized or invaded peoples and the colonial landscape as a ghostly or monstrous threat to the civilized (white) world” (xi). The rise of postcolonial awareness in recent decades in Canada has resulted in radical re-interpretations of Canadian history, politics, and culture, which reveal that the Canadian national project is flawed and fundamentally haunted by the spectres of territorial conquest and the inequities committed while constructing civilization in the New World. As Justin D. Edwards points out in Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature, The effects of marginalization, segregation, ostracization and oppression haunt Canada’s history with violent acts that refuse to be hidden. The nation’s unjust acts force us to view the country as a fragile entity that is pieced together out of the ideological abominations of a disturbing past. Under such ideological and historical strains, national unity is hard to come by, for various ethnic and racial groups cannot conceive of the country as a home. Canada remains foreign territory, a potentially threatening place. (110)

Although Canada tends to be imagined as a peaceful, equitable democracy, according to Daniel Coleman, Canadian national consciousness is founded on disavowal of traumatic events, while performance of “white civility,” a form of white normativity, supports the nation’s peaceable aspirations, transforming the Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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atrocities of the past into inevitable losses on the path of progress (29). Following this way of thinking, a recent strain of Gothic fiction in Canada has become more concerned with historical guilt and the dismantling of colonial metaphors. Sugars and Turcotte identify the following themes as characteristic of Canadian postcolonial Gothic: “fears of territorial illegitimacy, anxiety about forgotten or occluded histories, resentment towards flawed or complicit ancestors, assertions of Aboriginal priority, explorations of hybrid cultural forms, and interrogations of national belonging and citizenship” (ix). The desire for redress in postcolonial Gothic involves imagining revisionist narratives of Canadian history as well as opposing the clichés of Native absence and romanticized cultural representations of Aboriginals. In this vein, the term “postcolonial Gothic” has been also applied to writings by Canadian Indigenous authors. Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) by awardwinning Cree playwright and musician Tomson Highway (born in 1951), Monkey Beach (2000) by Eden Robinson (born in 1968), a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk nations, and, to a lesser degree, Three Day Road (2005) by Joseph Byden (born in 1966) of Irish, Scottish, and Métis heritage, have been read as examples of postcolonial Gothic.1 Several classical elements of the Gothic novel do appear in these texts. In accordance with Jerrold E. Hogle’s definition of Gothic structure as “a tortured mixture” of genres (8), the three novels under consideration do indeed blur “different levels of discourse” (9). Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen mixes Gothic tropes with magic realism to tell the story of two Cree brothers, Jeremiah and Gabriel Okimasis, in the second half of the twentieth century. In Monkey Beach, set in the 1980s, Robinson intersperses her depressed heroine’s realistic account of her growing up on the Canadian West Coast in a Haisla community with powerful visions and supernatural effects. In Three Day Road, Boyden fuses past, present, and future to create a convoluted, hallucinatory, schizophrenic narrative of two Cree friends, Xavier Bird and Elijah Whiskeyjack, who, due to their extraordinary marksmanship, gain the admiration of their regiment on the battlefields of the First World War. Irrational, incoherent, full of secrecy and ambivalence, the three novels seem to share the “strange ‘logic’ of fictive madness” associated with Gothic fiction (Brewster 281). The Gothic setting varies in the three works: from the prison-like Roman Catholic residential school and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the city in Kiss of the Fur Queen, reminiscent of such Gothic classics as The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson, the wild yet dangerous landscape of the northwest 1

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coast of British Columbia in Monkey Beach, illustrating the heroine’s emotional turmoil, a marker of Gothic fiction that can be traced back to European Romanticism, to the bloodshed and explicit horror of the European front in Three Day Road. The supernatural as a source of fear and sublime constitutes an explicit feature of the three works. Not only is Robinson’s protagonist, Lisamarie, visited at night by a red-haired man, a messenger of death, but she also hears the voices of animals, dead relatives and unidentified ghosts, allows invisible spirits to feed on her body (361-8; 274), and is confronted with a monster from Native mythology, a sasquatch, or B’gwus, known also as bigfoot or Yeti, a large, hairy, ape-like creature. As to Boyden and Highway, they both illustrate their respective protagonists’ metamorphoses into a Wendigo, a fearsome, gigantic cannibal. In the three novels, the family home functions in ways similar to the images found in early Gothic fiction: a site of both love and repression, emotional strength and abuse. The three authors also highlight the significance of lineage, threatened in times of social crises, when “The absence of stable paternal order provides room for the projection of both ideal and terrifying figures of authority and power” (Botting, “Aftergothic” 284): priests in Kiss of the Fur Queen, army officers in Three Day Road, psychologists in Monkey Beach. As in traditional Gothic fiction, these substitute parents “indicate the familial, religious, and social institutions threatened by moral . . . decline” (Botting, “Aftergothic” 284). Structural doubling plays an important role in the three texts, Kiss of the Fur Queen and Three Day Road in particular, where the central pairs of brothers function as Gothic doppelgangers; events are juxtaposed and echo in these narratives, blurring, in a way typical of the Gothic, the fixed boundaries of good and evil, self and other, which “discloses the ambivalence of identity and the instability of the social, moral and scientific codes that manufacture distinctions” (Botting, Gothic 141). Finally, the three texts construct a link between sexual abuse and Roman Catholicism. In early Gothic fiction, Catholic countries, such as Italy, Spain, southern France, were “associated with the twin yoke of feudal politics and popish deception, from which they had still to emancipate themselves. . . . Such representations drew upon and reinforced the cultural identity of the middle-class Protestant readership,” thrilled by the idea of political and religious persecution (Baldick and Mighall 219). In the anti-clerical Gothic fantasies of the period, Catholic European countries were also associated with sexual transgression, violence, and excess (Henderson 178). According to George Haggerty, discussing the history of Gothic fiction since the publication of The Castle of Otranto (1764), “Transgressive social-sexual relations are the most basic common denominator of gothic.” Haggerty also claims that Gothic fiction “offered a testing ground for many unauthorized genders and sexualities, including sodomy, triAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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badism, romantic friendship (male and female), incest, paedophilia, sadism, masochism, necrophilia, cannibalism, masculinized females, feminized males, miscegenation, and so on.” In this sense, the monasteries and convents appearing in such Gothic classics as Lewis’s The Monk are “precursors of the sexual laboratory” used to confront the readers with transgressive desire (Haggerty). In the context of my analysis, Boyden and Highway in particular reveal a fascination with Catholic iconography reminiscent of early Gothic fiction. Catholicism functions in these novels as a kind of “primitivism” (Henderson 178) – in both texts, the ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church are described as mysterious and irrational, Holy Communion is depicted as a revolting form of cannibalism, while the ritual of exorcism is presented as a form of spell-casting depriving the victim of her/his spirit. While all the three Indigenous authors share a concern with the issue of sexual abuse of Indian children by predatory priests and nuns, it is Highway in Kiss of the Fur Queen that exposes the dangerous (Gothic) correlation between violation and pleasure (see Henderson). Nevertheless, as examples of postcolonial Gothic, Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, Robinson’s Monkey Beach, and Boyden’s Three Day Road all reveal Gothic anxiety about the return of the colonial past, or rather suggest that colonialism is not over but right there in our midst. The three authors highlight an irreconcilable conflict of values that opposes the spiritual systems of the Canadian Indigenous peoples to the consumerism and aggressiveness of Western societies. In this sense, Monkey Beach, Three Day Road, and Kiss of the Fur Queen could be inscribed within the tradition of the Gothic persecution narrative, dating back to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). Robinson’s Monkey Beach illustrates perhaps most explicitly how difficult it is for Indigenous spirituality to survive in the contemporary world. The Haisla heroine is one of the few to possess the gift of communicating with ghosts and spirits, and the lack of comprehension around her, among both Native and non-Native characters, is responsible for her emotional breakdown. Her middle-class family treat her as emotionally imbalanced and try to cure her by sending her to a psychiatrist. Lisamarie’s mother, who, as it turns out in the course of the novel, used to have the gift of vision as well, has repressed it so deeply that she never talks about the past to her daughter and shows no empathy to what she considers a mental disorder, manifested in sleepwalking, visions of ghosts, dreams of the future and a pre-invasion past. Lisamarie’s encounter with the psychiatrist, who tries to convince her that the ghosts she sees are symptoms of a repressed fear of death, highlights the tendency to pathologize those Indigenous peoples who attempt to remain faithful to their spiritual legacy challenging the rationality of the Western world. Furthermore, as Jennifer Andrews suggests, Lisamarie’s manipulation of the psychiatrist, who is overconfident that she has identified the Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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source of the patient’s disorder and remains entirely ignorant of the Haisla spirit world, reveals that it is rather the psychiatrist – and the materialistic, nonmystical culture she represents – that are “struggling to repress that which cannot be colonized” (217). The only support the girl receives is from her uncle Mick, an Indian rights activist, entirely damaged by residential schooling, and her grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, treated by the rest of the family as an unaffectionate, difficult elder. They both respect Lisamarie’s power and teach her, defying Western logic, that “You don’t have to be scared of things you don’t understand. They’re just ghosts” (Robinson 265). When they die, however, the protagonist feels completely alienated and unable to deal with the powerful gift that terrifies her as she is unable to prevent the demise of the loved ones that she had a premonition about. She then deteriorates in a stereotypically “Indian” way: she drops out of school, abuses drugs and alcohol, and sinks into depression. Without guidance from her elders, the gift almost kills her, when she lets spirits feed on her blood thus hoping to save her brother Jimmy from death. At the end of the novel, nevertheless, having talked to Ma-ma-oo and Uncle Mick in the afterworld, Lisamarie learns to accept her gift, with the confusion and uncertainty that are inseparable from it. In Boyden’s novel, Aunt Niska and her nephew Xavier are hookimaws, windigo killers, who, in a world in which First Nations peoples have lost their autonomy and integrity, suffer from profound solitude and alienation. Niska, who lives alone in the wood, in accordance with the ancient customs of her tribe, most of whom have moved to the reserve now, is cursed with terrible convulsions that provide her with powerful visions yet leave her “drained and shaken” (Boyden 44), hardly capable of surviving in her isolation. When Xavier, her nephew that she has kidnapped from a residential school and to whom she has passed her spiritual legacy, joins the (fictional) Southern Ontario Rifles Battalion and leaves for the European front, he cannot get used to the violence surrounding him. Xavier highlights the civilization clash that renders the European culture completely alien to him. In his opinion, white men and their religion are dominated by greed, cruelty, and evil (Boyden 284). Raised in a culture in which even the killing of animals is a ritual and which values honour and solidarity, Xavier perceives the massive killings of the Great War as violations of profoundly held taboos. The soldiers’ indifference to the death of their comrades, the bloody massacres, and the disturbing metamorphosis of his closest friend Elijah, who seems to enjoy the killing, “feeding off the fear and madness of this place” (Boyden 25), result in Xavier’s inability to deal with the horror around him. He suffers from shell-shock and paralyzing anxiety, which situate his firstperson narrative on the verge of delirium and hallucination. Only when, having lost Elijah, one leg, and his mental balance, Xavier comes back to Canada, is Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Niska able to purify him of the poisoning influence of Western culture in the sweat-lodge ceremony she conducts for him. The power of the family, however tenuous in the novel, helps Xavier heal from the physical and mental wounds inflicted by white culture. By contrast, Highway’s protagonists, Jeremiah and Gabriel Okimasis, cannot rely on any parental figure to fight with the damaging impact of acculturation. At a tender age, they are separated from their parents and sent to a Roman Catholic residential school, where they are forbidden to speak their mothertongue, taught the fundamentals of Catholicism (which they hardly understand), and abused sexually by the principal, Father Lafleur. The scene of sexual abuse is depicted in Gothic terms in the novel; fighting with sleep, Jeremiah watches Father Lafleur’s assault on his brother, who is also confused by exhaustion and uncertainty. By resorting to the Gothic, Highway therefore “presents the novel’s most crucial incident of abuse as factually uncertain, yet with enormous symbolic and evocative force” (McKegney 159). After a year at the residential school, a gap appears between the Okimasis brothers and their parents, who are fervent Catholics and, in their sons’ opinion, would never believe them even if they found the words to tell them about the abuse (Highway 92). Synchronously, however, the protagonists’ reluctance to name their shame in Cree, “might also be a conscious decision to keep this guilt in English, to refuse its entry into the Cree world of their former innocence before the traumatic rupture in their lives” (Rymhs 105). Living thousands of miles away from their parents in Winnipeg, adult Gabriel and Jeremiah respond to the traumatic experience of colonization and sexual violation in very different ways. For the former, Father Lafleur’s sexual abuse is an initiation to homosexual desire and S-M that, in his fantasies, he will always connect with Christian iconography. As a result of spiritual and physical abuse, however, Gabriel rejects the “Catholic mumbo-jumbo” (Highway 184) and considers Christian culture an inherently cruel and aggressive one, well aware of the damages it has done to his own people. The protagonist finds healing in art: he becomes a world-famous choreographer and ballet dancer, integrating elements of Native mythology into his performances. 2 By contrast,

2

Kiss of the Fur Queen, initially written as an autobiography, was largely inspired by Highway’s own life. The artist was born on the island of Maria Lake in northern Manitoba as the eleventh of twelve children; his father was a traditional fisher, hunter, trapper and, like Abraham Okimasis, Jeremiah and Gabriel’s father in the novel, a champion dogsled racer. At the age of six, Tomson was sent to the Roman Catholic Guy Hill Indian Residential school, which experience was traumatic to him. According to Highway, the “‘unforgivable, monstrous evil’ of residential schools ‘should be published as the headline of every newspaper every day for 10 years’” (McKegney 153). He wrote the novel Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Jeremiah represses the memory of trauma, adapts to Western culture and religion, learns to despise Native tradition, and dreams of becoming accepted by the white man as a celebrated pianist. With time, however, he realizes that he will never belong to the Western world; he then sinks into depression and alcoholism to eventually re-connect with his roots working at the Winnipeg Indian Friendship Centre. Nevertheless, that he is the more damaged of the two brothers is proven by his sexual repression and terrifying paedophilic desires. Only by fusing Western art with Indigenous spirituality in a hybrid performance entitled Ulysses Thunderchild does Jeremiah start to recover from the trauma of colonization. Significantly, “Rather than being consumed by past trauma, and passing it on to others, Jeremiah channels his anguish into creative work that will not only aid his personal healing, but will provide the cultural materials for a broader Indigenous empowerment” (McKegney 171). Like Highway, Robinson and Boyden also focus in their novels on the issue of violent spiritual imposition and the residential school’s legacy of abuse within the Native communities. The Indian Residential Schools system, which functioned in Canada from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s, was based on the assumption that Aboriginal children should be isolated from their families in order to be assimilated into European-Canadian society. The students of residential schools suffered from poor housing, lack of medication, physical and sexual abuse, and were severely punished for practicing their own religious beliefs or speaking their own languages, which has recently led to allegations of cultural genocide.3 It is widely recognized that the residential school system was responsible for the “historical manufacture of cultures of violence within Native communities” (McKegney 169). Even after the schools were closed, sexual violence affected the lives of subsequent generations of children (Milloy in McKegney 169). In Monkey Beach, the heroine’s brother, Jimmy, dies at the end of the novel after he has killed Uncle Joshua, who had sexually abused Jimmy’s girl-friend Karaoke, having been himself abused in his childhood by a white priest. The heroine’s beloved Uncle Mick still suffers from unspeakable trauma after his experience at residential school. Lisamarie herself is raped by a Native friend. In Three Day Road, the power of spiritual legacy, inherited from Aunt Niska, allows Xavier to endure, though damaged and maimed, the horrors of the Great War. By contrast, Elijah spends a much longer period of time at residen-

3

after the death from AIDS of his brother, René Highway, an accomplished dancer and choreographer, in 1990, who, like Tomson, was openly gay. (New 487-489; McKegney) See the home page of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada for the settlement agreement and the 2008 statement of apology by the Canadian Government to the former students of residential schools: www.ainc-inac.gc.ca. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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tial school, where he is sexually abused by a nun and, although rescued by Aunt Niska too, he never fully recovers from this experience. On the front, although it is Xavier who taught him the secrets of the bush and is a much better sniper of the two, it is Elijah who wins the affection of the regiment as he can speak English with a perfect accent and easily adapts to the white soldiers’ world. Nevertheless, as a product of residential schooling, Elijah lacks any ethical imperatives and loses himself in the no man’s land, becoming a collector of German scalps, a predator who relishes killing in a way that questions the Native ethics of hunting (see Wyile 89). The ultimate transgressor, within the Gothic framework Elijah might be easily misinterpreted as a Romantic outcast; yet, he is rather a confusing/confused hybrid, irreparably damaged by the violence of white culture. The three Indigenous authors therefore apply Gothic tropes to their own political ends. The Roman Catholic residential school functions in their fiction only on the surface as an isolated “sexual laboratory,” in which the politics of sexuality interlocks with the politics of religion in a Gothic fantasy of excess. Within a postcolonial perspective, the purpose of the Gothic image of the school is rather to demonstrate that such schools were genuine carceral institutions in which excessive levels of violence were mentally and bodily endured by their vulnerable wards. Similarly, the monstrous figures from Native mythologies that appear in the three novels join in the line of Gothic figures of excess, yet they also serve to explore colonial terror as well as the ambivalent consequences of colonization. In Kiss of the Fur Queen and Three Day Road, the Wendigo (or weetigo) is terrifying because it feeds on human flesh and can turn people into cannibals. You can also become a Wendigo by tasting human flesh (New 1217; Colombo, The Big 46). In Highway’s novel, Christianity is clearly associated with cannibalism and “Wendigoizaton,” Father Lafleur being the epitome of the predatory creature that contaminates others with its greedy desires. The priest’s nightly visits to the boys’ dormitory are so bizarre and terrifying to Jeremiah that the little boy compares the principal to a series of terrifying predators, including the Wendigo: Visible only in silhouette, for all Jeremiah knew it might have been a bear devouring a honey-comb, or the Weetigo feasting on human flesh. As he stood half-asleep, he thought he could hear the smacking of lips, mastication. Thinking he might still be tucked in his bed dreaming, he blinked, opened his eyes as wide as they would go. He wanted – needed- to see more clearly. The bedspread was pulsating, rippling from the centre. No, Jeremiah wailed to himself, please. Not him again. He took two soundless steps forward, craned his neck.

