Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster 3031121791, 9783031121791

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Works Cited
Part I: Welcome to the Night: Issues of Reading and Media
Chapter 2: The Medium Is the Model
Works Cited
Chapter 3: The Adaptive Marketing of Penny Dreadful: Listening to The Dreadfuls
Introduction
Showtime’s Inferior Status
Speaking Dreadful
The Dreadfuls Speak Back
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 4: Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection: Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media from Shelley to Showtime
Part I: Penny Dreadful Collections
Part II: Canons and Characters
Part III: Frankenstein and the Anthology
Part IV: Penny Dreadful as Frankensteinian Collection
Works Cited
Part II: Anatomy of a Monster: Horror and the Gothic in Literature and on the Screen
Chapter 5: In the House of the Night Creatures: Penny Dreadful’s Dracula
Dracula 1
The Woman Question and The Vampire’s Wife
Feminism, Suffrage, and Lily
Psychoanalysis and the Occult
Gothic and Neo-Gothic
Works Cited
Chapter 6: Vampirism, Blood, and Memory in Penny Dreadful and Only Lovers Left Alive
The Myth of Blood: The Body in (Vampire) Films
Penny Dreadful: The Syncretic Vampire of Popular Culture
Melancholizing the Visceral in Only Lovers Left Alive
Works Cited
Chapter 7: “The Dead Place”: Cosmopolitan Gothic in Penny Dreadful’s London
Cosmopolitan Gothic and the Echoes of Empire
The Gothic Flâneur in London’s Labyrinth
Sealing the Gothic Gateway
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 8: Adapting the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection
“I Know This Place, I’ve Been Here Before”: Home Texts and Unhomely Adaptations
House of Vanessa Ives: John Logan’s Monster Mash(up)
Works Cited
Part III: The Monster Unbound: Theatrical Performance, Western Dime Novels, and TV Noir
Chapter 9: Penny Dreadful and the Stage: Lessons in Horror and Heritage
Victorian Legacies: The Heritage of Performance in Penny Dreadful
Showtime: The Performance of Heritage in Penny Dreadful
Performance and Spectatorship in Penny Dreadful
Works Cited
Chapter 10: Ethan Chandler, Penny Dreadful, and the Dime Novel; or, Dancing with American Werewolves in London
The Western Hero
The Dark Sidekick
Conclusion: The American Monster
Works Cited
Chapter 11: Dreadful Noir, Adaptation, and City of Angels: “Monsters, All, Are We Not?”
“Where Strangeness is Not Shunned But Celebrated”: Adapting to City of Angels
Cherchez la Femme
“You May Think You Know What You’re Dealing With”: Adapting toward Complexity
Works Cited
Part IV: Meanings of Monstrosity: Identity, Difference, and Experience
Chapter 12: Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein
The Bride: A Palimpsest of Consent, Class, and Hypersexualization
Pygmalion’s “Perfect” Woman
Gendered Trauma and a “Revolution in Female Manners”
Conclusion
Works Cited
Chapter 13: Predators Far and Near: The Sadean Gothic in Penny Dreadful
The Sadean Libertine
The Marquis de Sade and the Gothic
A Dreadful Mix of High and Low
Works Cited
Chapter 14: “All Those Sacred Midnight Things”: Queer Authorship, Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful
Works Cited
Chapter 15: Borderland Identities in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Penny Dreadful and Adaptation Reanimating and Transforming the Monster

Edited by Julie Grossman · Will Scheibel

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture Series Editors

Julie Grossman Le Moyne College Syracuse, NY, USA R. Barton Palmer Atlanta, GA, USA

This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames, mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media, and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not singular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations, remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as connected to various forms of visual culture.

Julie Grossman  •  Will Scheibel Editors

Penny Dreadful and Adaptation Reanimating and Transforming the Monster

Editors Julie Grossman Departments of English and Communication and Film Studies Le Moyne College Syracuse, NY, USA

Will Scheibel Department of English Syracuse University New York, NY, USA

ISSN 2634-629X     ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture ISBN 978-3-031-12179-1    ISBN 978-3-031-12180-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Phil Novak and Andrea Scheibel, who help us master our demons.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the guidance we received from Barton Palmer, co-editor of the Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture series, and Lina Aboujieb, the executive editor of film and television studies at Palgrave Macmillan, both of whom were invested in the project’s success from the beginning. Les Friedman and Con Verevis gave us helpful feedback on our proposal, and Nina Farizova inspired us with her own scholarship on Penny Dreadful and adaptation. Michele Combs undertook indexing the book with the utmost professionalism. Matt Hills and Kate Egan offered endorsements for which we are extremely grateful. The organizers of the 2022 Association of Adaptation Studies conference held in Lisbon provided an opportunity for us and some of our contributors to discuss ideas in this book with peers in the field. We are also indebted to the many colleagues who supported our work in various ways as we collaborated across our respective institutions in Syracuse, New York: Le Moyne College and Syracuse University (SU). At Le Moyne, thanks go to Maura Brady, Mary Collins, Matt Fee, James Hannan, Linda LeMura, Beth Mitchell, Michael Streissguth, Miles Taylor, and the Research and Development Committee. Our gratitude extends to SU’s Department of English, especially the chair of the department, Coran Klaver, and Will’s film and screen studies teammates, Roger Hallas and Chris Hanson. Eric Grode, the director of SU’s Goldring Arts Journalism and Communications program, wrote episode recaps of Penny Dreadful for The New York Times and shared his knowledge of John Logan’s theater background early in our project. Finally, Steve Cohan—retired from SU, but never more active as a scholar—remains our buddy in popular culture studies. vii

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel Works Cited  10 Part I Welcome to the Night: Issues of Reading and Media  13 2 The  Medium Is the Model 15 Thomas Leitch Works Cited  29 3 The  Adaptive Marketing of Penny Dreadful: Listening to The Dreadfuls 31 Christine Becker Introduction  31 Showtime’s Inferior Status  33 Speaking Dreadful  35 The Dreadfuls Speak Back  38 Conclusion  43 Works Cited  44

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Contents

4 Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection: Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media from Shelley to Showtime 49 Mike Goode Part I: Penny Dreadful Collections  49 Part II: Canons and Characters  53 Part III: Frankenstein and the Anthology  58 Part IV: Penny Dreadful as Frankensteinian Collection  63 Works Cited  66 Part II Anatomy of a Monster: Horror and the Gothic in Literature and on the Screen  69 5 In  the House of the Night Creatures: Penny Dreadful’s Dracula 71 Joan Hawkins Dracula 1  73 The Woman Question and The Vampire’s Wife  75 Feminism, Suffrage, and Lily  79 Psychoanalysis and the Occult  82 Gothic and Neo-Gothic  84 Works Cited  85 6 Vampirism,  Blood, and Memory in Penny Dreadful and Only Lovers Left Alive 87 Luciana Tamas and Eckart Voigts The Myth of Blood: The Body in (Vampire) Films  87 Penny Dreadful: The Syncretic Vampire of Popular Culture  91 Melancholizing the Visceral in Only Lovers Left Alive   97 Works Cited 103 7 “The  Dead Place”: Cosmopolitan Gothic in Penny Dreadful’s London105 Kendall R. Phillips Cosmopolitan Gothic and the Echoes of Empire 107 Conclusion 118 Works Cited 119

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xi

8 Adapting  the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection121 Will Scheibel “I Know This Place, I’ve Been Here Before”: Home Texts and Unhomely Adaptations 124 House of Vanessa Ives: John Logan’s Monster Mash(up) 129 Works Cited 136 Part III The Monster Unbound: Theatrical Performance, Western Dime Novels, and TV Noir 139 9 Penny Dreadful and the Stage: Lessons in Horror and Heritage141 Shannon Wells-Lassagne Victorian Legacies: The Heritage of Performance in Penny Dreadful 142 Showtime: The Performance of Heritage in Penny Dreadful  148 Performance and Spectatorship in Penny Dreadful  151 Works Cited 154 10 E  than Chandler, Penny Dreadful, and the Dime Novel; or, Dancing with American Werewolves in London157 Ann M. Ryan The Western Hero 158 The Dark Sidekick 166 Conclusion: The American Monster 172 Works Cited 175 11 Dreadful Noir, Adaptation, and City of Angels: “Monsters, All, Are We Not?”177 Julie Grossman and Phillip Novak “Where Strangeness is Not Shunned But Celebrated”: Adapting to City of Angels  178 Cherchez la Femme 181

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Contents

“You May Think You Know What You’re Dealing With”: Adapting toward Complexity 184 Works Cited 192 Part IV Meanings of Monstrosity: Identity, Difference, and Experience 195 12 Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein197 Lissette Lopez Szwydky The Bride: A Palimpsest of Consent, Class, and Hypersexualization 199 Pygmalion’s “Perfect” Woman 203 Gendered Trauma and a “Revolution in Female Manners” 206 Conclusion 212 Works Cited 214 13 Predators  Far and Near: The Sadean Gothic in Penny Dreadful217 Lindsay Hallam The Sadean Libertine 219 The Marquis de Sade and the Gothic 224 A Dreadful Mix of High and Low 227 Works Cited 231 14 “All  Those Sacred Midnight Things”: Queer Authorship, Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful233 James Bogdanski Works Cited 251 15 Borderland Identities in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels253 Seda Öz Works Cited 266 Index269

Notes on Contributors

Christine  Becker is Associate Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame specializing in film and television history and critical analysis. Her book It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) won an IAMHIST Michael Nelson Prize for a Work in Media and History. She is working on a research project exploring issues of cultural taste in contemporary American and British television. She also co-hosts and co-produces the Aca-Media podcast sponsored by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. James Bogdanski  teaches film studies at Long Beach City College and El Camino College in southern California. His research interests include pre-­ Code Hollywood, feminist and queer theory, gothic horror and the posthuman. In 2011, he won The Best Drama Teleplay Award at the Austin Film Festival. He has a forthcoming essay on the maternal abject in the films of Ingmar Bergman and he presented a modified version of it at Bergman Week in Sweden in Summer 2022. Mike  Goode  is Professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches courses on British Romanticism, media, ecocriticism, historiography, and the history of the novel. His book Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media was published in 2020, and his book Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History was published in 2009. His articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including Representations, ELH, Textual Practice, Romantic Circles, and PMLA. xiii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Julie  Grossman  is Professor of English and Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College. She is author of Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir (Palgrave, 2009), Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny (Palgrave, 2015), and The Femme Fatale (2020). She is co-author (with Therese Grisham) of Ida Lupino, Director (2017) and co-author (with Will Scheibel) of Twin Peaks (2020). She is founding co-editor (with R.  Barton Palmer) of the book series Adaptation and Visual Culture (Palgrave). With R.  Barton Palmer, she co-edited the essay collection Adaptation in Visual Culture (Palgrave, 2017). Lindsay  Hallam  is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of East London. She is author of the books Screening the Marquis de Sade: Pleasure, Pain and the Transgressive Body in Film, and the Devil’s Advocate edition of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. She is interested in all aspects of horror cinema, having written on topics such as female vampires, torture porn and post-9/11 trauma, mad science films, Italian horror, Australian ecohorror, transmedia horror and the television series Twin Peaks and Watchmen. Joan  Hawkins  is a Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She has written extensively on horror and the avant-garde. Her best-known book is Cutting Edge: Art Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde (2000); her most recent is an anthology, co-­edited with Alex Wermer-Colan, William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century (2019). She is working on a two-volume anthology on 1968. Thomas Leitch  holds the Unidel Andrew B. Kirkpatrick Chair in Writing at the University of Delaware. His most recent books are The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies and The History of American Literature on Film. Phillip Novak  is associate professor in the English department and the department of communication and film studies at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York. His work on both film and literature has appeared in PMLA, Criticism, Journal of Film and Video, and elsewhere. He is the author of Interpretation and Film Studies: Movie Made Meanings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Seda  Öz earned her PhD from the University of Delaware in the Department of English and is working on adaptation studies with a special

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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emphasis on cross-cultural adaptations and transnational film remakes of Turkish and German cinema. She has written on adaptation and film in Critical Survey, Adaptation, and Literature/Film Quarterly. Kendall  R.  Phillips is Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. His work focuses on the intersection of rhetoric, politics, and popular culture. He is author of several books related to horror, including Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture (2005), Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter and the Modern Horror Film (2012), A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema (2018), and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (2022). Ann M. Ryan  is Professor of English at Le Moyne College. She has written numerous articles on Mark Twain, the American gothic, and conceptions of race in America. She is the former editor of The Mark Twain Annual, co-editor (with Joseph McCullough) of Cosmopolitan Twain (2008), and is working on a book project on “The Ghosts of Mark Twain.” Will  Scheibel  is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the author of Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (2022) and, with Julie Grossman, the co-author of a “TV Milestones” volume on Twin Peaks (2020). He is also the author and co-editor, respectively, of two books on film director Nicholas Ray: American Stranger (2017) and, with Steven Rybin, Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground (2014). Lissette  Lopez  Szwydky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Arkansas Humanities Center. She teaches and publishes in the areas of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Adaptation Studies, Transmedia Storytelling, Gender Studies, and specializes in the Gothic tradition across forms and media. She is author of Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (2020). She teaches and writes about nineteenth-­ century literary history and popular culture from the Romantic period through the present, including essays in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (eds. Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckhart Voights, 2018), Frankenstein Adapted: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture (eds. Dennis Perry and Dennis Cutchins, 2018), and A Cultural History of Tragedy, Volume 5: The Age of Empire (eds. Michael Gamer, Diego Saglia, and Rebecca Bushnell, 2019). Szwydky is working on her second book, Frankenstein’s Bride: A Transmedia Cultural History of Her

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Own. She also co-directs (with Sean P.  Connors) the NEH Summer Institute for K-12 Educators “Remaking Monsters and Heroines: Adapting Classic Literature for Contemporary Audiences.” You can follow her on Twitter @LissetteSz. Luciana Tamas  is a Romanian-German visual artist, researcher, curator, and translator who is working on two PhDs—one in Literary and Cultural Studies at Technische Universität Braunschweig and one in Art History and Aesthetics at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). In 2012, she received a full, five-year scholarship from the DAAD to study Art; in 2017, she earned a “Diplom” degree (MA) in Fine Art from HBK and a bachelor’s degree in English Studies and Art History from TU. She has, since, also received a “Meisterschüler” in Fine Art and a second master’s degree, in Art History and Aesthetics, from HBK. She has participated in and coorganized over 130 cultural events—solo and group shows, artist talks, and conferences—and has received a DAAD Prize for outstanding achievements, among several other awards. Eckart Voigts  is Professor of English Literature at Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. He has written, edited, and co-edited numerous books and articles, such as the Routledge Companion to Adaptation (2018) and the special issue of Adaptation (vol. 6, no. 2, 2013) on transmedia storytelling, Reflecting on Darwin (2014), and Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse (2015). In 2021, he co-edited the Companion to BritishJewish Theatre since the 1950s (2021) and Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptation (2021). Shannon Wells-Lassagne  is a professor at the Université de Bourgogne/ University of Burgundy in Dijon, France, where she specializes in film and television adaptation. Her recently published works include Adapting Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations (2021), Adapting Endings from Book to Screen: Last Pages, Last Shots (2020), and Television and Serial Adaptation (2017). Her work has appeared in The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Screen, Critical Studies in Television, The Journal of Screenwriting, Series, TV/ Series, and The Journal of Popular Film and Television, among other venues.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Figs. 8.1 and 8.2 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2

Vanessa levitates above the séance table and speaks in the voice of the missing Mina Murray [Episode 1.2] Bereft at the death of Vanessa and frustrated by the addition of new serial threads in the final episode that would henceforth go unpursued, many fans rejected the notion it could have been the intended ending [Episode 3.9] Dorian Gray’s portrait gallery [Episode 1.2] The Creature reading books of poetry [Episode 1.3] When Ethan comes to rescue Vanessa, he finds her in a white room that appears as the transcendent version of the white padded room we had seen from her institutionalized past [Episode 3.9] When Ethan comes to rescue Vanessa, he finds her in a white room that appears as the transcendent version of the white padded room we had seen from her institutionalized past [Episode 3.9] Foregrounding the sanguine, Vanessa is shown in close-up during the Blood Ball [Episode 2.6] The Gothic flaneurs assemble in cosmopolitan London [Episode 3.8] Although Lawrence Talbot is named after Universal’s most popular lycanthrope, he looks more like the titular character in Werewolf of London, the studio’s first werewolf film [Episode 2.10] Penny Dreadful cites Nosferatu [Episode 1.1] Caliban luxuriates in the light of the stage [Episode 1.3]

23

42 50 57

76

77 95 115 130

144 145

xvii

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List of Figures

Fig. 9.3 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 13.1

Fig. 14.1 Fig. 15.1

Penny Dreadful cites The Great Train Robbery [Episode 1.1] Walt Whitman strikes a pose on the cover of Leaves of Grass, a performative declaration of an authentic American manhood Ethan Chandler strikes a pose reminiscent of his cinematic forebearer Ethan Edwards in the last scene of The Searchers [Episode 2.9] Ethan and Sembene sit by Vanessa’s door [Episode 1.7] Charlton Townsend, buoyed by his love for Kurt, does a bit of soft-­shoe in his living-room in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels [Episode 5] Victor Frankenstein and Lily discuss the physical and figurative constraints of nineteenth-century women’s fashion [Episode 2.4] The character Justine directly references the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, and her guardians Lily Frankenstein and Dorian Gray both fit into the mold of the Sadean libertine [Episode 3.6] Vanessa’s relationship with Mina, one “closer than sisters,” evokes lesbian desire [Episode 1.5] A Latinx neighborhood squares off against the Los Angeles police in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels [Episode 10]

147 163 164 167 189 204

218 247 264

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel

The Showtime-Sky Atlantic television series Penny Dreadful ran for three seasons from 2014 to 2016, inspiring critical acclaim, a cult of fan-viewers (calling themselves “The Dreadfuls”), tie-ins such as a prequel and sequel comic-book series published by Titan Comics,1 and a television spin-off, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, cancelled after the first season aired on Showtime in 2020. A subject of growing academic attention, Penny Dreadful has also received scholarly analysis in articles by Sarah Artt, Nina Farizova, and Benjamin Poore, chapters in monographs by Yvonne Griggs, Antonija Primorac, and Saverio Tomaiuolo, contributions to a special issue of Critical Survey (see Louttit, Akıllı and Öz, Rocha, and Manea), and the essays in an entire section of Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts’s edited collection Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations (see Böhnke, Mendes, VanWinkle, and J. Grossman (*) Departments of English and Communication and Film Studies, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] W. Scheibel Department of English, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_1

1

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Mantrant)—and this work only represents a sample of what has been published since the series aired. It is no wonder that this neo-Victorian mash-up—adapting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), among other sources— has attracted audiences from different taste cultures and interest from a range of academic fields. Creator and showrunner John Logan, credited as the writer on 24 of the 27 episodes, cites not only eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century Gothic novels but also the stage melodrama of the Grand Guignol, Romantic poetry, and popular horror movies (specifically from Universal Pictures in the 1930s and 1940s and Hammer Film Productions in the 1950s and 1960s). Having previously written for the stage and the cinema, Logan entered serial television for the first time with Penny Dreadful. Red, his play about artist Mark Rothko, which opened in London in 2009 and on Broadway in 2010, went on to win six Tony Awards, including Best Play. Logan earned his reputation in Hollywood with the Oscar-nominated screenplays for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) and Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004) and Hugo (2011). Contributing to the scripts for Sam Mendes’s James Bond films Skyfall (2011) and Spectre (2015), he also demonstrated his ability to work within a commercially successful franchise.2 Whether writing in a theatrical or cinematic mode, Logan views himself as an actor’s director. In a 2016 interview with Variety, he explained, “I’ve always said I have one job, which is writing scenes for actors. My goal is always to write great scenes for actors. Everything else is secondary” (Ryan, “Penny Dreadful”). To that end, while writing Penny Dreadful with the character Vanessa Ives at its center, Logan “fell in love with the idea of Eva Green and her playing Vanessa” (qtd. in Gosling 124). Green had starred in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), a sexually explicit art-house drama set on the backdrop of the Cinémathèque Française in May 68; Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), a historical epic about the twelfth-century siege of Jerusalem during the Crusades; and the James Bond reboot Casino Royale (2006), a reimagining of 007 as much as the so-called Bond Girl. Needing “a courageous actor,” Logan felt Green “would have the complexity, the passion and frankly, the nerve to play this part” (124).3 Although Penny Dreadful’s other leads would also have been recognizable from film, including British actor Harry Treadaway as Victor Frankenstein, two-time James Bond Timothy Dalton,

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

and millennial-Hollywood heartthrob Josh Hartnett as werewolf Lawrence Talbot (a.k.a., sharpshooter Ethan Chandler), many cast members established their acting careers on the stage: Rory Kinnear as Frankenstein’s Creature, Reeve Carney as Dorian Gray, Simon Russell Beale as Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle, Helen McCrory as witch Evelyn Poole (a.k.a., spiritualist Madame Kali), Sarah Greene as Evelyn’s daughter Hecate, Douglas Hodge as Scotland Yard police inspector Bartholomew Rusk, and Patti LuPone in a dual role as psychiatrist Dr. Seward and Vanessa’s mentor Joan Clayton. We point to the intertextuality of the series and the theatrical or cinematic backgrounds of its creative personnel not to suggest that the series is somehow anti-televisual but to show how accommodating a televisual adaptation can be to different medial sources and influences. Even one of Penny Dreadful’s main cast members, former teen pop-singer Billie Piper, has developed a star image by moving among film, theater, and television (prior to playing consumptive sex worker Brona Croft and her reanimated alter ego Lily Frankenstein on Penny Dreadful, Piper was best known for her role as Rose Tyler, the companion to the ninth and tenth Doctors in the revival of Doctor Who [BBC, 2005–2006]). Note that the serialized and sensationalist mode of Penny Dreadful as a horror-television series recalls the pulp horror narratives of the Victorian “penny dreadfuls” from which the title derives, as well the American dime novels to which the third season alludes in its storyline set on the Western frontier. Moreover, despite horror’s usually exclusive associations with fiction and film, television has been a home for the genre as early as the 1950s, when Universal sold the syndication rights to its pre-1948 horror catalogue to Columbia Pictures’s television subsidiary Screen Gems. Two packages of films were locally broadcast on a program titled Shock Theater, featuring horror-­ themed hosts in costume who introduced Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man to a new generation via the small screen (Grant 4). In their book TV Horror, Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott trace the history of the genre back to BBC’s Quatermass serials (1953, 1955, 1958), anthology series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS, 1955–1960; NBC, 1960–1962), The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964), and Boris Karloff’s Thriller (NBC, 1960–1962), and the daytime soap opera Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–1971). With its vampire protagonist Barnabas Collins, the authors argue, Dark Shadows “gave birth to the sympathetic monster that would become a defining feature of TV horror for years to come, not simply because it made the monster palatable for television

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audiences, but because it allowed audiences to see the human within the monster and the monster within the human” (209). The quotidian medium of television may in fact be ideally suited for sympathetic monsters, “or those who walk a fine line between good and evil, and whose popularity implicates the audience in [their] moral ambiguity” (205). As Jowett and Abbott contend, “If the contemporary horror film is built around an ambivalent relationship between the monster and normality, then the presence of horror on television in some ways normalizes the monstrous, blurring the lines between normality and the monster, and in so doing implicating the audience” (202). How monsters elicit (or fail to elicit) sympathy is a recurring theme in our collection, as Penny Dreadful plays on the recognition of characters, storylines, genre conventions, and spoken words from a whole host of sources across media. Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster is the first book-length critical study of the series (in the context of adaptation or otherwise), serving as a laboratory for experimentation with recent interdisciplinary methodologies that seeks to understand the mechanisms of adaptation more broadly. We claim that as an adaptation of multiple sources in different media, Penny Dreadful gives scholars, teachers, and students (hopefully some Dreadfuls, as well) an ideal textual corpus for thinking about adaptation beyond the traditional dyad of literature and screen media. Following the lead of the television series, which itself anatomizes the processes and possibilities of adaptation, we aim to respond to Logan’s brazen provocation: to rethink where stories begin and end; to appreciate how texts communicate with each other; to decipher the relationship between text, context, and intertext; and to explore how meaning is made and remade. In its crossover storylines and expansive narrative universe, Penny Dreadful reminds us of the endlessly generative potential of textuality and world building. Rather than proceeding with a production history of the series (for that information, we would direct our readers to Yvonne Griggs’s comprehensive account in Adaptable TV), in this introduction we want to explain how the terms “Gothic,” “horror,” and “adaptation” will be used in the chapters that follow. In his book The Pleasures of Horror, Matt Hills observes how “performative acts of generic (re)classification have occurred around horror on TV, with ‘Gothic TV’ functioning as a discursive other to TV horror—the latter being associated with gore and low culture, and the former carrying connotations of historical tradition, and ‘restrained’ suggestion or implication rather than graphic monstrosity and splatter”