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Anna Branach-Kallas When the beast reared its head, it came face to face, not four feet away, with that of Jeremiah Okimasis. The whites of the beast’s eyes grew large, blinked once. Jeremiah stared. It was him. Again. (Highway 79; first italics mine, second and third in the original)

As Deena Rymhs suggests, “The most reprehensible and fitting correlative [Jeremiah] can summon from his frame of reference, the Weetigo signifies the sublimated aspects of this trauma. The Weetigo is Jeremiah’s attempt at representing what is, in many ways, unrepresentable” (104). It is not until the priest and the monster fuse in the final performance of the Okimasis brothers, “the cannibal spirit shedding his costume at death, revealing a priest’s cassock” (Highway 285), that Jeremiah confronts the repressed knowledge that, like Gabriel, he was the victim of sexual violation at the residential school. Moreover, Highway represents Catholic rituals as incomprehensible, frightening, and monstrously excessive to his young protagonists. Christianity is thus defamiliarized and desacralized; his characters perceive Christian imagery as cruelly sadistic or nonsensical, and reinterpret the foundational moments of Catholic religion, such as annunciation or Christ’s passion, in parodic ways. By conflating Christian and Cree myths, the Okimasis brothers undermine the authority of Church doctrine (see Rymhs 104), which “pointedly counters the historical prohibition on the importation of First Nations languages and cultures into residential schools” (Henderson 182). Jennifer Henderson demonstrates, moreover, that Gabriel in particular reads Catholic iconography as sadomasochistic and homoerotic (183-195), both menacing and alluring, like the Wendigo. Interestingly, however, when Highway’s adolescent protagonists move to Winnipeg, it is Western consumerism that is reconfigured as a Wendigo, the shopping mall in which Gabriel learns that everything is for sale, even human flesh, being explicitly compared to a beast (Highway 116). Western culture, epitomized by television, is also described as “the Weetigo finally arrived to devour, digest, and shit out the soul of Eemanapiteepitat” (Highway 187), the brothers’ native village. Recent anthropological research shows that the cannibal monster was fully conceptualised in Aboriginal cultures only after European contact (Goldman 100) – the Wendigo is therefore to a large degree the product of cross-cultural interaction. According to Marlene Goldman, “Wendigo tales, passed down from generation to generation, thus attest to the Native people's awareness that the Europeans’ apocalyptic thinking posed a threat to the health and well-being of their society” (101). Nevertheless, Kiss of the Fur Queen does not offer a simplistic reversal of colonial binarism. Its Indigenous protagonists are not constructed as unambiguous victims, but as ambivalent figures, sharing in the monstrosity of the Wendigo. In an uncanny repetition of Father Lafleur’s attraction to young boys, Jeremiah is sexually aroused by small children: “How Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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fresh children smelled. You could take them in your hands, put them in your mouth, swallow them whole” (Highway 271). Furthermore, Gabriel’s homosexuality is ambivalently positioned in the novel as Wendigoization: “the body of the caribou hunter’s son was eaten, tongues writhing serpent-like around his own, breath mingling with his, his orifices punctured and repunctured, as with nails” (Highway 169) and Gabriel feels repetitively “devoured” by same-sex desire. The protagonist is not, however, simply constructed as a damaged victim of homosexual abuse. Apart from the fact that he finds fulfilment in S-M, thus denying the traumatic effect of the first sexual violation, Gabriel acts as a Wendigo himself when he continues to have sex with strangers, although he knows that he has AIDS. While dying of pneumonia caused by the lethal virus in his bloodstream, the protagonist hallucinates that he confronts the Wendigo who has the face of Father Lafleur, yet at the same time Gabriel whines out of hunger, trying to seduce the monster himself (Highway 299-300). In Three Day Road, Wendigoization becomes a symbol of violence, depersonalization, and psychic loss (Colombo, Strange 21) during the Great War. Boyden revitalizes the familiar representation of the war as a senseless beast “by linking it to the idea of the windigo, suggesting that a society willing to condone the consumption of lives at such a rate has become distinctly unhinged” (Wyile 86). Amidst the novel’s apocalyptic scenery, “windigos spring from the earth” (45; italics in the original). As I have demonstrated elsewhere,4 on the front Elijah displays all the symptoms of Wendigoization, feeding on the corpses of German soldiers and collecting their scalps as trophies. Elijah’s apparent metamorphosis into a Wendigo can be also interpreted as a hyperbole of the profound transformations in soldiers’ mentality in times of war, which liberates the archaic impulses of brutality controlled by civilized restraints. When he kills Elijah in the end, Xavier fulfils his duty as a wendigo-killer, yet he realizes that by murdering his best friend he has become a Wendigo himself. In this sense, the novel illustrates the Gothic truth that identity is unstable and that there is a monster hidden within each of us. With Gothic ambivalence, however, Xavier is portrayed in the novel as a vulnerable survivor but also as a paranoid madman suffering from persecution mania, whereas Elijah is depicted as both a bloodthirsty monster and a heroic tribute to his people. Boyden explores the similarities and differences between the two friends in a desire to honour the Aboriginal soldiers who contributed to the Great War and whose memory is often obliterated from official historical records, yet at the same time “as a provocative ex-

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pression of cultural recuperation” (Gordon; my italics).5 The Indigenous protagonists are both heroes and Wendigoes, whose rapaciousness and craving for power are exacerbated through contact with white culture. Similarly, in Monkey Beach monstrosity is not only a feature of Western culture: the central protagonist is alienated by her own family who refuse to understand her, she is raped by a Native friend, and she herself is given the nickname “Monster” by her Uncle Mick. Consequently, as Jennifer Andrews argues, “Robinson gives gothic conventions a Native twist in order to show how the desire to civilize what white settlers first perceived as an uncivilized ‘other’ race has resulted in evil behavior by both colonizer and colonized” (216). Moreover, Robinson constructs a connection between her protagonist and the b’gwus, “not quite human, not quite wolf, but something in between” (Robinson 374) to integrate Native spirituality, the voices of ghosts and animals, and thus to move beyond the binarism characteristic of Western thinking. By opposing the mass media construction of the sasquatch with Ma-ma-oo’s translation of an ancient Haisla narrative, in which the b’gwus is a product of purely human interactions, such as illicit love, incest, and jealousy (Robinson 211), Robinson humanizes “the b’gwus in a distinctive tribal context that dispels the sense that monsters are ‘other’” (Andrews 218). Undoubtedly, the analysis of Robinson’s, Boyden’s, and Highway’s novels within the critical framework of postcolonial Gothic makes it possible to approach Aboriginal works in aesthetic terms, not only as sociological or ethnographic testimony, a tendency prevalent in North American criticism (see Gordon). Furthermore, integrating Native spirituality with the Euro-American Gothic tradition, Robinson, Highway, and Boyden create a new aesthetics, moving beyond stereotypical representations of Aboriginals.6 Their novels do not simply attempt to rewrite history by positing the Indigenous characters as helpless victims in a postcolonial script. Their protagonists’ refusal to assume the role-model of the victim and their ability to survive by both adapting to and resisting Western culture undermine what Laura Smyth Groening identifies as “the most dangerous trope in Canadian literature: the Indian as the member of a dead and dying people” (21). Using conventions that, at least to a Euro-American reader, appear to develop the Gothic mode, the three writers revision the tradi5

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The Great War is often represented as a foundational moment for the Canadian nation. In Gordon’s words, “Boyden makes visible the mythmaking process that romanticizes both Canada’s participation in World War One and stereotypical representations of Aboriginals.” Hartmut Lutz claims that Boyden’s novel in particular represents a new development in Canadian literature, which he compares to the work of Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich in the US (59-60). Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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tion of colonial Gothicism, providing a challenging ethical reconsideration of the sources of terror and monstrosity in colonial encounters. Rejecting the stereotypes characteristic of earlier Canadian Gothic works, in which Aboriginal figures were depicted as hostile and blood-thirsty monsters, Boyden, Robinson, and Highway do not simply reverse the trope of monstrosity by casting the monster in white skin. Their Indigenous protagonists approach white culture with uncertainty, fear, and ambivalence, yet they also illustrate the unavoidable transformations within what Mary Louise Pratt has called the colonial “contact zone” (Pratt 7). In Kiss of the Fur Queen, Monkey Beach, and Three Day Road, the Aboriginal characters are also frightful shape-shifters and, as a result, cultural hybridity, celebrated in much postcolonial writing, is represented in the three novels as a monstrous, though inevitable, product of modernity. Consequently, the Native or postcolonial Gothic in Canada “explores not only the monstrosities of colonization and incorporates the power of the Native spirit world but also acknowledges the survival of Native populations and their traditions on their own terms” (Andrews 224-225; my italics). As deeply critical of the status quo, Robinson’s, Boyden’s, and Highway’s postcolonial Gothic formulations inscribe themselves within the Euro-American tradition of Gothicism, associated with marginality and transgression. Depicting Native communities faced with political, economic, and spiritual oppression, the three novels seem thus to contribute to the Gothic project of articulating the voices of the culturally dispossessed. Nevertheless, taking into consideration the fact that, as recent studies reveal, the relation of the Gothic to the mainstream has always been ambivalent (see Gamer) and that Gothic criticism is no longer a marginal current in modern literary criticism, but, on the contrary “stands as a central, if more colourfully flagrant, instance of the mainstream” (Baldick and Mighall 211), the classification of Indigenous works as postcolonial Gothic might in fact rather simplify Native aesthetics in response to a postcolonial awareness fashionable in the academia today. In this sense, postcolonial Gothic subversion would only confirm the “Law,” the category of postcolonial Gothic allowing for as much transgression as is acceptable by the status quo. In Graham Huggan’s words, “Marginality is defined, that is, not only in terms of what, or who, is different, but in the extent to which such difference conforms to preset cultural codes . . . , [as] attractively packaged and, at the same time, safely contained” (24).7 What is more, to apply the term postcolonial to Aboriginal writ-

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Huggan asks interesting questions about the value of marginality that seem thoughtprovoking also in the context of (postcolonial) Gothicism: “How is value ascribed to, and regulated within, the cultural margins? . . . What happens when marginal products, expliAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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ings and to interpret these forms of literary expression from the perspective of a European literary tradition, such as the Gothic, might seem risky and politically incorrect.8 Finally, the “anxiety model” prevalent in Gothic criticism (Baldick and Mighall 221), which tends to interpret perceptual anomalies in terms of psychoanalytic repression and the supernatural in terms of insanity and primitivism, risks in fact “continuing the epistemological work of empire” (Castricano in Henderson 178). In this light, an analysis of Boyden’s, Highway’s, and Robinson’s works as postcolonial Gothic novels might respond to the desire to “colonize” the eccentric aesthetics of their works by placing them within a more recognizable and familiar category. Whether the three Canadian Indigenous works analysed in this article benefit from inclusion within postcolonial Gothicism remains controversial. 9 However, the question that we might want to ask in conclusion is how much the Gothic benefits from the expansion of its postcolonial subcategory to Aboriginal territory. In their novels, Boyden, Highway, and Robinson provide challenging revisions of such ideas as the law, justice, norm, which have played a formative function in Gothic tradition. Most importantly, however, they involve the reader in a reconsideration of the concepts of fear, monstrosity, and the supernatural, intrinsic to Euro-American Gothicism. By depicting protagonists damaged by the violence of acculturation using Gothic tropes which have powerful effects on the readers, the three Aboriginal novels confront the Western reliance on rationality and facts with less rational but certainly not less reliable modes of being in, and making sense of, the world, such as dream visions or communication with ghosts. They thus both “respond to and creatively rework metropolitan demands for cultural otherness in their work” (Huggan 26; my italics). It might not be therefore too risky to claim that, moving beyond conventional modes of representation, Highway, Robinson, and Boyden transform the ambivalence inherent in Gothicism into a tool for resisting the image of the Indigene as colonial monster/postcolonial victim as well as into a powerful yet constructive trope to deal with historical trauma and (post)colonial oppression. In a way characteristic of the Gothic convention, their texts threaten the boundaries of the human, yet the

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citly valued for their properties of ‘resistance’, are seconded to the mainstream as a means of reinvigorating mainstream culture?” (20) Several Indigenous thinkers in Canada are deeply critical of the concept of postcolonialism. Thomas King, for instance, rejects postcolonial periodization, which posits colonial conquest as a foundational moment ignoring the fact that First Nations oratures had existed long before the Europeans “discovered” the New World. Native critics have elaborated critical frameworks that differ considerably from the way Euro-American critics approach art and literature (see Maracle; King). See Lacombe for alternative readings of Indigenous novels. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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human understood in a Eurocentric way. It is significant that Boyden’s, Highway’s, and Robinon’s monsters are trickster figures that “display the faults and foibles of humankind as well as some of the more admirable and moral qualities” (New 1138). Sometimes, they help people yet they can also disrupt their lives as their actions have unforeseen consequences. Being a trickster and being human means being fallible, and, once the protagonists learn to acknowledge this truth, the binaries between worlds – the natural/the supernatural, the contemporary/the ancestral, the human/the abject – vanish to create a more empowering, yet not less fearsome and difficult to assume, vision of reality. If, in the novels discussed above, the supernatural loses its Eurocentric associations with horror and repression and becomes a healing force, politically relevant to Indigenous communities, one might wander about the transformative effects of these “Gothic” images of monstrosity and violence when introjected into Euro-American imagination. Since, as David Punter reminds us, “it is precisely in Gothic that the whole issue of catharsis becomes focused to its most intense point,” the fascination and discomfort the Euro-American reader experiences while reading Highway’s, Boyden’s, and Robinson’s texts suggest that “the possibility of being ‘healed’ by surviving atrocious experience is perpetually challenged by the alternative possibility of being overwhelmed by that experience and swept off, like so many Gothic heroes, into the abyss, far away from any available map or compass” (Punter, “Introduction” 7). The potential of transformation in the alternative Gothic formulations analysed in this article lies therefore perhaps in the confrontation with Western pathologies of unreason and exploitation to which there is no Gothic counterbalance for purification is only a Gothic myth, unless we incorporate different epistemologies and ontologies, a utopian cultural project that might exceed the combined revolutionary impulses of postcolonial criticism and the Gothic tradition. Works Cited: Andrews, Jennifer. “Rethinking the Canadian Gothic: Reading Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.” Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009. 205-227. Print. Baldick Chris and Robert Mighall. “Gothic Criticism.” A Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Malden-Oxford-Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2001. 209-228. Print. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. ---. “Aftergothic: Consumption, Machines, and Black Holes.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 277-300. Print. Boyden, Joseph. Three Day Road. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005. Print. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Branach-Kallas, Anna. “Gothicizing the Wendigo: The Ambivalences of Monstrosity in Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden.” Unpublished paper presented at the conference “Evil, Ugliness, Disgrace in the Cultures of the West and East” organized by Opole University in .DPLHĔĝOąVNLRQ2FWREHU,QSULQW Brewster, Scott. “Gothic and the Madness of Interpretation.” A Companion to the Gothic. Ed. David Punter. Malden-Oxford-Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2001. 281-292. Print. Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto-BuffaloLondon: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Print. Colombo, John Robert. Strange but True: Canadian Stories of Horror and Terror. Toronto: Dundurn, 2007. Print. ---. The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories. Toronto: Dundurn, 2008. Print. Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Print. Gamer, Michael. “Gothic Fictions and Romantic Writing in Britain.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 85-104. Print. Goldie, Terry. Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures. Montreal: McGill – Queen’s University Press, 1989. Print. Goldman, Marlene. Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction. Montreal: McGill – Queen's University Press, 2005. Print. Gordon, Neta. “Time Structures and the Healing Aesthetic of Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road.” Studies in Canadian Literature 33 (1/2008). Web. 27 Sept. 2011. . Groening, Laura Smyth. Listening to Old Woman Speak: Natives and alter Natives in Canadian Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Print. Haggerty, George. “The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction.” Romanticism on the Net 36-37 (November 2004, February 2005). Web. 12 Oct. 2011

Henderson, Jennifer. “’Something Not Unlike Enjoyment’: Gothicism, Catholicism, and Sexuality in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen.” Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009. 175-204. Print. Highway, Tomson. Kiss of the Fur Queen. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1998. Print. Hogle, Jerrold E. Introduction: “The Gothic in Western Culture.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1-20. Print. Huggam, Graham. The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004. 183-190. Print. Kulperger, Shelley. “Familiar Ghosts: Feminist Postcolonial Gothic in Canada.” Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009. 97-124. Print.

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Lacombe, Michèle. “On Critical Frameworks for Analyzing Indigenous Literature: The Case of Monkey Beach.” International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue international d’études canadiennes 41 (2010): 253-276. Print. Lutz, Hartmut. “’The land is deep in time’: Natives and Newcomers in Multicultural Canada.” Towards Critical Multiculturalism: Dialogues Between / Among Canadian Diasporas. (G(ZHOLQD%XMQRZVND0DUFLQ*DEU\Ğ7RPDV]6LNRUD.DWRZLFH$JHQFMD$UW\VW\Fzna PARA, 2011. 47-64. Print. Maracle, Lee. “The ‘Post-Colonial’ Imagination.” Unhomely States: Theorizing EnglishCanadian Postcolonialism. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2004. 204208. Print. McKegney, Sam. Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2007. Print. New, W. H. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Punter, David. Introduction: “Of Apparitions.” Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography. Ed. Glennis Byron and David Punter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. 18. Print. ---. “Arundhati Roy and the House of History.” Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 192-207. Print. Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. Print. Rymhs, Deena. From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008. Print. Smith, Andrew and William Hughes. Introduction: “Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism.” Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre. Ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 1-12. Print. Sugars, Cynthia and Gerry Turcotte. “Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic.” Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009. vii-xxvi. Print. Wyile, Herb. “Windigo Killing: Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road.” National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada. Ed. Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010. 83-97. Print. Web. 26 Oct. 2011. www.ainc-inac.gc.ca.

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Gothic Topographies

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The Haunting of the House in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” Monika Kocot Introduction In his study Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler identifies a view held among readers of American literature who diagnose the latter as “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (29). And it seems that the identification of America with haunting implies a demythologized vision of American life and culture (Peterson 239). Indeed, the tale of the haunted house, while rooted in the European gothic tradition, has developed a distinctly American resonance. Since the first description of the House of Usher in 1839, the motif of the haunted house has assumed an enduring role in the American tradition. As Dale Bailey notices, the tales of the haunted house “often provoke our fears about ourselves and our society, and, at their very best, they serve as versatile metaphors, presenting deeply subversive critiques of all we hold to be true – about class, about race, about gender, about American history” (6). The perspective I am taking will touch upon Leslie Fiedler’s comments, as I will attempt to see Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” through the prism of two seemingly overlapping discourses, that is the discourse of haunting and the Freudian narrative of melancholia. Obviously, Gilman’s short story has been the subject of various interpretations. Some scholars read it as a study of hysteria and a protest against Doctor Mitchell, a famous Victorian physician and a specialist in hysteria treatment, whose name is actually mentioned in the story. Due to the modern marriage of hysteria and feminism, the story can also be seen as a feminist product of its time. Feminist understanding of hysteria, having been influenced by work in semiotics and discourse theory, sees hysteria as a specifically feminine protolanguage, communicating through the body messages that cannot be verbalized. For many scholars, the case of hysteria in Gilman’s story can be claimed as the first step on the road to feminism, a specifically feminine pathology that speaks to and against patriarchy. Much as I value these approaches, “The Yellow Wallpaper” remains to me a remarkable example of what Freud would call melancholia, and, more importantly, a cryptic tale of subjection, with scenes of haunting in the background, which again will add complexity to the already ambiguous ending of the story. In mirroring cultural preoccupations, haunted houses symbolize psychological vicissitudes. As Peter Brooks has commented, the layered map of many Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Gothic buildings bears affinities to the Freudian topology of the psyche (traps laid for the conscious by the unconscious and the repressed) (19). In my analysis, I will try to show how the issue of being overcome by melancholia (and possibly mania) is interwoven with the motif of the haunted house. Thus the interiors in Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” will serve as metaphors of the protagonist’s psyche, thanks to which the scenes of haunting might be viewed as cryptic tales of subjection. Gilman is one of the first authors to apprehend and exploit the innovations of Poe and Hawthorne, concentrating in graphic detail on the house itself rather than on the ghosts that may or may not be contained there (Bailey 28). This shift in focus deepens the story’s symbolic and psychological potential. Significantly, the story works as the final turn of the gothic screw: the realization that not the supernatural, or the extraordinary, but the ordinary, the everyday are the most terrifying and/or horrifying (Fiedler 487). Also, what seems to be essentially gothic about it is the underlying idea that “what she fears is true”; it is more than mere trifling and titillation (Fiedler 503). Obviously, “what she fears is true” because we are dealing with “hauntology,” understood as an interminable process of mourning that haunts one from the start. Haunting as a discourse As Dani Cavallaro puts it, haunting is a discourse: It encompasses a number of languages (both verbal and visual), image repertoires, performative acts and stylistic devices. These elements constitute a complex rhetoric, central to which is the principle of ambiguity: a blurring of logical distinctions, resulting in the sustained obfuscation of sense, whereby a mood of suspension and undecidability is produced. The prototypical figure associated with haunting, the ghost, typifies this rhetorical strategy, largely through its uncanny admixture of physical and incorporeal attributes. Furthermore, an atmosphere of haziness is frequently evoked through the juxtaposition of the natural and the supernatural, the rational and the irrational. (Cavallaro 65)

Cavallaro views conceptual conflicts personified by the hero-villain as parallel to the tension between the ego and the id – conscious reason and unconscious fantasies and desires – as theorized by Freudian psychoanalysis (49). Drawing on Freud’s concepts, Cavallaro states that when one’s hidden drives do not find an outlet in action, one’s psyche is likely to manifest its darkest traits. “In such cases, mental life folds and unfolds in its own interiority, spawning endless fantasies of transgression and morbid desire. The themes of possession, addiction and neurotic repetition play an important role” (52). Significantly for our analysis, one must bear in mind that from a psychological point of view, the energies that haunt us are very much a part of our own Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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selves. Cavallaro aptly observes that “they refer to what is missing from us and hence to a fundamental aspect of our being – lack” (62). “If we find them disorienting, spooky or overtly threatening” – Cavallaro continues – “this is because we have disavowed them in the interest of rationalist doctrines that brand anything which cannot be empirically ascertained and measured as a symptom of moral and mental degeneration. Narratives of darkness focus on the construction of identity out of lack, of presence out of an absence that will never leave it” (62). But Cavallaro goes further than that when he states that the instability of identity is paralleled by the depiction of alternative worlds where all solid foundations are shaken. “The shape of reality is continually sought in its invisibility, by tracing through time and space that which makes its mark by at the same time being there and not being there” (62). If the haunting forces stand for what we have repressed, they will not leave us alone precisely because we cannot leave them alone. For Cavallaro, this approach to haunting indicates that “there are no obvious distinctions between the inside and the outside, since factors which we may be inclined to deem external to our selves insistently turn out to be intrinsic aspects of our psyches and our bodies. Accordingly, it is hard to establish who is being haunted and who is doing the haunting” (61). And this is where the narrative of melancholia enters the scene. The Narrative of Melancholia Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” presumes that love of the object comes first, and only upon the loss of the object does melancholy emerge, producing “a set of spatializing tropes for psychic life, domiciles of preservation and shelter as well as arenas for struggle and persecution” (“Melancholia” 171). “In melancholia, not only does the ego substitute for the object, but this act of substitution institutes ego as a necessary to or ‘defence’ against loss’” (169). Obviously, an object-loss is withdrawn from consciousness. According to the narrative of melancholia that Freud provides, the ego is said to “turn back upon itself” once love fails to find its object and instead takes itself as not only an object of love, but of aggression and hate as well (169). Significantly, Freud identifies heightened conscience and self-beratement as one sign of melancholia, the condition of uncompleted grief. Unowned and incomplete, melancholia is the limit to the subject’s sense of what it can accomplish and, in that sense, its power. Freud comes to recognize that the work of melancholia may well be in the service of the death drive. In “The Ego and the Id,” he asks, “how is it then that in melancholia the super-ego can become a gathering-place for the death instincts?” He goes on and remarks that the “merciless violence” of conscience Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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shows that “what is now holding sway in the super-ego is, as it were, a pure culture of the death instinct” (Freud, “Ego” 54). In melancholia then, it would be impossible to separate the death drive from the conscience heightened through melancholia. In either case, the ego risks its life in the face of its failure to live up to the standards encoded in the ego-denial. In “The Ego and the Id,” Freud notes that the conscience often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time by the change into mania (253). In mania, a repressed part of the ego (social and familial) is finally freed from constraints, and we are dealing with the energetic throwing off of the attachment to the lost object, enshrined in the workings of conscience. Yet, in mania, what the ego is triumphing over remains hidden from it (Freud, “Ego” 254). The Yellow Wallpaper Since its republication by the Feminist Press in 1973, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has achieved the status of a recovered classic. Written following Gilman’s experience as a patient suffering post-partum depression in 1887, the story explicitly rejects Philadelphia physician S. Weir Mitchell’s rest cure for female disorders. As Catherine Golden reports, Mitchell’s rest cure involved a six-to-eight week period of bed rest, seclusion from family and familial surroundings, and prohibition from the intellectual stimulations of conversation, reading and writing (147). This is precisely the regimen prescribed to Gilman’s unnamed narrator, by John, her physician husband, following the birth of her own child. Instructed to remain in bed, the woman becomes fixated upon the yellow wallpaper in the room to which she is confined. She gradually envisions movement, and eventually a woman, behind its mesmerizing patterns. The presence of the woman haunts her more and more, and at the end of the story the protagonist seems possessed by the spectre. Critics have read the story as a parable of feminist escape from an oppressive patriarchy, depiction of repressed sexuality, as a critique of the so-called cult of true womanhood, and as an indictment of the medical establishment. Gilman herself invokes the idea of a haunted house at the very beginning of the story: It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity – but that would be asking too much of fate! Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it. (649)

Considering the way the story opens with several rhetorical gestures alluding to the gothic tradition (including the “ancestral mansion” and a discussion of Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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its possibly being haunted), it is curious – as Agnieszka Soltysik sensibly notices – that modern critics have paid relatively little attention to the possibility that the house and wallpaper might really be haunted in the world of the story. Yet, given the fact that Gilman, like James, used the supernatural in other stories of the period, such a reading cannot be dismissed out of hand (106). In Soltysik’s view, “Gilman has chosen the gothic for its power to connote a past heavy with injustice and tragedy, especially for women, whose restless ghosts haunt the houses that served as the prisons for their smothered lives” (129). Similarly, Carol Margaret Davison sees “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a paradigmatic female Gothic text where the supernatural is used for political ends (48). Nevertheless, how gothic the story is and whether the house is really haunted is a puzzle the reader has to solve, as the story opens to a whole array of interpretive approaches. I will attempt to show the relation between the physical and mental imprisonment and melancholia which appears as its consequence and which in turn induces a peculiar mental condition where the scenes of “haunting” predominate. The highly complex dynamics in question will be interwoven with the process of the emergence of the subject in Gilman’s story. It needs stressing that subjection, apart from becoming a subject, signifies the process of becoming subordinated by a power that appears to be external, pressing the subject into subordination. And it is this power that assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the “external” power that haunts the protagonist proves to be an internalized, but unacknowledged, aggression towards the other, the protagonist’s husband, and consequently towards the protagonist herself. Given the description of a husband-wife relationship, we learn that he is a physician and the reason they are in the house is her sickness which he calls nothing but temporary nervous depression or a “slight hysterical tendency. ”John is “practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be left and seen and put down in figures” (Gilman 649). He is an embodiment of cool reasoning, looking for visible symptoms of any problem. When he does not see them, he is sure that they do not exist whatsoever. And this is what happens in the case of his wife – he does not believe she is sick, as there are no visible signs of the illness; therefore he is absolutely sure that the whole problem is a figment of his wife’s imagination. There is an unstated psychological battle between the two, though the whole aggression is transferred to the unconscious. The nursery room, situated in the attic, in which the action of the story takes place, is significant, as in Freudian psychoanalysis it is symbolically associated with the super-ego. It imposes external limitations but it also involves, as we will see later, limitations the protagonist unconsciously imposes on herself. AlAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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so, the description of the house suggests that there is a deep relationship between the building and the “construction” of the speaker’s psyche. The speaker says that the house is quite alone, standing well back from the road, and far away from the village. Similarly, she tends to be rather isolated, both distanced from and distancing herself from others. Significantly, the speaker is fascinated with the organization of the house – “there are hedges and walls and gates that lock, and lots of separate little houses for the gardeners and people” (Gilman 650). She unconsciously “projects” images of constraint, of limited space or even exclusion. It’s not even that she creates these images but the space, the architecture around her, imposes such images on her subconscious which she of course does not see but begins to feel. It is interesting that she seems to want to preserve the prison she is locked up in, which is connected with the fact that she has yet to discover her self-identity. The cultural demands imposed on her leave no room for her own agency, and her husband “hardly lets her stir without special direction” (Gilman 650). On a symbolic level, her fascination with the garden with its box-bothered paths is linked with the social projection of a wife, which forces her to submit to the will of her husband. Whether she wants to or not she follows this pattern and sees the world through the eyes of the husband. The moment of discovery of another world will be a turning point of the story. The struggle for release from tension is another theme of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The speaker says that her husband forbids her to show anger. As aggression is prohibited, she strives to hide any kind of negative emotions. But the tension builds up, which naturally leads to uncontrolled attacks of crying; she says she cries at nothing and most of the time (Gilman 653). She has to hide her tears from everyone. She has to control herself in the presence of others, and this exhausts her. She constantly has to lie to John and his sister, and she has to lie to herself. This obligation of dissimulation and a self-imposed censure are closely linked with what Freud refers to as “the heightening of conscience” (Freud, “Melancholia” 169). If we follow Freudian reading of the melancholic state as a condition of uncompleted grief that limits the subject’s sense of what it can accomplish, then we can see why the speaker speaks of exhaustion, which is even activated by the prohibitions and instructions of how to behave appropriately. Now, I would like to have a closer look at the way the speaker attains selfconsciousness. At the beginning of the story we read the first description of the wallpaper. It has got “flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (Gilman 651). The patterns are Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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full of life, and yet she associates them with bad art. It is difficult to follow the patterns, but at the same time it is impossible not to look at them. The torture becomes an addiction, the pain becomes a pleasure. Obviously, those impressions are inextricably linked with the speaker’s experiences in her real life – what she sees on the wall might be seen as a displacement. The intensity of images might be read as overdetermination, especially in the latter part of her vision. And just as in the case of dream work, different patterns are condensed into one big structure that unifies them all. Even the feelings aroused by looking at the wall are ambiguous because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange; it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. What she perceives as a source of suffering, she later on turns into a source of satisfaction and masochistic pleasure. The wallpaper works as a symbolic representation – a sort of therapy. The speaker projects her psyche on the paper and, even though she does it unconsciously, she studies her own subjectivity. The trace produces and follows its route, the trace which traces, the trace which breaks open its own path. The metaphor of pathbreaking, so frequently used in Freud’s descriptions, is always in communication with the theme of supplementary delay and with the reconstitution of meaning through deferral, after a molelike progression, after the subterranean toil of an impression. The following passage shows the protagonist’s determination in finding the “design” behind the pattern. I lie here on this great immovable bed – it is nailed down, I believe – and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I WILL follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion. I know a little of the principle of design, and I know this thing was not arranged on any laws of radiation, or alternation, or repetition, or symmetry, or anything else that I ever heard of. It is repeated, of course, by the breadths, but not otherwise. Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes – a kind of “debased Romanesque” with delirium tremens – go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase. The whole thing goes horizontally, too, at least it seems so, and I exhaust myself in trying to distinguish the order of its going in that direction. They have used a horizontal breadth for a frieze, and that adds wonderfully to the confusion. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Monika Kocot There is one end of the room where it is almost intact, and there, when the crosslights fade and the low sun shines directly upon it, I can almost fancy radiation after all, – the interminable grotesques seem to form around a common centre and rush off in headlong plunges of equal distraction. (Gilman 653-654)

Each time she notices any significant details of the grand design, which might quite naturally stimulate the process of subjection, she decides to retire. Nevertheless, after a while she is once more drawn to the wallpaper and day by day she notices new elements that start to influence her perception of the “real” world. At first the speaker claims that the wall paper is the ugliest paper she ever had seen in her life. Then she notices something strange – the paper looks at her as if “it KNEW what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. There is one place where two breadths didn't match, and the eyes go all up and down the line, one a little higher than the other. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! (Gilman 652)

Later we learn that it is not only one head; there are many of them and each belongs to women who tried to find a way out of their prison: “nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through that pattern, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” (658). Bearing in mind that, as Freud states in “The Ego and the Id,” in melancholia the super-ego, the highly aggressive potential of conscience, awakens death instincts; it would be impossible to separate the death drive from the conscience heightened through melancholia. Hence, the question of who emerges amongst the mysterious patterns on the wall is very difficult to answer in simple terms. Is the protagonist being haunted? If yes, who/what is doing the haunting? The speaker claims that by daylight, there is a lack of sequence on the pattern, whereas at night in any kind of light, the bars and the woman behind them appear. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. .... Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream. The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions – why, that is something like it. That is, sometimes! There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes. When the sun shoots in through the east window – I always watch for that first long, straight ray – it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it. That is why I watch it always. By moonlight – the moon shines in all night when there is a moon – I wouldn't know it was the same paper. At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candle light, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be. I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman. By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still. It is so puzzling. It keeps me quiet by the hour. (Gilman 655-656)

Just as in the Freudian distinction between the manifest and latent content of the dream, the speaker discovers not only the visible, manifest, pattern of the paper but, subsequently, also the latent content of the vision. The woman behind the paper and her actions, for instance her shaking the bars, are distinguishable only after hours of studying the paper. She is not visible during the day, just as reasoning represented by the daylight excludes the power of unconscious represented by the night. The elimination of instincts, creativity and in general the uncontrolled part of the psyche results in eliminating the problem. Nevertheless, it reappears at night, a time when reasoning is “turned off,” and this is when we learn that the speaker never sleeps at night, devoting this time to observing the pattern. The woman behind the bars can be seen as the symptomatic form of the return of the repressed. She appears to remind the speaker of the destitute state she is in. The woman behind the bars is also a projection of femininity. And just as she shakes the bars of her prison, the speaker rejects the role of wife and mother. The deaths of women who tried to climb through the pattern says something about the condition of women who wanted to lead a life of their own, without restrictions imposed on them by society. The effect of those images is that of pity and horror. Later on we can see the protagonist’s disgust Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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when she looks at the moon, which on the symbolic level is closely associated with the sphere of womanhood and motherhood. It is not only the sight of the wallpaper that haunts her. The images from the wallpaper begin to enter her world through the sense of smell. She becomes all the more bewildered, and eventually overcome by the “yellow smell”: It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs. It gets into my hair. Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it – there is that smell! Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It is not bad – at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met. In this damp weather it is awful, I wake up in the night and find it hanging over me. It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house – to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOR of the paper! A yellow smell. (Gilman 657)

Interestingly, the overwhelming sensation of closeness of the smell brings the protagonist to the conclusion that the woman behind the bars is the same one she sees everyday outside the house. It works as a progressive projection; first, she notices the similarities of conditions they both have to endure, but later on the protagonist ventures a way out of her physical and mental prison. She now decides to tear off the wallpaper, to separate the patterns from each other, to come to terms with her obsessions: If only that top pattern could be gotten off from the under one! I mean to try it, little by little. ... I've got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her! But I forgot I could not reach far without anything to stand on! This bed will NOT move!

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I tried to lift and push it until I was lame, and then I got so angry I bit off a little piece at one corner – but it hurt my teeth. Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision! (Gilman 658-659)

Now the feeling of rage is strong enough to prompt her to take some violent action – as she peels off the paper she states: “I am getting angry enough to do something desperate. To jump out of the window would be an admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong even to try. Besides I wouldn’t do it. Of course not. I know well enough that a step like that is improper and might be misconstrued” (660). On the one hand, she is finally free, but she does not know how to use the freedom. She is still under the influence of her superego and all the restrictions imposed on her by society. She cannot and will not think on her own. She says: “I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard!” and later: “I don’t want to go outside” (Gilman 660). She seems somewhere in between with a strange inability to make conscious choices. At the end of the narrative we find her creeping on the floor and acting as if she is mad. Through that neurotic repetition the subject pursues its own dissolution, its own unraveling, a pursuit that marks an agency, but not the subject’s agency – rather, the agency of a desire that aims at the dissolution of the subject, where the subject stands as a bar to that desire. In his analysis of the dynamics of melancholia in “The Ego and the Id,” Freud notes that the conscience “often enough succeeds in driving the ego into death, if the latter does not fend off its tyrant in time by the change round into mania” (253). Mania appears to be the compulsive breaking of the bond with the lost object. However, it needs stressing that in such cases the ego’s selfawareness is considerably limited. In our narrative, the only thing the speaker is able to say to her husband at the end is: “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman 660). In mania, a repressed part of the ego (social and familial) is finally freed from constraints. However, the process of the emergence of the whole of the ego is not completed. The tyrant is fended off, but not thrown off or overcome; it remains structurally ensconced for the psyche – and unknowable. As the aim of psychoanalytic therapy is to enable the process of gaining awareness of the content of one’s unconscious, it involves the stage of turning binary oppositions into coniunctio oppositorum. The conflicting forces should be erased, creating a free, unconstrained mind. This stage does not take place in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” At the end of the story, the reader is left in a sort of ambivalent suspense; we do not know whether the protagonist becomes possessed, turns maniacal, or commits suicide. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Conclusion To come back to my initial comment about variegated readings of the narrative, whether one uses the feminist, psychoanalytic, or other tools, the gothic framework of the story lends itself to various, often complementary interpretations. As Dani Cavallaro aptly notices: . . . the physical and psychological reality of the protagonist’s incarceration by her husband in an attic, justified on the grounds of her presumed insanity, is encapsulated by the walls of her prison as sites of both writing and haunting. . . . The text tells a story of Gothic entrapment hinging on the patriarchal victimization of women, a message reinforced by the fact that when the heroine struggles to organize the wallpaper’s sliding signifiers into an intelligible image, the vision she perceives is that of “a woman.” Her ordeal, as she painfully endeavours to negotiate words and visions, is replicated by the predicament of another spectral female. It is also significant that the narrator lacks confidence in her ability to write. This feeling does not merely result from a general sense of insecurity and self-dispossession. It is also related to the notion that what she is attempting to bring to life on “dead paper” is a ghost, the phantom of both her silenced self and the fleeting vision on the wall. The Yellow Wallpaper seems to confirm the hypothesis, advanced earlier, that words and visions partake simultaneously of presence and absence: words erode the materiality of the real by translating presences into absences while visions, in turn, question the reliability of perception by intimating that there is often a discrepancy between what is there for us to see and what we ideate in its absence. (Cavallaro 110-111)

The rhetoric of haunting in the narrative erodes not only the dividing line between the real and the imaginary but also the boundaries of the self. By dismantling the physical and psychological demarcations, the rhetoric “shakes the very foundations of the edifices we like to conceive of as impregnable identities. It locates the phantom of ambiguity at the core of selfhood by positing the ultimate haunter as a lacuna within the subject. At the same time, it stresses the cultural specificity of both haunting agents and the inner gaps they symbolize” (Cavallaro 74). And as one of the scariest spectres is that which remains equivocal and cryptic, “The Yellow Wallpaper” continually exposes tropes of displacement and disorientation that are linked to the incessant interplay of terror and horror; terror which conventionally alludes to the perception of intangible threats, and horror which suggests the confrontation of physical abomination. In the narrative those two dimensions unrelentingly coalesce. The distinctive open-endedness of the text, inspired by a gothic vision, entails that the meanings constructed both by the narrator and the speaker are inevitably provisional. The unreliability of authorial power makes the reader responsible for co-creating the meaning. However, the interpretive task might prove as inconclusive as the narrative itself. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Works Cited: Bailey, Dale. American Nightmares: the Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Print. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976. Print. Cavallaro, Dani. Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear. London, GBR: Continuum International Publishing, 2002. Print. Davison, Carol Margaret. Haunted House/Haunted Heroine: Female Gothic Closets in “The Yellow Wallpaper. ”Women’s Studies 33.1 (2004): 47-75. Print. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Scarborough Books, 1960. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melacholia.” Ed. and trans. J. Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The Ego and the Id.” Ed. and trans. J. Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19. London: Hogarth, 1953-74. Print. Golden, Catherine. Ed. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper. NY: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 1992. Print. Perkins, Gilman Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Ed. N. Baym. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. vol. 2. New York and London: N&Co, 1998. Print. Peterson, Christopher. “The Haunted House of Kinship. Miscegenation, Homosexuality, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” The New Centennial Review 4.1 (2004): 227-265. Print. Soltysik, Monnet Agnieszka. Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Farnham, Surrey, GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2010. Print. Wigley, Mark. The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993. Print.

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Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf as a Modern Gothic Tale: A Cognitive Poetic Perspective Krzysztof Kosecki 1. Introduction Steppenwolf is often regarded as a novel with biographical elements. Harry Haller may be Hermann Hesse himself: on publication of the novel in 1927, Hesse was exactly 50 years old, hence, like Harry, a middle-aged man (Zybura 284). Haller’s painful experience may thus be read as a reflection of Hesse’s own middle-age crisis (Hesse 5). Another interpretation is that following separation with his wife, Ruth Wenger, Hesse stayed alone in Basel and in Zürich, and was unable to come to terms with his life (“Steppenwolf _(novel)”). On a more universal level, Steppenwolf involves a tension of two opposing worldviews–the romantic/gothic and the classical. The former is represented by Harry Haller’s ego-centred personality that consists of human and wolfish properties, and is enhanced by his uses of space; the latter is expressed by his encounters with Goethe and Mozart, as well as his mental and emotional evolution, which results in a partial return to society and conventional values. 2. Cognitive Poetics Cognitive Poetics is largely grounded in the Lakoff-Johnson-Turner theory of metaphor (Deane 628-30). Metaphor involves two conceptual domains: the abstract target is understood in terms of the concrete source by means of a set of mappings (Lakoff and Johnson 3-6). A LIFETIME can, for example, be understood in terms of the stages of A YEAR: She is in the springtime of life. He is already in the autumn of his life. Winter of life is all that remains for him.