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(120). Such cultural distinctions have occurred at every level of discourse surrounding television, from the production of programming content to the publicity of television programs, to writing about television, whereby slipping from the genre label of “horror” to “Gothic” lays claim to the cultural value of period drama or literary adaptation (119–120). “By showing less gore and being diegetically cast back in time,” Hills writes, “‘Gothic TV’ not only takes on a literariness or worthy wordiness, it also overwrites the culturally dangerous category of ‘TV horror’” (120). He continues, “The safety of ‘the Gothic’ for TV producers, schedulers and publicists lies partly in the fact that its texts are often highly familiar to audiences, being effectively pre-sold through audience recognition” (120). While Penny Dreadful takes place in late-Victorian London and capitalizes on audience familiarity with characters from works of canonical literature, it also revels in the bloody excesses of contemporary horror, a topic that our contributors Luciana Tamas and Eckart Voigts take up in Chap. 6. Indeed, as Christine Becker uncovers in Chap. 3 of our collection, Showtime shaped its marketing of the series around fan responses on social media, exploiting themes of monstrosity, marginality, and transgression with which the fan community identified as “outsiders” themselves. As scholars have noted, horror and franchise/worldbuilding cultures bloomed after the millennium. Building from Jowett and Abbott’s earlier work on TV horror (“TV Horror”), Simon Brown and Stacey Abbott refer to the “2010s as a new golden age of TV horror” (98). Examples include American Horror Story (FX, 2011–present), Bates Motel (A&E, 2013–2017), Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015), Sleepy Hollow (Fox, 2013–2017), Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016–present), True Blood (HBO, 2008–2014), and The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–2022). The variety of platforms (broadcast and cable networks, streaming services) and sources and inspirations (novels, short stories, comic books, films) suggests the ubiquity of this phenomenon (98–99). Kyle Meikle notes that shows during this period turned away from the “prudish mores of mainstream fare to the lovingly prurient interest of fans” (83), a point well illustrated in Penny Dreadful’s promotion and reception chronicled in Becker’s chapter. In the series, Logan marries the tradition of Gothic literary adaptation with this recent trend in popular TV horror. The genre of penny dreadfuls is an intriguing analog to conceptions of adaptation as imitative “low”culture pot-boilers, serving audiences doubly in showing how creatively and entertainingly the most canonical of story worlds can be reimagined. If penny dreadfuls (and dime novels) are traditionally seen as disposable

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and sensationalist, the series Penny Dreadful finds poignancy and depth in a retelling of iconic monster stories. So, too, we find the show’s mash-up of beloved and legendary characters and storylines not a series of cheaply conceptualized adaptations but a compelling exploration of themes of monstrosity embodied by superb acting. When we refer to Penny Dreadful’s status as “Gothic TV,” then, it is not to reaffirm the Gothic as a “respectable” alternative to horror but to underscore how the horror of Penny Dreadful operates within the mode of the contemporary Gothic. According to Catherine Spooner in her book on the subject, the contemporary Gothic spans fiction, film, television, popular music, fashion, contemporary art, and consumer culture. Instead of understanding the Gothic as a distinct, historically specific genre, as it had been previously conceptualized in relation to Medieval architecture and literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Spooner regards it as “a more diverse, loosely defined set of narrative conventions and literary tropes” that may be found in multiple genres (26). Chief among those conventions, for the purposes of our collection, are the Gothic’s preoccupation with the past, not only in its “historical settings and narrative interruptions of the past into the present” (9) but also in how it investigates “its own past, self-referentially dependent on traces of other stories, familiar images and narrative structures, intertextual allusions” (10). Penny Dreadful therefore makes an exemplary case study in the Gothic’s cannibalistic process of self-adaptation, drawing from literary, theatrical, cinematic, and televisual histories, as aware of its “high” cultural iterations as its “low” (distinctions that are always historically determined, anyway). The “use” of the Gothic in the series is also not merely a repetition of past traditions but an adaptation of certain sensibilities or social concerns to the needs, desires, and appeals of new contexts. As Spooner persuasively argues, “There is no ‘original’ Gothic; it is always already a revival of something else” (10). In other words, “The notion of revival can be seen to imply a reappropriation and reinvention of previous forms rather than straightforward repetition. Thus contemporary Gothic discourses can be viewed as relating to an earlier Gothic tradition while expressing at times an entirely different range of cultural agendas” (12). We hope our readers will appreciate what Penny Dreadful’s Gothic horror reveals about the late-Victorian era as much as present-day issues of aesthetics, performance, gender, sexuality, race, and our complex relationship to reading and media. Just as horror has been seen as a degenerate form of the literary Gothic, so too have new-media adaptations been sometimes viewed as inferior

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versions of their source texts. Kamilla Elliott problematizes the commonplace value judgments ascribed to ostensibly original sources. In her book Theorizing Adaptation, Elliott shows how, before the nineteenth century, adaptation theory “was diverse, complex, nuanced, contested, and often ingenious” (86). Since the Romantic period, however, aesthetic judgments have privileged originality, turning adaptations into “bad theoretical objects.” Although Elliott’s longer history of the retelling of stories reveals attitudes toward adaptations that were positive and forward-­ looking, audiences have often internalized a Romantic commitment to originality, finding adaptations to be secondary and derivative. Many contemporary readers, viewers, critics, and scholars may share this retrospective view of sources and adaptations, preferring the earlier text and evaluating it as superior. But Elliott calls a preoccupation with an adaptation’s faithfulness to its source the “fake news” of adaptation studies (20), suggesting that a historical account of adaptation reveals different priorities over time. Indeed, adaptations’ greater concern historically has been how re-versioned texts are products of their own time as much as or more than they are attempting to adapt earlier sources (see Elliott 86, 94). Much in the same way that the Gothic is “always already a revival of something else” (Spooner 10), contemporary adaptation theory emphasizes how adaptations are always already adaptations of adaptations—there is no “original” source text—and this process of constant textual remaking is nothing new. R.  Barton Palmer reminds us that though we think of multi-media practices of textual remixing and mash-ups as contemporary modes, adaptation has been a vibrant cultural practice as long as stories have been told. Focused on Medieval revisioning of Percival and referencing Bernard Cerquiglini, Palmer observes that “‘[i]ncessant re-writing’ is an apt description […] not only of medieval practice but of text-making enterprises in every period, including our own; these are fundamentally transtextual and characteristically hypertextual, and where the opening of the already written to further extension is necessary to ensure the predictable ‘flow’ of new text that sustains the cultural tradition” (79). Adaptation studies gives us a lens through which to explore and dissect how given texts change and live on: “once continued, the ‘work’ is revealed as inchoate rather than boundaried, its self-containment more a matter of convention and interpretation rather than of material fact, with its present form open to further extension” (83). Penny Dreadful illustrates un-­boundaried textuality whereby familiar characters are ripped from their original context, as the Creature bursts violently from the body of Proteus in Episode 2. * * *

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The essays in the first section of our collection posit ways we might understand reading Penny Dreadful in particular contexts of media. Thomas Leitch provocatively relates mediation (in the spiritualist sense dramatized in the series) to the notion of adaptation as itself a medium. Shifting to the marketing and reception of Penny Dreadful as, distinctly, a television series, Christine Becker demonstrates how Showtime’s adaptive strategies for responding to fan identification with characters and themes branded the series as an “outsider” text from an underdog cable network. While Penny Dreadful is a product of twenty-first-century cable television, it is equally indebted to the conventions of “monstrous media” from the nineteenth century, as Mike Goode suggests in his chapter on literary anthologies, museums, and the culture of collecting. The second section of our book offers readings of Penny Dreadful in the contexts of Gothic horror literature and film. As Joan Hawkins proposes in her chapter on Penny Dreadful as an adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula, the influence of this novel is not confined to the third season, when Dracula finally appears, but is present throughout the series in its explorations of gender and sexuality. Luciana Tamas and Eckart Voigts continue an examination of vampirism in the series with their chapter comparing Penny Dreadful’s representation of the sanguinary to a contemporaneous vampire text, Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013). Turning to the London setting of Penny Dreadful and Dracula as a Gothic space, Kendall R. Phillips posits the framework of the “cosmopolitan Gothic” for reading the city in the shadow of Empire. Will Scheibel concludes this section by connecting Penny Dreadful to its cinematic intertexts in the Universal Classic Monsters films of the 1930s and 1940s, drawing from Freud’s “the uncanny” to articulate a model of adaptation based on unhomely returns. Unbinding the monster from Gothic horror on the page and the screen, the third section looks at less obvious sources of inspiration for Penny Dreadful. Given the recurring motif of performance in the series, from Ethan’s Wild West shows to the Grand Guignol setting in Season 1, to the visual allusions to Max Schreck’s physiognomy as Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922), Shannon Wells-Lassagne considers theatrical spectacles as historical precedents, aspects of mise-en-scène, and a central thematic in the series. Whereas Wells-Lassagne takes up the figure of the sharpshooter as a theatrical personage, Ann M.  Ryan shifts our attention to Ethan as a

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frontier hero in the tradition of the American dime novel, particularly in Ethan’s companionship with racial Others. Julie Grossman and Phillip Novak conclude this section with an introduction to Penny Dreadful’s 2020 spin-off City of Angels, arguing that in Logan’s pivoting from Gothic horror to the detective genre, this new series redefines the monstrous by adapting classic film noir such as Chinatown (1974), incorporating Mexican folklore, and responding to the social-historical conditions of 1930s Los Angeles. Issues of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity are the subjects of the fourth and final section of the book. Lissette Lopez Szwydky finds in Lily Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful’s version of the “bride” of Frankenstein, one of the latest incarnations of a palimpsestuous female figure with origins in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley up through the many film adaptations of Frankenstein. Not only does Lily’s protégé Justine recall the Frankenstein family maid, Justine Moritz, from Shelley’s novel, but she also evokes the eponymous protagonist in the Marquis de Sade’s 1791 novel. Reading Penny Dreadful as work of the “Sadean Gothic,” Lindsay Hallam interprets de Sade’s textual presence in sexually transgressive characters such as Justine, Lily, and Dorian Gray, as well as in the melding of high and low cultural forms. Also interested in the representations of sexual transgression, James Bogdanski locates a “queer sublime” in the series. Bogdanski foregrounds the authorial legacy of James Whale, director of Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), in Logan’s vision as an openly gay writer while also attending to certain queer relationships in the series’ narrative, such as Vanessa’s close bond with Mina. The final chapter of the book revisits City of Angels, as Seda Öz investigates “borderland identities” in 1930s Los Angeles, the time and place of social unrest that gave rise to the Chicano Movement and bear a chilling resonance with U.S. efforts to redraw borders following the 2016 presidential election of Donald J. Trump. To borrow the words of Jonathan Harker in his cherished journal, this is Gothic horror “up to date with a vengeance” (Stoker 37).

Notes 1. Written by supervising producer Chris King and Season 3 staff writers Krysty Wilson-Cairns and Andrew Hinderaker, the prequel series was collected in a trade-paperback edition titled Penny Dreadful in 2017. The sequel series, written by King and titled Penny Dreadful: The Ongoing Series, was collected

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in three trade-paperback volumes: The Awakening (2017), The Beauteous Evil (2018), and The Victory of Death (2019). 2. When making Penny Dreadful, Logan and Mendes (the executive producer of the series) would unite cast members from the Bond franchise, including Timothy Dalton, Eva Green, Rory Kinnear, and Helen McCrory. 3. For more on Logan’s work with Green and his conception of Vanessa Ives, including his rationale for her death in the Season 3 finale, see Goldberg and Ryan, “Creator.”

Works Cited Akıllı, Sinan, and Seda Öz. “‘No More Let Life Divide…’: Victorian Metropolitan Confluence in Penny Dreadful.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 15–29. Artt, Sarah. “‘An Otherness That Cannot Be Sublimated’: Shades of Frankenstein in Penny Dreadful and Black Mirror.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 11, no. 2, 2018, pp. 257–275. Böhnke, Dietmar. “The ‘Grand Guignol’ Approach to Adapting the Victorians: Penny Dreadful and the Multiple Adaptations of Globalised Popular Victorianism,” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 123–140. Brown, Simon, and Stacey Abbott. “Inspiration as Adaptation: TV Horror, Seriality, and the Adapted Text.” New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation, ed. Betty Kaklamanidou, Wayne State UP, 2020, pp. 97–115. Elliott, Kamilla. Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford UP, 2020. Farizova, Nina. “Romantic Poetry and the TV Series Form: The Rhyme of John Logan’s Penny Dreadful.” Adaptation, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 176–193. Goldberg, Lesley. “Why Showtime is Ending Penny Dreadful.” Hollywood Reporter, 20 Jun. 2016, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-­news/ penny-­dreadful-­canceled-­at-­showtime-­903757/. Gosling, Sharon. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan Books, 2015. Grant, Barry Keith. Monster Cinema. Rutgers UP, 2018. Griggs, Yvonne. “Penny Dreadful: The Neo-Victorian ‘Made-for-TV’ Series,” Adaptable TV: Rewiring the Text, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 13–66. Hills, Matt. The Pleasures of Horror. Continuum, 2005. Jowett, Lorna, and Stacey Abbott. TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen. I.B. Tauris, 2013. Meikle, Kyle. Adaptations in the Franchise Era, 2001–16. Bloomsbury, 2019. ———. “TV Horror: Santa Clarita Diet.” Horror: A Companion, ed. Simon Bacon, Peter Lang, 2019, pp. 45–52.

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Louttit, Chris. “Victorian London Redux: Adapting the Gothic Metropolis.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 2–14. Manea, Dragoş. “A Wolf’s Eye View of London: Dracula, Penny Dreadful, and the Logic of Repetition.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 40–50. Mantrant, Sophie. “Jack the Ripper in the Age of Trauma: Ethan Chandler in Penny Dreadful, Season One.” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-­ Victorian Adaptations, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 169–178. Mendes, Ana Cristina. “The Cumulative Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fandoms of Penny Dreadful.” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 141–154. Palmer, R.  Barton. “Continuation, Adaptation Studies, and the Never-Finished Text.” Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds, ed. Julie Grossman and R.  Barton Palmer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 73–100. Poore, Benjamin. “The Transformed Beast: Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic.” Victoriographies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 62–81. Primorac, Antonija. “Re-fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations: Tailoring and Shape-Shifting as Queer Adaptation and Appropriation,” Neo-­ Victorianism on the Screen: Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations of Victorian Women, 2018, pp. 133–176. Rocha, Lauren. “Angel in the House, Devil in the City: Explorations of Gender in Dracula and Penny Dreadful.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 30–39. Ryan, Maureen. “Creator John Logan and Showtime’s David Nevins on the Decision to End Penny Dreadful.” Variety, 20 Jun. 2016, https://variety. com/2016/tv/news/penny-­dreadful-­ending-­season-­3-­series-­finale-­creator-­ interview-­john-­logan-­david-­nevins-­1201798946/. ———. “Penny Dreadful Creator Talks Season 3, Vanessa’s Demons and the American West.” Variety, 4 May 2016, https://variety.com/2016/tv/features/penny-­dreadful-­john-­logan-­interview-­1201766847/. Spooner, Catherine. Contemporary Gothic. Reaktion Books, 2006. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Reader’s Library Classics, 2022. Tomaiuolo, Saverio. “Penny Dreadful from Neo-Victorian to Neo-Baroque,” Deviance in Neo-Victorian Culture: Canon, Transgression, Innovation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 143–180. VanWinkle, Matthew. “‘Is the Language Not Rich with Felicity of Expression?’: Penny Dreadful, Romantic Poetry, and the Limits of the Neo-Victorian.” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 155–168.

PART I

Welcome to the Night: Issues of Reading and Media

CHAPTER 2

The Medium Is the Model Thomas Leitch

At the heart of all the dire, sanguinary threats to the Penny Dreadful’s colorful cast of characters are a more existential threat: their inability to define themselves to each other’s, the audience’s, or even their own satisfaction. Sometimes the continuing characters act very much like their Victorian namesakes; sometimes they don’t, especially when they cross each other’s paths. Count Dracula’s alter ego, Dr. Alexander Sweet, works as a well-regarded zoologist in the Natural History Museum of London. Victor Frankenstein’s colleague, Dr. Henry Jekyll, is addicted to radical experiments, but now these experiments are carried out on other people rather than himself. Dorian Gray is a pansexual seducer who remains eternally young-looking because a portrait he’s hidden away in his palatial home ages in his place, but his story changes dramatically when he partners with the Bride of Frankenstein, who wishes to exploit her ties with him to convene a cabal of homicidal streetwalkers bent on exacting revenge against men. The most prominent plotline in the show’s first season concerns the efforts of Sir Malcolm Murray, a wealthy explorer who’s constantly off in

T. Leitch (*) University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_2

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Africa, to discover what’s become of his daughter Mina, who vanished without a trace during his last journey but now seems to be reaching out from the spirit world. The fact that her name is Mina Murray gives a broad hint about what’s become of her. The second and third seasons focus increasingly on malevolent spirits’ constant threats against Sir Malcolm’s ward, Vanessa Ives, and the attempts of Sir Malcolm, Frankenstein, the sharpshooter Ethan Chandler, and Ethan’s adoptive Apache father Kaetenay to save her from eternal damnation. Most of the threats to Vanessa take the form of demonic possession through one of his earthly agents: Mina Murray, who in life was Vanessa’s best friend; the sorceress Evelyn Poole, who first appears as the society medium Madame Kali; and Dracula, whose benevolent, absent-minded alter ego Dr. Sweet she falls in love with. The underlying fear that drives Penny Dreadful is the threat of invasion by malevolent otherworldly presences capable of penetrating into the characters’ most secure dwellings, their bodies, and their psyches. The earliest example of this invasion in the series, and one of the most unnerving, is the jump-scare moment when the Creature, not yet self-identified as John Clare, emerges from the body of Proteus, the creation of Frankenstein whom he’s just killed [Episode 1.2]. Who exactly is John Clare? His namesake was both a leading English Romantic poet and a man who suffered from delusions that he was a bigamist and a prizefighter and the reincarnation of Shakespeare and Lord Byron, several of whose poems he rewrote, and who spent the second half of his life confined to the High Beach asylum. Is Penny Dreadful’s John Clare another incarnation of the poet, a monster created by Frankenstein, or a resurrected version of an attendant in the Banning Clinic, in which Vanessa Ives is lobotomized in Episode 3.4? Lavinia Putney, the blind daughter of the waxworks owner who employs Clare for much of Seasons 1 and 2, muses, “It’s like he’s not really alive.” Clare tells Frankenstein: “I’m your other self. Your truer self” [Episode 2.10]. In the same episode, Vanessa tells him, “I think you are the most human man I have ever known,” even though the long flashback to her stay in the Banning Clinic shows his general demeanor of self-effacing compassion alarmingly inverted when his eyes suddenly burn red and he tells her, “I believe what you say about Lucifer. After all, I was there. We have a lot to catch up on.” The same fear of possibly demonic possession haunts Lily Frankenstein, who wonders when Dorian Gray identifies her as Brona Croft, who died of consumption before she was reanimated by Frankenstein, whether she’s really Lily, Brona, or “some divine admixture of both” [Episode 2.9], and

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Ethan Chandler, who’s secretly a werewolf. As the story unfolds, this fear of otherworldly possession shared by so many characters is focused increasingly on Vanessa, who a long flashback in Episode 1.5 reveals seduced Captain Charles Branson on the eve of his wedding to Mina, perhaps in revenge for the sexual encounter Vanessa saw between Sir Malcolm and Vanessa’s mother earlier in that episode. If the first season of Penny Dreadful is organized around Sir Malcolm’s ultimately futile attempt to track down his daughter and rescue her from the realm of the Undead, the series as a whole is organized around the quest to identify the true nature of Vanessa and rescue her from external threats like Lucifer and Count Dracula. Who is Vanessa Ives? When we first meet her, she seems to be a bored socialite whose openness to new experiences is continually repaid by threats of demonic possession. Another long flashback in Episode 2.3 recounts her formative experience when she apprenticed herself to the Cut-Wife Joan Clayton, the rural witch of Ballentree Moor, whom she approached with questions about how to understand her disturbing visions and how to help her troubled friend Mina. By the time Vanessa, confronted in the final episode of Season 2 with the possibility that she has been possessed by the primordial Egyptian goddess Amunet, cries, “My soul is mine!”, it’s hard to share her confidence, since the series has gone to extraordinary lengths to call that very assertion into question for any number of characters, from Vanessa herself to the Cut-Wife, who years after she’s burned as a witch at the end of Episode 2.3 returns as Dr. Seward, the alienist Vanessa insists she’s met before—a conviction that’s made considerably less irrational by the fact that Dr. Seward and the Cut-Wife are both played by Patty LuPone. Penny Dreadful uses the threat of otherworldly possession to dramatize questions about identity the characters frequently make explicit. In a single episode [2.8], John Clare asks Lily Frankenstein: “Who are you?”; Vanessa asks Ethan, who has avoided a forced return to America by turning into a werewolf and killing his predator: “What are you?”; Dorian Gray asks Angelique, the transgender prostitute who’s fallen in love with him, “Can you accept me as I am?”; Sir Malcolm’s servant and companion Sembene remonstrates with him: “Know who you are”; and a doll fashioned in Vanessa’s image asks her, “Is that not the engine of all human creatures: to be loved for who you are?” In the third season, Dr. Sweet assures Vanessa, “I love you for who you are, not for who the world wants you to be” [Episode 3.6], just before they make unholy love. In the following episode, he tells her as she holds him at gunpoint: “I don’t want to

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make you good. I don’t want you to be normal. I don’t want you to be anything but who you truly are” [Episode 3.7]. When she replies not by accepting him but by accepting herself, he bites her neck and feeds on her. Penny Dreadful places extraordinary emphasis on questions of identity precisely because it is so difficult for the characters to establish, even to themselves, who they are. The series abounds in images of identities multiplied, fractured, or otherwise thrown into question. The one-armed Inspector Bartholomew Rusk, who eventually arrests Ethan and accompanies him back to America, calls Ethan, the fugitive son of the rancher Jared Talbot, “a phantom limb” [Episode 2.9] like Rusk’s own amputated arm, which he found after losing it but then tossed away. In the long flashback following Episode 3.3, in which Dr. Sweet takes Vanessa into a hall of mirrors that disorients her by multiplying images of her, the Banning Clinic attendant John Clare carefully applies makeup to Vanessa’s ravaged face, holds up a mirror, and tells her, “this is who you are” [Episode 3.4]. In the following episode, Jared Talbot tells Ethan, now dressed in some of Talbot’s own clothes, “It’s like looking into a mirror” [Episode 3.5]. The resulting confusion is as much hermeneutical as psychological, for Penny Dreadful undermines any number of narrative, visual, and thematic tropes that would normally help its audience determine the characters’ true identities—or at the very least allow them to decide whether a given character was good or evil. Moral character, exceptionalism, happiness, sensory experience, free will, religious faith, and nature are all shown to be unreliable foundations or indexes of identity. So are sin, because “everyone has sinned,” as Vanessa tells Dr. Seward [Episode 3.2]; love, because every sexual encounter in the series turns out badly; medicine, like the dose Frankenstein wants to inject into Lily’s brain to banish the rage she takes as defining her [Episode 3.6]; family, especially the twisted families of Sir Malcolm and Ethan; memory, since the characters are constantly tormented by recollections whose accuracy they cannot trust; power, since apparently pitiable victims like Lily Frankenstein, her protegee, the young streetwalker Justine, and the blind Lavinia Putney all show their claws to those who befriend them; abjection, for soon after telling Evelyn Poole, “You don’t need to blackmail me. I’m your creature” [Episode 2.8], the campy Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle takes part in the assault on her stronghold and later refers Vanessa to the alienist Dr. Seward and the thanatologist Catriona Hartdegen, her two most indispensable helpers in Season 3; and cosmology, for, as Vanessa tells Dr. Sweet, “We make our own heaven and our own hell” [Episode 3.9]. In place of any stable identity, Dr. Jekyll