Springtime of life is, naturally, youth, whereas autumn and winter correspond to old age. Such metaphors are strongly grounded in human everyday experience– in the present case, it is the experience of the astronomical cycle of the year and its influence on plant and animal life on earth (Lakoff and Turner 18). Artistic or poetic metaphors are “different in degree, not in kind from the metaphors used in conventional speech”, and “poetic use of metaphor is seldom completely original” (Deane 630). Such metaphors can be extended, elaborated, questioned, or composed so as to achieve a specific poetic effect (Deane 63031). In the poem “Gold Leaves,” Chesterton uses the metaphor A LIFETIME IS A YEAR in a very conventional way, and combines it with the metaphor A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy 60-63): Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Lo! I am come to autumn, When all the leaves are gold, Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out The year and I are old. (Pietrkiewicz 258)

The third line of the stanza, however, elaborates the former metaphor in that it establishes a correspondence between the grey hairs of an old man and golden leaves of autumn trees. Another conceptual mechanism present both in conventional and artistic language is metonymy. Unlike metaphor, it involves a mapping in which a part of a domain stands for the whole of it or only for some of its elements (Lakoff and Turner 101-01). The following fragment of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” well illustrates it: . . .but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (Jeffares 246)

The rocking cradle stands for the baby in it, which, in the context of the poem on historical cycles, is Jesus Christ (Lakoff and Turner 101). The metonymy in the expression can be called LOCATION FOR PERSON. Christ, in turn, stands for the whole Christian era and civilisation in Yeats’s complex system of history (Jeffares 246), and such interpretation is possible thanks to the metonymy PERSON FOR ERA/CIVILISATION. Finally, Bethlehem is Christ’s birthplace (Jeffares 246), and, like Christ himself, it stands for Christianity. In this case, the metonymy can be called LOCATION (IN WHICH IT ORIGINATED) FOR ERA/CIVILISATION. 2.1. Cognitive Poetics and narratology The gothic aspects of the novel could be approached from other analytic perspectives as well. One of them is Campbell’s mono-myth, developed within the framework of narratology. It points out to fundamental structures shared by myth narratives from various cultures (“Narratology”). Since hero’s evolution in novels often has points in common with some myths, the theory helps unveil the hidden significance of the plots as well. Some of the elements postulated by Campbell (“Narratology”) can indeed be found in Hesse’s novel. Harry Haller contacts the supernatural aid; he meets Hermine, who acts as a temptress; he goes on a long road of trial by encounters with Maria and Pablo; finally, he comes to understand the sense of life and gains freedom to live. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Narratology, however, has its sources in structuralism, especially in the concept of the “grammar” of narration (Todorov qtd. in Hawkes 122). Its affinities with anthropological analyses of myths (Lévi-Strauss) and studies of narrative structures of folk tales (Propp) are more than obvious. Cognitive Poetics, though it in no way disregards the narrative structures of literary works, emphasises the role of non-literal conceptual elements in them (Gavins and Steen; Stockwell; Turner). Complex interplays of metaphors and metonymies, many of which are universal across languages and cultures (Kövecses), bring out major theses of a literary work of art. Since narrative structures often serve as source domains of such metaphors, the two approaches need not be at odds with each other. They aim at different explanations of a literary text, but also complement each other so as to make readings of artistic texts complete. 3. The classical, the romantic, and the gothic The distinction between the classical and the romantic is of major importance in the history of culture: Classical and romantic, these are the systole and the diastole of the human heart in history. They represent our need of order, of synthesis, of a comprehensive yet definite, therefore exclusive as well as inclusive, ordering of thought and feeling. (Grierson qtd. in Phelps 113)

That is why the opposition also underlies literary works which are not directly associated either with the classical or the romantic tradition. Broadly speaking, the classical sees “a person as an integral part of an organized society” (Abrams 114). It emphasizes “what humans possess in common–representative characteristics, and widely shared experiences, thoughts, feelings, and tastes” (Abrams 114), hence the objective aspects of human existence. An individual is regarded as “an essentially limited being who ought to address him or herself to accessible goals” (Abrams 114); therefore, they should stick to the principle of “the golden mean (the avoidance of extremes)” and “submit to a restricted position in the order of things . . . often envisioned as a natural hierarchy, or Great Chain of Being” (Abrams 114). In the eighteenth century England, as elsewhere in Europe, it was largely the middle-class worldview. In contrast to that, the romantic means the emphasis on one’s private feelings and the activity of thinking and meditation (Abrams 115-16). It also involves the “broader tendency to re-emphasize the significance of the individual and the possible validity of the individual judgment” (Harding 42), and “. . . the open conflict in the intellectual life . . . centred on the claim of individual people to defy the standards and expectations of conventional society” (Harding 43). Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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The romantic subject is never a part of an organized society–he is a solitary figure in a quest for self-realization, a social nonconformist, an outcast, very often a rebel (Abrams 116). The gothic, in turn, represents the extreme of the romantic: . . . anything wild and barbarous, and destructive of classical civilization. . . . In the early part of the eighteenth century, when classical values reigned supreme, Gothic was a term of contempt, but when the reaction against Classicism set in the word took on positive implications. . . . Indeed, the most constant feature of the Gothic novel was the presence of a medieval building of some sort, with secret corridors and labyrinthine underground passages. (Phelps 110)

Other important elements were “various supernatural manifestations; a mysterious crime . . . a villain . . . tombs and graveyards . . . nature itself conspiring to produce effects of gloomy terror” (Phelps 110-11), as well as the motif of the Doppelgänger, that is, “a person’s ghostly double which haunts him throughout his life” (Skilton 67-68). Since its beginnings on the turn of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the gothic has undergone various transformations so as to suit the late nineteenth and twentieth century experience. The major one was the replacement of medieval landscapes and natural phenomena by urban space, usually dark and isolated: . . . the mystery is often transferred from the gothic castle to the great city. The labyrinth and its attendant dangers are no longer buried beneath convents and medieval ruins, but hidden in the warrens and rookeries of London and Paris, and even the complex web of ‘respectable’ urban life. (Skilton 67)

The Doppelgänger remained, but a new element was the motif of flâneur which departed from Baudelaire’s standard version of “experiencing the city by walking it” as “a way of living and thinking,” and from the idiosyncrasies of dandy culture (“Flâneur”). The gothic flâneur typically walks the outlying areas of the city at night. He is thus an escapist rather than a man participating in social life. 4. The novel The romantic/gothic elements form the setting of Hesse’s novel and the initial shape of Harry’s personality, namely, him having a Doppelgänger and being a flâneur. The opposition of the romantic and the classical underlies the plot of the story and Harry’s mental and emotional evolution from a middle-aged pessimist, keenly aware of ageing and disillusioned with contemporary bourgeois mass culture, to a man who is again able to function in society.

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4.1. The gothic cityscapes The novel is partly set in a respectable bourgeois house, where Harry rents the attic, and partly in the dark streets on the periphery of an unnamed German or Swiss town that he walks in gloomy moods. The funeral procession that Harry joins on one day also takes place in a distant suburb of the town. The Magic Theatre that he attends has its entrance in an old stone wall with a gothic arch in the middle of it, and is located “in one of the quietest and oldest quarters . . . in the darkest valley of the Old Town” (Hesse 39, 41). Those places and the moods of darkness and isolation that they evoke are the modern counterparts of medieval gothic settings. Harry’s attic can be reached by climbing steep stairs, which is reminiscent of the architecture of old gothic buildings. The Magic Theatre has many doors and corridors – it resembles the mysterious medieval castles of the gothic novels. 4.2. Harry as an outsider and a gothic flâneur On renting the attic, Harry asks the owner of the house not to report his stay to the police, and, unlike a typical bourgeois, leads a very irregular life. He is a man of the evening and the night: “It was part of the Steppenwolf’s aspects that he was a night prowler. . . . With this was bound up his need for loneliness and independence” (Hesse 56). His loneliness is contrasted with the public life of the city: “A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness” (Hesse 22). Harry is “entirely outside the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor social ambitions” (Hesse 62). He even feels “a foreign body” (Hesse 122) in the house where he rented the attic, and wants to escape, even go away: “It was the dread of returning to my room and coming to a halt there, faced by my despair” (Hesse 101). He is thus a man of ego-centred, morbid personality: he spends time alone, often in pain, and thinks of suicide. Since Harry wanders “the dark and foggy streets,” and “the moist pavements of the narrow streets” (Hesse 35, 37) of the town at night, without company of other people, he is also a gothic flâneur. He recalls how he “used to love the dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter,” when he “imbibed their moods of loneliness and melancholy,” and “strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless winter landscape” (Hesse 37). He first enters the Magic Theatre “on a wet night with not a soul passing by” (Hesse 41). 4.3. Harry and the Doppelgänger Harry has a Doppelgänger. He “finds in himself a ‘human being’ . . . a world of thoughts and feelings, of cultured and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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this he finds in himself also a ‘wolf’ . . . a dark world of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature” (Hesse 70). Like Faust, he believes “that two souls are far too many for a single breast and must tear the breast asunder” (Hesse 73). The second self comes to the foreground when Harry accepts the young professor’s invitation to visit him at home: And while I, Harry Haller, stood there in the street, flattered and surprised and studiously polite and smiling into the good fellow’s kindly, short-sighted face, there stood the other Harry, too, at my elbow and grinned likewise. He stood there and grinned as he thought what a funny, crazy, dishonest fellow I was to show my teeth in rage and curse the whole world one moment and, the next, to be falling all over myself in the eagerness of my response to the first amiable greeting of the first good honest fellow who came my way. . . . (Hesse 90-91)

Having found the professor’s bourgeois home and his conservative and militant views unacceptable, Harry leaves: Loud in my soul the wolf howled his glee, and between my two selves there opened an immense field of operations. . . . For me, it was a final failure and flight. It was my leave-taking from the respectable, moral and learned world, and a complete triumph for the Steppenwolf. (Hesse 99)

He resumes walking the streets of the town, “driven on by wretchedness” (Hesse 100). It is at this point that his opposition to the contemporary bourgeois culture reaches the extreme. 4.4. The Steppenwolf’s evolution Harry himself originally is a bourgeois: “Oh, it smells good here” (Hesse 8), he says, on entering the house where he rents the attic. He admires the little vestibule with the araucaria, which to him is symbolic of order and “superlative bourgeois cleanliness, of care and precision, of a feeling of duty and devotion to little things” (Hesse 20). The house represents the modern bourgeois culture and the way of life associated with it, faithful to convention and order. The essence of such life is “. . . the search for a balance . . . the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct” (Hesse 63). The bourgeois not only strives to “maintain his own identity” at the cost of “intensity of life,” but he also wants to achieve “his own preservation and security . . . as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire” (Hesse 64). Harry is different in that he experiences “a wild longing for strong emotions and sensations . . . a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life” (Hesse 35). He has “a mad impulse to smash something . . . to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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boys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, 1 to seduce a little girl, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads” (Hesse 35). In short, he hates “this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity” (Hesse 35). He is one of the Steppenwolves or the bourgeois “outsiders”: he is “developed far beyond the level possible to the bourgeois . . . despises law, virtue, and common sense,” but “is nevertheless captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot escape it” (Hesse 65). He is the bourgeois and its antithesis at the same time. Harry also cannot accept the mass-culture, which is a part of the contemporary bourgeois society: I cannot remain for long in either theatre or movie. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book. I cannot understand what pleasure and joys they are that drive people to the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the suffocating and obtrusive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to world Exhibitions, to the Corsos. . . . And in fact, if the world is right, if this music of the cafés, these mass- enjoyments and these Americanized men who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. 2 (Hesse 39)

At another point he says: . . . I had reached the Market Place, where there is never a lack of evening entertainments. At every other step were placards and posters with their various attractions, Ladies’ Orchestra, Variété, Cinema, Ball. But none of these were for me. They were for ‘everybody,’ for those normal persons whom I saw crowding every entrance. (Hesse 41-42)

Still later on, on his way back home, he has a similar experience: From a dance-hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively jazz music, Hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh. . . . This kind of music, much as I detest it, had always had a secret charm for me. Jazz was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable to all the academic music of the day. (Hesse 46-47)

The music is just another aspect of the degenerated contemporary bourgeois society. More than any other element, the house where Harry lives stands for the values of the society and culture that he rejects. It thus becomes the vehicle of the metonymy LOCATION FOR THE ANTI-IDEAL. Harry wants to escape from it: “I renewed my fitful wanderings through the town, making many de1 2

Hamburg stands for unrestricted entertainment. It is thus the vehicle of the metonymy LOCATION FOR THE IDEAL. Compare similar metonymies below. This passage anticipates a similar evaluation of the early 20th century mass culture by Ortega y Gasset (11-12). Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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tours not to return to the house which I had always in my mind and always deferred” (Hesse 101). It is at this point that the conceptual metaphor SOCIETY IS AN OBJECT WITH CENTRAL AND PERIPHERAL PARTS comes into play. It is based on human primary experience “of the body as centre and the perceptual field as periphery,” which involves dynamic movement to and from the centre, and later generalizes into various other objects, some of which are only metaphorical objects (Deane 633-35). The metaphor thus maps “the part/whole structure of physical objects onto society while imposing an organization into central and peripheral parts,” and underlies the conventional statements that “some people are marginal” while others “will form an inner circle to run things” (Deane 635). Harry walks the outlying and dark areas of the town because he wants to escape from the bourgeois anti-ideal that lies in the society’s centre. The peripheries of the town thus map onto the peripheries of the society, and the movement away from the house is the metaphorical movement away from the bourgeois society. The rebellion against the modern bourgeois culture makes Harry a prototypical romantic: a lonely, ego-centred man, who shuns contacts with people, in a word, an outsider. The wolf in him, that is “all that is instinctive, savage, and chaotic” (Hesse 74), is also a part of his romantic personality since it gives priority to the emotional and the irrational over the moderate and the sane. The dark, uncanny, modern gothic setting serves to amplify it. One night, following a dramatic visit at a young professor’s house, which, much like the house where he himself lives, represents the modern bourgeois anti-ideal, Harry again walks “the streets in all directions, driven by wretchedness,” (Hesse 100) and thinks of suicide as a solution to his condition. He finds himself “late at night in a distant and unfamiliar part of the town,” (Hesse 102) where he enters the public house called The Black Eagle. There he meets Hermine for the first time. She later acquaints him with Pablo, who has a room “on the top floor of an hotel in the suburbs” (Hesse 170), and Maria, whom he meets in in a “quiet and secluded restaurant” (Hesse 181). Staying at The Black Eagle, Harry falls asleep and in a dream meets Goethe: There stood old Goethe, short and very erect, and on his classic breast, sure enough, was the corpulent star of some Order. Not for a moment did he relax his commanding attitude, his air of giving audience, and of controlling the world from that museum of his at Weimar. (Hesse 112)

Harry addresses Goethe: “‘Year after year you lived on at Weimar accumulating knowledge and collecting objects, writing letters and gathering them in, as Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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though in your old age you had found the real way to discover the eternal in the momentary . . . ’” (Hesse 113-14). Goethe answers: “It may be unforgivable that I lived to be eighty-two. My satisfaction on that account was, however, less than you may think. You are right that a great longing for survival possessed me continually. . . . If it helps to justify me I should like to say this too: there was much of the child in my nature-curiosity and love of wasting time in play. Well, and so it went on and on, till I saw that sooner or later there must be enough of play.” (Hesse 114-15)

He adds: “You take the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend. . . .We immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking. Seriousness . . . consists . . . in putting too high a value on time. . . . For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.” (Hesse 115-16)

Soon after the dream ends: Goethe’s “withered old man’s face laughed a still and soundless laughter that shook him to the depths with abysmal old man’s humour” (Hesse 117). This is a crucial point in the novel. With the metonymies LOCATION FOR THE IDEAL and PERSON FOR THE IDEAL, Weimar and Goethe stand for the classical eighteenth century bourgeois culture. They complement the metonymy LOCATION FOR THE ANTI-IDEAL, in which the house where Harry lives stands for the contemporary bourgeois culture, which has degenerated into mass patterns, convention, and mediocrity. Having met Hermine and Goethe, Harry begins his gradual return to society: All of a sudden a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could live once more and once more be a human being. My soul that had fallen asleep in the cold and nearly frozen breathed once more, and sleepily spread its weak and tiny wings. Goethe had been with me. A girl had bidden me eat and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me and had called me a silly little boy. (Hesse 120)

Pablo, the musician, shows Harry the value of the current over the contemplative. Maria, who becomes his lover, brings him back to the world of sensual beauty. Thanks to them, he even begins to understand and accept the disliked popular culture: Wasn’t the blossoming of Maria’s childish emotion over the song from America just as pure and beautiful an artistic experience and exalted as far beyond doubt as the rapture of any academic bigwig over Tristan, or the ecstasy of a conductor over the Ninth Symphony? (Hesse 164).

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The emotional and intellectual compromise with the contemporary life thus becomes possible. Hermine, however, is a key figure in the process. She plays “at being a child” and teaches Harry “the game of living for each fleeting moment” (Hesse 132): “The war against death, dear Harry, is always a beautiful, noble and wonderful and glorious thing, and so, it follows, is the war against war. But it is always hopeless and quixotic too. . . . Your life will not be flat and dull even though you know your war will never be victorious. . . . Do we live to abolish death? No – we live to fear it and then again love it, and just for death’s sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now and then so brightly.” (Hesse 139-40).

Both her actions and her words echo Goethe’s words in Harry’s dream. Goethe’s message of laughter and the child in man returns also to Harry himself. He spends time with Maria before the Masked Ball in The Globe Rooms, and it is then that he really begins to understand its sense: It was a laughter without an object. It was simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left over when a true man has passed through all the sufferings, vices, mistakes, passions and misunderstandings of men and got through to eternity and the world of space. (Hesse 181)

It reappears during the Ball in Pablo’s “gleam and smile” and in the “mystic union of joy” (Hesse 197) that Harry himself experiences: “But today, on this blessed night, I myself, the Steppenwolf, was radiant with this smile. I myself swam in this deep and childlike happiness of a fairy-tale” (Hesse 197). It also accompanies Harry at the end of the Ball: Somewhere below I heard a door bang, a glass break, a titter of laughter die away, mixed with the angry hurried noise of motorcars starting up. And somewhere, at an indeterminable distance and height, I heard a laugh ring out, an extraordinarily clear and merry peel of laughter . . . . Where had I heard this laugh before? I could not tell. (Hesse 201-02)

It is present when, on taking him to the Magic Theatre, Pablo shows Harry in the glass his bitter and tormented image of the Steppenwolf: “He laughed aloud as he spoke, a short laugh, but it went through me like a shot. It was the same bright and peculiar laugh that I had heard from below” (Hesse 205). The laughter is still present at the Magic Theatre during Harry’s conversation with Mozart: 3 “How the uncanny man laughed! And what a cold and eerie laugh!” (Hesse 246). Mozart also says: “Please, no pathos, my friend! . . . Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest” (Hesse 246, 248). Finally, it appears 3

Mozart is also a representative of the classical in music. (Scholes 633). Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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during Harry’s execution: “On the word ‘three’ all who were present broke into one simultaneous peal of laughter . . . ” (Hesse 250). The outward-oriented attitude to life, which entails avoidance of extremes and a social rather than a solitary way of living, is a part of the classical outlook. It is evident in Harry’s presence at the Masked Ball, in which he participates for the first time in his life: the rooms, stairs, corridors, and the numerous orchestras playing represent the potential of being a social person rather than a Steppenwolf. Then Pablo takes Harry to The Magic Theatre, behind whose innumerable doors are countless possible ways of life. Harry engages there in a game of chess, whose pieces represent aspects of his own self. The chess-player explains the purpose of the game: “We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life” (Hesse 224). The Ball, the theatre, as well as the game of chess, whose pieces happen to be men and women of all kinds, are all metaphors of the potential variety of life, which is at the heart of the classical outlook, and to which Goethe alluded in his conversation with the Steppenwolf. Last but not least, the classical is also evident in Maria’s words to Harry following their love-making on the night before the Ball: “Any time might be the last time” (Hesse 183). It is clearly an allusion to the carpe diem motif expressed by Horace, a major representative of Roman classicism and one of the reference points of modern classicism. 4 Mann wrote: “Goethe laconically defined the Classical as the healthy, the Romantic as the morbid” (197). The poet’s cheerful, outward-oriented, and social attitude to life, 5 expressed also in the dream meeting with the Steppenwolf, complements Mozart’s comment on Harry’s life: “You have made a frightful history of disease out of your life, and a misfortune of your gifts. . . . I don’t care a fig for all your romantics of atonement” (Hesse 248, 251). Harry’s return to society is expressed by means of the metaphor CENTRE IS AN INFLUENTIAL FIGURE (Deane 633-34, 636), which places Goethe in the centre of the process, as it is during the dream meeting with the poet that Harry’s evolution begins. Hermine, Maria, Pablo, and finally Mozart all reflect, be it in their words or in their actions, Goethe’s words. They all help Harry return to the healthy and positive outlook, which is an aspect of the classical. They all orbit around Goethe’s philosophy of life while Harry has for some time been pulled away from it. At the end he is ready to accept it:

4 5

Weimar, also mentioned in the novel, was the centre of German classicism (Peyre 220). See Peyre (226) on this aspect of Goethe. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. . . . One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too. (Hesse 25253)

5. Conclusions The dark, outlying cityscapes, the Doppelgänger, and the flâneur clearly liken Hesse’s novel to gothic fiction. Other similar motifs are the so-called forbidden knowledge, related to the state of mind of the immortals, and the out-of-body experience, which takes the form of dreams in which Harry first meets Goethe and then Mozart (Davis). The most important gothic aspect of the novel, however, is the implicit opposition between the romantic and the classical, the inward-looking and the outward-looking states of mind and attitudes to life. It is clearly expressed in Harry’s evolution. At the same time, the most anti-gothic element of the novel is the victory of the classical over the romantic. This set of ideas is expressed in terms of three ideal-related metonymies and two centre-periphery metaphors. They most directly reflect Harry’s evolution from a morbid, romantic misfit on the peripheries of society to a healthy man that is ready to embrace the classical ideal of being a social person. The metaphors LIFE IS A PLAY (Lakoff and Turner 20-23) and LIFE IS A GAME, whose source domains are, respectively, the Magic Theatre, the Masked Ball, and the play of chess at the Magic Theatre, also express the classical variety of life, but serve only a complementary function. Irrespective of its conclusion, Steppenwolf received a lot of attention and acclaim in the Anglo-Saxon world, perhaps even more than in Germany (Zybura 283-84). Some aspects, notably the emphasis on the full development of personality, the anti-war and anti-consumerist views, were adopted by the Hippies and the flower children of the 1960s in the USA (Zybura 286-87). In 1968 the rock band Steppenwolf released the song “Born To Be Wild,” which later became a part of the soundtrack for the film Easy Rider (“Steppenwolf _(band)”). The Steppenwolf Theatre Company was established in Chicago in 1974 (“Steppenwolf_Theatre_Company”). A part of this influence may have been due to the interest in all things gothic, revived by the gothic subculture of the 1970s and 1980s. Works cited: Abrams, Melford H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt, 1971. Print. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Print. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. “Gold Leaves.” 1900. Antologia liryki angielskiej 1300-1950. Trans. Jerzy Pietrkiewicz. Warszawa: Instytut Wydawniczy Pax, 1987. 258. Print. Davis, Jack. “Steppenwolf (Jack’s Blog).” Web 16 Oct. 2011. . Deane, Paul D. “Metaphors of Centre and Periphery in Yeats’s The Second Coming.” Journal of Pragmatics 24 (1995): 627-642. Print. “Flaneur.” Wikipedia. Web. 16 Oct. 2011. Gavins, Joanna and Gerard Steen. Cognitive Poetics in Practice. London: Routledge, 2003. Print. Grierson, Herbert J. C. “Classical and Romantic: A Point of View.” The Background of English Literature and Other Collected Essays and Addresses. London: Chatto and Windus, 1925. N. pag. Print. Harding, Denys W. “The Character of Literature from Blake to Byron.” The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 5: From Blake to Byron. Ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. 35-66. Print. Hawkes, Terence. Strukturalizm i semiotyka. Trans. Ignacy SLHUDG]NL:DUV]DZD3DĔVWZRZH Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1988. Print. Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf. 1927. Trans. Basil Creighton and rev. Walter Sorrell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Print. Jeffares, Alexander Norman. Ed. Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Selection. London: Macmillan, 1984. Print. Kövecses, Zoltán. Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Print. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Print. ---. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic, 1999. Print. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Print. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958. Print. Mann, Thomas. “Germany and the Germans.” 1946. Yale Review 75/2 (1986): 181-99. Print. “Narratology.” Wikipedia. Web. 30 Oct. 2012. Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses. 1930. New York: Norton, 1993. Print. Peyre, Henri. Co to jest klasycyzm? 7UDQV0DFLHMĩXURZVNL:DUV]DZD 3DĔVWZRZH:\GDwnictwo Naukowe, 1985. Print. Phelps, Gilbert. “Varieties of English Gothic.” The New Pelican Guide to English Literature 5: From Blake to Byron. Ed. Boris Ford. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. 110-27. Print. Propp, Vladimir. Morfologia bajki. 7UDQV:LHVáDZD:RMW\JD-Zagórska. :DUV]DZD.VLąĪNDL Wiedza, 1976. Print. Scholes, Percy A. The Oxford Companion to Music. Ed. John Owen Ward. London: Oxford University Press, 1978. Print. Skilton, David. Defoe to the Victorians: Two Centuries of the English Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Print. “Steppenwolf_(band).” Wikipedia. Web 16 Oct. 2011. “Steppenwolf_(novel).” Wikipedia. Web 16 Oct. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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“Steppenwolf_Theatre_Company.” Wikipedia. Web 16 Oct. 2011. Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Todorov, Tzvetan. Grammaire du Décaméron. Paris: Mouton de Haye, 1969. Print. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print. Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming.” 1920. Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Selection. Ed. Alexander Norman Jeffares. London: Macmillan, 1984. 246-47. Print. =\EXUD 0DUHN Ä3RVáRZLH GR Wilka stepowego Hermanna Hesse.” Wilk stepowy. Hermann Hesse. Trans. *DEULHOD0\FLHOVND:URFáDZ:\GDZQLFWZR'ROQRĞOąVNLH 1992. 283-88. Print.

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“Nature is the Church of Satan.” The Gothic Topography in Contemporary Scandinavian Horror Novels and Films Yvonne Leffler John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, 2004), Lars von Trier’s psychological drama Anti-Christ (2009), and Tommy Wirkola zombie comedy Dead Snow (Död snö, 2009) are all good examples of the explosion of horror stories that has taken place in Scandinavia in the last decade. Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One is a bestseller both inside and outside Sweden, and it has been translated into several languages, including English. It has also resulted in two films: a Swedish-language film by the same name, directed by Tomas Alfredson in 2008, and an English-language film, Let Me In, directed by Matt Reeves and released in 2010. Lars von Trier’s film AntiChrist has won several prizes and attracted much attention as it caused disagreement about gender issues. In several interviews, the Danish director has confirmed that he chose to make a horror film as it could be used for certain images and themes he wanted to communicate. Wirkola’s Dead Snow (2009) is one of many appreciated Norwegian zombie films dealing with certain aspects of Norwegian history. Although contemporary Scandinavian authors and directors, such as Ajvide Lindqvist, Wirkola, and von Trier, are very much part of the worldwide and international production and distribution of horror, their works thrive on a Scandinavian tradition of the genre dating back to the earlynineteenth century. Just as in former works by Scandinavian writers, the mazy architecture of the Gothic medieval castle, the labyrinthine city, or the haunted house is replaced by the boundless, uncontrollable Nordic wilderness, often the immense dark forests in northern Sweden and Finland, the snow-covered mountains of Norway and Sweden, the frozen Baltic Sea, or the stormy Scandinavian west coast in Sweden and Denmark. The scenery is not, as in most Anglophone Gothic fiction and horror films, mainly an emotionally coloured setting that expresses the emotional state of the main characters or the narrator. Instead, the landscape is the generating locus of action. The scenery, the Nordic wilderness, acts as an external threat, a hostile antagonist fighting the protagonist by using forces of nature, and the protagonists are depicted as victims of the landscape, the wilderness and its dark history, in a way that is characteristic of Scandinavian horror. In this essay, I will demonstrate how contemporary Scandinavian horror, novels as well as films, constitute a place-focused, or topofocal, genre where the Nordic scenery is intertwined into the story rather than used as backdrop for the action on stage. 1 Although Scandinavian horror expresses what Max Oelschlae1

For a definition of the term topofocal in connection to fantasy, see Ekman 12. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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gerperceives as a dualistic distinction betweendomesticated landscape and wild nature (4-5, 28) it also constructs a complex relationship between landscape and character, space and focalisation, external environment and internal mental state, the present time and the hidden past. On the basis of selected films, such as Tommy Wirkola’s Norwegian zombie comedy Dead Snow, the Finnish director Aj Annila’s Sauna (2008), Anders Morgenthaler’s Danish film Echo (Ekko, 2007) and Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Valhalla Rising (2009), and novels, such as Johan Theorin’s A Place of Blood (Blodläge, 2010), Andreas Marklund’s The Harvest Queen (Skördedrottningen, 2007) and Ajvide Lindqvist’s Harbour (Människohamn, 2008), I will demonstrate how the landscape, the Nordic wilderness, plays such a hostile and aggressive part in Scandinavian horror, and why it may embody an antipode of postmodern human civilization. The topofocal tradition There is a long tradition of topofocal horror in Scandinavian literature and film. In the nineteenth century, many Scandinavian writers used a Gothic landscape to illustrate the evil forces in nature and in man. The most famous example is the Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf’s novels and tales, for instance Gösta Berling’s Saga (Gösta Berlings saga,1891) and Lord Arne’s Silver (Herr Arnes penningar, 1903), both of which have been placed in a Gothic tradition (Leffler 153-166; Wijkmark 8). Also in the Danish writer Bernhard Ingemann’s The Werewolf (Varulven, 1834) and the Swedish author Victor Rydberg’s The Vampyre (Wampyren, 1848), the landscape is there to enhance the Gothic atmosphere and the ambiguous character of the monster. The Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s first Scandinavian vampire film, Vampyr (1931-32), is structured as a journey back to a savage place, a community on an isolated island beyond time and space. The characters, both the protagonists and the monsters, are depicted as both projections and victims of the gloomy landscape in a way that blurs the distinction between external and internal space. In contemporary Scandinavian literature and film, the topofocal aspect is even more emphasised. In stories about a haunted house, it is significant that the house is situated in – or a representation of – wild nature. In von Trier’s TVproduction The Kingdom (Riget, 1994; Riget II, 1997), the modern hospital in the Danish capital Copenhagen is built on a swamp that now and then calls forth the powers of nature and an ancient Danish past (Agger 488–517). In Alfredson’s film Let the Right One In, the rather urban setting of the novel is placed in the background. The horror scenes, which show the attacks of the vampire and its assistant, often take place in the snow-covered untamed nature left within the modern suburb Blackeberg outside the Swedish capital Stockholm. In the film, the snow and the woods seem to be just as important for the vampire’s health as Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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the darkness of the night. In the Scandinavian tradition of female Gothic, the female protagonist’s identity, body and mind, are literally invaded by the uncontrollable wilderness to illustrate her gendered world of chaos, alienation and fragmentation in novels such as Mare Kandre’s Bübin’s Offspring (Bübins unge, 1987), and Marie Hermanson’s The Host (Värddjuret, 1995). Although most Scandinavian literature and film from the early nineteenth century to the present day are densely intertextual, the writers and film-makers are devoted to a specific Scandinavian tradition. On the one hand, they place themselves in an international Gothic tradition and take for granted that their readers and spectators are familiar with it; on the other hand, they are repeatedly reminding their audiences that their stories are located in an identifiable and explicitly named Scandinavian location. Nordic myths and regional folklore about supernatural creatures living in the wilderness, such as fairies and trolls, and local pagan traditions and rituals are used to enhance the atmosphere. Often, the protagonist’s dark desires and repressed memories are triggered by the surrounding landscape, the uncontrollable wilderness and its pre-historic pagan past. This practice is conspicuously demonstrated when today’s writers and film-makers refer to well-known Gothic works in their texts or films. In Michael Hjorth’s film The Unknown (Det okända, 2000), a Swedish adaptation of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’ film The Blair Witch Project (1999), there are no haunting witches lurking in the woods. Instead, the external space, the pine forest, acts as a hostile antagonist to the protagonists, a group of young scientists from Uppsala University who are sent off to investigate a remote fire-ravaged area in northern Sweden. During their investigation and documentation of the area, the forest is transforming into a claustrophobic place, where an unknown but omnipresent alien force actively persecutes the protagonists in their scientific work. The Unknown, like most modern Scandinavian horror stories, illustrates what Northrop Frye calls “the theme of descent,” the protagonist’s movement from a higher to a lower world, from the natural world to the underworld in his or her search of lost identity (97-126). It also expresses a concept of wilderness as a state prior to civilisation; or, as Max Oelschlaeger and Roderick Frazier Nash claim, the idea that civilisation created the concept of wilderness and a distinction between domesticated landscape and wild nature (Oelschlaeger 31-67; Nash xi-22). This concept is very much confirmed by how today’s Scandinavian horror is promoted by commercials, book covers, and film trailers. The genre is greatly marketed by its topography, that kind of Nordic wilderness where the protagonists undergo a series of transformations or ritual sufferings that lead to the painful discovery or recovery of their lost or hidden identities, as well as their connection to a Scandinavian pagan past before Christianity – or even civilisation – was brought to Northern Europe. The encounter with untamed nature Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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is thus in many narratives a return to a barbaric – or mythic – state before time and chronological order existed as a central part of man’s culture and civilized life. Accordingly, Scandinavian Gothic often refers to old regional folklore, where the wilderness has kept its significance as the earthly realms of the powers of evil. The confrontation with wild nature in contemporary Gothic thus activates concepts dating from early medieval Christianity, as well as ideas about a pre-industrial way of life when the population in the Scandinavian countries mainly consisted of farmers, fishermen and forestry workers. People were then living in what could be called a magic landscape of production, a landscape producing the necessities of life but at the same time considered to be inhabited by powers and forces that people had to appease or adapt to. According to popular belief, and Scandinavian folklore, every type of landscape and region was populated by its specific nature-beings, often ambivalent creatures who, if well treated, could be of service, but if offended would fight back and punish those persons that had violated their rules (Frykman and Löfgren 21-73). The hostile landscape In contemporary horror stories, such as Wirkola’s film Dead Snow, the protagonists are often young modern city-dwellers who by accident, because of work or for vacation, end up in an environment they are not familiar with and are not able to adapt to. The landscape and nature thus play an even more prominent part than in earlier literature and film. The representation of untouched nature as the unknown, the significant “other,” is stressed as it is focalized from the visitors’ point of view. The landscape becomes an aggressive place; it becomes the ultimate antagonist in Dead Snow when some winter tourists are attacked by famished and greedy Nazi zombies, the remains of a German army unit that lay in ambush up in the high Norwegian mountains during the Second World War. In other novels and films, the wilderness is largely depicted as an undefined omnipresent force of the local wildlife. In these works, the landscape often acts as an external opponent fighting the characters and preventing them from reaching their goals. Winding Refn’s film Valhalla Rising (2009) is a filmed Danish version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). The story takes place in 1000 AD when a mute warrior and his boy slave board a Viking vessel on Iceland and begin a voyage into a land of obscurity, the very heart of darkness. The vessel is engulfed by endless fog before the crew sights an unknown barren land where mysterious arrows kill them one by one. Also in Annila’s Sauna the Nordic landscape plays a prominent part. In 1595 a group of soldiers and land surveyors are sent to the desolate marshland in the north-eastern part of Finland by the Swedish king and the Russian tsar to mark the new border between the countries. Just as in Hjorth’s The Unknown, the landscape in Sauna is transformed Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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into a vicious claustrophobic place, where the protagonists are victimized by some alien force in nature. Unlike in most horror, it is not another character, or a monster, but the landscape itself that prevents the protagonists from reaching their goals or holds them back by placing impediments in their way. The influence of the landscape is much more fundamental, as the hardships the protagonists have to endure gradually affect their perception and mental states. The boundless landscape triggers frightening visions in a way that makes the distinction between landscape and character dissolve. In The Unknown, Valhalla Rising and Sauna, the scientists’ rational ideas as well as the Viking warriors’ and land surveyors’ pragmatic worldview are bit by bit challenged by an ancient primitive force in nature. In that way, they are gradually and literally taken over by the wilderness. In other stories, the supernatural creatures of nature act as unpredictable and ambivalent helpers who bring out the protagonists’ dreams and dark desires. In Theorin’s novel A Place of Blood, which combines the plotline of a modern crime investigation with the depiction of a haunted Gothic place, a woman persuades her husband to leave town and move to a stylish summer house close to the farm where she was born on the Swedish island of Öland. Since she was a child, she has believed in the local stories about fairies and their seductive fairy queen, popular folklore known from many places in Sweden. When she and her husband arrive at the island, she soon establishes contact with what she believes to be the fairies, and she begins sacrificing to them hoping they will make her wishes come true. Since she has for many years been kept down by her famous and successful husband, she finally leaves her wedding ring at the old sacrificial stone as a gift to the supernatural creatures of nature asking them to make him die of a heart attack. Although the fairies and their queen appear to have fulfilled her wishes before, it does not work this time. Now it is she herself who seems to be the sacrificial victim of the fairies as she almost dies during the ceremony. Something similar happens in Marklund’s novel The Harvest Queen, when a young scholar and his girlfriend visit the northern region of Sweden to search for a missing friend who might be the victim of a crime. As the snowbound winter landscape prevents them from returning to Stockholm, it brings the male protagonist gradually closer to his own ancestors’ dark history, preparing him to become a new servant to the old death goddess, “the Harvest Queen.” That is, his search for a missing friend is part of the dark forces’ plotting to make him uncover his ancestors’, especially his grandfather’s, hideous secret, as well as an alien and powerful reality beyond postmodern life. The northern landscape and the winter climate are the driving forces of the plot as they activate the repressed power within man as a product of savage, untamed nature. The meeting with the wilderness, the link to the past of the old farm, gradually makes chronological Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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order collapse and the characters, especially the male protagonist, end up in another reality, or mythic world. Also Morgenthaler’s film Echo, Ajvide Lindqvist’s Harbour and von Trier’s Anti-Christ illustrate how an encounter with the wilderness leads to a breakdown of the ego, as well as of chronological time, in a way that is typical of contemporary Scandinavian horror. In the films and the novel, the process starts with a violent death: in Echo, a man’s death and the son’s repressed memories, in Harbour and Anti-Christ, a child’s death and a parent’s traumatic experience of it. In Echo, a divorced policeman is confronted with his childhood during his and his young son’s visit to a summer house by the sea, where the boy and the man are haunted by weird hallucinations. The boy’s visions bring him and his father to the old landing-stage where the man is brought back to his own childhood trauma and the night when his father drowned at the same place. In Harbour, a father is haunted by the mysterious disappearance of his little daughter one cold winter day out on the frozen Baltic Sea, and in Anti-Christ, a mother has a breakdown, because her little boy falls to his death when he climbs through an open window while she and her husband are making love in their bedroom. In all three stories, the local landscape directs the characters’ attention and actions. It communicates by giving rise to visions; it evokes the characters’ repressed memories and makes them act as its instruments in bringing forth secrets of the past. Although the horror centres on the recent past and the memories of a traumatic event, the ultimate cause of what occurs is connected to what once happened at the same place back in history. In Anti-Christ, the parents of the dead boy retreat to a cottage in the woods, called Eden, to recover from their loss. During their stay, the man experiences strange visions triggered by mythical animals in the landscape. As his wife manifests increasingly violent behaviour, he is confronted with even more uncomfortable revelations from the past, images of his wife when she visited the cottage alone – or together with their son – at a time when she was working on her PhD thesis on the witch trials that took place in the region far back in history. Thus, an uncanny connection is established between what has been and what is in these stories. In Echo, the policeman’s childhood, his son’s dreamlike visions, and what happens to them during their stay at the summer house appear to be integrated in a vibrating mental present where there is no distinct division between the actual external environment and the characters’ internal fantasies, father and son, past and present crimes. In Harbour, the father’s search for his daughter and a visit to a subterranean cave on the island where she disappeared, makes him believe himself to be united with his daughter as well as the island and its dark secret. In Anti-Christ, the unspecified Northern forest first seems to be a peaceful and romantic place, but it soon changes into a locus of pain and Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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suffering, killing and death. Past, present and future gradually lose their historical order and tend towards an eternal present. It all comes to an end when the man has strangled his wife in a fight and burnt her body on a funeral pyre outside the cottage. He then leaves Eden and rushes through the forest. In the final scene, he falls down on the ground and is more or less swallowed up by the forest, the tree-trunks and roots transforming into a horde of slowly moving women with blurred faces, all looking like those witches his wife once wrote about, the image of both timeless and ageless femaleness or femininity, representing both pure nature and past times, both erotic pleasure and fatal, Satanic horror. Just like Theorin’s A Place of Blood and Marklund’s The Harvest Queen, Trier’s Anti-Christ, Morgenthaler’s Echo, and Ajvide Lindkvist’s Harbour are examples of topofocal horror where the setting, the harsh Nordic landscape, can be seen as a powerful character. At first, the devious landscape, or its representative, acts as an external threat, a hostile antagonist fighting the protagonists by using forces of nature and hard weather, such as snowstorms and extreme arctic cold. But gradually, wild nature starts to act as an internal enemy, actively invading the protagonists, using them as instruments to fulfil its aim and by that blurring the distinction between outer and inner space, man and nature. Thus, the novels and films are structured as a journey back to a savage place beyond both time and space, where time and chronological order dissolve and man becomes one with the surrounding landscape as well as its past, present and future. Accordingly, the protagonists’ confrontations with the wilderness place them in a state of mental dissolution, on the verge of disappearing as individuals. After a time, no boundaries exist between the self and environment, between man and landscape, local history and present experiences. The border between the protagonists and the surrounding wildlife is gradually dissolved as the protagonists more and more act on behalf of the landscape, either by free will or as its downcast slaves. The landscape then also starts to act as an inner monster, a Mr Hyde, that is, a repressed or hostile force within the protagonist, as illustrated by the novels and films above. In these works, the protagonist establishes a bond with representatives of nature; she or he becomes part of the wildlife and transforms into a non-human savage being. The way the protagonist becomes one with the environment and the way the meeting with nature calls forth repressed forces is characteristic of Scandinavian horror. The landscape and its representatives trigger forbidden and repressed desires within the protagonist. By doing so, they also make the protagonist turn into a new representative of the landscape and its uncanny alien power.