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unsurprisingly posits “the duality that makes us who we are” [Episode 3.2]; Frankenstein tells Vanessa, comparing his drug addiction to her “addiction to God”: “Scientifically speaking, life’s nothing but a series of chemical reactions” [Episode 2.9]; and Sembene tells Ethan: “Things become other things. The leopard consumes the monkey and becomes leopard and monkey. The crocodile consumes the leopard and becomes crocodile and leopard and monkey…. The ones so cursed do not always fully remember it, this becoming” [Episode 2.7]. The series heightens this indeterminacy still further by its delight in darkly playful general remarks that clearly refer simultaneously to multiple characters and plot strands, as when Lily tells Dorian, “I’m not sure there are any lifetimes,” a remark equally true of them both [Episode 2.6], or Evelyn Poole’s daughter, the apprentice-witch Hecate, tells Ethan: “I suspect we’re not so different, you and I” [Episode 3.5], or Sir Malcolm tells Ethan, “We prize things most when we’ve lost them” [Episode 3.7]—an observation that could apply without alteration to every other character in the series. A montage of sexual couplings in one episode [2.5] cuts freely between Dorian and Angelique, Frankenstein and Lily, and Sir Malcolm and Evelyn Poole, melding them into a single licentious sequence, and the final episode in Season 2 [2.10] cuts back and forth between the unhappy reunions of Frankenstein with the creatures he’s created and Sir Malcolm with the family members he’s betrayed. Although it follows both its Victorian models and other television series in ending any number of episodes with melodramatic cliffhangers, the big reveals of these cliffhangers, which unmask Ethan as a werewolf, or Dr. Sweet as Dracula, or Kaetenay as another werewolf, turn out to be complications or equivocations, deepening the characters’ contradictions rather than resolving them. Even as it freely complicates popular moral, psychological, and eschatological dualities, the series freely traffics in these dualities, palimpsestuously stacking them atop each other instead of rejecting them. In short, Penny Dreadful is a gallery of variously human and demonic monsters defined precisely by the fearfully protean instability that makes them impossible to define. In the process of developing these adapted characters and bringing them into collision with each other, Penny Dreadful foregrounds the secret other adaptations labor to hide: that the process of adaptation is ceaseless, licentious, often scandalous. The tropism toward constant refashioning, sometimes by themselves, sometimes by otherworldly forces they cannot understand or control, that makes its characters so threatening to each other and so disturbing to their audience is faithfully reflected

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in the status of Penny Dreadful itself, a prototype in this regard for all serial fiction. Unlike an Aristotelian tragedy with a beginning, a middle, and an end that provides a definitive rationale for its entire structure, serial fiction aspires to be all middle, multiplying its complications indefinitely without ever bringing them to the definitive end that would kill the series. Intertextual adaptation has generally been defined as an attempt to replicate or transfer narrative components like characters or events or settings or entire narratives from one presentational medium to another—from page to stage, from the live theater to the movie theater, from radio to television, from comic books to theme parks, from canonical fiction to online fanfiction, and, to take the intermedial transfer that remains most often studied, from novels to films. This model assumes that these media are stable and knowable, with borders as clearly demarcated as those of nations, and that adaptations cross these borders at their peril, risking opprobrium from purists devoted to the texts they adapt and rejection by partisans of the media in which they seek a new home. Recent developments in digital media and the challenges they pose to older media and to ways of thinking about media generally have raised fundamental questions about this model. Henry Jenkins’s highly influential work on intermediality traces the ways texts like The Matrix, originally conceived in a single medium, colonize other media so successfully that it is no longer possible to think of them as works in a single medium that have been adapted partially to other media but require us to think of them as multimedial or transmedial texts. Now that investigations of transmediality have so radically challenged the distinctiveness and independence of different presentational media and their distance from the cultures that generate, police, and consume them, I’d like to propose that adaptation is itself a medium. This proposition flies in the face of three generations of discussions among adaptation scholars and an even longer period of analyses of presentational media. The consensus to date among scholars, reviewers, fans, and the general public is that adaptation is an intermedial, not a medial, practice. But since adaptations have from their earliest days raised questions about the relations among apparently irreconcilable media, and since these questions have been multiplied and intensified by the rise of media studies and transmedial studies, I’d suggest that media is a term that could fruitfully be applied to discursive practices like reproduction, translation, and adaptation as it is already routinely applied to specific texts whose uniqueness

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they call into question and traditional media whose discreteness they challenge. Traditional media like music, painting, sculpture, dance, theater, opera, novels, newspapers, magazines, cinema, radio, television, video games, and digital media are widely understood as platforms for communicating information or providing aesthetic pleasure, and adaptation is understood as an intermedial or transmedial, rather than a medial, practice. As John Durham Peters points out, however, this way of conceiving media is a relatively recent historical development in “the long lineage of media as ambiance” (48) that “was connected to nature long before it was connected to technology” (46). “Medium,” notes Peters, “has always meant an element, environment, or vehicle in the middle of things.” Aristotle’s notion of το περιεχον (to periekhon), or “surrounding,” posited “atmosphere, cloud, climate, and the air” (46) as media. It was not until the thirteenth century that Thomas Aquinas, translating Aristotle, “smuggle[d] in the term medium to account for the missing link in the remote action of seeing” (46–47). With Isaac Newton, “medium became a more instrumental concept, ‘an intermediate agent,’ a condition for the transmission of entities such as light, gravity, magnetism, and sound” (47). But Peters finds a “decisive break” in our understanding of media as “a conveyance for specifically human signals and meanings” (47) in the middle of the nineteenth century: The telegraph as a medium of communication combined physical phenomena long observed in nature (speedy immaterial processes) with an old social practice (writing to distant correspondents). […] Perhaps the most critical shift came with spiritualism, around 1850, when a person, typically a woman imitating the telegraph’s ability to bridge wide chasms, came to be called a medium, which no longer meant a natural element but a human intermediary between the worlds of the living and the dead. […] This was a stepping-­ stone to the sense prevailing in the twentieth century that media were human-made channels that carried news, entertainment, advertising and other so-called content. The spiritualist quest for communiqués from distant minds went together with the shrinkage of the notion of communication to mean intentional sendings among humans. (47–48)

In other words, “media” didn’t originally mean platforms for human communication; that meaning is relatively recent in origin; and one of its harbingers is the designation of spiritualists as mediums, a term that has been

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applied to them longer than it has been applied to books, movies, or the Internet. In between the shift Peters describes and the rise of convergence culture, the pivotal text in the study of media is Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, whose subtitle indicates how absolutely it opposes what would come to be Peters’s understanding of media as rooted in natural phenomena. McLuhan famously begins his monograph with a chapter entitled “The Medium Is the Message,” a formulation he elaborates by saying that “the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (7). In exploring the implications of his aphorism for a range of media that include not only printed texts, newspapers, photography, telegraphy, comic strips, movies, radio, and television but also speech, numbers, clothing, housing, wheels, money, clocks, games, motorcars, and weapons, McLuhan does not so much reject the subordination of media to the messages they carried as transpose the messages into media themselves, for “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph” (8). Echoing T.S. Eliot, he asserts that “the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (18). Despite the plain sense of his most famous pronouncement, McLuhan does not equate the medium with its content; he sees the medium as far more important than its content, which at any rate is always another medium. In his second most famous passage, McLuhan divides all media into hot and cool media. A hot medium like photography and radio is one that extends one single sense in “high definition.” High definition is the state of being well filled with data. […] Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. (22–23)

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McLuhan’s argument has two broad implications I doubt that he would endorse himself: that the medium offers the model, not the message, for contemporary communications theories and for communication itself and that some mediums are both hot and cool. Although McLuhan gives radio as an example of a hot medium, for example, radio plays, which provide a great deal of auditory information which they invite audiences to supplement by providing a visual track of their own imagining, seem like a much cooler medium, one that requires and rewards active participation. I’d like to develop these two implications further by taking a closer look at Madame Kali, the medium in Penny Dreadful whose seance creates such a stir in the series’ second episode. Invited to give the gentlefolk assembled at Ferdinand Lyle’s party the sense that they have been vicariously in touch with the spirit world, she summons malignant spirits that swiftly infect Vanessa, who levitates above the table and speaks in the voice of the missing Mina Murray (Fig. 2.1). Madame Kali’s fearsomely, uncontrollably contagious activity is associated with shock, horror, sensationalism, and discontinuity but also with a powerful vision denied other characters unless the medium herself, perhaps unwillingly, shares it with them or infects them with it. Several episodes later, when Sir Malcolm recognizes Madame Kali in a shop, she

Fig. 2.1  Vanessa levitates above the séance table and speaks in the voice of the missing Mina Murray [Episode 1.2]

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identifies herself as “Evelyn Poole, from Brighton.” Most members of the audience are probably inclined at first to see this as her true identity. But the sidelong glance she gives the camera after telling Sir Malcolm that she’s sure they will meet again suggests that her identity is ultimately ambiguous. She isn’t Evelyn Poole dressing up as Madame Kali; she inhabits both identities at once and maybe others besides. More than most stories, whether or not they’re continuing series, Penny Dreadful works to make questions about the status of spiritualist mediums, the possibility of demonic possession, and the difficulty in fixing individual identity both ambiguous in themselves (is the person in question truly possessed?) and ambiguous in determining the possessed victim’s identity (is the possessed person better identified as herself or as the spirit who speaks and acts through her?). As a result, the series makes these questions equally impossible to answer and to ignore in very much the same way the medium of adaptation makes it both more important and more difficult to establish just what counts as a definitive text. The questions Penny Dreadful raises about the relations between autonomous individuals, the spiritual realm, and the mediums who make them available to each other become increasingly fraught as the series draws to an end because apart from the Creature, the leading characters have already rejected the teleological markers of individual and group identities classic fiction offers—normalcy, stability, peace, and a return to your loved ones and your true self—as temptations to be shunned at any cost. Although Catriona Hartdegen calls “the End of Days, the one constant in all thanatologies” [Episode 3.7], the very possibility of the End of Days is challenged by the form of serial drama, whose later episodes are more properly adapting, or, as Penny Dreadful might have it, feeding on, its earlier episodes and the franchise itself than any earlier sources. So the main features that establish the final episode of Season 3 as the series’ ending are the unusually slow pace of its last 15 minutes; the Creature’s valedictory recitation of the first stanza and part of the fourth stanza of William Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode as he watches Vanessa’s funeral procession, then approaches, and kneels at Vanessa’s grave; and the final fadeout to the intertitle “The End,” a title rarely seen in serial dramas, or indeed in television programs of any kind. In an article in Deadline Hollywood, Dominic Patten reported that [John] Logan had decided during the middle of the second season that the third season should be the last, and he pitched the third season to Showtime

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president David Nevins accordingly. They did not release this information until after the final season had completed, as Nevins stated, “given what I knew the ending of Penny Dreadful was going to be felt like a massive spoiler and it felt disrespectful to the experience that people were having with the show.” Logan said regarding not releasing the information: “That’s what the ending of this series is, it is meant to be a strong, bold, theatrical ending because I think that’s what our fans like and to water that down with an announcement or having them know I think would be an act of bad faith.” (“Penny Dreadful [TV series]”)

Fans were far from unanimous in accepting this account of the series’ sudden ending. Online columnist Trace Thurman took the number of plot threads left dangling as proof that Logan had planned to continue the series and was thwarted by Showtime because the series had never justified its expensive production costs, and most of the 74 fans who commented on his column agreed. Vox contributor Melanie McFarland, who found the third series both deviant and anticlimactic, contrasted Logan’s closing characterization of the series as “about a woman grappling with God and faith” with an announcement he’d made three years earlier, before the series premiered: “Growing up as a gay man, before it was socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated, to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was” (McFarland). How could Penny Dreadful possibly have ended in a way that satisfied viewers hooked on its gleefully licentious mashup of what Steven Marcus’s 1966 monograph called “the other Victorians”? Continuing television series are notoriously difficult to end, as fans’ reactions to the endings of The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), Mad Men (AMC, 2007–2015), and The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008) attest; Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013) succeeded only by killing off its protagonist and his leading antagonist in the final episode. Even deaths like these would not have provided definitive closure in Penny Dreadful, which had established from its opening episodes that characters can continue to stir the pot long after they have died, whether or not they are reincarnated as new characters, because character itself is a medium of experience, a trope for identity, rather than a kind of experience or identity itself.

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Consider the relations between the uncontrollably proliferating monsters of Penny Dreadful and several other tropes that we typically consider more stable in the context of Grossman’s observation that any adaptation might be considered “monstrous,” that is, isolated from its predecessors because it is born of new concerns, new desires to express ideas in a different medium, with a changed-up narrative reflecting shifting cultural priorities. Because of these altered contexts, adaptations are often born resisting the original desires of their sources. A provoking figure for reanimations of their earlier source texts, “monstrous” describes the shocking violation of original and organically pure matter when adapted or reshaped in new contexts. (2)

For Grossman, adaptations are often monstrous whether or not their casts include actual monsters. Penny Dreadful, of course, is full of actual monsters that threaten to disrupt the characters’ lives and their world. But these monsters might be seen not as scandalously exceptional creatures but as literalizations of the tropes of fluid identity in Victorian classics that are apparently more invested in stability and closure: the protean figure of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (1848), the endless, all-consuming lawsuit of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in Bleak House (1853), the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the River Thames in Our Mutual Friend (1865), and the social gatherings that periodically bring the characters in Middlemarch (1872) into potentially revealing contact with each other, and all those hyperextended moments in Trollope’s novels when the heroines agonize over whether to accept a proposal of marriage that will fix their identities forever. Moving forward from the Victorians, consider the moment early in the single uneventful June day Virginia Woolf chronicles in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) when Clarissa Dalloway observes: “She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on” (11). Do the previsions of Penny Dreadful here indicate Woolf’s debt to shilling shockers like Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) a more general debt High Modernism owes the other Victorians or simply the ubiquity of psychological insights that are both radical and commonplace? Just as the abundance of traditional pleasures of the sumptuous Victorian set pieces like Dorian Gray’s ball suggests that all fiction mixes stabilizing and destabilizing tropes, in

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whatever different proportions, Vanessa’s confrontation with the doll Evelyn Poole has fashioned in her image reminds us not only of the wax museum that looms so large in the first two seasons of Penny Dreadful but of the fact that all its characters who solicit our interest are only audiovisual simulacra of iconic fictional figures, a medium for a horrifying experience the audience never wants to end. Going further, we can see Penny Dreadful itself as a medium whose gleefully boundary-breaking mashup brings together plot lines from nineteenth-­century English novels; memes from dime Western novels and Grand Guignol melodramas; characters from Frankenstein (1818) to Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), with sidelong glances at Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo [Episode 3.2] and the Marquis de Sade’s long-suffering heroine Justine; and twentieth-­ century monster movies from The Exorcist (1973) to An American Werewolf in London (1981). In the process, it reveals unexpected kinships among them by casting a given character like Victor Frankenstein in diverse roles in simultaneously unfolding stories and retrospectively reveals a tradition of the other Victorians which, like “the broken circuit” (1) Richard Chase describes as a defining feature of the classic American novels, challenges and subverts the socially cohesive tradition long associated with the contemporaneous English novelists Scott, Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot, Trollope, and Hardy: a counter-­ tradition whose hallmarks are trauma, monstrosity, isolation, transgression, revolution, and protean, uncontrollable transformation, one that implies a view of adaptation as a liminal conduit or medium quite as potent and suggestive as more traditional views of adaptation that emphasize fidelity, coherence, continuity, and transparency. Imagine how our ways of thinking about the contemporary mediascape and its historical antecedents might change if we thought of adaptation as a medium like the psychic mediums who offer to put grieving relatives and friends in touch with the loved ones they have lost to death. Although these mediums cannot bring the dead back to life, they can provide them further opportunities to speak across what might seem to be an unbridgeable abyss. Adaptation, in this model, can be as seductive, as transgressive, and as treacherous as Madame Kali—that is, as Evelyn Poole—who is a hot medium, like McLuhan’s movies, for the exceptionally vivid, high-­ definition spirits she summons, and a cool medium, like McLuhan’s television, for the active participation those spirits demand from Vanessa Ives.

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So too specific adaptations, and adaptation in general, can be at once hot and cool. Madame Kali is of course far from the only medium available as a model for adaptation. She may be set alongside the mediums Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini became convinced could speak for their own beloved dead, the burlesque figure of Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s 1941 play Blithe Spirit, and the transparently fraudulent mediums in real life or any number of mystery novels who ply their trade by promising something they have no intention of delivering. Just as the medium of adaptation can be figured as a shaman, a psychic, a magician, a scripted performer, a con man, or a mystery, audiences for this medium can think of the texts the medium promises to channel as their loved ones, their estranged ones, ghosts, familiars, or texts they wish or fear to see defamiliarized. And different audiences can adopt an attitude of unquestioning faith, conditional faith, broad skepticism, determination to expose the fraud of adaptation, and eagerness to enjoy a performance that allows their willing suspension of disbelief—or, more generally, of interrogating both the adapting texts and the adapted texts Linda Hutcheon has said are “haunted” (6) by the texts they have adapted. Of the many possible valences mediums suggest for adaptation and its audiences, one area in particular stands out. Seances like the one in Penny Dreadful are highly ritualized performances whose audiences are governed by norms of communal decorum and collective behavior as tightly scripted as that of the medium herself. The requirements that participants in seances sit in a circle, take each other’s hands, and remain silent unless the medium or the spirits she invokes specifically ask a particular member of the circle to speak are ritual requirements to contain the possibility of a radically indecorous, boundary-breaking experience in which hell may literally break loose. It is all the more striking that in fictional seances, the ritual norms designed to subordinate individual reactions that may include skepticism, denial, or boredom to collective behavior invariably have the opposite effect of singling out a single member of the circle for a traumatic visitation. Vanessa’s sudden and terrifying visitation by the spirits Madame Kali has summoned in Penny Dreadful takes its place alongside Madame Arcati’s comically unintentional summoning of the spirit of Charles Considine’s late first wife in Blithe Spirit. The same pattern appears in different terms in the seances in Dorothy Sayers’s Unnatural Death (1925), Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery (1931), Carter Dickson’s The Plague Court Murders (1934), Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear

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(1943), Hake Talbot’s Rim of the Pit (1944), Paul Gallico’s The Hand of Mary Constable (1964), and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens (2006). These mediums are both hot, because they promise to summon spirits who can provide vital but otherwise inaccessible data, and cool, because they end up provoking specific members of their audience to react to those spirits in highly interactive ways. Whatever their tone or their original intent, the fact that seances are tightly scripted communal experiences that invariably overrun their boundaries to become traumatic experiences for individual participants rather than the entire community reminds us that the medium of adaptation is equally tightly scripted and transgressive, individual and collective. There are many other ways that considering adaptation as a medium might change our understanding of adaptation. We might be more inclined to consider adaptation its own thing rather than a relation, a medial rather than an intermedial practice. Or we might invert the argument and use its medial status to further interrogate our assumptions about the ascription of identity to individual texts. In the same way, thinking of adaptation as a medium could change the way we thought about media generally. We might be more inclined to see media as practices rather than resources. We might be more inclined to ascribe agency to media instead of considering them mere affordances. Or we might follow John Durham Peters in looking more broadly at the natural, non-human nature of all adaptation and all media. Mediums like Madame Kali are celebrated for allowing remote presences to speak, a very specific power they share with adaptations. But they also have at least two much less widely remarked powers: they teach their audience how to listen more closely and attentively, and they remind us of the ethical dimensions of creating and interpreting texts. Imagine the possibilities if we thought of adaptation, not only as a new way of allowing dead texts to speak but as an invitation to listen better and to be especially mindful as we did of the ethics of writing and reading.

Works Cited Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Doubleday, 1957. Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed, Routledge, 2013.

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McFarland, Melanie. “How Penny Dreadful’s Surprise Series Finale Betrayed Its Best Character.” Vox, 30 Jun. 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/6/30/ 12053744/penny-­dreadful-­finale-­recap-­vanessa-­ives-­dies. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw– Hill, 1965. Patten, Dominic. “Penny Dreadful Ends after 3 Seasons, Series Creator & Showtime Boss Confirm.” Deadline Hollywood, 20 Jun. 2016, https://deadline.com/2016/06/penny-­d readful-­e nds-­a fter-­t hree-­s easons-eva-­g reenjohn-­logan-­showtime-­david-­nevins-­patti-­smith-­video-­1201775483/. “Penny Dreadful (TV series).” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Penny_Dreadful_(TV_series). Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. U of Chicago P, 2015. Thurman, Trace. “Penny Dreadful Was Meant to End After Three Seasons? I’m Not Buying It.” Bloody Disgusting, 21 Jun. 2016, https://bloody-­disgusting. com/editorials/3395635/penny-­dreadful-­finale-­lies/. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925.

CHAPTER 3

The Adaptive Marketing of Penny Dreadful: Listening to The Dreadfuls Christine Becker

Introduction There is a place where the malformed find grace, where the hideous can be beautiful, where strangeness is not shunned but celebrated.—Vincent Brand [Episode 1.3]

“This place is the theater” completes the above dialogue excerpt, but many fans of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful surely finish it in their heads as, “This place is Penny Dreadful.” These viewers identified strongly with its themes and the characters who embodied them, embracing Penny Dreadful as a transgressive, empowering experience best enjoyed by those who saw themselves as marginalized. They were not, however, marginalized by the marketing department at Showtime, the premium cable channel on which the series aired in the United States for three seasons. In fact, Showtime’s marketing strategies not only catered to this fan identity but were even

C. Becker (*) DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_3

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crafted in response to what the fan community itself generated in online spaces. For instance, the Penny Dreadful fan community originated a nickname for themselves on social media: The Dreadfuls. This moniker was subsequently adopted by Showtime for use in its marketing materials, which included internal guidance about “speaking Dreadful” (Dang). This is an example of what fan studies scholars Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green describe as listening to a fandom rather than merely hearing what the community is saying: “Hearing is the physical act of receiving a message; listening is an active process of waiting for, concentrating on, and responding to a message” (177). The result can potentially erode “perceived divides between production and consumption” (27) and “increase the participating fans’ engagement with the property, allowing them to feel stronger stakes in its potential success” (146). It can also, as it were, supply free fan labor for producers’ aims to market a series to audiences (Jenkins et  al. 174–175). This would be particularly valuable for Showtime, which has long navigated the prestige drama landscape as second fiddle to dominant player HBO, and in the mid-2010s, as streaming services began to alter the cable television landscape and push toward more direct subscriber engagement. By essentially adopting a fan perspective and adapting marketing strategies from and to what was observed in Penny Dreadful’s core fan community on social media, Showtime bolstered the series’ already rich potential for fan engagement and even pioneered tactics that are now common in social media marketing for television. To explicate this argument, this chapter will begin by laying out the television ecosystem in which Showtime operated leading up to Penny Dreadful’s release, as the channel tried to stand out in a crowded and evolving field among premium drama outlets. Next, the chapter will document how Penny Dreadful’s marketing strategies evolved essentially as a feedback loop working in symbiosis with fan response, taking the show’s core themes and marrying them to fan-inspired ideas in order to serve Showtime’s distinctive competitive demands. We will then close with coverage of how these strategies spoke deeply to The Dreadfuls, such that even their complaints about the series, at least up to the series finale, were largely reconciled by their appreciation for the show’s thematic brand, which they had unknowingly helped to foster themselves. These apparent outsiders were actually insiders, and a series that was all about loving something despite its fateful flaws translated into a deepened embrace of

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the show itself, with a behind-the-scenes assist from Showtime’s marketing team.