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Time and place As illustrated by the Scandinavian examples above, the landscape should not, as in most Gothic fiction, be read as a metaphor for the situation of the subject, an external symbol for a mood. It is not solely there to enhance the atmosphere by causing mists and storms, or to delay the protagonists from reaching their goals. Instead, it is the main structural component and of central importance to the plot. In Scandinavian horror, it has a life of its own, interacting with the characters as an alien force or organism, and directing their actions and perceptions. Thus, its function is literally to transform the protagonists into an uncivilized creature, and, at the end, the protagonists often become one with the surrounding landscape of fear and terror, as the man in Anti-Christ, the father in The Harbour, and the scholar in The Harvest Queen. Besides the complex bond between landscape and character, or external circumstances and inner mental state, there is also a complex relationship between time and focalisation, between what is happening to the protagonist in the present time of narration and what happened in a certain place in the past, and between the local landscape and the characters’ awareness of it. The landscape makes the characters see and experience certain things connected to the local region and its spiritual history. The wilderness is always part of an uncivilized or barbaric state that subverts the physical world of science and the laws of time and space. When the protagonists give in to the powers of nature residing within them, they also give in to the power of the pagan past of the specific region, as for instance in Sauna and Valhalla Rising. As in most Gothic fiction and horror, the past represents a threat to the protagonist, but more distinctly than many other western authors and directors, Scandinavian writers and film-makers recall an era further back in time, often a pagan pre-mediaeval era, as in Valhalla Rising, or, as in most cases, a prehistoric savage period further back in history, as in The Harvest Queen and The Harbour. In many works, this encounter with the pagan forces of nature results in a dissolution of modern categories; it subverts the notion of a reality consisting of a meaningful chain of cause and effect, or progress. The Nordic wilderness represents a cyclic, a timeless and infinite state, a mental chaos where chronology and spatial distinctions are dissolved. Gradually, ego and milieu are united in the eternal time of Norse myth, as in AntiChrist, The Harvest Queen and The Harbour. This also happens when the encounter with the landscape activates the protagonist’s personal past and a much more recent period in history. A visit to a certain spot in the landscape may activate dramatic or painful episodes that have occurred at the very same place at a specific moment in the protagonist’s own life. In Anti-Christ, the man experiences visions of what once happened when Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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his wife and little son visited the cottage in the forest on their own; in Echo the visit to the old landing-stage by the summer house activates the father’s repressed memories of how he himself caused his father’s death; in The Harbour, the father’s grieving for his daughter evokes repressed memories from his own childhood on the island where she disappeared. Apart from these personal memories, the landscape may also trigger reminiscences of events dating further back in time, and by that connecting the protagonist’s personal trauma to something much more far reaching, to the collective history of the place and the external environment and untamed nature as such, as in The Harbour where the father’s search for his daughter unveils the dark secret of the island and an ancient pagan pact between the inhabitants of the archipelago and the sea. In that way, there is a mixture between, or fusion of, present time and hidden past: all those things that once took place are happening once more and will be repeated again in the future. These events are not ordered side by side in different spatial positions. Instead, they are constantly repeated and mixed together in the unresolved spatial chaos of an everlasting moment. Although most modern horror mainly deals with the protagonist’s individual trauma, Scandinavian horror is more frequently concerned with evoking a collective cultural memory of those evil nature-beings who were once believed to inhabit the local landscape and the wilds of the North, but who now only occur in old myths, arts, legends and children’s fairy tales. Also in those Scandinavian works, where the protagonist’s arrival to a certain place activates a more recent traumatic memory connected to a common or regional Scandinavian past, wellknown and recent historical events are always depicted as part of evil events much further back in time. Those works that refer to painful episodes in historical time, such as the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War in Dead Snow, or the witch trials in medieval times and the seventeenth century as in Anti-Christ, also imply that these specific historical events are an integral part of the place and its nature. In the narrative, they serve as a recognized expression of all the things that might be hiding in, or are brought forth, by the local wilderness. Hence, Scandinavian horror seems to express a fear of losing control over external conditions, the landscape and climate, as well as a lack of control over the remains of a mythical, pagan and agonizing past still existing. Old conceptions of supernatural creatures and evil powers trigger a repressed memory of a lost past and perhaps also revive the nowadays almost forgotten knowledge of how to master, or co-exist, with the forces of the surrounding Nordic landscape. Today, supernatural beings once believed to be living in the wilderness and local pagan traditions about sacrificial ceremonies and fertility rituals are used to enhance the Gothic atmosphere. In many works, the protagonist’s dark side is then Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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bound to and triggered by the surrounding landscape and the pre-historic pagan past of the Nordic region, which leads to what William Patrick Day calls a descent into the self and a confrontation with the protagonist’s darkest fears and desires (27). The encounter illustrates what Will H. Rockett names a downward transcendence (xvi); instead of craving for contact with a religious transcendent world and a sublime plane of existence, the protagonist is driven towards a downward transcendence, a descent into an underworld of horror and an interfusion with wilderness unbound. The wilderness as “the other” The Gothic tradition in literature and film may give an ambivalent picture of what is identified as Scandinavian culture. People from the Scandinavian countries are acknowledged to be nature lovers, to have a close relationship to their regional landscape and the wilderness. Today, many Scandinavians live in cities, but most of them still spend their holidays in summer houses outside town, often in sparsely populated areas. To them, the stunning scenery and untouched nature represent a sanctuary from the stress of modern urban life. The former landscape of production has become a landscape of tourism and nostalgic summer dreams. To visit the countryside is to be on vacation, to be on a beneficial recreation or retreat, or to go for controlled adventure, safely exploring something exotic. Still, most young urban citizens feel rather lost when confronted with untamed nature. They do not know how to read the landscape, how to predict changes in the weather, deal with bugs and wild animals, or find protection if lost: they rely on GPS and cell-phones, and if those do not work there is no back-up knowledge available. That is, wild nature – however exquisite – has lately become an unfamiliar and foreign environment, representing ambivalent ideas to many modern Scandinavians. Thus, it is hardly a coincidence that so many contemporary horror stories depict young city people’s fearsome encounter with untamed nature. Since Scandinavia became a modern industrialized society much later than most of Europe, the collective cultural memory of another way of life still prevails. It was not until after the Second World War that most Scandinavians lived an urban life. Therefore, although today most young people are rather unfamiliar with the realities of country life, still, their family, their grandparents and maybe even parents have their roots in a rural way of life. To these young urban dwellers, the rural heritage and untouched nature may embody conflicting ideas. A stay far away from modern city-life represents both something positive connected to good old times, summer and vacation, and something so unfamiliar and threatening that they do not know how to deal with it. In most nineteenthcentury literature, untamed nature represents a place inhabited by supernatural Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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powers condemned by the Christian church and disowned by the new bourgeois class; in today’s horror the wilderness stands even more for alien and aggressive powers outside the scientific-technical society of the twenty-first century. Beyond the postmodern urban world of cell-phones, internet, and GPS, there is another world lurking, a reality that calls forth the haunting memory of a hidden and forgotten past. Precisely because this pre-modern past is now partly repressed and not clearly recognized any longer, it is not easily exorcized. As it existed prior to the modern concepts of time and place, it is a threat to both social order and to the common concept of the postmodern, civilized and rational world. Thus, the Nordic wilderness is a very central generating locus of horror in contemporary Scandinavian narrative fiction, literature and film. Like most Gothic stories, Scandinavian narratives illustrate how the protagonists give in to their repressed desires and are taken over by their dark sides in their search of their lost identities. However, in Scandinavian Gothic, their secret desires are, far more distinctly than in most European and American horror, bound to and triggered by the landscape. When the protagonists lose control over their senses and imagination, or over their ability to distinguish between actual reality and mental fantasy, there is a fusion between inner and outer reality within the character, that is, between ego and landscape. The protagonists’ unreliable status as focalisers does not solely illustrate their emotional state but the state of the world – or nature – itself. In most western horror, the stability of the external world breaks down, and the mysteries relate more to the personality and mental state of the protagonists than to the environment. In Scandinavian horror the case is quite the opposite, the ego is the environment. The protagonists are attacked, invaded and taken over by the Nordic landscape, the alien “other.” They become one with disordered wilderness. Therefore, nature is, as the wife in AntiChrist claims, “the church of Satan.” At least, that is the way it is in Scandinavian horror stories. Works Cited: Ajvide Lindqvist, John. The Harbour (Människohamn, 2008). Trans. Marleine Delargy. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010. Print. Anti-Christ. Dir. Lars von Trier. 2009. Zentropa Entertainments. DVD, 2009. Day, William Patrick. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985. Print. Dead Snow (Död snö). Dir. Tommy Wirkola. 2009. Miho Film. DVD, 2010. Echo (Ekko). Dir. Anders Morgehthaler. 2007. Zentropa Entertainment. DVD, 2008. Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1976. Print. Frykman, Jonas and Löfgren, Orvar. Den kultiverade människan. Lund: Gleerup, 1979. Print. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Leffler, Yvonne. I skräckens lustgård. Skräckromantikisvenska 1800-talsromaner (In the Delightful Garden of Horror: The Gothic Tradition in the Swedish Nineteenth Century Novel). Diss. Gothenburg University: Göteborg, 1991. Print. Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in). Dir. Thomas Alfredson. 2008. Svergie Television. DVD, 2009. Marklund, Andreas. Skördedrottningen (The Harvest Queen). Stockholm: Järnringen, 2007. Print. Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and The American Mind. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982. Print. Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Print. Rockett, Will H. Devouring Whildwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Print. Sauna. Dir. Aj Annila. 2008. Bronson Club. DVD, 2009. The Kingdom (Riget, 1994; Riget II, 1997). Dir. Lars von Trier. Koch-Lorber Films. 1994-97. DVD, 2011. The Unknown (Det okända). Dir. Michael Hjorth. 2000. Action Film AB. DVD, 2007. Theorin, Johan. Blodläge (A Place of Blood). Stockholm: Wahlström&Widstrand, 2010. Print. Valhalla Rising. Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn. 2009. IFC Films. DVD, 2010. Vampyr. Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. 1932. Vereinigte Star-Film. DVD, 1998. Wijkmark, Sofia. Hemsökelser. Gotiken i sex berättelser av Selma Lagerlöf (Hauntings: The Gothic in Six Short Stories by Selma Lagerlöf). Diss. Karlstad University Studies: Karlstad, 2009. Print.

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Gothic Bodies

Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

Antonia and the Male Gaze. Imaging Femininity in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk $JQLHV]NDàRZF]DQLQ Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) is a horror Gothic story of excess, exuberance and ambivalence. Opposites run down its aesthetic artery, virtue and ecstasy shimmer through Christian iconography, and sex and the macabre are never far apart. The Monk is a story of religious subversion and moral transgression. Here, flesh often speaks in categories of moral and aesthetic beauty, and is at once the object of religious veneration and lustful passion, innocent and chaste, but also uncanny and horrifying. An abundance of iconographic messages produces a novel which is visual in its texture and moral undertones, a novel where action is largely instigated by the act of perceiving and relating to the image. Drawing on Moers’s coinage of the term “female Gothic,” The Monk has been classified as an example of “male Gothic” (Miles; Ellis). The genetically determinant factor of the author’s sex is probably less important in this classification than what appears to be a subscription to the homocentric ideology, evident in placing the eponymous male character at the core of action, and the setting within the socioeconomic patriarchal environment of the arrogant villainy of Dukes, Marquises, Condés, fathers and Abbots, who rage when displeased, dispossess when dissatisfied, rape when sexually insatiate. However, as Miles via Stone notes, “the Gothic, with its obsessive interest in patriarchy revive[s] just at that point when the traditional patriarchal patterns were historically weakest” (19). Seen from the perspective of late-eighteenth-century sociology and gender allocation, The Monk appears to grapple with these transitory tendencies by acknowledging the ambivalences they produce. It is evident, for example, in the fact that the male axis of the novel is spun by female characters who, operating within the restrictive bondages of patriarchy, override its sexual ideologies (Matilda), and, though objectified, become indispensable agents in the process of exposing crevices in the shifting assumptions of its era (Antonia). Spooner draws attention to the fact that in both “female” and “male” Gothic texts, the female body “remains a contested ground . . . the site on which numerable fears and desires are played out” (23). In Lewis’s male Gothic text, it is mainly female bodies that are displayed to be looked at, interpreted through ambiguities fed by preconceptions instilled through archetypal expectation, imagistic conviction and religious dichotomy. Put in an array of visual circumstances, they cause extremities of conflicting religious and erotic experience. Exposed to the act of viewing, they arouse veneration and lust by bringing aesthetic pleasure to the point where it ceases to be the sublimation of religious ecstasy but beAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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comes the expression of sexual desire and pornographic pleasure. The Monk demonstrates that the meaning of a female body is not inherent in its substance, doesn’t reside in itself, but in the reverberate pull that is recognized and unknotted by the obligatorily male viewer. It is often displayed as mute and passive, walled in by clothing, threatened by the enclosure of a monastic cell or death itself, responding to cultural and religious expectations, but also revealing ambivalences in established ideological and iconographic patterns, crumpling and subverting them. However, it seems that none of the tropes evoked, none of the images presented, none of the often morally appalling circumstances the characters are placed in, are expected to be taken at face value – the baldness of the novel’s aestheticism is modulated by its satirical and mocking tone. The Monk’s exuberance is expressive of its exoticism, the author’s erudition and eloquence feeding the ambience of a paradigmatically Gothic otherworldliness. The twenty oneyear-old Lewis, just back from the Continent, where he was exposed to German folklore, the frenetic sentiment of Sturm-und-Drang and the Schauer-Romantik (McEvoy xii), crams the novel with balladic ghosts, flashy incarnations of the devil, scenes of rape and murder, all described with attention to image. Colour, garment, bodily detail, setting and choreography are always rendered with confident narrative strokes. Otherworldliness, inscribed in the geographical-cumethical attributes of literary Gothicism, the obligatory expulsion of the setting to Continental and Catholic Europe, allowed Lewis to arrogantly, if at times ignorantly, indulge in the depiction of the tacit pre-eminence of Protestantism over Popery, over Catholic superstition and imagistic veneration. The novel’s ethic rests on a Christian delineation of good and evil, but is buttressed by Protestant disdain of Catholicism: its practices, institutionalism and visual splendour, alien and exotic to the British reader of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the point of their being innately Gothic. Lewis picks up stock elements associated with Catholic Otherness in British popular consciousness at the time – monasteries, convents, taking the monastic veil, the adoration of the Madonna – and peppers them with allusions to classical Mediterranean culture, foreign and, when seen from the perspective of a Grand Tourer, Catholic too. All this worked to produce a record of political, class and aesthetic anxieties, of epistemological transitions of the last decades of the eighteenth century, of paradoxes inherent in institutionalised faith and inconsistencies in decoding the visually transmitted messages. The novel grapples with these complexities, and, relying on a semantic reading of the female body, communicates ambivalences about gender perception and allocation.