Showtime’s Inferior Status In his study of the evolution of the Starz cable channel in the U.S., Myles McNutt writes that there are “two primary goals for any premium cable channel brand to consider: creating a sense of distinction from its competitors, and articulating a sense of value for both its consumers and its shareholders” (375). HBO was the undisputed master of this beginning with The Sopranos (1999–2007), building from that base an original series brand oriented around discourses of “quality” well above and beyond the network norm and framing audiences, that is, potential subscribers, as having elite intellectual values and discriminating cultural taste, “elevated above the riffraff that merely consume television” (Santo 20). Showtime struggled to measure up to these same distinctions and had fewer households seeing it as a worthy value. Showtime has long operated in the shadow of HBO in everything from subscriber numbers to cultural buzz. In assessing this rivalry in 2013, freelance writer Aaron Dobbs proposed that Showtime’s shortcomings were borne of a scripted programming strategy in the 1990s that “frequently seemed like a response or reaction to HBO rather than any attempt to create a strong, dynamic identity of its own,” and thus Showtime usually appeared “to be playing catch-up with its bigger, more powerful rival” (“The Oldest”). Dobbs argues that Showtime headed in a stronger direction in the back half of the 2000s thanks to more distinctive series like Dexter (2006–2013), Californication (2007–2014), and Nurse Jackie (2009–2015), which were oriented around adult themes and a sense of play within odd worlds. Dobbs saw additional positive changes in Showtime’s tone and sensibility under the tenure of David Nevins, who took over as entertainment president in 2010. The first show Nevins greenlit was Homeland (2011–2020), which finally would earn the channel’s first-ever Best Drama Emmy in 2012. However, Showtime would still continue to lag behind HBO overall. In the year that Penny Dreadful premiered, Showtime reportedly had 23  million subscribers (Spangler); HBO hovered around 31 million (Andreeva). HBO’s highest-rated episode of the year, Game of Thrones’ (2011–2019) fourth season finale, touted over 7 million viewers; the series finale of Showtime’s most popular show, Dexter, was watched by only 2.8  million (Frail). HBO won 19

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Emmy awards that year; Showtime took home only four (Frail). Showtime could not beat HBO at its own game. Myles McNutt argues that Starz started to shift away from the HBO and Showtime model of “worth based on critical acclaim and Emmy nominations” in 2013 (380), and instead, under the slogan “Obsessable,” it developed a more fan-oriented model, wherein “an economy of affect replaced an economy of prestige, as large crowds at Comic-Con or a strong presence on social media can affirm programming value with or without an Emmy nomination” (381). McNutt frames this strategy as particularly well-suited for the emerging era of direct-to-consumer streaming services, as the value of increased service to fans could increase direct subscriptions. In terms of programming to serve this value, Starz “embraced a collection of populist genre series and reshaped the rules of distinction and value in premium cable” (McNutt 382). Those reshaped rules accordingly reverberated back on HBO, not with the channel abandoning its usual prestige aims but instead additionally embracing fan-­ oriented elements of shows like Game of Thrones (McNutt 382). Starz would actually overtake Showtime as the subscriber runner-up to HBO in 2015 (Andreeva), and one could imagine David Nevins watching the subscriber count climb just as closely as HBO’s leaders did and similarly considering “embracing the affect of fandom as a centerpiece of its brand as opposed to an ancillary audience” (McNutt 382). In a September 2013 interview with IndieWire, Nevins conveyed his desire to find shows with “a slightly different sensibility” featuring “different elements that people can love about them and identify with” (Dobbs, “Why Showtime”). Penny Dreadful was in development at this point, and Nevins cited its distinctive sensibility as “a whole show full of flawed anti-heroes. […] But they’re not anti-heroes as defined most recently by Dexter, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos” (Dobbs, “Why Showtime”). Even before the show’s release, Nevins was trying to position Penny Dreadful as a program for outsiders to connect with. But Showtime would have to undertake this positioning with a fraction of the marketing budget and labor force that competitor HBO had at its disposal. Prior to becoming Showtime’s Director of Social Marketing in 2013, Ashmi Dang worked at 360i, a digital agency HBO contracted with to create social media campaigns for its series, and she describes the marketing differences between the two cable channels bluntly: “HBO has a lot of money. A lot.” In addition to a much larger budget, HBO also had the assistance of an entire agency’s workforce to help formulate their early

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social media strategies, while at Showtime in 2014, the social media team consisted of only two primary members, Dang and community manager Christie Colaprico (Dang). Partly out of necessity, then, this two-person force turned to close analysis of fan behavior on social media and looked within the fandom for ways to further fuel it. In a striking echo of the Jenkins/Ford/Green characterization, Dang says she called this “social listening.” This was not only economically minded, but it turned out to be the ideal strategy for the ideal series.

Speaking Dreadful By 2014, Showtime was, as ever, trying to catch up with HBO but also now staving off a resurgent Starz right as the video-on-demand streaming ecosystem escalated, resulting in a desire for shows that could garner critical acclaim but also foster passionate, committed fanbases. Penny Dreadful’s intermixture of the ancestral penny dreadful concept with the world of literary fiction was ideal for this intertwining set of demands. As Benjamin Poore has argued from a scholarly perspective, Penny Dreadful drew from the defiantly lowbrow connotations of the material its title evokes for outlaw status while utilizing in its premise “elements from folklore, the early-nineteenth-century Gothic novel, late-Victorian ‘modern Gothic’ fiction, and cultural history,” thereby gaining “a rich, broad semantic and historical range in which to operate” overall (66). From the marketing perspective, Ashmi Dang explains how the utility of “the supernatural, the level of suspended disbelief, allowed us to really take our creative to heights then unseen,” while at the same time, they also knew they could appeal to “a really high quality audience […] due to the literary roots of the series.” Showcasing equal parts of prestige and pulp, quality and stigma, the literary and the lurid, and elegance and excess, Penny Dreadful supplied an idiosyncratic alchemy within the saturated high-end drama landscape. Penny Dreadful’s publicity efforts planted the value of this noteworthy amalgamation in the press right at the start of the series. For instance, on the day of the series premiere, a tabloid featured star Timothy Dalton remarking, “It’s a unique take on something—I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s very intelligent and literate yet it’s wrapped in this lurid ‘penny dreadful’ wrapper” (Brooks). Similarly, a Wall Street Journal profile of series creator John Logan previewed that the series would be “very literary, but it’s also designed to make you jump out of your seat” while noting

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that Logan’s background in such ventures as the James Bond series illustrated how he was “interested in giving high-minded ideas pop appeal without dumbing them down” (James). The subtext of these observations is that Penny Dreadful would feature unexpected combinations that would pleasantly surprise those bored by traditional markers of premium channel drama while elevating the tastes of those used to standard genre fare. But beyond planting these seeds in the press and playing to the critics that premium channels like HBO had always courted, Showtime’s social marketers saw value in additionally feeding fan-based appreciation for Penny Dreadful. Ashmi Dang explains that the marketing team knew the literature the series was adapting would allow them to engage right off the bat with an existing fan community. Accordingly, Showtime partnered with Goodreads to launch a digital book club in December 2013, five months before the series would premiere, which encouraged readers “to re-read and discuss the classic literary inspirations for Penny Dreadful online, including Frankenstein [1818], Dracula [1897], and The Picture of Dorian Gray [1891].” The strategic choice of “re-read” here is an indication that they were trying to flatter viewers predisposed to engage with the literary world of the series. The club also featured creator John Logan supplying discussion points “to further engage the series’ new fans” (Showtime), as well as online discussions moderated by members of the Showtime marketing team (Dang), and the enthusiastic response showed Dang and Colaprico that the followers they were attracting “were not just your average TV viewer. They were a little bit more thoughtful and a little bit more exposed to high quality programming and films, so we could tell that this community was special and needed to be treated as such” (Dang). Once Penny Dreadful began airing, the “social listening” ramped up. As Showtime’s then vice president of digital marketing Marcelo Guerra described, his group would look for “what the most passionate corner of the fans were talking about and the language they were using and we’d take that language and amplify it. That was effective, because it had authenticity.” A crucial principle of effective marketing, especially in the online space, is that it doesn’t actually seem like marketing, and it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a corporate brand (Dang). Ashmi Dang says her approach to help ensure that Penny Dreadful’s social media efforts resonated as relatable and authentic “was always to take the point of view of the number one fan with the most inside information and access.” For example, right off the bat she identified a strong contingent of fans connecting with Vanessa Ives, “so we knew we had to turn the volume up on

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content that featured Eva Green,” this despite the fact that the actress herself had no pre-existing social media presence to contribute (Dang). Dang was also the beneficiary of what she characterized as “a social media marketer’s dream” when mere minutes after the first episode ended, a viewer posted a simple illustration of a character who dies in the episode; the fan art had begun. Dang argues that this served much more than just the utility of having fans provide marketing for them; in concert with ratings reports, it also helped her prove to Showtime the wider viability of this social listening strategy: “it really helped me illustrate the value of really thinking about how to engage fans because they could see the correlation between this highly engaged community and how the series was doing on air.” Accordingly, Showtime further fueled these connections in the hiatus between Seasons 1 and 2, with Dang explaining how the fan perspective again drove marketing decisions: “my insight was just because the show is not on air doesn’t mean I stopped being a superfan.” Marcelo Guerra discussed in a 2015 interview how energizing the core fan base in this heightened way occurred with a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con a month after the first season ended (Edelsburg). Traditionally a “geek culture” showcase, Comic-Con increasingly featured mainstream studio films and prestige cable dramas across the 2010s (Woo et  al. 11; Gilbert 359–360), offering a hybrid experience not too dissimilar from Penny Dreadful itself. From the studio perspective, as Annie Gilbert describes, “Media industry presence at SDCC is designed to generate publicity and fan interest, capitalizing on consumer appetites for exclusive content to provide viable direct and indirect returns on financial investment.” From the fan perspective, “Comic-Con attendees enjoy their time at the convention as an opportunity to be among their ‘tribe’ and immerse themselves in geek culture; as one attendee notes, ‘We are all looking for something a little bit bigger; [Comic- Con] allows you to indulge in that’” (Gilbert 366). Guerra’s crew capitalized upon that indulgence as a “bridge strategy” between seasons, seeking to build Penny Dreadful’s prominence not through traditional, HBO-like appeals to critics and Emmy voters but by courting passionate fans across every social media platform: [W]e used Vine and Twitter to create a Tarot card reading experience for fans; we had a 100  Days Of Penny Dreadful campaign using Twitter and Storify; and we curated a recap of season one using Victorian themed graphics on Facebook to refresh fans and prep for the new season premiere. In

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paid media, we executed a character campaign as a launch partner for Instagram’s new carousel ad product. And through partnerships with high profile YouTube content creators, we drove over a million views to Penny Dreadful inspired content. […] This season we’re executing a special Snapchat campaign related to Evelyn Poole’s dolls that will entertain our fans. (Edelsburg)

Showtime also developed fan art campaigns, organized weekly on social media as “Fan Art Friday,” and built a Tumblr featuring a fan art gallery (Dang). In meeting the fans where they were at and feeding them more of what they most strongly responded to, Dang argues her team became experts on the fan community and the show itself. However, in assessing Showtime’s encouragement of fans generating their own creative materials, Benjamin Poore proposes, “Depending on one’s viewpoint […] Penny Dreadful is either a radical opening up of corporate culture to the anarchic jouissance of media fan production, or it is corporate culture’s appropriation and recuperation of those media fans, and their free fan labour for cynical ends” (76). A true Dreadful, though, arguably might hold these clashing viewpoints simultaneously, with fans potentially accepting the consequences of corporate appropriation as part of the imperfections tied to everything the series represented. Perhaps because of those imperfections, Penny Dreadful was never widely popular. However, the perceived flaws of the series may have actually helped to deepen the commitment of its small but devoted viewer base, especially those who saw themselves reflected in the show’s characters and themes. IndieWire critic Allison Keene captured that well with her description of how viewers vicariously watched the series’ flawed characters: “It’s about these broken and shunned characters who find strength in their alliances, and fight the darkness while we earnestly join them.”

The Dreadfuls Speak Back A key through line in Penny Dreadful is empathy for damaged outcasts. Creator John Logan set the stage for this in publicity released as the show launched, telling the Wall Street Journal, “I wrote this show because I’m a gay man. […] Living on that razor’s edge of accepting what people perceived of as monstrous, and rejecting it, is really what the show is about. Of course I learned as I grew up to celebrate the thing that made me what I am. All the characters in the show have to grapple with their own

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versions of that, of ‘Do you want to be “normal”?’” (James). That question is the final line of dialogue in the first season finale, and it appears frequently in fan art for the series (DA-Dreadfuls), illustrating an affective connection to this concept among The Dreadfuls. As Benjamin Poore explains, “The show’s focus on runaways, outlaws, and spiritually lost and displaced characters functions as a valorisation of outsiderdom (be that sexual, intellectual, or social), which again seems tailor-made to appeal to, and to create, dedicated fans” (75). Over and over again in online posts, fans acknowledged the show’s apparent imperfections, such as scattered and convoluted plotting, improbable twists, melodramatic excess, and excessive gore, but conveyed their love for it regardless. Wrote one emblematic Reddit user: “The characters, set pieces, dialogue, soundtrack are all phenomenal but there’s just something missing storywise. … Regardless, it’s still one of the best shows on TV” (SlidyRaccoon). Along these lines, many fans seemed to form a key part of their tribal identity around being able to understand and reconcile Penny Dreadful’s flaws in a way that others could not. Freelance writer Noah Berlatsky reflected back on the series in 2020, calling it “the greatest TV drama ever” while accepting it as “too hybrid a patchwork thing to be celebrated as it should, perhaps.” Other fans called it “definitely not for everyone” (Rav) and “not something I would easily recommend to just anyone” (thefablemuncher). No less than a professor of Victorian literature expressed frustration that others within his discipline failed to appreciate his all-time favorite television show: I was always baffled by the reception that Penny Dreadful got, both from critics and casual viewers. It was repeatedly snubbed by the awards circuit and received the dubious and baffling nomination for “best campy show” from Fangoria. In my own circle of Victorian-fiction academes, it was especially loathed—a fact I found borderline distressing, given how perfectly it wed Victorian Gothic fiction to the prestige drama format. (Dean)

Above all, those defending the honor of Penny Dreadful sound like they’re speaking more to their fellow insiders rather than trying to convince anyone outside of the fandom, who could never possibly understand it anyway. Novelist Christian A. Brown wrote on the Den of Geek website about why he thinks readers should care about his argument that Penny Dreadful is a progressive text:

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Well, you’re on Den of Geek, so, assumedly, you’re a “geek”—a person who enjoys the darker, stranger or more eccentric choices life has to offer. Perhaps you’re a clairvoyant, a werewolf, or destined bride of Satan like Vanessa (or you like to don such costumes at Comic-Con). Whatever. The point is, we are all monsters; those of us who share a penchant for the strange. We should find unity and solidarity in our differences, even if our differences are matters of degrees and taste.

Similarly, Noah Berlatsky appealed for understanding by quoting from the series: “All the broken and shunned creatures. Who’s going to care for them if not us?” Dracula asks Vanessa while disguised as a humble, nerdy museum caretaker. The dread lord of the night is expressing sympathy for people with strange powers and people with sexual desires. He′s siding with gay people and disabled people, and also with vampires cast out of heaven. But he’s also talking about misshapen stories, those that don’t fit into one exhibit or another but skitter from gallery to gallery with clumsy grace. In a way, he’s talking about the show itself.

Through Penny Dreadful, misshapen stories and outcast fans are united together as imperfect and deserving of each other. Given these interdependent imperfections, it’s fitting Penny Dreadful’s series finale [Episode 3.8 and 3.9] left some fans feeling angry and dissatisfied yet still convinced of the show’s eternal greatness. One viewer of the two-hour finale offered a response that could stand in for the series as a whole: “It’s Penny Dreadful, so it’s brilliant. But it’s also a mess” (Fr Jonny Hellzapoppin’). The third season finale’s simultaneous status as a series finale was not officially announced before its airing, leaving many stunned when the show’s most cherished character died and a literal declaration of “The End” appeared on screen. As noted earlier, Showtime’s social media team recognized from the start that Eva Green/Vanessa Ives was the most substantial affective connection many of The Dreadfuls had to the series. Ashmi Dang noticed the strongest responses from fans came after episodes focused on Vanessa’s distressing psychological state, because “fans really felt for her suffering.” It was thus inevitable that viewers would react strongly to Vanessa’s tragic death, leaving the marketing team with the challenge of trying to shape this reaction favorably. How do you feed back to fans what they might not want to hear?

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Dang says the answer was in “again taking the point of view of the number one fan, that they were going to be heartbroken and crushed” and they would need to be taken “through the grieving process.” A number one fan would also, of course, know Penny Dreadful backwards and forwards, so going into Season 3, Showtime’s community manager looked back on the first two seasons and identified telltale moments in previous episodes that pointed toward this inevitable ending. The end result was a marketing campaign titled “It was foretold,” which launched upon the premiere of the final episode (Dang). Showtime submitted this campaign for a Shorty Award, which honors the best social media creations of the year, and described it in their nomination materials as “a multi-platform campaign designed to support the fanbase through the tragic end of Penny Dreadful. Profile creative was turned black (in mourning) and text based graphics featuring quotes from throughout the series were posted to show the end had always been part of the story” (Showtime Networks Inc.). They also conducted a season-long fan art contest that would culminate with a grand prize winner announced on the day of the finale. The winning entry was an exquisitely eerie pen-and-ink illustration of Vanessa ascending to heaven. With the tagline “It was foretold” added, the image was released on limited-edition merchandise available in Showtime’s online store, and it sold out immediately (Dang). Creator John Logan and Showtime president David Nevins also sat for joint post-finale interviews with multiple outlets to convey their insistence that ending the series at three seasons was a storytelling decision Logan had made the year before, a claim that members of the marketing team later confirmed (Guerra, Dang). Nevins told the press he reluctantly but quickly conceded to Logan’s creative decision out of respect for the showrunner’s creative vision, but they decided to keep it quiet before this to prevent spoiling the final season story arc (Goldberg; Ryan; Connolly). Baked into this was the subtext that the series was not canceled over low ratings or economic concerns, even as those pressures surely were a factor, because that might have implied that the love of The Dreadfuls was insufficient to sustain the show. Instead, Nevins explained: John has said three seasons is enough and I think it’s really interesting that we live in this world where every show can have its own rhythm and create its own destiny. This is a case of your creator says this is the best thing for the show and eventually you just say OK, do it, just do it well. […] You

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don’t have to get to 100 episodes to have a lasting impact or to have business financial success. (Goldberg)

In a striking appeal to the fans’ affective attachment to Penny Dreadful, Nevins even conveyed the idea that the series ended relatively early simply because it was odd: “This show has a passionate base of Dreadfuls following it, and we try to make decisions that will respect the audience and respect the people who’ve fallen in love with the show. You can have satisfaction and closure in 27 episodes. 27 is an odd number, and three seasons is an odd number, but that’s what this show wanted to be, so we let it be” (Connolly) (Fig. 3.1). Despite this clever attempt to anthropomorphize the show itself as one of The Dreadfuls, some refused to believe that their beloved Penny Dreadful would treat them this way. Bereft at the death of Vanessa and frustrated by the addition of new serial threads in the final episode that would henceforth go unpursued, many rejected the notion it could have been the intended ending. They insisted it had to be a rash business decision, not a justified creative one, blaming Showtime for pulling the plug and Logan for carrying the channel’s water. One viewer posted, “there’s

Fig. 3.1  Bereft at the death of Vanessa and frustrated by the addition of new serial threads in the final episode that would henceforth go unpursued, many fans rejected the notion it could have been the intended ending [Episode 3.9]

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NO WAY this was always planned as 3 seasons from the start, this is all JL keeping the peace/money considering he’s under contract with Showtime, he’s essentially their puppet, he says what they want him to say, or else he’s out of a job” (JaiMcFerran). Not even the extensive “This is foretold” campaign could convince some, including this Reddit commenter: It’s obvious that the PR machine is in full swing from Showtime right now. They want fans on board with the idea that this show was always meant to end this way, so they don’t look like jerks for cancelling a beloved cult television show. It’s pretty obvious that the only thing that was foretold was network execs at Showtime telling Logan that the show was getting the axe and to bring it to a close asap. (Benjen_Victorious)

It’s apparent that at least some fans clearly saw the foretold clues building across the season given that one was able to produce well before the finale’s airing an elaborate drawing that represented Vanessa’s demise. But Showtime’s official social media channels didn’t take the opportunity to point this out. One aggrieved fan claimed that the show’s Facebook moderator was only replying “to the nicer, supportive comments” and not to unhappy viewers (SPARKIE529). At this point, there was really no more listening to do.

Conclusion When asked his thoughts about negative reactions to the series finale, digital marketing executive Marcelo Guerra responded that it’s impossible for a creative team to know what is a satisfying ending and what isn’t in television because some faction of the audience is always going to come away disappointed and social media will distort the scale of that response: “When you have something like Twitter now, the voices get amplified, and they amplify each other, and so many opinions can just snowball. You don’t know what’s going to take hold” (Guerra). Indeed, Guerra, Ashmi Dang, and the rest of the small Showtime marketing team could listen to the Penny Dreadful fandom and adapt what they expected would most resonate within that community, but there’s no guarantee the loop would always close in the way they envisioned. In this regard, it’s important to return to the words of fan studies scholars Jenkins, Ford, and Green when they note that “companies do not ‘create’ brand communities. Rather, they ‘court’ existing communities whose broad interests predispose them

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toward the kinds of conversations the company seeks to facilitate” (Jenkins et  al. 164). That so many of the fan conversations Showtime helped to facilitate around Penny Dreadful actually were right in line with the heart of the series’ themes is a testament to the richness of the connections fostered between show, creators, fans, marketers, and platforms, particularly in a time of relative infancy for such social media engagement. Perhaps most appropriately, then, some Dreadfuls turned their disappointment in Penny Dreadful’s ending into poetic readings of the series’ final betrayal. One Redditor offered, “true to its genre, only tragedy awaited Penny Dreadful in the end, it’s [sic] fans doomed to be tormented by a longing unfulfilled” (thefablemuncher). Another devoted fan wrote, “no one take can it away from the fans … forever more we shall be the outcasts[,] the night creatures … those that have been shunned by the world …” (Leon de clerk). In this light, even John Logan would likely take heart in the negative comments given his own statement about what he hoped viewers ultimately took away from the series: “Love your demons, they’re who you are. If there’s anything about these characters that I loved, it’s that they’re all flawed. The more they embrace who they are, the more peace they achieve” (Goldberg).

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Showtime Networks Inc. “From the 9th Annual Shorty Awards: Penny Dreadful Art of the Dreadful Gallery / It Was Foretold Campaign.” Shorty Awards, h t t p s : / / s h o r t y a w a r d s . c o m / 9 t h / p e n n y -­d r e a d f u l -­s e r i e s -­f i n a l e ­fan-­art-­campaign. SlidyRaccoon. Comment on “No More Excuses: Eva Green & Penny Dreadful Need Emmys, Now.” Reddit, 20 May, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/ PennyDreadful/comments/4jz5c1/comment/d3cpkm6/. Spangler, Todd. “As Netflix Rises, Subscriptions to HBO, Showtime and Other Premium Nets Shrink as Percentage of U.S.  Households: Report.” Variety, 20 Jan. 2014, https://variety.com/2014/digital/news/ as-­netflix-­rises-­more-­people-­are-­canceling-­hbo-­and-­showtime-­1201065399. SPARKIE529. “Comment on ‘It was foretold…’” Reddit, 21 Jun. 2016, https:// www.reddit.com/r/PennyDreadful/comments/4p7ow7/it_was_foretold/d4ljvig. thefablemuncher. Comment on “How is Penny Dreadful?” Reddit, 23 January 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/424u37/comment/cz8y6q6. Woo, Benjamin, Brian Johnson, Bart Beaty, and Miranda Campbell. “Theorizing Comic Cons.” Journal of Fandom Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2020, pp. 9–31.

CHAPTER 4

Penny Dreadful and Frankensteinian Collection: Museums, Anthologies, and Other Monstrous Media from Shelley to Showtime Mike Goode

Part I: Penny Dreadful Collections The many archives, museums, and collections that make appearances in Penny Dreadful serve several narrative functions. The more recognizable, public repositories like the British Museum and Natural History Museum help ground the series’ supernatural storylines in a verifiable historical time and place, late-Victorian Britain, when amassing, taxonomizing, and displaying collections had become a governmental obsession (Bennett 17–58). Over 200 of Britain’s grand public museums and libraries were founded after the passage of the Museums and Public Libraries Acts in 1850, including the Natural History Museum (Freeman 242–3). Indeed, the contents of these public collections occasionally get marshalled in

M. Goode (*) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_4

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Penny Dreadful to convince characters that what might seem unbelievable is all too real or that what might seem innocuous is actually a hidden threat whose existence has been known throughout the centuries by select individuals or cultures. Privately curated archives and collections in Penny Dreadful can work similarly, though they serve the additional narrative function of revealing character. Sometimes they do so by operating as superficial emblems, such as the explorer Sir Malcolm Murray’s ever-visible backdrop of maps and piles of travel books; sometimes they do so more symbolically, such as Dorian Gray’s collection of portrait paintings. In the clever shot that first gives us a glimpse of Gray’s salon-hung portrait gallery, the back of his head and torso is framed so perfectly by one of his paintings that its sitter is entirely obscured (see Fig.  4.1). The image telegraphs Gray’s serial behavior of collecting people—of imposing himself onto the wills of others as he gratifies his mercurial, sensual, and aesthetic curiosity—at the same time that it winkingly indicates the medium which is secretly recording his behavior’s toll. In keeping with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the source text for Gray, the sole material register in Penny Dreadful of Gray’s decadent and dissolute life turns out to be the changing face in a painted portrait of himself that he keeps carefully hidden from view.

Fig. 4.1  Dorian Gray’s portrait gallery [Episode 1.2]

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But if archives, museums, and collections can help Penny Dreadful flesh out the late-Victorian world it depicts, encouraging viewers to suspend their disbelief, their onscreen presence can also interrupt viewers’ immersive experience by making the series itself recognizable as a kind of exhibition of a curated collection. Penny Dreadful repeatedly collects into one televisual display case characters and storylines selected not just from The Picture of Dorian Gray but also, of course, from several other nineteenth-­ century British novels, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Viewed with this in mind, the image of Gray observing and admiring—yet blocking our full view of—his portrait gallery can be read as not just an emblem of his character but also an acknowledgement of the series’ metaphorical overlap with his project of collecting figures who interest him and imposing his ideas, tastes, and pleasures on them. In Season 2, through the character of an unscrupulous wax museum operator, Oscar Putney, Penny Dreadful invites still more direct critical reflection on its relationship to its source material by marking the series’ cultural and medial descent from some decidedly more problematic kinds of Victorian exhibited collections. Putney hopes his waxworks will someday compete with Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, the popular if tasteless real-life gallery that by the late nineteenth century was “regularly updated […] with new wax figures whose models were infamous for particular criminal atrocities” (Huet 197). He enters the series just as he is putting the finishing touches on the newest addition to his own collection of tableaus, a wax recreation of a fictional murder scene from the final episode of Season 1 of Penny Dreadful [Episode 2.1]. Within weeks, he expands his collection of bloody crime scenes to include a new gallery that displays a caged living “monster,” Victor Frankenstein’s resurrected Creature, whom Putney has tricked into captivity after first employing him to work at the museum [Episode 2.6]. The point of this brief narrative episode may be to perform Penny Dreadful’s moral and medial superiority to Victorian wax museums and dehumanizing freak shows. After all, the series’ portrayal of Victor Frankenstein’s Creature is sympathetic and deeply humanizing, whereas Putney’s character and museum become increasingly irredeemable. But Penny Dreadful also invites us to reflect on how it, too, like Putney’s Family Waxworks, traffics in gory reanimations of Victorian scenes and makes an entertaining spectacle of a collection of appropriated nineteenth-century monsters, including Frankenstein’s.

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I do not mean to suggest that, through Gray’s portrait gallery and Putney’s Family Waxworks, Penny Dreadful delivers negative final judgment on itself as an adaptation or entertainment. The arc of the series neither coerces viewers to regard it as a debased cultural form nor to consider its appropriations of characters from classic literature as unfair use. My point, a more general one, is that the series is usually being self-­ reflexive about its creative and medial project in the many moments when Victorian collections and archives are given extended screen time. At Penny Dreadful’s narrative heart is a collection culled from within a broader nineteenth-century archive—a selection of recognizable characters and character types taken from iconic novels—and the show’s creative premise is a kind of curatorial arranging, building out, and recontextualizing of this collection, to show how each of its parts makes sense with the others. The same Victorian collections that Penny Dreadful uses to help bring us into its Victorian world also tend to make visible how the series itself uses and inhabits its medium.1 Scholars of adaptation often offer metaphors for what certain media adaptations do with their source materials. In Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Kamilla Elliott proposes a general taxonomy of these metaphors (ventriloquism, psychic transformation, genetic descent, incarnation, trumping) (137–183), and in Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, Thomas Leitch traces how our sense of the spectrum of possible relations between texts, from adaptation to allusion, relies on a still more expansive set of metaphors (celebration, adjustment, imitation, revision, and so forth) (93–126). Penny Dreadful develops its own metaphor for adaptation, one specific to its project of adapting multiple works at once— namely, the curated recombination of a collection gathered from a broader, historically situated archive. Gray’s portrait gallery and Putney’s Family Waxworks are never offered to viewers as perfect analogues for Penny Dreadful as an adaptation, any more than is, say, the witch Evelyn Poole’s collection of homemade voodoo dolls, which includes dolls representing some of the other characters in the show (and thereby introduces the idea of an adaptation as something that can improperly possess and ventriloquize its source materials). But as these imperfect analogues pile up over the course of the series, they reinforce the general analogy between the series and curated collections, and thus they feel more like a sequence of challenges designed to test what exactly the series is doing with, or what it is creating out of, its collection culled from the broader archive of nineteenth-­ century British cultural production. Is Penny Dreadful to

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Bram Stoker’s characters what Evelyn Poole is to her voodoo dolls? Is Penny Dreadful’s mode of engaging with The Picture of Dorian Gray akin to how Penny Dreadful’s Dorian Gray relates to the paintings he collects and hangs on his wall?

Part II: Canons and Characters Penny Dreadful may encourage us to contemplate its project of adapting nineteenth-century British literature through its many depictions of collecting, curating, and conserving nonliterary objects in nineteenth-­century Britain. But as a project engaged specifically in adaptation of literary sources, it is also medially embedded in a more specific cultural history of collecting, curating, and conserving—namely, canonization. The authorized companion volume to Penny Dreadful explains that the series’ creator, John Logan, first conceived the idea for the show as he was rereading what he refers to as “‘the canon’ of early horror texts—specifically, Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Gosling 62), a body of works that Logan elsewhere recounts he came to “from reading a lot of [R]omantic poetry” (Watercutter). While it is unclear whether Logan uses the term “canon” in its old qualitative sense (i.e., “the best” early horror texts) or merely to designate texts that have proven culturally enduring (i.e., “the most well-known” early horror texts), the implication either way is that, as an adaptation, Penny Dreadful was conceived early on as a curated selection from and reorganization of an already selective, widely remembered, subset of texts drawn from within the broader archive of nineteenth-century British writing. Students of media history will be aware that stage and screen adaptations have long been vehicles of literary canonization, perpetuating the cultural memory and influence of older texts even as they overwrite them (Dobson 5; Hutcheon 176; Leitch 12–13; Sanders 11–12; Szwydky 63–96). William St. Clair has documented, for example, that Frankenstein was most widely known as a play for the first decade of its existence: only 500 copies of the novel were in print before the first of its many successful loose stage adaptations led Shelley to have it republished in 1823 (360–361). The novel’s prominence was more firmly secured after that, in 1831, when the publisher Richard Bentley chose it, “again as a result of the interest caused by stage versions,” for inclusion in Bentley’s Standard Novels, a series of cheap new editions of earlier out-of-print novels whose tail-end copyrights he had purchased (St. Clair 361). Bentley’s decision,

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akin to when a publisher today re-releases an older novel in conjunction with a new film adaptation of it, ultimately kept Frankenstein in print for two decades alongside what were then more famous novels by Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Jane Austen, among others. Frankenstein’s inclusion among this august company, along with new stage adaptations and revivals of the novel (and of course, eventually, screen versions too), was essential to creating the interest the novel sparked among academics in the late twentieth century, and also for helping it achieve the cultural status wherein someone in the early twenty-first century might consider it part of some kind of “canon” of Gothic horror (Forry 3–100; Hitchcock 279–286).2 The contents of this canon, however subjectively understood, are a subset of texts that, in each case, have benefited from over a century of myriad collaborations across theatrical and print media, collaborations that now include Penny Dreadful itself. Indeed, the series’ success led Titan Books in 2014 to create and market “The Penny Dreadful Collection,” a set of reprints of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Picture of Dorian Gray targeted at the show’s fans. Canons are transmedial creations. That the contents of “The Penny Dreadful Collection” include not one “penny dreadful,” the pulpy serial-horror and adventure fictions targeted at lower-income Victorian readers, points up the irony of entitling the series Penny Dreadful given its canonical source material. Penny Dreadful concedes this disconnect between its title and archive when it briefly introduces into the story Dracula’s vampire-hunting scientist Abraham Van Helsing [Episode 1.6]. Meeting with Victor Frankenstein in a bookshop (yet another kind of archive and curated collection), Van Helsing pulls from a neglected shelf a serial installment of an actual “penny dreadful,” Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1845–1847). He proceeds to advise Victor that its overlooked contents, known only to “a small percentage of the reading public with a taste for a certain kind of literature,” will afford more insight than science can into the kind of powerful threat that Victor faces. This brief introduction into the series of a real “penny dreadful” barely provides more than a glimpse at its contents, however, before again relegating it to the unread corners of the archive. Not only does Van Helsing reinforce Varney’s critical marginalization by conceding that “as literature it is uninspiring,” but the entire bookstore sequence involving these two highly canonical nineteenth-century horror characters is bookended by performances of how memorable they find certain bits and pieces of well-known poetry. The visit to the store comes just on the

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heels of Victor telling Van Helsing that, “There is a line from [Percy] Shelley that haunts me, a single line from Adonais. I cannot get it out of my head: ‘No more let life divide what death can join together.’” The visit ends with Van Helsing quoting, as a caution to Victor, “Denn die Todten reiten schnell,” or “For the dead travel fast,” a line from Gustave August Burger’s “Lenore” (1773), a Gothic poem so influential in Britain that it prompted five different English translations in 1796 alone (Gamer n241). The quotation and its recitation also happen to be canonical in a way more directly relevant to Penny Dreadful, for this is the exact line that Stoker’s character Jonathan Harker overhears in Transylvania at the start of Dracula but fails to recognize in time as a warning that a vampire is near (Stoker 10). Penny Dreadful’s bookstore sequence ultimately does less, then, to expand the range of the series’ canonical nineteenth-century source materials to include critically marginalized texts than to model for viewers how virally circulating excerpts from literature constitutes another vehicle of canonization, one medially distinct from theatrical adaptations and from publishing and reprinting. The series leans into this mode of canonizing heavily, for the sequence between Van Helsing and Victor is but one of more than a dozen incidents when characters rely on attributed quotations from well-known Romantic and early-Victorian poems to deliver wisdom, counsel, sympathy, inspiration, or warning. A shortlist of some of these pregnant moments includes the following: Vanessa Ives observes that Victor carries around a copy of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), and then the two recite together Wordsworth’s lamentation of “what man has made of man” from Lyrical Ballads’s “Lines Written in Early Spring” [Episode 1.2]; when a demonic, dreamed version of Sir Malcolm Murray tries to seduce Vanessa into joining him in death by asking her if she “knows Keats” and then quoting four lines from John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) about the seductiveness of “easeful death,” lines he says “have always struck a chord” with him [Episode 1.5]; when Frankenstein’s Creature shares the opening four lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” (ca. 1803) with Vanessa in an underground soup kitchen to convey his profound sense of the world’s “sacred mysteries” [Episode 2.2]; when Ferdinand Lyle recites the oft-repeated closing lines of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842) to Vanessa to encourage her “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” as she suffers through a debilitating bout of depression [Episode 3.1]; and when, as voiceover for the series’ final scene, the Creature delivers several lines from Wordsworth’s

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“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807). The lines mourn one’s sense of loss when the visionary wonder of youth gives way to maturity, a sentiment applicable to several of the series’ characters but, in context, an affect also projected onto viewers who might be lamenting the completion of the series: “The things which I have seen I now can see no more!” [Episode 3.9]. Penny Dreadful’s reverential quoting from canonical Romantic poetry and its appropriations of characters from canonical nineteenth-century novels ultimately seem less about making a political case for what might be worth collecting or conserving, however, than about exploring how the analogies the series draws between adapting, curating, and collecting might be extended to encompass being. Though the series posits a universe in which individuals may imagine they are fated to play particular parts, it also suggests that a person’s character depends crucially on how their mind archives, curates, and transforms memories from within their broader bank of experiences, experiences which include the texts that the person knows and remembers and that, sometimes, haunt them. To put the argument slightly differently, Penny Dreadful fosters an analogy between individual being and canonizing, since one’s sense of self emerges from adapting and recombining selected bits of knowledge and texts that, for whatever reason, have managed to collect in, endure in, and leap to mind from the broader archives of one’s memory. The series most clearly explores this analogy through Victor Frankenstein’s Creature. Like so many in Penny Dreadful’s cast, the Creature spends considerable time learning who he is by grappling with retrieved memories. But more pronouncedly than other characters, how he remembers—indeed, how he thinks and perceives—gets filtered through the poems he has read. At times this is explicit and acknowledged, such as the aforementioned “Auguries of Innocence” moment or when he recalls to Victor that being brought to life “was not a triumph over mortality, the lyrical Adonais of whom Shelley wrote” [Episode 1.3]. At other times, it slides into his rhetoric more subtly, such as when we watch his memory of being beaten and then crying on the street at night in London while still a kind of naïve child. His voiceover to this memory, “London, cruel as the harlot’s curse,” converts what we are watching into a multimedia remix of three lines from Blake’s “London” (1794): “But most thro’ midnight streets I hear/ How the youthful Harlot’s curse/ Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear” (Erdman 27) [Episode 1.3]. Early on, the series explains why Frankenstein’s Creature might experience and remember

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through poetry, or at least why he might so often fall into quoting it. As the creature narrates to Victor, he learned language through reading poetry: “Eventually, I learned words,” he says, “Your beloved volumes of poetry were my primers,” a voiceover accompanied by an image of him stretched out reading among an array of open books, as if they are his component parts almost as much as his limbs (see Fig. 4.2) [Episode 1.3]. By the time Penny Dreadful has the unnamed Creature, who has been nicknamed Caliban by his theater mentor Victor Brand, decide to assume the name John Clare, after the late Romantic peasant-poet [Episode 2.1], it is thus carrying to its logical extreme the already-present suggestion that people are adaptations of what they read. The series later reinforces this idea by having the Creature-Clare recite a portion of the poet Clare’s lyric “I am” (1844) to Vanessa (“I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;/ My friends forsake me like a memory lost:/ I am the self-consumer of my woes”) [Episode 2.5]. Clare could not be a more apt choice of poets through which to develop the idea that what we read ultimately composes who we are, even as we adapt it to ourselves. While in his mid-forties, Clare became psychologically unmoored, spending years in an asylum, during which time he began to believe that he was someone else. Sometimes this someone else was Shakespeare, but more consistently and enduringly, it was the poet Lord Byron, under whose borrowed titles he

Fig. 4.2  The Creature reading books of poetry [Episode 1.3]

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wrote original poems and signed them as Byron (Russett 137–154). In Frankenstein’s Creature, Penny Dreadful gives us a tortured soul who calls himself John Clare and to some extent becomes Clare’s feelings and words as he makes them his own by memorizing and performing them.

Part III: Frankenstein and the Anthology Characters from Frankenstein initially might not seem like they belong in Penny Dreadful’s collection. Though unquestionably part of the British horror canon, Shelley’s novel was first published three quarters of a century before The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula. It takes place still earlier, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, as well as primarily outside the British Isles. Frankenstein’s central characters, none of whom are British, therefore can feel out of place when encountered in the late-Victorian London universe that Penny Dreadful creates primarily out of the other three novels. Certainly, Victor’s and his Creature’s repeated references to Romantic poetry only add to the general impression that they lack contemporaneity with the late Victorians and that their cultural tastes are residual, more consonant with an earlier time. But to recognize Frankenstein’s Creature as Penny Dreadful’s chief vehicle for the idea that individuals are composed, in part, of the texts they remember and adapt to their circumstances is also to understand why this Creature needs to be in this particular canonical collection, for the idea itself is adapted from Shelley’s novel. Just as in Penny Dreadful, Victor and his Creature in Frankenstein share a penchant for frequently quoting and alluding to poetry to explain their thoughts, feelings, and senses of ethics (more on this in a moment). More generally, Frankenstein represents both characters’ lives as the products, to no small degree, of their reading. Victor attributes his intellectual movement beyond conventional science to devouring portions of a discredited natural philosophy text by Cornelius Agrippa that he first “chanced” (Shelley 21) upon in an inn where he was taking shelter from the rain. According to his own testimony, he regards his different kind of science as the result of following a different kind of syllabus, for he contends that it was from this arcane mystical alchemy text that he “received the fatal impulse that led to [his] ruin” (Shelley 22), since it led him to reading works by other mystics and alchemists. That the existence of Victor’s Creature is created in turn from these readings is an association Frankenstein fosters by figuring the textual catalyst for Victor’s

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thinking in electrical language that anticipates the process whereby he brings his thinking to life: just as the readings transmitted a “fatal impulse” to him, he will later “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing” that is his Creature (Shelley 37). The mind of the Creature is composed of remembered readings too. Frankenstein devotes considerable attention to the Creature’s initial acquisition of language and understanding. He learns at first by secretly following along with a young Turkish noblewoman whose French suitor is teaching her French by having her work through passages sampled from Volney’s Ruins of Empires (1791), a catalog of the political and moral failings of different cultures that amounts to a radical critique of all religions and forms of government. Subsequently, he discovers a leather satchel containing French translations of “Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter,” books that he naively approaches as “histories” (Shelley 96). Characterizing these early reading experiences as among the “events that impressed me with feelings which, from what I was, have made me what I am” (Shelley 86), the Creature narrates how he took what he found in these books and “applied much personally to my own feelings and condition” (Shelley 97). Whereas Plutarch taught him “to admire and love the heroes of past ages” (Shelley 97), he “learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom” (Shelley 97) and projected himself into the different characters in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) to determine which offered the most fit “emblem of [his] condition” (Shelley 98). No wonder that by the time the Creature narrates all of this, he has become melancholic, regards human cultures and governments pessimistically, and repeatedly quotes Paradise Lost to explain his view of his creator’s responsibilities towards him. The clear suggestion is that education shapes experience—that we become adaptations of what we read. Given that Victor and his Creature both lead flawed lives, their misfortunes read in part as a critique of their reading. The thrust of this critique, however, is directed primarily at the randomness of, and lack of supervision over, their reading choices. The first book of science Victor chances upon, in an inn he just happens to enter because the weather changes, leads him to others like it, and this too only because his father was distracted by something else at the time and therefore “looked carelessly at the title-page” and did not dismiss it forcefully enough (Shelley 22). Had his father done so, Victor relates, “I should probably have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry” and “never have received” the

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aforementioned “fatal impulse that led to my ruin” (Shelley 22). The Creature’s first encounter with a book, Volney’s Ruins, itself an idiosyncratic educational starting point, involves skipping around in it, as opposed to reading it cover to cover. The leather satchel he subsequently finds, a further random inflection point, also contains not all of Plutarch’s multivolume Lives but just “a volume.” Who can read Frankenstein without wondering just how differently Victor’s and his Creature’s lives might have unfolded—what different beings they might have become—had Victor instead chosen a book of sermons at the inn, or had his father not been distracted, or had it not been raining? Or had the satchel the Creature found contained, say, one of Shakespeare’s comedies, Robinson Crusoe, and some French erotica? The events of Shelley’s novel are haunted by the texts that never reach its characters’ hands. When Shelley first published Frankenstein, cultural concerns over non-­ systematic programs of reading, and especially over reading just pieces of books, often targeted anthologies, volumes that selected and republished extracts (Price 1, 75–76). Anthologies could be compiled from a variety of genres and for a variety of purposes, from cultivating moral and intellectual improvement to educating wit and taste, a range reflected in their titles (e.g., The Beauties of English Poesy [1767], Elegant Extracts [1807], The Poetical Monitor: Consisting of Pieces, Select and Original, for the Improvement of the Young in Virtue and Piety [1796]). For anthologies’ detractors, however, the problem was that, in practice, the form could hinder individual development by fostering hackneyed ideas while also failing to promote sustained and contextualizing reading practices. The first chapter of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1816), for example, offers a tongue-in-cheek takedown of its heroine Catherine Morland’s early education for having left her only with a stock of “those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of [heroines’] eventful lives” (40). It proceeds to quote a whole series of Catherine’s “learnt” extracts that mean little in themselves and at times offer contradictory wisdom. Anthology editors’ practices of collecting extracts with a specific purpose in mind also gave extracts a reputation for lacking a different kind of systematicity insofar as the effect was sometimes to multiply different potential connotations of the same passage across anthologies and readers (Benedict 7–12). Anthologies exploited the generic malleability of texts when taken out of context, such that a passage collected as a “witticism” or “epigram” in one anthology might take on a different life if it showed up in another that was devoted to cultivating virtue. Presumably

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it did not help anthologies’ reputation for lacking integrity and systematicity that the form had developed in part out of the practice of an earlier generation of booksellers trying to shed excess inventory of unbound printed essays, poems, and pamphlets—literally, wasted print—by stitching together multiple recent unsold titles or pieces of titles into single miscellaneous volumes and then selling them under generic classifications like “Bundles of Sticht Pamphlets,” “Sticht Books,” or “miscellanies” (Smyth). By the time Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818, anthologies could attract the degree of concern they did because they dominated the literary marketplace. In 1817, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge grumbled that “a shelf or two of Beauties, elegant Extracts,” and literary reviews seemed to comprise “nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public” (I.3.49). Though an exaggerated estimate, the comment smacks of authorial resentment at the profit and fame that often accrued to anthology editors and reviewers through works written by others. Not long after lampooning the extract-oriented education of her heroine in Northanger Abbey, Austen gives this resentment a gendered edge: whereas female novelists who produce original stories tend to get criticized, she complains, “the abilities of […] the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from The Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens” (59). In fact, the influence of anthologies had become significant enough by the end of the eighteenth century that, as Leah Price has demonstrated, it was starting to impact the form of novels (90–104). Many of the same elements of Romantic British novels that readers today can find dull—complete texts of poems written by sentimental heroines, extended philosophical reflections, sustained descriptions of landscapes, and prolonged speeches offering moral counsel—reflect the market for potentially extractable passages. Novelists wrote not just knowing that any successful novel might be quickly adapted for the stage (as many were), but also keeping in mind the cultural taste for extracts and quotations. Frankenstein itself exhibits this formal tendency. In addition to including the kinds of sustained descriptions of landscapes and philosophical reveries just alluded to, it contributes through the proxies of Victor and his Creature to the practices of extracting and recirculating poems. The Creature twice quotes portions of Percy Shelley’s “Mutability” (1816), Victor quotes eight lines of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (1798), and both quote snippets from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

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(1798) and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Mary Shelley republished “Mutability” in its entirety in 1824 when she edited a collection of her recently drowned husband’s poetry titled Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, an enterprise that Susan Wolfson and Julian North have argued she regarded as a process of Frankensteinian reanimation (Wolfson 48–50; North 756–757). Moreover, she did so while also reading proofs for William Hazlitt’s anthology Select British Poets, or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time (1824). Hazlitt’s anthology claims “select” or canonical status, for several contemporary poets—Percy Shelley among them—by republishing their poems in the same collection with what Hazlitt calls the “Illustrious Dead,” including Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope (Gates 168–169). His anthology included “Tintern Abbey” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” as well as selections from Paradise Lost (Hazlitt 100–134, 619–625, 651–652). Frankenstein affords a kind of preview of the canonizing practices Mary Shelley would engage in more directly a few years later by working on anthologies after her husband died. Hazlitt’s Select British Poets immediately ran into legal difficulties because a recent change to copyright law affected its section called “Living Poets,” which comprised nearly a third of the volume. In 1814, a new law had doubled copyright ownership from 14 to 28 years or, alternatively, for the remainder of the author’s lifetime, whichever was longer, suddenly making publishers more fiercely protective of valuable copyrighted material by older living writers, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott (Li et al. 7–8; Deazley 839–841). Though Percy Shelley was already deceased by 1824, Hazlitt excised his poems along with the rest of the “Living Poets” section when he chose to suspend publication of Select British Poets and instead print it in truncated form as Select Poets of Great Britain (1825), a volume that he ended with Robert Burns, who had died 30 years earlier (Robinson 223). One notable effect for publishing history of this otherwise minor legal episode is that, for 18 years after 1824, at which time copyright law changed again, bound anthologies quite literally stitched together only bits and pieces of corpuses whose authors were already dead. This development occurred, too, in a cultural context in which it was commonplace for writers to figure libraries as sepulchers, old books as corpses, and British literary tradition as invested “with the animating power to bring Britain to life and to imaginary community” (Lynch 39). Mary Shelley would have known these metaphors well from her deep familiarity with several of the writers included in the excised “Living Poets” section

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that she had read in proofs. George Crabbe’s The Library (1781), for example, refers to books as “the lasting mansions of the dead” and to libraries as “tombs” that hold “all that live no more” (Crabbe II: 33, 35), while Robert Southey’s lyric “My Days Among the Dead are Passed” (1828) speaks of books as at once “the Dead” and his “never-failing friends” (347). If ever a moment was suited for a media form to be considered Frankensteinian, it was the literary anthology after 1824.