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A tone of smugness and satire overrides The Monk from the very first scenes in the church of the Capuchins, where ostentation and elaborateness rule over true reverence. Do not encourage the idea that the Crowd was assembled either from motives of piety or thirst of information. . . . The Women came to show themselves, the Men to see the Women . . . one half of Madrid was brought thither by expecting to meet the other half. The only persons truly anxious to hear the Preacher were a few antiquated devotees. . . . As to the remainder of the Audience, the Sermon might have been omitted altogether, certainly without their being disappointed, and very probably without their perceiving the omission. (Lewis 7)

The detached narratorial perspective enhances the flamboyant quality of this introductory scene and forbids seriousness. Right from the start The Monk communicates that image, appearance, perception, seeing and being seen, will be at its core, will constitute its imagistic texture and moral overtones. But also, in line with the opening chapter, the tone unmistakably suggests that the novel will be a display of deception, a showcase of exaggeration and, not infrequently, a joke, even if at times a violent and repulsive one. The theme of treacherous appearance runs right through the novel, and emerges already in its first episodes when the ageing maiden Leonella, Antonia’s aunt, is masterfully duped, having mistaken the tongue-in-cheek kindnesses of Don Christoval, Lorenzo’s friend, for tokens of his belated affection. Her pretensions to seriousness are checked by the teasing tone of a Gypsy who publically exposes the elderly lady’s make-up-trickery: Believe me, Dame, when all is done, Your age will still be fifty one; And men will rarely take a hint Of love, from two grey eyes that squint. Take then my counsels; Lay aside Your paint and patches, lust and pride, And on the Poor those sums bestow, Which now are spent on useless show. (Lewis 37)

Leonella applies “paint and patches” to cover up her age and produce an illusion of beauty, a fraud exposed in this farcical tirade, which, like a Sheridan comedy of manners, ridicules the harmless vice of vanity. All the other pivotal elements of the plot rely on the same pattern of application of different “paint and patches” in order to deceive and accomplish what otherwise is not within reach: Satan’s envoy, Matilda, resorts to cross-dressing and acting as the novice Rosario to attract the Monk, who in turn uses his saintly reputation to unlock Antonia’s bedchamber and drug her into a death-like slumber in order to defile her virginal body; Agnes’s pretended death is bruited as punishment for her Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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premarital loss of virginity. Lucifer appears twice in the novel, each appearance in a different guise, once as “a Figure more beautiful, than Fancy’s pencil ever drew” (Lewis 276), then “in all that ugliness, which since his fall from heaven had been his portion” (Lewis 433). However, whereas the opening episode exposing Leonella’s make-up trickery is, at most, laughable in its harmlessness, as the story develops, Lewis seems to accelerate and veer away from a mere jokey farce. Though later incidents in the story follow a similar structural, if not aesthetic, pattern, their moral overtone is much more grievous. Bodily interventions go beyond external “paint and patches,” trespassing on human individuality, causing unrivalled suffering, threatening the core of existence, or wholly annulling it. From the onset of the novel women are objectified and subjected to the scopophilic pleasure men derive from looking at them. In her interpretation of “woman as image, man as bearer of the look” in contemporary cinema, Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalytic tools to demonstrate mechanisms which allow women to be “simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote tobe-looked-at-ness” (203). In Lewis’s visual novel the effect of erotic pleasure derived from “to-be-looked-at-ness” demands that women similarly conform to rigorous aesthetic expectations, and it is their ability to meet them that legitimises their fictitious essence. The female bodies that connote Mulveyan “to-belooked-at-ness” engage the male characters and thus create action; the ones who do not, cause visual displeasure, are fictionally immaterial, at best used, like Antonia’s aunt, Leonella, as an object epitomising garrulousness, a scorned female vice. Referring to the epistemological moment to which The Monk belongs and contributes, Peter Brooks described the novel as “one of those works of literature that demonstrate a remarkable understanding of their own historical situation” (249). It can be safely said that along with the epistemological ambience of the era, Lewis also reflects on the aesthetic transitions and ambivalences of the late eighteenth century – as evidenced by the visual texture and “a theatrical quality” of the novel (Spooner 43). Right from the beginning of this masculine text, perception of the female body, always subordinated to the male gaze, subscribes to the European tradition of perceiving beauty in symmetry, but also to the so-called “Grand Theory,” according to which beauty consists in the proportion of the parts (Eco 214). Eighteenth-century aesthetics returned to the concept of the “classical body” in the form of “Neoclassical Beauty” (Eco 254), aristocratic trendsetters ensuring that “the classical tradition continued to be interpreted as it had been for generations since the Renaissance” (Langford 396). Additionally, the study of anatomy, which at that time became more advanced, Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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enhanced the understanding of the human body and greatly influenced its artistic representation in the belief that depiction of the body was impossible without “an exact knowledge of the fundamental architectonics of its bone structure” (Porter 67). As a consequence, artists at the newly-founded Royal Academy of Arts in London were educated by professors of anatomy and attended dissecting classes, exemplified, for example, in Elias Martin’s “The Life School at the Royal Academy of Arts, with William Hunter Teaching Anatomy” (1770) or in Johann Zoffany’s portrayal of Hunter’s RAA lecture (1772). Classical Vitruvian models were sought for in the form of sculpture and live muscular bodies. These practices resulted in the application of “iconographic systems” based on “anatomic arithmetic where classical ideals were promoted using such images as Apollo and the Venus de Medici” (Abichou). Lewis’s text acknowledges these “iconographic systems” that stem from the academically adopted classical canon in their mathematical request for harmonious proportions. As a consequence, especially evidenced in his treatment of Antonia, Lewis proposes a concept of beauty that confines the perception of the female body within a labyrinth of formulas, walls it up within expectations assembled from visual matrixes feeding on cultural consciousness. When Lorenzo perceives Antonia for the first time, the concepts of “symmetry” and “proportion” are brought up and recorded as his first impressions: Her features were hidden by a black veil; But struggling through the crowd had deranged it sufficiently to discover a neck which for symmetry and beauty might have vied with the Medicean Venus . . . Her dress was white; it was fastened by a blue sash, and just permitted to peep out from under it a little foot of the most delicate proportions. (Lewis 9)

From a rich cultural reservoir Lewis selects the Medicean Venus as the signifier of aesthetic perfection. This imagistic reference to the ancient goddess may be seen as symptomatic of the above-mentioned tendencies in the viewing of the body characteristic of the eighteenth century, which further linked beauty, symmetry and harmony with “inner excellence.” The body, investigated, if not exploited at that time by science, was believed to reveal “God’s design; anatomy and physiology progressively laying bare the divinely exquisite proportions and contrivances of the human machine (machina carnis)” (Porter 70). The bits of Antonia’s body that sneak out from underneath her veil are symmetrical, thus she, through her body, is perceived as beautiful and by extension modest, innocent and good. However, immediately after this first visual encounter with Antonia, something interesting happens. Urged by her aunt to follow the local customs, the young woman removes the veil and Lorenzo notices that she was “not so lovely from the regularity of features, as from sweetness and sensibility of CounteAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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nance” (Lewis 11). Symmetry and regularity, though referred to again, are mentioned along with qualities which are to stand for innocence, and that in turn is to be read as a chastity, moral and physical, necessary to complete beauty. It seems that, on the one hand, as has been mentioned, by referring to the symmetry of some visible parts of Antonia’s form, Lewis acknowledges the prevalent idea of seeing God’s design in appearance, inner excellence being revealed in proportions of the body. On the other hand, by denying Antonia’s face the beauty of regularity – Lorenzo notices that of, “[t]he several parts of her face considered separately, many of them were far from handsome” (Lewis 11) – in his recognition of the aesthetic canons Lewis gracefully progresses from unquestionable adherence to classical precepts, and his rendering of Antonia’s beauty marks a possibility of departure from seeing it only in classical proportions. By virtue of his birth and foreign travels, like other aristocrats, Lewis was exposed to classical influences, but also to Germanic folklore, thus back on native soil he seems to have recognised the aesthetic tension between high and low, between foreignness, embedded in sophisticated recognition of classical significance, and local influences, which represented a break with “passion for classical imitation and allusion” (Langford 396). Hogarthian aesthetics best illustrates this gradual departure from Continentally-acquired classical tastes. Being a “native” aesthetics,it openly expresses disdain for regularity and symmetry, rejects “the Classical link between Beauty and proportion” and professes “an edifying, narrative beauty, exemplary in its own way and embedded in a story from which it cannot be extrapolated” (Eco 256).1 Along with summoning the ancient goddess Venus to produce an accurate image of Antonia’s posture, in the next sentence Lewis makes another classical reference, this time to a Greek mythological being, in order to depict her figure, which “was light and airy as that of an Hamadryad” (Lewis 9). Hamadryads were ephemeral nymphs attached to the trees they inhabited, and believed to die together with them. The transient nature of the nymph to which Antonia is compared certainly foreshadows the abrupt ending of her life. But it seems that this classical reference is much more than a visual comparison evoked for the purpose of precision, for grace of expression or the snobbish satisfaction of his erudite readers. The Monk was published in 1796; the decade before saw the pre1

An interesting parallel can be detected between a Hogarthian ideal of female hair and Lewis’s description of Antonia’s. Hogarth speaks of the “flowing curl” as the most amiable hairstyle, “the many waving and contrasted turns of naturally intermingling locks ravish the eye with the pleasure of the pursuit” (Hogarth in Eco 257). Antonia’s hair, fair and undulating, is similarly described as descending “below her waist in a profusion of ringlets” (Lewis 12). Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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miere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in 1787, an opera in which “the figure of the libertine vainly searching for ideal Beauty . . . is observed ironically from a distance.” Mozart’s masterpiece is regarded by Eco as the one marking “the end of the Classical age and the dawning of the modern age” (256). Perhaps then the vision of a short-lived Hamadryad is summoned to symbolically declare that the novel’s classical beauty, Antonia, is doomed to pass together with the aestheticism she stands for. Or, to take the interpretation a step further, it may also represent the passing trance of femininity Antonia epitomises: secluded, protected, fragile and vulnerable in its obligatory inexperience. This is juxtaposed with the more down-to-earth and passionate nature of Agnes, and with the more earthly temperament of the woman who supplants Antonia after her death, Virginia della Franca, described as both “virtuous” and “affectionate” (Lewis 397). Kate F. Ellis reads The Monk as “the attack on the ‘cloistered virtue’ of monks, but also of women brought up in circumstances created to protect them from contact with evil” (xiii), that is, circumstances ultimately shielding women from the facts of life. Read as a response to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), where the unbridled sexuality of Signiora Laurentini is put in contrast with the triumphant chastity of Emily, a quintessential middle-class woman, The Monk extravagantly subverts its puritanical ideology of virtue rewarded. That Antonia represents a problematic model of femininity – desired, yet doomed to death – inscribed in her innocence-cum-passivity, is evident in the ambivalent reactions she produces and the aura she is seen to evoke. Lorenzo’s early comparing of her to the Medicean Venus suggests that portions of her body sneaking from beneath her garment and veil not only, as has been said, speak of her proportionate beauty but also, and more importantly, invite the onlooker to imagine the veiled invisible rest, provoke us to unclothe her completely. Looking at Antonia for the first time, and under the roof of the church, Lorenzo evidently sees her robbed of her garments in his mind’s eyes. It is not only the young chevalier who compares this truly innocent virgin to Venus, a Roman goddess of beauty, sex and seduction. Ambrosio too, calls for this classical ideal when, presented by Matilda with a magical mirror, among “a thick smoke” and “A confused mixture of colours and images,” he discerns Antonia standing on the brink of the bath, in his intellect’s command, “in the attitude of the Venus de Medicis” (Lewis 271). Confronted with Antonia’s nakedness, Ambrosio, much more understandably and justifiably than Lorenzo in the church, makes this cultural connotation, while Matilda, using sorcery, answers his dreams and makes his repressed desires visible. That the whole scene is a craftily staged projection of his passions is made clear by the hyperbolic nature of the subsequent incident where, in a bizarrely gratuitous manner, “a tame Linnet flew towards [Antonia], nestled its head between her breasts, and nibbled them in Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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wanton play.” In order to shake off the bird she raises her hands, displaying all her charms, at which Ambrosio’s desires are “worked up to frenzy” (Lewis 271). This crude passage, which ridicules the power of imagistic manipulation, exposes a dishonesty of representation and is a piece of downmarket titillation, at the same time probably best enacts a parallel with the critically acknowledged artificiality of the original to which Antonia is compared throughout, the Medici Venus. Kenneth Clark stresses the fact that in this version of Venus, serving as a model of feminine beauty for two centuries, “the rhythmic completeness of the whole is almost lost” due to a faulty restoration of the right arm, which, in an attempt to make her cover the breasts and “deserve her reputation for modesty,” has been unnaturally bent at too sharp an angle. This miscalculation produced a sculpture which is “stilted and artificial,” with the result that it becomes no more than “a large drawing-room ornament” (Clark 79, 80). Just like the Venus de Medici, Antonia is a construct of the eye and the mind, both for Lorenzo and for Ambrosio. Her inexperience is a carefully-wrought artefact. The knowledge of the world she draws from expurgated excerpts of the Bible on the one hand and the innumerable gratuitous attempts to read, compare and imagine her in her presence and in absentia on the other, make her an object desired by the male gaze, but this is explicitly a wholly unnatural woman, a construct doomed to pass. This first chapter also introduces another crucial theme, that of male agency and female subordination evident in the objectification of the female body reduced to an erotic sight in a scene which inflates all the stock paraphernalia of a Gothic text and again rests on an image of theatrical quality. After his first encounter with Antonia, Lorenzo remains in the cathedral, where “the faint beams of the rising Moon scarcely could pierce through the gothic obscurity,” and, “darting into the Church through painted windows,” they “tinged the fretted roofs and massy pillars with a thousand various tints of light and colours” (Lewis 26). In a surreal manner, Lorenzo falls asleep and dreams of his wedding with Antonia during which, before the couple unite, the bride is snatched by an “Unknown” monster of “swarthy” complexion who grabs her and tortures her with his “odious caresses.” Other Walpolian-Gothic details are summoned to complete the scene: “a loud burst of thunder” is heard, the church crumbles into pieces and the altar vomits clouds of flame. As the Monster drags Antonia to the Gulph, she resists so fervently that her robe remains in his possession, leaving her, presumably, cloth-less. In this manner she darts upwards, the roof of the cathedral opens, and Antonia is received among harmonious voices pealing in the vaults, and glory “composed of rays of such dazzling brightness, that Lorenzo was unable to sustain the gaze” (Lewis 28). Again the beauty and chastity of Antonia’s body are enacted as the culprit of her doom in a scene, which, Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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above all, confidently balances the duality of femaleness, its association with both religious and erotic ecstasy amidst descriptive flashiness. But this scene also points to difficulty in representation: carnal desires, depicted as sinful, cannot coexist with but must cancel the divine adoration of a woman. Here again a parallel may be drawn with Antonia’s imagistic point of reference, Venus de Medici. Numerous representations of the Venus similarly problematise this incapacity for reconciliation, and attempts to give her body a form which “may cease to be vulgar and become celestial,” as Clark points out, “has been one of the recurring aims of European art” (64). In this context, in a novel ambivalent about and playing with religious concepts of chastity, veiling of a female body stands for preserving innocence, warding off sinful carnality and protecting against temptation; it denotes chastity and becomes a trademark of virtue. But veiling is also seen as an act of erotic manipulation. A “concealment / revealment motif” (Spooner 30) is used to describe both Lorenzo and Ambrosio’s attraction to Antonia. Time and again, the novel garners erotic pleasure equally effectively by clothing and by unclothing, veiling and unveiling, a fact that has led Sedgwick to conclude that “the veil that conceals and inhibits sexuality comes by the same gesture to represent it, both as a metonym of the thing covered and as a metaphor for the system of prohibitions by which sexual desire is enhanced and specified” (143). If, as has been suggested, Lewis subverts Radcliffian ideologies, he also subverts her use of the veil in the famous scene in Udolpho, where, having lifted the veil, Emily sees – what the reader is to learn some hundred pages later – a decaying body. Lewis picks up the Gothic trope of the veil introduced by Radcliffe and stages moral decay resulting from its lifting, which his female predecessor modestly located backstage. But unlike Radcliffe’s Emily, Lewis’s pure Antonia does not swoon at the sight of decay of the other. In her case, unveiling signifies breaking the prohibition of sexual desire enacted at the sight of her body. At the same time in this male Gothic text veiling must be seen as connected with the idea of the male need to control and subordinate. In this light both the formulaic aesthetic interpretation of female beauty and the females’ ubiquitous veiling become a caging of their bodies. Constraining behind veils and in allcovering garments can thus be seen as paradigmatically Gothic, such forced enclosure being one of its fundamental tropes. Concealment and the veiling of the female body correspond also to the architectural topography of the text. The act of looking, intensified by the act of imagined unveiling or actual unclothing, never takes place outside, but always within the architectural confinement of an abbey, a hermitage, a monastic cell or vaults. The fact that the act of perceiving becomes the vital source of erotic stimuli in all the relationships depicted in The Monk is in line with the Gothic concepAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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tion of the individual identity which, according to Sedgwick is “social and relational rather than original or private.” Also, sexual identity is “anchored in this image of the contagious, quasi-linguistic inscription of surfaces” (Sedgwick 142). Recollecting his first contact with Rosario, Ambrosio admits: “From the moment in which I first beheld you, I perceived sensations in my bosom, till then unknown to me” (Lewis 57-58). Hearing Matilda sing, Ambrosio “indulged the sense of hearing; a single look convinced him, that He must not trust to that of sight” (Lewis 78). On arrival at the Castle of Lindenberg, Don Raymond casts his first glance at Agnes, concluding: “For me whose heart was unoccupied, and who grieved at the void, to see her and to love her were the same” (Lewis 129130). When Ambrosio enters Antonia’s chamber “his eyes flamed with lust and impatience,” and he soon devours her “charms with his eyes” (Lewis 300). Just as “clothes maketh the man,” in this novel the male gaze maketh women. This is especially well documented in the Antonia-Ambrosio relation. Spooner notices that Antonia’s modesty has been partly constructed by the Monk himself (31). But because modesty, like veiling, is presented as sexually enticing, Ambrosio’s gaze also manufactures Antonia’s inviting sexuality. And thus the modest Antonia becomes for him an object of erotic fantasies, food for his pornographic imagination. The beginning of the novel, however, also offers a curious reversal of the culturally-inscribed male-female perception pattern the novel mostly adheres to. Ambrosio’s religious habit is a metonymic character shorthand, a sign of his holiness and modesty (McEvoy xxi). But, echoing the Monk’s later admiration of and excitation by the image of the Madonna, Antonia’s perception of Ambrosio hints at the possibility of crossing the threshold of unequivocally religious reverence towards erotic initiation. When in the above analysed first scenes of the novel, Ambrosio finally appears in the church of the Capuchins to deliver his sermon, Antonia gazes upon this “Man of Holiness” “eagerly” and feels “a pleasure fluttering in her bosom which till then had been unknown to her, and for which She in vain endeavoured to account. . . . and when at length the Friar spoke, the sound of his voice seemed to penetrate into her very soul” (Lewis 18). Playfully, Lewis reverses the perception pattern here, suggesting another “viewing” option. Looking at and listening to Ambrosio, “[e]ven Lorenzo could not resist the charm: He forgot that Antonia was seated near him” (Lewis 19). This brief encounter with the Monk and the emotions it arouses seem to foreshadow the later homoerotic tinges in the Rosario episode, but also make room for gender ambivalences and a questioning of the culturally inscribed agency of the necessarily male gaze. The final objectification of Antonia’s body takes place in her fake-death, which allows Ambrosio to remove her outside society to the vaults of the convent of St. Clare, where she is “far from every prying eye” (Lewis 330). DeAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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prived of agency, defenceless, turned into a mere tool of erotic pleasure, Antonia is no longer her own self; in human terms she is no longer alive, though her body retains its physical functions. There, after the rape, an interesting transformation in the perception of her body takes place. Ambrosio proceeds from seeing Antonia as the embodiment of modesty and innocence, next, as virtue inviting defilement, then, as beauty with bewitching qualities. “[M]y sweet Girl” becomes “wretched girl” (Lewis 381, 385). Finally, after violating her body, Ambrosio is repulsed by the sight of Antonia, which metonymically communicates its defilement. Antonia’s beauty is now conceived “as a mask for decay” (Bronfen 67). The rape “unveils” and robs her beauty of the attributes of innocence. Sedgwick draws attention to an interesting technique of character presentation in Gothic writing, namely, the equation of character with what is inscribed on the flesh. “Writing on the flesh” occurs “at different levels of literalness” in various Gothic novels (Sedgwick 151). In The Monk, personalities or emotional states are limned on bodies and faces, and a second person’s body, especially a woman’s body, never speaks in its own terms, but is used to express the viewer. Such a semantic projection happens in the case of Ambrosio’s attitude to Antonia’s raped body, which now gives flesh to his own vileness. Lewisite aesthetics commences with references to classical proportions in the description of the feminine, but overrides it with folkloric images of the haggard irregularities of the Bleeding Nun, the pornographic directness of Matilda’s curvatures, the massacred body of the Domina and maltreated Agnes, reduced to a “miserable Object” (Lewis 367). The epitome of the old order, the naïve innocence of Antonia, envisioned as the unattainable beauty of the Medicean Venus, is in the final scenes perversely privatised by Ambrosio, constrained in the inaccessible dungeons of the female convent, a territory that seems to mock the security of the female-usurped, similarly anti-public domestic sphere. In Antonia’s final moments the classical repositories by means of which her fictitious being has been reified seem to come full circle in the enactment of the corollaries of rape, the most immediate classical reference, imagistic and political, which is offered to close her existence being the rape of Lucretia. Just as Lucretia’s rape and suicide effected the liberation of Rome (Saunders 156), so is Antonia’s personal tragedy woven into the public fabric of the overthrow of the convent. However, whereas in the classical rendering of Lucretia’s story, both by Livy and Ovid, the atrocity of the rape and the chastity of the woman’s mind despite the bodily stain, are legitimized by her wish to die, in Lewis’s text Antonia’s persistent attempts to escape and her cries to Ambrosio, “Spare me! Spare me!” (Lewis 386), seem to act as a contemptuous reversal of the classical repository. All Antonia wishes is to return home to “weep unrestrained [her] shame and Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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[her] affliction” (Lewis 385), agreeing quietly to passivity, and acting contrary to the otherwise unfeminine – in the masculine imaginary, yet in this case expected – agency, resulting in materialising the wish to die and annul the defamed body. But in these final moments a curious reversal takes place which underwrites the cultural ambivalences inherent in the potency of the trope of a raped woman. Wishing to silence the victim of and witness to his dissolution, Ambrosio stabs Antonia and flees, hoping she is dead. Mortally wounded yet still conscious, Antonia is found by Lorenzo, who manages to confess his enduring affection for her. It is only with the knowledge of his love and only in his presence that, in Lucretia-like manner, ”She resigned herself to the Grave without one sigh of regret” and conceded that “deprived of honour and branded with shame, Death was to her a blessing” (Lewis 392). Inscribed by the male gaze throughout the novel, Antonia now succumbs to it, Lorenzo’s presence evidently stimulating her to welcome and redraw her own death, all in line with the homocentric stance on the literary forces of love and death professed in the novel. However, for an eighteenth-century English reader another literary reference was immediate, that to one of the most popular novels with the reading public, a critical and financial success, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), among whose notable admirers of the time were Fielding, Johnson, Reynolds, and Diderot and Rousseau on the Continent, to name just a few. In her analysis of The Monk Anne Williams concludes that “[l]ike Clarissa, The Monk implies that a good woman is entirely defined by sexual honour, so that she must literally die when that honour is reft from her” (116). But Lewis’s text makes it clear that Antonia is like Clarissa only upon the inspiration of the male gaze. The femininity that survives in this novel is far from the puritan ideal of the innocence professed by Richardson. It is unleashed after the overthrow of the convent and embodied in the haggard Agnes, so beaten up by experience that she is unrecognised on her emergence from the dungeons. Together with Virginia, she becomes Lewis’s experienced woman-survivor. The novel’s end offers a genderbalanced ethical conclusion whereby the concentric villainy is theatrically punished, both its reign and incarceration being split into the male-female double of the Abbot – who dies “maimed, helpless, and despairing,” his flesh torn “piecemeal” (Lewis 442) – and the Prioress – whose body is beaten, trod upon, ill-used till it becomes “no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and disgusting” (Lewis 356). Sex and death, sin and virtue, real and acquired character, man and woman: if these are opposites, The Monk blurs them in a flourish of ambivalences. For Robin Lydenberg, this novel’s ambivalence springs from Lewis’s conflicted attitude to his own “authorial role,” heralded, for example, in the prefatory poem, Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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where satirical use of devices of terror, meant to establish a distance, “between himself and all aspects of his narrative,” contradicts his later serious application of the same Gothic equipment (66). This ambivalence is reinforced by “continual shifts of tone within the narrative” (Lydenberg 68). And perhaps we can see shades of this ambivalence in Lewis’s yielding to the pressure of the critics and “the Attorney-General . . . prompted by a society for the suppression of vice” expunging passages in the novel’s subsequent edition and undertaking “other later purifications” (Davenport-Hines 185). Ambivalence “towards the sexual and supernatural extravagance,” which for Lydenberg is “shared by most gothic novelists” (65), relates also to women, to their representation and perception. The creation of female characters who exemplify a clear-cut dichotomy of Madonna vs. whore categories, whereby women are delineated as reservoirs of either goodness and chastity or sinful temptresses for the male protagonists, does not seem to apply in The Monk, as evidenced by the visual, imagistic texture of the novel. Lewis’s women often perform in a clichéd manner but their oscillation and fluidity of character seem to set forth his era’s growing confusion, if not quite dissatisfaction, with the roles assigned them. In the last decades of the eighteenth century “in Britain the boundaries supposedly separating men and women were . . . unstable and becoming more so” (Colley 255). Moreover, Lewis’s women are constructed as yielding to but also playing with a plethora of their representations amassed by culture, religion and social expectations. Unlike its female Gothic counterparts, which propose a dreamland of ideal relations between an efficient woman, a heroine who “triumphs over the patriarchy,” and an effeminate man who “promises, if not in word then through his sheer incompetence, to be completely malleable” (Hoeveler 7), Lewis’s text does not make any proposals but exposes and continually breaks with a variety of stereotypes that his own culture made available to him. Works Cited: Abichou, Anne. Oxford Companion to the Body: art and the body. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. http://www.answers.com/topic/art-and-the-body Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body. Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. Print. Brooks, Peter. “Virtue and Terror: The Monk.” English Literary History 40.2 (1973): 249263. Print. Clark, Kenneth. The Nude. A Study of Ideal Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964. Print. Colley, Linda. Britons. Forging the Nation 1707-1837. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012. Print. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic. Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York: North Point Press, 2000. Print. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Eco, Umberto. On Beauty. A History of a Western Idea. Trans. Alastair McEwen, London: MacLehose Press, 2010. Print. Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle. Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989. Print. Hoeveler Long, Diane. Gothic Feminism. The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Print. Langford, Paul. “The Eighteenth Century (1688-1789).” The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain. Ed. Kenneth O. Morgan. London: BCA, 1993. 352-418. Print. Lewis, Matthew Gregory. The Monk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. Lydenberg, Robin. “Ghostly Rhetoric: Ambivalence in M. G. Lewis’ The Monk.” ARIEL10.2 (1979): 65-79. Print. McEvoy, Emma. “Introduction.” Lewis, M. G. The Monk. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998. vii-xxx. Print. Miles, Robert. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 198-209. Print. Porter, Roy. Bodies Politic. Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Print. Saunders, Corinne J. Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England. Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2001. Print. Sedgwick Kosofsky, Eve. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. London: Methuen, 1986. Print. Spooner, Catherine. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Print. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness. A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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Who's Afraid of Carmilla? Le Fanu's “Carmilla”: Gender and Power Tomasz Fisiak Introduction I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased whimpering. She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself under the bed. Le Fanu 225