Part IV: Penny Dreadful as Frankensteinian Collection All of this is suggestive context for reinterpreting Mary Shelley’s famous reference to Frankenstein as her “hideous progeny” (191) in the 1831 Introduction she wrote for the revised edition of her novel for Bentley’s Standard Novels. One robust tradition of interpreting Shelley’s phrase is that it refers to her novel’s afterlife. Frankenstein, a novel about a Creature that assumes a life apart from its creator, would have seemed Frankensteinian to Shelley by 1831 given the popularity of its loose stage adaptations. Hideous Progenies (1990), the title of Steven Earl Forry’s landmark study and anthology of early Frankenstein dramatizations, bills the novel’s stage and screen adaptations as its “hideous progenies,” and at least one scholarly commentator has asked us to consider Penny Dreadful itself as a “hideous progeny” (Heholt 188). An adjacent reading proposes that Shelley’s phrase acknowledges that adaptations of Frankenstein across media simply continue a creative process she had already started, since Frankenstein’s subtitle announces itself as an adaptation of the Prometheus myth and its epigraph, excerpted from Paradise Lost, encourages reading the novel as a reworking, too, of Milton’s poetic reinterpretation of the Christian creation myth. The idea of Frankenstein as already an adaptation fuels the proposition, developed forcefully by Julie Grossman in Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny, that in “hideous progeny” we find an apt metaphor for adaptation in general, considered as a process simultaneously of appropriating and sampling old material and creatively renewing it (9–10). Certainly, film adaptations since James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) have often used the sequence in which Victor resurrects his Creature as an occasion to associate film with Frankensteinian creation, the spectacular infusion of life into the Creature (“It’s Alive!”) serving as both example of and metaphor for how the industrial light and magic of film reanimates otherwise “lifeless matter” (Heffernan 139–140).

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Another received interpretation of Shelley’s “hideous progeny” is that the phrase applies more directly to the book, that “the monster created in Frankenstein is a likeness of the novel itself” (Cottom 60). According to the standard version of this reading, Shelley is reworking the timeworn authorial practice of referring to one’s creations as one’s children by figuring her novel as a kind of Frankensteinian birth out of parts (Bronfen 28–29). After all, readers of the novel will recall that the novel is a kind of composite corpus, a bound collection of letters and voices (the explorer Walton’s letters to his sister include a transcript of Victor’s oral history of his life, which in turn includes a transcript of his Creature’s oral history of his life). Evidence to support this reading can be found in other parts of the 1831 Introduction, such as when Shelley refers to the Introduction itself as a new “appendage” to the novel (186), portrays her new revisions to the novel as stitchwork (“I have mended the language” [191]), calls the novel “the offspring of happy days” (191), and confides that she now associates certain sections of the novel with her dead husband, “one who, in this world, I shall never see more” (191). I would add that further evidence can be found in Frankenstein’s formal overlap with the anthology, in conjunction with the novel’s thematic emphasis on the Creature being composed of excerpts. Given anthologies’ association by 1831 with infusing posthumous life into stitched-together bits and pieces collected from dead corpuses, it had become more possible than ever before to imagine the novel metaphorically as its own creature. Readers need not choose among these readings, since they are not mutually exclusive. I offer them to make additional sense of what Frankenstein’s Creature may be doing in the Penny Dreadful collection and of what Penny Dreadful does with Frankenstein’s Creature. In a different publication, I develop the theory that sometimes specific new media seem to gravitate so easily to a particular text because they are responding to medial potentials already present in it, signature ways that the text inhabits media and expresses its fascination and frustration with mediation (Goode 1–32). By representing Frankenstein’s Creature as a kind of walking and talking anthology of canonical early-nineteenth-century British verse, Penny Dreadful taps into a kind of collection, the anthology, that was always medially lurking within Mary Shelley’s novel. In other words, the series’ portrayal of the Creature’s penchant for reciting famous excerpts actualizes a medial potential of the novel, the same potential that I have just suggested helped underwrite Shelley’s very ability to imagine Frankenstein metaphorically as its own creature, its “hideous progeny.”

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At the same time, Penny Dreadful also reinvents the critical and filmic tradition of seeing in Frankenstein a metaphor for adaptation by portraying Shelley’s Creature in this manner in the context of a television series in which curated collections function self-reflexively, as occasions for considering the series’ own status as an adaptation of a collection. Penny Dreadful may include Shelley’s Creature to help deliver its thematic point that we are what we read. But as a being whose mind is composed of bits of canonical texts, the Creature himself is another curated collection—like Gray’s gallery of portraits, Putney’s collection of wax tableaus, and Evelyn Poole’s collection of voodoo dolls—through which Penny Dreadful invites viewers to contemplate the nature of its own creative project. Is the series Frankensteinian? Does it bear the same relation to its component canonical pieces as Victor does to his Creature or his Creature does to the poems he recites? More than the other curators and collectors in the series, the Creature has a human heart (in direct contrast to Evelyn Poole, who literally rips out an infant’s heart at one point and transplants it into one of her dolls [Episode 2.2]). I would argue that it is this living, breathing collection with a heart, this collection whose stitches are its curator’s sympathies for and feelings of affiliation with what he reads, that Penny Dreadful privileges in the end as its inner curatorial voice. After all, Penny Dreadful gives its appropriated Creature the series’ heartfelt final words, and these words are, appropriately, neither his own nor a continuous whole, but two excerpts from Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode that he has creatively stitched together.

Notes 1. Some readers will rightly recognize this statement’s congruence with Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s influential concept of the “double-logic” of remediation, which holds that even as media strive to achieve immediacy with what they mediate, they also call attention to mediation, something that becomes most noticeable when they refer to or incorporate other media (e.g., a radio broadcast playing within a film, a pixelated image of a manila folder on a computer desktop, and so forth) (Bolter and Grusin 2–18). 2. As late as 1892, the publisher of the “Penny Popular Novels” abridged version of Frankenstein was still able to advertise it to prospective readers by saying, “Everybody has heard of Frankenstein. But comparatively few have read the weird and powerful novel which made the name Frankenstein one of the symbol words of the language” (qtd. in St. Clair 645).

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Works Cited Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, edited by Claire Grogan, Broadview, 2002. Benedict, Barbara. Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies. Princeton UP, 1996. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge, 1995. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT P, 1998. Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Rewriting the Family: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in its Biographical/Textual Context.” Frankenstein: Creation and Monstrosity, edited by Stephen Bann, Reaktion Books, 1994, pp. 16–38. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Princeton UP, 1983. Cottom, Daniel. “Frankenstein and the Monster of Representation.” SubStance, vol. 9, no. 3 1980, pp. 60–71. Crabbe, George. Poetical Works of the Rev. Georg Crabbe. John Murray, 1834. 2 vols. Deazley, Ronan. “The Life of an Author: Samuel Egerton Brydges and the Copyright Act 1814.” Georgia State University Law Review, vol. 23, 2007, pp. 809–846. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769. Clarendon, 1995. Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge UP, 2003. Erdman, David, ed. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Anchor, 1988. Forry, Steven Earl. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present. U of Pennsylvania P, 1990. Freeman, Michael. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World. Yale UP, 2004. Gamer, Michael. Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation. Cambridge UP, 2004. Gates, Payson G. “Hazlitt’s Select British Poets: An American Publication.” Keats-­ Shelley Journal, vol. 35, 1986, pp. 168–182. Goode, Mike. Romantic Capabilities: Blake, Scott, Austen, and the New Messages of Old Media. Oxford UP, 2020. Gosling, Sharon. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan Books, 2015. Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Hazlitt, William. Select British Poets, or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time, with Critical Remarks. William C. Hall, 1824. Heffernan, James A.  W. “Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 1, 1997, pp. 133–158. Heholt, Ruth. “Perverting the Family: Re-working Victor Frankenstein’s Gothic Blood-Ties in Penny Dreadful.” Transmedia Creatures: Frankenstein’s

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Afterlives, edited by Francesca Saggini and Anna Enrichetta Soccio, Bucknell UP, 2019, pp. 187–199. Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. Frankenstein: A Cultural History. Norton, 2007. Huet, Marie Hélène. Monstrous Imagination. Harvard UP, 1993. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006. Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Li, Xing, Megan MacGarvie, and Petra Moser. “Dead Poets’ Property—How Does Copyright Influence Price?” SSRN, 15 June 2017, https://ssrn.com/ abstract=2170447. Lynch, Deidre. “Gothic Libraries and National Subjects.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 40, no. 1, 2001, pp. 29–48. North, Julian. “Shelley Revitalized: Biography and the Reanimated Body.” European Romantic Review, vol. 21, no. 6, 2010, pp. 751–770. Price, Leah. The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. Cambridge UP, 2003. Robinson, Jeffrey C. Unfettering Poetry: Fancy in British Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Russett, Margaret. Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845. Cambridge UP, 2006. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2016. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, edited by Susan Wolfson, 2nd ed., Pearson Longman, 2007. St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge UP, 2004. Smyth, Adam. “Profit and Delight”: Printed Miscellanies in England, 1640-1682. Wayne State UP, 2004. Southey, Robert. The Poems of Robert Southey, edited by M.  H. Fitzgerald, Oxford UP, 1909. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Oxford UP, 1983. Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. The Ohio State UP, 2020. Watercutter, Angela. “Penny Dreadful Might Be Blood-Drenched, But It Ain’t Horror.” WIRED, 16 May 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/05/penny-­ dreadful-­what-­genre/amp. Wolfson, Susan. “Editorial Privilege: Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s Audiences.” The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, edited by Audrey A. Fisch et al., Oxford UP, 1993, pp. 39–72.

PART II

Anatomy of a Monster: Horror and the Gothic in Literature and on the Screen

CHAPTER 5

In the House of the Night Creatures: Penny Dreadful’s Dracula Joan Hawkins

Dracula is the main antagonist of Penny Dreadful’s Third Season and the overarching antagonist of the entire series. He is a vampire and the brother of Lucifer; the effect he has on Vanessa Ives is one of the series’ strongest narrative arcs. In keeping with pluralist postfidelity theories of adaptation, this essay discusses Penny Dreadful’s Dracula in relation to Bram Stoker’s eponymous novel. In fact, one of the interesting aspects of Penny Dreadful is the way it unmoors its monsters from their established nineteenth-­ century narratives, allowing them to interact in new and generative ways. At the same time, the series provocatively uses what is arguably the quintessential modern monster—Stoker’s Dracula—to engage the present, post-postmodern era. Especially interesting are the ways the series uses nineteenth-century ideas of gender, feminism, sexuality, and science, so I will be referring back to the novel in order to explore the relationship between the Victorian Gothic and the present, especially as it relates to feminism.

J. Hawkins (*) Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_5

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I call Dracula the quintessential modern monster because in Stoker’s novel he is linked to all the markers of “modern” progress: international commerce and trade; banking and real estate; sexuality and gender; the scientific taxonomy of perversions; technology; and—through Renfield— psychiatry. He is a liminal figure, defined as much by the atavistic past (his past) as by the capitalist, scientific, and socially shape-shifting present that he currently inhabits. Penny Dreadful’s Vanessa is a medium and a “new woman,” and she, too, straddles two worlds. So, it is perhaps inevitable that she and Dracula seem to be destined for one another. Certainly, she is a worthy adversary—so much so that in his quest to make her his tool, Dracula ends up falling in love with her. What he ultimately offers is equal partnership and his own service to her, not a lackey position among his vampire legions. Both Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Penny Dreadful experiment with form. Dracula asks us to reconsider classic novel conventions, since it is a fragmentary rather than unified text. Comprising journal entries, letters, reports, newspaper articles, and business records—all written from multiple viewpoints—it never establishes an omniscient third-person or consistent first-person point of view. The fact that we believe the story at all, and stay with it, is a testament to how much we—like The X-Files’ Fox Mulder (Fox, 1993–2002)—want to believe. In a similar fashion, Penny Dreadful plays with serial form in ways that are sometimes reminiscent of David Lynch. In “A Blade of Grass” [Episode 3.4], for example, Vanessa undergoes hypnosis (actually, she demands to be hypnotized) so that she can relive her time in the Banning Clinic, a psychiatric treatment center in which she says she was tortured. In terms of Vanessa’s journey, this is an important episode. But it momentarily stops the season’s action, plunging us into a padded room from the past where Vanessa only sees the orderly who is kind to her but who also channels both Lucifer and Dracula. In the padded room, we cannot know how much is true memory and how much is hallucination—especially since the orderly resembles Frankenstein’s Creature. Rory Kinnear plays both roles. (This is explained later, when we learn that Frankenstein used the orderly’s dead body to make the Creature.) Similarly, this essay plays with form. Much like a TV series, it is organized in a fragmentary or episodic fashion, in chapters, if you will. Rather than crafting one unified linear argument, the chapter explores facets of the Penny Dreadful text and puts them into conversation with each other; it occasionally loops back on itself in an attempt to untangle meanings and raise more questions. It is designed to encourage readers to produce their

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own arguments while consuming mine. In that sense, I like to think of this as a vampiric Gothic text, or perhaps as a kind of academic-fan postboard, in which observations are allowed to stand without necessary elaboration to simply enhance our enjoyment of the text.

Dracula 1 In the groundbreaking study Our Vampires Ourselves, Nina Auerbach writes that “every age embraces the vampire it needs” (145). Since the observation occurs in a chapter titled “Draculas and Draculas,” what she really means is that every age embraces the Dracula it needs. And here she sounds very much like the Penny Dreadful character Catriona Hartdegen. A thanatologist who studies death and its rituals, Hartdegen attempts to help Vanessa Ives understand Dracula, the creature that has been hunting her since Season 1. “One of the few written accounts of him,” Hartdegen tells Vanessa, speaks “of an ancient being flushed with youth. A strategist changing his appearance and identity from century to century” [Episode 3.6]. In Season 3, Dracula, the master strategist, presents as Dr. Sweet, a soft-spoken zoologist. He initially attracts Vanessa with his intellect and his care for the broken, unloved things of the world. Subsequently, he seduces her with his unconditional acceptance of her being. “I love you for who you are,” he tells her when she comes to him, “not who the world wants you to be” [Episode 3.6]. In this way, he is an oppositional figure to the other male scientists in the season, who are all bent on taming women, curing them of their rage and their madness, and healing their scars. Within the story world, he is linked to his demonic brother Lucifer, but also to beatific figures like the Apache Kaetenay. Outside the story world, he is linked to Jesus, since like Him, Dracula in this version can be killed, “like any man,” when he is in his human form. When he is not in his human form, nothing can touch him. Unlike other immortals in the series—Dorian Gray, for example— Dracula is not bored. He has projects. In addition to wooing Vanessa, he plans to bring on the End of Days. In fact, winning Vanessa seems to be a necessary precursor to that enterprise, which suggests that he cannot do it alone; a couple must rule the darkness. When Vanessa finally accepts his bite, the world is plunged into pestilence and a plague is unleashed on the land.

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Our first introduction to Dracula as a character in this season is aural. Vanessa has begun therapy with Dr. Seward, and Dracula, who wishes to know her secrets, sends his minions to abduct Seward’s secretary, Renfield. Dracula charges Renfield to surveille and spy, and just to make sure his wishes are honored, he bites the secretary’s neck. “The Day Tennyson Died” [Episode 3.1] ends with this bite and a chilling voice coming out of the dark: “My name is Dracula.” We do not know that the demon voice belongs to the mild Dr. Sweet until the end of Episode 3.2, the aptly titled “Predators Far and Near.” So, like Vanessa, we do not immediately recognize Dr. Sweet as an homme fatale. Instead, we see him initially as a sympathetic character, one who values the shunned. And since he doesn’t conform to vampiric convention—he is gentle, has a day job, reflects in mirrors, and so on—he retains something of that sympathetic aura even after we know what a monster he is (he feeds one of his vampire spies to the minions, for example, and he continues to spy on Vanessa even after she joins him). It is unfortunate the season ended so abruptly that the relationship between Dracula and Vanessa could not play out. Creator John Logan says that he had always planned it that way, but the writing would suggest otherwise. The romance seems rushed, as does the intellectual sparring between the two lovers. And the two climactic moments—when the lovers have biteless sex and when Vanessa accepts Dracula’s bite—are followed by disappointing denouements, disappointing at least for me. Having brought us to the point of believing that Dracula can indeed free Vanessa to be herself, the series doesn’t seem to know what to do with Vanessa, once she becomes powerful—or even, for that matter, once she falls in love with a man who is not afraid of her. Throughout Season 3, Vanessa functions as a foil for Dracula, testing the limits of his nature and of his supernatural abilities. Unlike Stoker’s Dracula, Dr. Sweet does not have total access to Vanessa’s mind once he has made her his “bountiful winepress” (Stoker 306). He has to spy on her clinical files in order to have access to her mind even after she is turned. This becomes crucial when he knows her former lover is coming to rescue her. And here he behaves much like a suspicious husband hiring a private eye to spy on his wife, since presumably if he believed she loved only him, he could ask her about Ethan Chandler’s weaknesses. The power relationship and sexual economy between Vanessa and Dracula/Sweet is one of the most interesting aspects of the series’ narrative. It is she who initially invites him out (“I don’t know that I’ve ever

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been asked out by a woman,” he tells her [Episode 3.2]). It is she who initiates and dominates the first pre-bite sexual encounter. Even when she does ultimately accept his bite, she does not exactly succumb to him. “Do you accept me?” he asks, demanding consent rather than the usual swoon. “I accept myself,” she tells him, offering her neck [Episode 3.7]. It’s unclear what being a vampire means for Vanessa. Ironically, vampire-­ Vanessa is Ives’ least interesting depiction in the series. When Ethan comes to rescue her (to save her soul), he finds her in a white room that appears as the transcendent version of the white padded room we had seen from her institutionalized past. Dressed in white and standing still in a roomful of candles, she has no intellectual stimulation and no projects of her own that we can see. Having reduced the world to pestilence, Dracula still has an enterprise, something to manage. Vanessa appears to have nothing outside her own thoughts. As in the padded room, she is completely dependent on one man for information and society. Having accepted her nature, she seems here reduced to the thing she never wanted to be, solely a “companion and helper” (Stoker 307), a Victorian wife (Figs. 5.1 and 5.2).

The Woman Question and The Vampire’s Wife The nineteenth century is noted for promoting a certain feminine ideal: the selfless and sexually pure, maternal woman that Virginia Woolf once called “the angel in the house” (285). Her polar opposite was, of course, the Whore. Coarse and sensual, often plying her trade in the street, she was frightening—not the least because she was a temptress. What’s important here is not that there were two oppositional sexual categories for women but that they were not separate and discrete. In fact, in the nineteenth-­ century British Imaginary, the Madonna and Whore—like Jekyll and Hyde—cohabited the same body. The “angel in the house” remained an angel only to the extent that the Whore was not activated. That at least was the deep-seated fear, that any woman, however pure she might seem, could turn into a sexual temptress in the blink of an eye. This belief is demonstrated most forcefully in medical literature of the period. As Mary Poovey has noted, one of the surprising medical debates of the mid-nineteenth century concerned the ethical use of chloroform, the “perfect anesthesia,” in childbirth. “The anesthesia debate,” she writes, “constitutes an important episode in the mid-Victorian discussion of the ‘woman question’ because of the crucial role played by medicine in

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Fig. 5.1  When Ethan comes to rescue Vanessa, he finds her in a white room that appears as the transcendent version of the white padded room we had seen from her institutionalized past [Episode 3.9]

formulating a scientific justification for what was held to be woman’s natural reproductive function and circumscribed social place” (Poovey 138). At issue was the seemingly spasmatic initial response of women to anesthetizing drugs. When ether or chloroform were administered, doctors noted, women would babble incoherently in the first instance; this babbling would be followed by a spasm of the legs. W. Tyler Smith, one of the founders of the British Obstetrical Society, cited these spasms as a reason to ban anesthesia in childbirth and, quite possibly, in all surgical procedures performed on women. Seeing the spasms as evidence not of involuntary muscular movement, but, rather, of excitation, Smith was afraid of what the drug might unleash. Following Poovey, I want to quote Smith at some length: In one of the cases observed by Baron Dubois, the woman drew an attendant towards her to kiss as she was lapsing into insensibility, and this woman afterwards confessed to dreaming of coitus with her husband while she lay etherized. In ungravid women, rendered insensible for the performance of surgical operations, erotic gesticulations have occasionally been observed, and in one case, in which enlarged nymphae were removed, the woman

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Fig. 5.2  When Ethan comes to rescue Vanessa, he finds her in a white room that appears as the transcendent version of the white padded room we had seen from her institutionalized past [Episode 3.9] went unconsciously through the movements attendant on the sexual orgasm, in the presence of numerous bystanders. (qtd. in Poovey 142–143)

In other words, when the conscious mind—the “angel”—was temporarily anaesthetized by a drug (once again the similarity to Dr. Jekyll’s experiments is notable), the Whore would immediately take over. It would be preferable, Dr. Smith argued, to allow the woman to suffer unbearable pain and keep her purity intact. I have discussed this at length because this particular nineteenth-­ century fear is one of the key subtexts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and a recurring theme in Penny Dreadful. Dracula is dangerous in Stoker’s novel, precisely because he is so seductive and so successful at releasing the Whore who, the Victorians feared, lurks inside every pure woman. He calls women to him, puts them in a kind of trance or swoon, and bites them. Once bitten, they are his. They devise devious stratagems to outwit the precautions that good men and doctors take against him. It is they who remove the garlic flowers from the shutters, open the windows of their homes, and invite him to enter, unfastening their gowns as they do so. Throughout the novel, women, madmen, and commerce become the

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means and portals through which Dracula can infect British society. And throughout the novel, Dracula unleashes the wild vamp within every good Victorian woman he seduces. Here, for example, is the passage in which virginal Lucy, on her deathbed, drained of blood, welcomes her fiancé: In a sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way, she opened her eyes […] and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips: “Arthur! Oh my love I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!” Arthur bent eagerly over to kiss her; but at that moment van Helsing, who, like me, had been startled by her voice swooped upon him […] and actually hurled him across the room. “Not for your life!” he said; “not for your living soul and hers.” (Stoker 172)

The earlier seasons of Penny Dreadful depict Dracula as something of a blood-sucking Don Juan, a foreign nobleman who seduces Vanessa’s friend Mina and turns her into a vampire, in order, we learn later, that she might bring Vanessa to him [Episode 1.5]. But, more importantly, the series plays with how Victorian society viewed and circumscribed female sexuality and propriety. While Mina is pure until Dracula seduces her and unleashes the sexuality within, Vanessa Ives is established as a sexual and seductive woman from the outset. She is viewed harshly by society, particularly by the medical establishment, and she herself believes that she is possessed by demons. This possession began, she believes, when she saw her mother fornicating with the man who would become Vanessa’s guardian. Instead of being repulsed by the primal scene, Vanessa enjoyed watching. “Something whispered, I listened,” she writes, thereby accepting the notion that her sexuality is abnormal, unhealthy, and sinful [Episode 1.5]. Ironically, it is her mother—the vamp who unlocked her daughter’s sexuality—who commits her to an institution. In Season 3, we see Vanessa’s memories of being locked in an asylum, where she is force-fed, subjected to hydrotherapy, and even undergoes surgery [Episodes 3.3, 3.4]. Here, we see a literalization of what Poovey calls “the crucial role played by medicine in formulating a scientific justification for what was held to be woman’s natural reproductive function and circumscribed social place,” as Vanessa is scheduled to have a hole drilled in her skull in order to let the bad out and bring her to heel (138). “I didn’t counterfeit normality well enough,” she tells her caretaker the night before her surgery. “I tried. I spoke lowly. I bent my head. I was submissive. I was the woman you all want me to be. I

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almost succeeded. But then they asked me to speak about my faith. I told them the truth” [Episode 3.4]. The series depicts Vanessa as someone who is troubled by a sexuality she cannot always control. Her first great sin, she tells Dr. Seward, was to seduce her friend Mina’s fiancé, the night before Mina’s wedding [Episodes 3.1, 1.5]. This rash act resulted in the estrangement of the two friends and Mina’s eventual death. And Vanessa believes that sexuality has continued to be her downfall—the sign that she is being hunted. In that respect, she is very much a proper Victorian woman. Penny Dreadful functions here as a subversive gloss on the nineteenth century, as it lays bare the hypocrisy of Victorian culture regarding women. And its own subversive project is that—to some extent—it encourages us to invest in Dracula’s enterprise, of convincing Vanessa to accept her nature. Dracula does not need to unleash Vanessa’s sexuality; it has already been released by seeing her mother have sex. His project is to persuade Vanessa to accept her sexuality, to join him as someone outside the strictures of Victorian propriety. And since Victorian mores are stifling, we want her to embrace her nature too. “You are the great fertile bitch of evil,” the Native American werewolf Kaetenay tells her, “and I love you for your fertility and your power. You are the woman of all our dreams and all our night terrors.” Kaetenay also wants Vanessa to embrace her nature, but not at the expense of her immortal soul. The night creatures, he tells her, “are false lovers. And if I know anything, it is this: you are made for the day, not the night” [Episode 3.7].

Feminism, Suffrage, and Lily Earlier I mentioned that Dracula, in his guise as Dr. Sweet, stands in contrast to the other male scientists in Season 3. In a sense, Lily and Vanessa are contrasted in the same way—as two women who threaten the patriarchy from very different angles. While Dr. Sweet wants to embrace the shunned creatures of the night and set free Vanessa’s nature, Doctors Frankenstein and Jekyll are embarked on a completely different enterprise. As the season opens, the woman whom Dr. Frankenstein made for his creature is living with Dorian Gray and pursuing very different goals from the ones Victor had imagined for her. In Pygmalion fashion, he has fallen in love with his female creation Lily, but she has left him. In her new life, she is suffused with rage against the patriarchy, specifically against men who traffic women and abuse them during paid sexual encounters (hence the sexual hypocrisy that I mention earlier). With Gray’s help, she begins

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rescuing street walkers, turning them into a violent army. In one memorable dinner party scene, she tells the gathered women to go out into the alleyways, find the men who had mistreated them, and bring back their severed right hands. When the dinner party resumes some hours later, a pile of bloody stumps adorns the table [Episode 3.7]. Earlier in the episode when she and her accomplice Justine see a group of Suffragists demonstrating, Justine asks Lily if she supports the cause. “They think as you do, the Suffragettes,” she says. “No,” Lily answers, “our enemies are the same, but they seek equality.” What Lily seeks, she tells Justine, is “mastery.” The Suffragists don’t go far enough, and they are naive. “All this marching around in public and waving placards. That’s not it. How do you accomplish anything in this life? By craft. By stealth. By poison. By the throat quietly slit in the dead of the night. By the careful and silent accumulation of power” [Episode 3.7]. In this way, she sounds very much like Dracula, who in Stoker’s novel also organizes an army of women and seeks to overturn the rule of men. Certainly, Lily’s table decorations resemble his. But she also espouses what sounds very much like a nineteenth-century version of Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M [Society for Cutting Up Men] Manifesto. Solanas, too, found herself at odds with the feminists of her time and thought them naive. “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money systems, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex” (Solanas 3). While Lily retains fondness for Dorian Gray, seeing him as outside his sex, she basically preaches Solanas’s message. Alarmed by this murderous change in Lily, Victor arranges to have her kidnapped and brought to him. With the help of Dr. Jekyll, he plans to do to Lily what the doctors at the Banning Clinic had tried to do to Vanessa—to perform surgery with the aim of rendering her pliant and sweet. “We’re going to make you into a proper woman,” he tells her [Episode 3.7]. Vanessa’s trajectory is somewhat different. Throughout this season, she is linked to Mr. Lyle, to the Creature, and to Dr. Sweet, men who remain on the fringes of society or who tend to those who are marginalized. She has carved out a niche in which she can live more or less as she wants, without resorting to Lily’s violence. She is frequently represented throughout the season taking a kind of narrative control—writing letters that sum up the action, studying books, and consulting female experts on psychiatry and the occult. In a sense, she is outside politics, visually framed in

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wide open spaces or in the proximity of boxed specimens (so that her own freedom is emphasized). The one time she seems truly out of control is at the carnival, when one of Dracula’s minions comes too close and she is lost in a hall of mirrors [Episode 3.3]. She flees, and Dracula—enraged— feeds the miscreant vampire to his brothers. While Season 3 engages directly with First, Second, and even Third Wave Feminism, raising uncomfortable questions about whether it is indeed possible, as Audre Lorde once asked, to change the system from within, it tends to resolve these arcs conservatively (Lorde, 1984, 2007). As Carol J. Clover and Robin Wood have both argued, horror texts frequently resolve through the restoration of the normative. In this way, horror remains a rather conservative genre; the subversive elements occur in the heart of the tale, when the monsters run amok. It’s important to note here that the monsters in Season 3 of Penny Dreadful are women. Yes, Dracula and Frankenstein must be stopped. The werewolf must learn to control his special nature. But the real demons who must be laid to rest, the series suggests, are the exceptional women. Dracula simply disappears at the end of Season 3, when he sees Vanessa’s dead body, and it’s not entirely clear what has happened to him. His demise, if there is one, is remarkably anticlimactic, given that he is the monster whose machinations set the series narrative in play [Episode 1.1]. Similarly, Dr. Frankenstein has joined the band set upon Dracula’s destruction. Hyde is trying to help the insane in the asylum where he works. Even Frankenstein’s Creature achieves a sort of life-affirming redemption at the end. The sacrificial and salvific death that is played up and out in great melodramatic detail is Vanessa’s. She begs Ethan to kill her and put an end to her suffering and to the world’s. In a lengthy scene, she presses his gun against her body and tries to persuade him to pull the trigger. He kisses her. She repents her earliest adolescent transgressions. They say the Lord’s Prayer together. When he finally does shoot, she dies in his arms saying that she can see the face of God. Not only has evil been vanquished, but Vanessa’s soul has been saved, and she has been socially redeemed as well—as the self-sacrificing “angel in the house.” Visually, this scene seems to undo her earlier sexual encounter with Dracula/Sweet. In that sexual encounter, when she mounted her lover, the skirt of her black dress fanned out around them. Now, she lays in Ethan’s arms, her white dress fanned out in the same way. Shortly after she dies, the darkness lifts and a salvific sun lights the House of the Night Creatures.

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Similarly, Lily also is restored. Chained in Frankenstein’s lab, she tries every moral and ethical argument to dissuade him from the cruel surgery he is about to perform on her. It is only when she tells him her own melodramatic tale, the long story of how her baby daughter died, and pleads with him not to erase this most feminine of tragic memories from her brain, that he relents. When she returns to her home, the army of women has been disbanded by Dorian Gray (who betrayed her to Frankenstein). Subdued and chastened, she leaves Dorian to his immortal boredom. Perhaps she will find her fire again, but in terms of the series, she has been restored to something like conventional femininity, her power and ambition contained, softened, and undone by maternal grief.

Psychoanalysis and the Occult The three characters most invested in allowing Vanessa to find her true self are Dracula, Kaetenay, and Dr. Seward. While Dracula reasons with Vanessa and poses as a scientist, his real modus operandi is occult. Similarly, Kaetenay, the Apache, has the gift of sight. He harnesses his religion to induce trances when he throws his stones and bones, his “bits,” as he calls them. Dr. Seward is a psychoanalyst, but the season calls her by the antiquated name of “alienist,” a term that seems to suggest something both otherworldly and occult. In this way, she is linked to Dracula but also to Joan Clayton, a sorceress from Vanessa’s past whom she physically resembles [Episode 2.3]. Like Clayton and Dracula, Dr. Seward helps Vanessa navigate the darkness inside her. Like Dracula, she genuinely wants Vanessa to embrace her own nature, and like him—through hypnosis—she can invade Vanessa’s dreams. Like Joan Clayton, Dr. Seward becomes Vanessa’s guide in the occult. It is through psychoanalytic hypnosis that Vanessa learns, or recovers, Dracula’s name [Episode 3.4]. The parallel structure here is telling. Episode 3.1 ends with Dracula’s voice: “my name is Dracula.” Episode 3.4 ends with Vanessa’s voice: “his name is Dracula.” In some ways, the series plays occult knowledge against scientific knowledge, a frequent conflict in horror. In the original novel, Dr. Van Helsing has to resort to garlic and consecrated wafers to defeat Dracula. Similarly, Dr. Seward gives up all pretense of science at the end of the season, when she joins the gun-toting band who are off to rescue Vanessa. And she loses control of a hypnosis session, when Vanessa—bent on her own discovery—refuses to leave the padded room and enters what Dr. Seward calls a “fugue state” [Episode 3.4]. It is important that Dr.

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Seward’s brand of psychotherapy is still marginalized at the time the story takes place. In the popular nineteenth-century imaginary, psychoanalysis was as fantastical as Kaetenay’s spiritual trance states—and, through careful editing, the season suggests the same essential connections between characters that the nineteenth century would have made. In terms of science, however, Dr. Seward and Dr. Sweet represent a positive pole, driven by compassion. When the season opens, Vanessa is in a deep depression. Her friend, the Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle, finds her in a dreadful state and pleads with her to see Dr. Seward. The doctor, he tells her, had enabled him to accept himself as a homosexual and find some peace [Episode 3.1]. Her science is practiced outside the clinical taxonomies practiced by Richard Krafft-Ebing and other nineteenth-century scientists. While they were interested in cataloguing and categorizing modes of normality and deviance, Dr. Seward tells Vanessa that all emotions may be expressed in her rooms without the patient’s fear. While psychotherapy as practiced at the Banning Clinic is positively medieval, relying on waterboarding, forced feeding, and trepanning to treat psychosis, Dr. Seward’s “alienism” uses every modern technique. The doctor records sessions on a wax gramophone record, which Renfield then transcribes (and types). When she hypnotizes Vanessa, she uses the sound of the stylus cutting into the record to induce the somatic state. Like Freud, she employs the talking cure. And she cries when she replays Vanessa’s narrative, suggesting that a kind of countertransference is taking place. Most importantly, like Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader, she is not confident in drawing hard and fast lines between “normal” and “abnormal” and “sane” and “mad.” Even though she believes that Vanessa is a true split personality, she encourages her to live a normal life (there is no discussion of hospitalization). Like Leader, she doesn’t hold a “relativist view that madness is just what doesn’t fit social norms” (7). The fact that she, like Leader, isn’t entirely sure where the line between sanity and madness might reside, that she believes in liminal boundaries, cements her link to the occult figures in the story, who similarly interrogate the boundaries between life and death and dream vision and empirical fact. The other admirable scientists in the series are Egyptologists, thanatologists, and anthropologists, people who have travelled and have seen non-Western epistemological systems that allow for a wider range of knowledges. In this sense, the series mirrors the novel, which simultaneously celebrates modernity and challenges its ability to explain the

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ineffable. And it speaks to a contemporary hunger for diversity and for the destabilization of Western empirical and epistemological hegemony. This aspect of the series helps account for its dedicated fanbase—the postboards on Reddit, for example. This is an era when young people especially have abandoned strict identity politics and have embraced the possibilities of gender fluidity, nonbinary identification, the social construction of race, and multiple sexualities. Penny Dreadful’s flirtation with a kind of creative science, as opposed to the nineteenth-century taxonomies of Krafft-Ebing (who first identified sexual deviation and inversion), marks it as a contemporary reiteration of the Gothic. Here, technologies of knowledge are explored to see how they in fact work, how they both make meaning and are unmade by their very strategies of meaning-­ production. Hence the interest in magic-lantern shows, in seances, in museums and exhibitions, in asylums, and in laboratories—all the technologies and sites where the nineteenth century attempted to crack the code of categorical knowledge.

Gothic and Neo-Gothic Gothic fiction follows Romantic fiction in its embrace of the liminal (often drug-induced), hallucinatory state. As I have written elsewhere, “in terms of epistemology and philosophy, the gothic blurs distinctions between reality and dream/memory” (Hawkins 3). Often, we cannot be sure that the monster exists outside of hallucination. As noted above, this is particularly true in the padded white room sequence [Episode 3.4], in which the orderly appears to channel both Dracula and Lucifer, while still remaining a sympathetic character, and in which Dr. Seward herself moves in and out of the padded chamber (mixing present with past). Here, as in all Gothic tales, we are reminded not only that there are different ways of knowing but also that atavistic, occult knowledge coexists with modern technology (rather than being supplanted by it). As Alice Rayner notes, vampires, ghosts, and phantoms—some of the creatures populating Penny Dreadful—do not so much “present an ontological truth as they indicate the limits of dualistic thought” (xii). This is true even in the strict Manichean good/evil universe that Penny Dreadful presents, where Vanessa Ives can be redeemed even after giving up her soul. Like monstrosity, truth in this world is relative. In that sense, the Gothic, especially as it appears in contemporary fictions, encroaches on post-structuralist theory, as it continually interrogates the limits of the binary. It shows that

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the rich fabric of life exists in the slippage between categories, in the play of different signifiers and meanings (Hawkins 3). As I have tried to show, Penny Dreadful plays with the Gothic. As noted above, it unmoors Gothic monsters from their narrative confines and gives them a new life, and through its female characters especially, it does what Rosemary Jackson argues the best Gothic always does: it introduces “oppositional strategies into a repressed social order” (179). In terms of contemporary culture, Penny Dreadful shares formal and thematic characteristics with what David Church has called “post-horror” and I have dubbed “neo-Gothic.” It shares with post-horror a certain “tone—that is especially apparent when alternative uses of film unsettle our conventional ways of approaching genre conventions” (Church 11). It replaces an aesthetics of fear with an aesthetics of the Uncanny (Hawkins). It shares with films like It Follows (2014), The Woman in Black (2012), and It Comes at Night (2017) a minimalist art-film aesthetic. It evinces “minimalism over maximalism, largely eschewing jump scares, frenetic editing, and energetic and/or handheld cinematography in favor of cold and distanced shot framing, longer-than-average shot durations, slow camera movements and stately narrative pacing” (Church 11). In the case of Penny Dreadful, it’s difficult to say how much of the style is dictated by the fact that it is a prestige television series. What is true, however, is that it demands and rewards a certain commitment on the part of the viewer. The best of it unfolds just like one of Dracula’s night-long stories in the Bram Stoker novel. These stories, Jonathan Harker writes in the novel, are “most fascinating. It seemed to have in it the whole history of the country” (Stoker 35). In this case, it has the whole history of English Gothic literature, resituated—as in the novel—through its encounter with the contemporary world. And like Dracula himself, it is revitalized and rejuvenated through this encounter.

Works Cited Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. U of Chicago P, 1995. Church, David. Post-Horror: Art, Genre and Cultural Elevation. Edinburgh UP, 2021. Clover, Carol J. Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1992. Hawkins, Joan. “It Fixates: Indie Quiets and the New Gothic.” Palgrave Communications, vol. 3, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2017.88.

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Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Routledge, 1981. Leader, Darian. What is Madness? Penguin, 2011. Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 1984. Crossing P, 1984, 2007, pp. 110–114. Poovey, Mary. “‘Scenes of an Indelicate Character’: The Medical ‘Treatment’ of Victorian Women.” Representations, no. 14, 1986, pp. 137–168. Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. 1967. The Olympia P, 1971. Stoker, Bram. Dracula, Revised edition. Penguin, 2003. Wood, Robin. “Return of the Repressed.” Film Comment, vol. 14, no. 4, 1978, pp. 24–32. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” Collected Essays, vol. 2, Hogarth, 1966, pp. 284–289.

CHAPTER 6

Vampirism, Blood, and Memory in Penny Dreadful and Only Lovers Left Alive Luciana Tamas and Eckart Voigts

The Myth of Blood: The Body in (Vampire) Films Narratives that revolve around vampirism are bound to display a number of elements of convergence, regardless of the historical period in which they are set. This essay proposes a comparison between two divergent forms of adaptation, in relation to memory, subjectivity, and the body (as symbolized by blood). While Penny Dreadful exhibits a syncretic inflation of a sanguinary, violent Gothic, Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive

L. Tamas (*) Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, Braunschweig University of Art, Braunschweig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] E. Voigts Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_6

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(2013), conversely, reduces the visual tropes and violent screen displays of the vampire myth. The television series displays the vampiric body as the human’s monstrous Other and deliberately invokes the visual clichés of traditional horror narratives, while Only Lovers reverses this structure with its three erudite vampires as carriers of memory and tradition. Unlike literary exegesis, which may focus on elements such as plot, language, or style, the analysis of cinematic and televised adaptations of the motif of vampirism must consider a number of additional—audio-­ visual—aspects. More predominantly, perhaps, than literary texts, multimedia productions employ strategies that intentionally manipulate memory and subjectivity—and that radiate also onto bodily perception. In the essay “Eye and Mind,” French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the role of the body in visual art, noting that painters take their body into the creative process: “It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings” (“Eye and Mind” 123). At the same time, the world cannot be separated from the body because things “are incrusted in [the body’s] flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the very stuff of the body” (“Eye and Mind” 125). A painting, then, is not a passive object but rather an entity that dictates the seer’s way of seeing: “I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it” (“Eye and Mind” 126). Similarly, just as the museumgoer “sees according to, or with” the painting, the audience, we argue, sees according to the cinematic or televised production, which likewise does not fixate the gaze but allows it to wander along with its visual narrative. The levels of seeing, in the film, also change because the gaze is meticulously curated and ordered by another. The “lending [of the] body” in the film is thereby a collective construct since the filmic “world” is created and controlled by an entire apparatus of screenwriters, directors, actors, or camera operators. The movement of the camera controls the eye, in a way that most often conceals, rather than exposes, its power. Vision, therefore, “is never a static mode of perception. Rather, it is a dynamic system of communication that is lived as the inherent reversibility of perception and expression, of the visual and the visible” (Sobchack 21), and is endowed with a selective power that curates the surrounding reality (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 70). The autonomy and intentionality of the human gaze are opposed to the “frozen” gaze of the camera, which primarily dictates a pre-established way of seeing, onto “a screen that has no horizons” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 70). As

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the camera moves and widens its horizon through visual strategies such as close-ups, the eye, while engrossed in the act of watching, remains immobile. Although it may choose to focus on certain aspects, it nonetheless remains enclosed in a space of the given, of the existent, which has been dictated by another. The eye, then, no longer negotiates its limits—they are already predetermined. It is a “willing suspension” of the eye’s power: where its horizons end, those of Another begin—namely, the film’s. Cinematic productions entail a temporary interference, or hybridization, between the viewer’s subjectivity and the fictional reality. Meaning, rather than existing as an intact entity of its own, results from the interference of individual realities—and, in the case of cinema, from the interference of the viewer’s reality and the reality projected on the screen. The film addresses the body directly, and although the viewer’s being-in-the-­ world is not the same as the film’s, these multimedial stimuli and illusions sustain a necessary level of projection. Thus, the curating gaze of the camera becomes that of the viewer’s, who then perceives herself as a witness— or even, at times, a protagonist—of the actions presented on screen. This way, the fictional (filmic) narrative insidiously extends—and symbolically replaces—the viewer’s being-in-the-world, which can lead to the assumption that films are in themselves “vampires” that feed off the minutes of our lives. In productions that revolve around the vampiric, the theme, with its different forms of presentation, substitutes, like a hologram, the viewer’s reality—due, first of all, to her emotional involvement with what she may view with fascination, repulsion, or both. The level of empathy—and bodily identification—with the vampiric arguably depends on the viewer’s relationship with the vital element around which such productions essentially revolve—namely, the human blood. The references to it are not solely on a metaphoric but a physiological level: Blood is the center of the vampire’s parasitic existence, its relationships, or sexual instincts; it is through it that the vampire relates to the world. Blood, then, through the vampiric theme, is endowed with a type of materiality that makes the viewer aware of her own mortality and fragility. When the Christian restriction against bloodshed was narrowed down to the shedding of Christian blood, a medieval “vampire state” was created, as Gil Anidjar (135) argues, which established an essential difference between Christian and other kinds of blood, thus unleashing a hematology that enabled an “asymmetric universality.” The vampire articulates a challenge to this asymmetric universality

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and also, as many commentators have pointed out, to the foundational binaries of Western thought (see Horner and Zlosnik 1). Vampire narratives are placed, then, to destabilize these boundaries between death and life, bodies, sexualities, and genders—and, now, genres. Their interest in destabilizing outsider figures links the Romantic to the Victorian Gothic and is manifestly expressed in the liberal referencing of the neo-Victorian series Penny Dreadful, as well as in the neo-Romantic outsider-chic in the contemporary setting of Only Lovers Left Alive. It is useful, therefore, to note a few principal characteristics of the various vampire myths. First, vampires are not born—but made; the human body, in this view, exists in a transitional state. Second, they undergo two births— the human birth and the vampiric one (the transformation). Third, although all vampires are candidates to immortality, they cannot achieve this state unless they follow a set of norms—such as protection from sunlight, perpetual nocturnal life, and the sacrificing (transformation) of their human, warm-blooded peers. In Romanian culture, perhaps the principal area in which the legend of the vampiric originated, we can identify a recurrent theme of the blood, which is traditionally seen as a mystery. This radiates also onto the Romanian language, which uses several dozens of phrases such as “glasul sângelui“ (“the voice of the blood,” meaning love for one’s family members), “frate de sânge” (a brother with whom one shares the same set of parents), “sânge rău” (“evil blood”), “sânge bun” (“good blood”), and “sânge albastru” (“blue blood”—signifying royalty). Romanian folklore, furthermore, emphasizes that durable constructions, as well as great deeds and great works of art, can be set forth only through blood sacrifices—as seen, for instance, in one of the culture’s chief ballads, Mănăstirea Argeșului. Here, the cathedral that Master Manole and his constructors are building falls apart every night, despite the assiduous work they invest during the day; it is only after Manole sacrifices his pregnant wife to— quite literally—the walls of the cathedral that the construction finally holds (“Mănăstirea Argeșului” 122–128). Blood is seen as the very essence of life’s mystery—as the vital element through which the body finds and negotiates its place in the world. It is, then, not merely a metaphor but the basis of the self’s materiality and existence. Writer Nicolae Steinhardt likewise believes that blood is a mystery—one that is tightly connected with the elements of evil (57). Just as blood can be either “good” or “evil,” the elements that gravitate around it can be both positive and negative; purity is possible only in exceptional

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cases, which rely on strict Christian rituals and are usually attained only by priests or monks. In the profane world, the blood that was once pure can, through external intervention, become “evil.” Simion Cosma shows that Transylvanian Romanians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still entertained beliefs in “strigoi” (ghosts or vampires) and practiced rituals of exorcism, “despite the modernizing assaults that had come from the Imperial administration and the forums of the two Romanian Churches” (115; translation by Tamas). These beliefs and practices, lasting up to the twentieth century, fed a mythology “that inspired the creators and propagators of the modern myth of vampires and of Transylvania as their realm” (115). He further remarks that the violence of these practices was determined by people’s fears of epidemics and meteorological catastrophes (115). Beyond the Transylvanian realm, Eliade and Culianu also describe an ancestral practice of the Confucian nobility, which aimed at “attaining immortality” through sexual methods (134). They note that Daoist practices included a species of “sexual vampirism,” which should allow the parties involved in the act to regain youth (134). In Jarmusch’s film, discussed below, it is the love between the two protagonists that gives them the force to resist, as a whole, the pressures of time.