Through this passage, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu introduces the eponymous character of his insightful, yet underappreciated, short story, published in 1872. Even though Carmilla is not the first vampirical character in literature (one should mention for example Polidori’s The Vampyre or Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, whose authorship is attributed to either James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Preskett Prest), she is, however, one of the first female vampires. “Carmilla” significantly predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the best-known vampire narrative. But it would be unfair to deem this character a mere female counterpart of Dracula, as there are many differences between them, sex aside. Still, like Dracula, she evokes fear in many people. What makes her so special, apart from her vampirism? Who in fact is Carmilla? Whom or what does she threaten the most? The following analysis will try to delve into these problems. Carmilla – a gothic monstrous woman and her predecessors To comprehend the complexity of Carmilla, one has to be aware of the historical background of gothic fiction. The early gothic novel introduced a very specific binary opposition of a damsel in distress and a tyrant. These two remained in a complicated relationship of dominance and subordination. Horace Walpole, in his milestone The Castle of Otranto (1764), juxtaposed the character of a tyrannical king, Manfred, with that of a meek and mild princess, Isabella. The distribution of power between them was uneven, with the female protagonist suffering a great many persecutions from the male. A similar pattern of hegemonic masculinity would be recreated in most of the gothic novels written afterwards, mainly in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Among them there are the works of Ann Radcliffe, such as The MysteAgnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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ries of Udolpho (1794) or The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitent (1797), and The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis. Nevertheless, both Radcliffe and Lewis also incorporated the figure of a merciless woman, a fallen hag whose demeanour would be later punished. Radcliffian marchesas and Lewis’s evil nuns are Carmilla’s obvious antecedents. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, an anti-heroine named Madame Montoni is contrasted with the angelic character of Emily St. Aubert. Cheron is Emily’s aunt who treats her in a condescending and scornful way. Eventually, her immoral behaviour backlashes against her and she dies in oblivion and pain, abandoned by her husband and taken care of only by her virtuous niece. Radcliffe intentionally uses this stark contrast between the women, for it enables her to express her social critique of the spiritual decay of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Diane Long Hoeveler explains: “[i]f Madame Cheron is supposed to represent upper-class woman, then we can conclude that Radcliffe intended us to condemn the moral corruption, sexual depravity and petty vileness of such people” (95). Madame Cheron indeed embodies evil, yet at the same time she is a powerful figure and as such threatens the classical division of power between sexes. Her miserable demise may be considered a punishment for her misdeeds against Emily, her desperate “craving for position” (Ostrowski 165) and, finally, her unwillingness to submit to the authority of her husband (as she refuses to give him full command over her properties). Radcliffe uses a similar manoeuvre in The Italian, where, apart from the typical gothic male villain, Father Schedoni, she exploits the vengeful character of Marchesa di Vivaldi. The marchesa, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, resorts to all possible means, abduction and attempting a murder among others, to prevent her son from marrying an innocent but poor Ellena. Just like Madame Montoni, she epitomises many negative qualities of the aristocracy (lust, greed, vindictiveness). Eventually, tormented by remorse, she repents for her sins and dies. In Matthew Gregory Lewis’s notorious novel, The Monk, it is the character of Matilda who stands for the vices of women. Matilda seduces the titular monk and leads him directly to depravity. Under her influence, he rapes and kills a nun-like young noblewoman, Antonia. The Monk overtly shows that a woman may instigate the moral downfall of a man. Matilda escapes obvious classifications as she initially conceals herself in the guise of a man named Rosario. The gender construction of Matilda lacks stability – the character of a pious novice, Rosario, smoothly morphs into that of Matilda, a dangerous temptress. Definitely, all three paved the way for the eventual emergence of Carmilla. Le Fanu skillfully recreates the classical gothic conflict of a tyrant and a young girl in peril. However, this time both of these roles are performed by women. Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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Carmilla takes over the position once intended for men only, seducing innocent Laura and almost destroying her. Her villainy and Otherness stem from several factors. She possesses a strange power over the people she stays with. She is a vampire, which means she has managed to retain her youthful looks despite the passage of time. What is more, the target group of her vampirical attacks comprises women only. Therefore, Carmilla’s surprisingly straightforward lesbianism arouses fear and loathing, mostly in men. Last but not least, she is strongwilled and independent, from the outset locating herself beyond the patriarchal order. She is unable or maybe unwilling to conform to the Victorian standard of womanhood, because in fact she is everything a Victorian woman could not be. It is even difficult to ascribe one name to her, for she exists under various guises. The reader learns about Carmilla, but also about Mircalla and Millarca, all of them strong and man-threatening. The threat, nonetheless, is not direct, as Carmilla does not really assault men. Yet, from men she does take away the most valued trophy – other women, for example, potential mothers of their children, objects of sexual gratification, submissive servants. Her role exceeds that of a classical temptress, a vamp, or a femme fatale. She finally becomes a reflection of many male anxieties. But such a statement needs more support. The story describes a budding friendship between Laura, a shy teenager, and Carmilla. Their first meeting takes place in Laura’s early childhood, seemingly in a dream vision. It takes a few more years before Laura understands the significance of this encounter. After Laura’s eighteenth birthday, Carmilla re-appears as an unexpected guest at the castle belonging to Laura’s father. As Carmilla confesses: “At all events it does seem as if we were destined, from our earliest childhood, to be friends. I wonder whether you feel as strangely drawn towards me as I do to you; I have never had a friend – shall I find one now?” (Le Fanu 237). A very peculiar friendship begins, because it is not devoid of strong sexual undertones. From the very start, Laura remains unable to resist the allure of her strange new friend. Unlike Laura, however, the reader concludes quickly that Carmilla is indeed a vampire. Hence one awaits with awe Carmilla’s rise in power over her new friend. Laura, established in the story as an ”everywoman” vulnerable to attack by Carmilla (Senf 51), describes Carmilla frequently, revealing genuine admiration for her beauty: She was slender, and wonderfully graceful. Except that her movements were languid – very languid – indeed, there was nothing in her appearance to indicate an invalid. Her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders; I have often placed my hands under it, and laughed with wonder at its weight. It was exquisitely fine and soft, and in color a rich very dark brown, with something of gold. I Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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loved to let it down, tumbling with its own weight, as, in her room, she lay back in her chair talking in her sweet low voice, I used to fold and braid it, and spread it out and play with it. Heavens! If I had but known all! (Le Fanu 238-39)

As a result, the effect of surprise increases. A beautiful young lady turns out to be the monster threatening the decency and purity of a Victorian girl. And as a monster, she has to be neutralised. Who is afraid of Carmilla? And why? Eliminating Carmilla from Laura’s life seems reasonable from a standpoint of a Victorian man, fixed in a patriarchal construction of the society. Carmilla indeed threatens on many levels the social fabric. On the surface level, it is her vampirism that disqualifies her as a regular member of society. Her lesbianism, not to mention her independent lifestyle, only augment the feeling of exclusion. As Maria Janion puts it: “she transcends the social roles ascribed to a woman twice: first, she breaks the rule of female sexual passivity; second, she desires another woman, thus opposing the heterosexual normativity” (184).1 Janion suggests that this may provide an explanation for Carmilla’s existence as a vampire, for lesbianism and vampirism have much in common. Both break the norms imposed by the community and lead to ostracism. The existence of a sexually liberated woman could evoke outrage in prudish Victorian times, a period usually thought of as sexually inhibiting, especially for women. The vampirism of Carmilla could be then treated as an excuse for unrestrained erotic prowess and a materialisation of the true needs of a sexually repressed woman. Carmilla does not even pretend to hide her lust for Laura. What is more, that feeling is reciprocated, for Laura admits: I felt rather unaccountably towards the beautiful stranger. I did feel, as she said, "drawn towards her," but there was also something of repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging. (Le Fanu 237)

Initially, Laura tries to resist the desire, but she fails: From these foolish embraces, which were not of very frequent occurrence, I must allow, I used to wish to extricate myself; but my energies seemed to fail me. Her murmured words sounded like a lullaby in my ear, and soothed my resistance into a trance, from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms. (Le Fanu 240)

It appears that here lies the main source of apprehension about Carmilla. She literally sucks the life energy out of Laura. On the symbolic level, nevertheless, Laura gradually acquires the features of her friend/foe. One realises that Laura 1

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would die and become a vampire as well, and later, probably, a lesbian, a threat, a new woman fearless in the fight for her own territory, hungry for a life she could live on her own terms. Hence Carmilla evokes fear, as she possesses the qualities men would certainly find inappropriate in a woman. She is the Other, in the de Beauvoirian meaning. What does this term signify? The process of Othering is as complex as the whole notion of Otherness itself. In the introduction to The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir asks: “what is a woman?” (6), to conclude that she is “the Other in a totality” (10), referring, among other things, to the Aristotelian concept of female “natural” inferiority to male. De Beauvoir uses the image of a master and his slave to illustrate the everyday toil of being a woman in an environment that praises only the masculine. She also adds that “it is required of woman that in order to realise her femininity she must make herself object and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as sovereign subject” (17). Therefore, Carmilla cannot be perceived as an embodiment of womanhood, for her mien contradicts the “natural” one. She displays many typically male traits of character, especially when she endows herself with the natural privilege to claim Laura as her possession: “I have made your acquaintance twelve years ago, and have already a right to your intimacy” (Le Fanu 237). Such audacity hurts the male pride as “no one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility” (de Beauvoir 15). A female sexual predator must then perish – Carmilla dies, killed by a group of men fearing her body and her unrestrained sexual ambitions. Her death acquires a highly symbolic dimension – she is impaled on a wooden stake, a clearly phallic object. It demonstrates how the patriarchal order is being restored. Even her own body betrays her as the Other, monstrous, abject. On the one hand, it evokes adulation, is beautiful and sensual. Yet at the same time, it is abject, in the Kristevan sense of the word, because it feeds on innocent blood to survive and belongs to the socially unacceptable individual. Julia Kristeva, in her treatise Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), uses the term “abjection” not only to describe the purely bodily processes (producing wastes, rotting, dying) and their by-products (saliva, urine, excrement, blood), but also to signify marginalised groups. The abject has to do with “[w]hat disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva in Felluga 1). Carmilla as a lesbian, vampire and strong woman transcends the Symbolic order. Kristeva relates abjection also to perversion, as it corrupts, misleads and breaks the rules (15). Carmilla’s perversity manifests itself in two ways. She is perverse as a nonconformist woman, who demonstrates her power by rejecting the standards the society set for her. But her perversity has its roots also in an Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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atypical sexuality. “The abject both fascinates and horrifies: it thrives on ambiguity and the transgression of taboos and boundaries” (Chaudhuri 91). The monstrous and abject is what “crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’,” for example, the border between human and non-human, man and beast, natural and supernatural, normal and abnormal gender behaviour and sexual desire, the clean, proper, well-formed, and the dirty or deformed body (Creed 10-11). Carmilla crosses the gender boundaries, merging female body with male behaviour. It is she who courts Laura, flirts and gradually seduces her, and wants to possess her physically. It is difficult to deem her identity as stable, for she is not fully feminine, nor entirely masculine. The impression of instability is corroborated by her existence under several names: Carmilla-Millarca-Mircalla. Also the very way Carmilla looks at other people suggests she is dangerous. Again, a reference to the text is necessary: Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever." Then she had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling. (Le Fanu 240-41)

That particular way of gazing is usually associated with men. The so-called appropriating male gaze was described by Laura Mulvey in her groundbreaking “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Though the author had cinema in mind when she wrote her essay, some of her conclusions carry over into the literary ground. Carmilla may evoke terror in men as she takes away from them not only the possibility to subdue women; she also ‘steals’ the very privilege of looking at women in a man-like way. Men could try to tame her with their gaze, but with no effect. Carmilla does not respond to their look. Instead, she looks at other women in a masculine way and succeeds in conquering their hearts. It proves she exists here on two different levels, being at the same time an active observer of her female prey and a relentless bearer of the inefficient male gaze. The fear of Carmilla’s body is also bound to her overall appearance. Her physical attributes at some point liken her to her black servant, who travelled with her through Styria before she stopped at Laura’s castle. The servant is described as a “hideous . . . woman . . . who was gazing all the time from the carriage window, nodding and grinning derisively towards the ladies, with gleaming eyes and large white eye-balls, and . . . teeth set as if in fury” (Le Fanu 234). Later, Laura observes with awe how Carmilla’s face “darkened, and became Agnieszka Lowczanin and Dorota Wisniewska - 978-3-653-99701-9 Downloaded from PubFactory at 06/23/2021 01:45:34PM via free access

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horribly livid” in an attack of anger (Le Fanu 242). Marilyn Brock explains that the concept of racial Otherness intertwines with that of sexual Otherness (130). Carmilla carries then a burden of an ethnic Other as well, a foreigner defiling the virtue of a noble lady; therefore, she has to be destroyed, or rather put back in her “rightful” place in the social hierarchy, in order to keep the status quo intact. It goes without saying that men are afraid of Carmilla because she succeeds on their territory, offering other women pleasures and sensations a man would usually excite. Her vampirism might serve as a mere cover for the ability to live without the assistance of men. Elizabeth Signorotti elucidates: “Le Fanu pushes his male characters, who lose all control over their women, toward the edge of his narrative. Ineffectual in either understanding or treating Styria's baffling (female) ‘malady,’ Le Fanu's men suffer exclusion from male kinship systems because they are unable to exchange women. Instead, women control their own exchange”(2). What is more, the homosocial friendship of Laura and Carmilla “assaults patriarchal law and is finally perceived by Styria's men as anything but innocuous” (Signorotti 3). Their bond rejects the despotic inclinations of men and, significantly, the whole notion of marriage. Conclusion “Carmilla” is a work of fiction that provokes a lot of questions. How did Le Fanu view his antagonist? Was he critical of such a model of un-Victorian femininity? Was the story his personal, scathing manifesto against the hypocrisy of the nineteenth century British society? Undoubtedly, Le Fanu plays with the convention of an intimate friendship of two young ladies whose affection, noneWKHOHVV JRHV EH\RQG WKH DFFHSWHG VWDQGDUGV