Penny Dreadful: The Syncretic Vampire of Popular Culture In Penny Dreadful, blood is ubiquitous. Here, the motif of vampirism exhibits an inflation of a sanguinary Gothic in the vein of a deluge of movie versions of the vampire since Georges Méliès’s shape-changing vampire-devil in The House of the Devil (Le Manoir du diable, 1896). Historically, Hammer studio productions have provided milestones in making vampire narratives more colorful, bloody, violent, physical, and sexual (Hutchings 57–97). Arguably, streamed television and social media platforms have accelerated the gradual erosion of restrictions on what kinds of blood and gore would be acceptable on both film and television screens, further contributing to the excess of violence and blood in vampire series—True Blood (HBO, 2008–2014), Blade (1998–2004; Spike, 2006), and Underworld (2003–2016). As Penny Dreadful exults in bloody physicality and the mix of violence and sexuality of its generic traditions, it has been pointed out that the three-season series reflects a generic “hollowing out” (Poore 71). Thus,

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Penny Dreadful invokes a genre template or a universe of “Gothic” characters and destroys notions of fidelity with calculated historical or narrative anachronisms and infidelities. Indeed, vampires and other monsters have generically proliferated into teen rom-com and comedy, as early as in the 1940s Universal studio productions.1 Penny Dreadful also takes extensive liberties with its adapted neo-Victorian Gothic characters by killing both Mina Harker and Van Helsing in the first season. Stacey Abbott, however, sees Vanessa Ives as a hybrid of Stoker’s Lucy and Mina (200). The joint centrality of the retired colonial adventurer (Malcolm Murray/Allan Quatermain), Dorian Gray, the supernatural prostitute (Brona Croft/ Fanny Hill, alias Lily Frankenstein), and the American gunman (Ethan Chandler/Tom Sawyer) shows how indebted the series is to the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (1999) and its film adaptation (2003).2 Penny Dreadful is a palimpsestuous hybrid of apocalyptic and playful horror (see Abbott 199) that meta-references the connections between contemporary vampire TV and the nineteenth-century vampire lore of the penny bloods, when Professor Van Helsing picks a volume of the penny blood, Varney the Vampyre (1845–1847), from a shelf, and Victor Frankenstein calls it “a penny dreadful” [Episode 1.6] (see Poore 71). Dr. Frankenstein’s second creature in Penny Dreadful is named Proteus, and while the character is short-lived, his name programmatically indicates the protean verisimilitude of Gothic culture in Penny Dreadful. Not just the monster-filled Demimonde in the series might be described as a veritable syncretic meta-world of popular Gothic monsters and further personnel with mostly Romantic literary credentials. Key characters such as werewolf Chandler, Dr. Frankenstein, and the pansexual Dorian Gray are joined by a set of supporting literary luminaries, such as Frankenstein’s Creature/Caliban/John Clare, the blind Lavinia (Titus Andronicus), Henry Jekyll, Justine (suggesting both de Sade and Justine Moritz from Frankenstein), a whole set of characters from Dracula (Dracula, Mina Harker, Renfield, Dr. Seward—here female), and Catriona Hartdegen (an in-joke referencing writer John Logan’s character Alexander Hartdegen in his 2002 movie version of The Time Machine). This generic instability of the characters fits nicely to the idea of shape-­ shifting vampires and Penny Dreadful metafictionally feeding off Gothic mythologies. Indeed, as Sophie Mantrant has suggested, the monstrous identity of shape-changing links the idea of transformative monsters such as wolf-men or vampires to (repressed) memories and dissociative

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disorders (176). Quite ironically, then, Penny Dreadful merges a deliberate and metafictional positioning as heir to the kitschy and populist end of the vampire narrative spectrum with an allegiance to the high production standards of streamed TV, signaled by quality actors well-known from film and theater (Eva Green, Billie Piper, Timothy Dalton, Rory Kinnear, Simon Russell Beale, Helen McCrory, and Patti LuPone), as well as by the high-profile theater and film credentials of the producer/writer team of Sam Mendes and Logan (see Abbott 196). As Poore has shown, the emergent Victorian genre of the penny dreadful was preceded by the so-called penny bloods. He argues that the “name ‘penny blood’ was ‘first used as a term of attack’ […], and the name effectively encapsulates the dual fear of the genre’s opponents: cheap fiction that was excessively violent” (64). We suggest, however, that beyond indicating violence, the more fitting denominator penny blood is evocative of an excessive visual foregrounding of the sanguine that riffs on the above-mentioned centrality in Christian mythology. Blood is the mediating element between the forces of good and evil, and the sanguine display of aesthetics begins with Penny Dreadful’s cold open as first “appetizer” in Season 1: a blood-splattered scene of a woman and her daughter being snatched from the “privy.” We later see them found mutilated and dismembered in a scenario that rehashes the popular obsession with violent crimes against women in Victorian London—the misogynistic tropes of the entertainment industries’ Ripper myth, in which women are displayed in often sexualized, sadistic, gory scenarios as victims of male aggression. In the Gothic displays of Penny Dreadful, women are sexualized and associated with depravity and crime, both as victims and as monstrously assertive femmes fatales. It is true that the series grants considerable agency to female characters such as Vanessa Ives, Madame Kali, Brona Croft, Hecate, and numerous minor characters. Unsurprisingly, in a series that flaunts its popular generic markers, however, this agency occurs within generic character boundaries, as either femme fatale, prostitute, harpy, “unwoman,” or femme fragile on the hysterical edge. The teaser is followed by the dark-blue tinted slow-motion title sequence for Season 1, featuring predatory spiders, bugs, snakes, and bats, as well as bloody hands washing medical instruments submerged in water, blood-splattered petals, and a teacup overflowing with blood, falling and shattering on the floor. A cornucopia of stylistic features contributes to directly affecting the viewers’ apparatus of sense perception and creating a precarious physicality

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that suggests bodies might open and blood might be gushing out of orifices at any time: low-key lighting in a mainly damp, foggy, and shadowy Victorian London (mostly filmed in Dublin), seedy locations and excessive parlors filmed with filters, atmospheric mise-en-scène punctuated by frantic action scenes and jump scares, and strangely contorted and monstrously transformed bodies, often shown in close-up. Acting, settings, costumes, and props—Penny Dreadful employs the vocabulary of stylized, artificial neo-Victorian horror to a tee. The visceral visuality of blood sets the pattern for all of the three seasons in the first episode [Episode 1.1] as blood is abundantly shed when Ethan Chandler joins Vanessa Ives and adventurer/explorer Malcolm Murray with the vampires, looking for Sir Malcolm’s daughter Mina. As the first episode indicates, the series deliberately delights in parading bloody corpses; a bloodied rising zombie-­ creature featuring red, bloodshot eyes; extended pathological body examinations performed by Dr. Frankenstein; and a further carnage-fest in which plenty of vampires are being killed in bloody and violent ways. At the beginning of Season 2, Vanessa cuts her thumb and, incanting Latin verses, smears blood on the floor in a scorpion pattern. The obvious excess and memorable effectivity of Penny Dreadful’s bloody iconography in both seasons’ first episodes suggest that it is seen as an enticing visual asset by the showrunners. Keeping the mise-en-scène of bloody excess in the context of the stylized, melodramatic effects of neo-Victorian Gothic tropes firmly in place, the second season features, for instance, Evelyn Poole—Madame Kali, from the Indian Hindu goddess (demon)—taking an extended bloodbath in a room full of voodoo dolls. Here, Penny Dreadful’s appropriately named second-season antagonist invokes the Elizabeth Báthory trope of a rejuvenating soak in young blood. Poole then goes on to explain the conventional link of blood and memory in vampire horror: spilled blood is a reminder of our vulnerability and mortality [Episode 2.1]. Impressive feats of acting and mise-en-scène, as in the particularly effective séance scene [Episode 1.2], are employed to pathologize the key character Vanessa Ives, whose vulnerability as well as the excessive anger and dangerous, deviant sexuality are on full display when she is possessed by various spirits accusing Malcolm Murray—and, storming out of Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle’s parlor, has sex with a random stranger. Later in Episode 2.6, she attends a ball at Dorian Gray’s home and has a vision of the roof drenching the parlor in blood. This so-called Blood Ball both proved particularly challenging to the cinematic apparatus and was

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Fig. 6.1  Foregrounding the sanguine, Vanessa is shown in close-up during the Blood Ball [Episode 2.6]

singled out for particular praise by audiences (see Fig. 6.1). In the finale of Season 3, before the werewolf Ethan Chandler kills Vanessa Ives to prevent her union with Dracula, she confirms how the imagery of blood links the seasons: “[Ethan] and I shall write the ending in blood, as it was always going to be” [Episode 3.9]. “I see our Lord,” says Ms. Ives, and the final bloodshed is written as a good Christian sacrificial ending (Fig. 6.1). While this is where we would place the visual style of Penny Dreadful, thematically, the series invokes established tropes of vampires as carriers of undead memory: a lengthy introduction by Egyptologist Lyle introduces the “blood cure” explanation concerning the “Egyptian Book of the Dead.” Egyptian cult is a favorite source for contemporary vampire narratives, and Matthew Beresford refers to rejuvenating blood-bathing as well as mummification practices and several spells in the Book of the Dead as informing the vampire myth (28). An autopsy performed on a killed vampire reveals ancient hieroglyphs etched beneath the skin. Quite literally here, the scene suggests Merleau-Ponty, as words of the ancient world are made of the very stuff of the body. The vampire corpse contains a Demimonde resurrection spell involving Egyptian gods Amunet (female, representing everlasting life at the cost of the souls of others) and Amun-Ra

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(male, the sun, the bringer of light, and creator), who are depicted together, potentially wreaking havoc on the world. Vanessa Ives is later revealed to be an incarnation of Amunet, while the master vampire Amun-­ Ra—alias Dr. Sweet, alias Dracula—seeks to gain control of both Mina and Vanessa [Episodes 1.7 and 1.8]. Vanessa Ives is a similar kind of medium, communicating with, and providing access to, the vampire Demimonde. Here, then, we find an equivalent to the curating gaze of the camera, as neo-Victorian mediums perform glimpses into unseen worlds and promise the expansion of the experiential realm for viewers both in and outside the diegesis of vampire screen narratives. As Dracula/ Amun-Ra is a carrier of a bygone world that can only be accessed by way of his bodily communion, he is at the same time planning an alternative future in congress with Vanessa Ives as Amunet—and characters such as Madame Kali and her ilk as well as, to some extent, Vanessa Ives invoke the clichés of the pathologized, sexualized “monstrous feminine” discussed at great length in neo-Victorian criticism. Ultimately, for all her assertive prowess, Vanessa is an objectified femme fragile whose blood sacrifice ends her role as bone of contention between “God’s hound” Chandler and Dracula, whereas Brona Croft’s prostitute rebellion also goes nowhere. Tim Posada has succinctly dissected the gender politics of Penny Dreadful: as Brona’s female rebellion is thwarted by the three men, Frankenstein, Jekyll, and queer Dorian, her erstwhile ally, she becomes a “calm […] proper woman,” as Frankenstein phrases it. Finally, the New Woman Vanessa Ives (rather abruptly) offers her neck to Dracula, accepting his preceding character analysis, but casting it as an act of self-recognition rather than as a submission to the male vampire: “I … accept myself.” Subsequently, she has to be killed to prevent the threatening union with Dracula. “An emancipated woman dies leaving patriarchy intact,” as Posada’s disillusioned conclusion reads (230). The finale of Season 3 puts an end to all the empowered gazes a masculinized, “transgendered” Vanessa has previously used to control Dracula. As Vanessa embraces God in death, Dracula disappears as regular Gothic antagonists tend to do when their dark plans to lure women into unreproductive carnal desires go astray. For all the iconoclastic genre remix and feminist gesturing of Penny Dreadful, from the first to the final battle scene, Dracula and the vampires serve as a key component of the antagonistic devilish world threatening the Christian order. As we shall see in the following, Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive offers a different trajectory for vampire narratives.

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Melancholizing the Visceral in Only Lovers Left Alive Productions that revolve around the theme of vampirism may be examined in light of their affiliation, as it were, to an “inauthentic”—low— sphere of culture. Boris Groys defines cultural fundamentalism as a phenomenon that was born from the inner disputes of modernism, which distinguishes itself by a formal rupture—between “high” and “low,” avant-garde and kitsch (63). As a consequence of this rupture, authors of high culture have felt alienated from their audiences, while those of low culture have desired to be regarded as “serious” authors. While this dichotomy became a dominant concern of modernism, following these inherent dissatisfactions on both sides, a middle ground has been sought in postmodernism and fundamentalism—namely, a new type of culture in which “seriousness” may become popular, and vice versa (63). For this reason, as Groys further remarks, it has become difficult to keep the signs of high and low culture fully apart: now, the rupture is no longer on a semiotic level, but on an interpretative one (64). Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive offers an original reading of the high/low dispute. In contrast to Penny Dreadful’s visual sanguinary excesses, the film is based on a stark reduction thereof, substituting blood and violence primarily for high culture and aestheticism as well as the symbiotic romance between the vampires Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton). Also, notably, it strategically avoids the standard tropes and clichés of vampire narratives, while at the same time drawing from, and translating, some of their traditions into a (post)modern setting. The film, unlike other vampire narratives, invokes, through the presence of this androgynous couple, the Adamic myth. Referring to this myth, Eliade notes that the Yahvist narrative of man’s creation from clay is not unique, given that the trope has been recorded around the world: “The creation of woman from a rib taken from Adam can be interpreted as indicating the androgyny of the primordial man” (165). The myth of the androgyne, Eliade further notes, is equally widespread and illustrates that “human perfection, identified in the mythical ancestor, comprises a unity that is at the same time a totality” (165). Along with it, he invokes the concept of the “divine bisexuality” and shows that it represents “one of the many formulas for the unity signified by the union of opposed pairs: feminine-­ masculine, visible-invisible, heaven-earth, light-darkness, but also goodness-­wickedness, creation-destruction” (165). To some extent, as we

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have shown above, the dissolution of gender binaries is a distinguishing feature in many vampire narratives and can also be witnessed in Penny Dreadful—in the characters of Dorian Gray or Angelique and, most prominently, in Vanessa Ives. The two protagonists in Only Lovers Left Alive arguably embody the myth of the androgyne, as they appear, through their indissoluble bond, as a singular totality. They are perfectly adapted for survival, requiring—as vampires are traditionally bound to do—careful camouflage, protection from sunlight, and nourishment to survive. What, however, differentiates them from most other vampires and helps them survive even as they run out of uncontaminated nourishment is, as the film’s title suggests, their love for one another. As Adam and Eve’s obsession for water’s purity envisions the outlines of a dystopian ruin (the end of a world that slowly destroys itself and brings, with it, the end of the parasitic vampire tradition), the solution their narrative offers is love: Only those who have passions that devour their fear of duration can remain within the visible world. This relationship is arguably unique in the context of vampire narratives: Adam and Eve are androgynous beings ennobled through love—a stellar bond that unites their bodies and minds in a way that the passing of time can in no way diminish. Despite their otherwise perfect adaptability, they can fully exist only within this bond—each of them becoming, in a sense, an extension of the other. The film’s rhythm is dictated by this common thread, finally elucidated as Eve asks Adam to finish his explanation of the theory of entanglement: Eve:

Tell me about entanglement. Einstein’s spooky action at a distance. Is it related to quantum theory? Adam: Hm. No, I mean, it’s not a theory. It’s proven. Eve: How does it go again? Adam: When you separate an entwined particle and you move both parts away from the other, even at opposite ends of the universe, if you alter or affect one, the other will be identically altered or affected. This theory explains, however, not only the relationship between Adam and Eve but also the vampires’ connection to their other peers—which becomes apparent, for instance, as Marlowe, Adam, and Eve dream of Ava only a few days before she visits the couple for the first time in several decades.

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Adam and Eve’s symbiosis is, to a degree, one of opposites—a vampiric Yin and Yang. Adam, a musician who embodies the Romantic ideal of the tormented genius, struggles with depression and suicidal tendencies—an obsession with death that Eve attributes to his “Romantic” years spent in the company of the likes of Shelley, Byron, or Wollstonecraft. Music and his bond with Eve appear to be the strongest telos that justify postponing his death. Eve, conversely, embodies the rational-vitalist persona of a scholar—a sophisticated, learned woman of great erudition, who reads voraciously and with great speed in several languages. During a chess game, she defines herself as “a survivor.” With all her erudition and cultural voraciousness, Eve does not display Adam’s creative abilities but likewise does not suffer from the anguish that plagues him. Instead, she proceeds through the centuries with nonchalance and fine irony. Both perceive themselves as witnesses of the decadence of a humanity they belonged to a few centuries before; human beings, conversely, are seen as “zombies”—paradoxically, as a species of vampires who extract their planet’s vital force without caring either for the environment in which they live or for their own bodies. Their vital fluids—water and blood—are subjected to a process of contamination, which projects also onto the vampires, their “parasites,” who are at risk of poisoning themselves in a moment of neglect (which further complicates the protagonists’ attempts at finding “the good stuff,” Type 0 Negative). Through their lives of successive accumulations and their exceptional memories, the vampires, therefore, become archive(r)s of some of humanity’s most sophisticated creations. Significant, here, is Adam’s wall of portraits, a collage that depicts pioneers from various cultural spheres and ages—from Baudelaire and Mahler to Kafka, Sontag, or Waits. In a sense, the wall becomes an important character in the film, which can be said to be a trace of “vampirism” in itself. Instead of acquiring the blood of those depicted in the portraits, it acquires their cultural “blood”—which projects an aura of intellectual finesse upon Adam and Eve. At times, Adam recounts moments he has shared with some of these figures, which suggests that he has met, if not all of them, certainly the majority. Marlowe appears to be the only living, if already fraying, extension of the wall—an equally noble witness of the world’s decay, and a mentor to Eve and protector of her and Adam’s love story. With this collage, the film opens a loop of possible questions: whether the depicted were, like Marlowe, also vampires or Adam and Eve’s friends or protégés; whether they are solely a source of inspiration for Adam’s creative quests; or whether they are

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“collected” as embodying the essence of a humanity which, despite its constant erosion to the point of “zombification,” also has the capacity to renew itself and to create valuable vocabularies. This collage, in any case, provides a key to understanding Adam’s creative experience, since the wall is a visual extension of a past which, to him, has become possible in this form and length only through his transformation into a vampire. Just like the wall, the film is sprinkled with cultural references, as the vampires display great erudition and interests in several fields of human knowledge— literature, visual arts, or science. Adam, for example, takes the pseudonyms Dr. Faust (which opens an array of further literary associations, from Marlowe and Goethe to Dostoevsky or Mann) and Dr. Caligari. Eve chooses the names Stephen Dedalus and Daisy Buchanan for their journey and is seen reading and packing books by or about authors and artists such as Cervantes, Beckett, or Basquiat. It is Adam and Eve’s aestheticism—as well as their erudition—that sets them apart from the original vampire type. In the film, Dracula appears as a barbaric, cartoonish fictional motif in a YouTube clip—a difference that becomes all the more evident as Ava, Eve’s younger sister, makes her apparition. She functions, in the film’s narrative, as a counterbalance that helps further differentiate the three erudite vampiric prototypes the film proposes—Adam, Eve, and Marlowe—from the traditional vampiric trope à la Bram Stoker that is also invoked in Penny Dreadful. Ava was transformed into a vampire at a younger age than the others, which may explain, to a degree, her lack of evolutionary instinct and her constant need to place her physiological needs first. Yet age alone cannot fully justify their differences. Rather, it appears to be their respective cultural leanings (their education—or lack thereof) that may best explain them. She appears as a violent being, incapable of generating anything but chaos and death. While Eve and her two companions are “vampiric” in their voraciousness for literature and art, Ava is uninterested in assimilating anything but blood and second-rate entertainment. While each of the three is balanced and empathetic (caring not just for the two other vampires with whom they have welded their destinies, but also for humans), she represents restlessness, boundless appetite, and lack of empathy both towards her fellows and towards human beings. At the same time, she is jealous of the others’ virtues and talents, which she—unwittingly or not—jeopardizes. By killing their human friend, Ian, Ava also inadvertently destroys the rhythmicity of the life and routine Adam and Eve have shared up to that point. Although the latter two often refer to humans as “zombies,” they appear to view

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them through a filter of lyricism and affection. For Ava, however, the human being that the couple regard as a friend and companion becomes a mere source of nourishment. Yet, Adam and Eve are not exempt from their vampiric instincts. The sight of even a drop of human blood or a bleeding wound requires great power of self-control on their part. This “family” of ennobled vampires respect and protect life, cultivating affectionate relationships with those who should, traditionally, be their victims. Instead of feeding off the blood of living humans, they go at great length to procure nourishment from blood banks: Rather than hunting humans to consume their blood, they consume their culture. Interestingly, they also contribute with their own (musical and literary) creativity and experience to the edification of innovative vocabularies of the “zombified” world—for instance, Marlowe’s writing (some of) Shakespeare’s plays or Adam’s writing a sonata for Schubert. High culture appears as a life-­ affirming means of spiritual refinement and empathy that sublimate the violence of the “Dracula” type (embodied here by Eve’s sister). Thus, the traditional vampire type appears, in the film, to be divided into two negative images. This tension—between the animalic (instinctual) and the refined (cultured)—is visually rendered in the occasional ruptures throughout the film and projects upon the viewer’s bodily presence. The story’s otherwise slow rhythm becomes, at times, suddenly interrupted, for example, by a gunshot or the shattering of a blood-filled bottle. The vampires’ speed, which becomes apparent in moments of urgency (e.g., Eve taking the pistol from Adam as he tries to shoot himself), offers a glimpse into the opposition between the vampires’ abilities and their chosen way of living. (This aspect of Only Lovers Left Alive is one of the ways in which it is at odds with the conventions of vampire horror as displayed in Penny Dreadful, where the three digitally transformed naked Nightcomers/ witches attack Ethan Chandler and Vanessa Ives [Episode 2.1] with supernatural speed, highlighted by furious movements, frantic speed-cuts, and jarring sound design.) The film’s slowness is further emphasized through the music (composed and performed by Jozef van Wissem and SQÜRL) and may be indicative of the vampires’ accumulated bodily time. The dark, velveteen polyphony of Adam’s compositions is progressively amplified despite their bolero-like repetitiveness; the hypnotic effect is suggestively visualized through the close-ups of the rotating record player. Images of the vampires drinking the vital fluid from crystal suggest a trance-like state—an existential routine outside of which duration remains

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inaccessible. What could be an expression of violence and sadism becomes, through music, a routine of refinement, which projects the couple—and, with it, the viewer—into a species of non-time. The veil of blood and music which unites past and present connects also the oriental and occidental and is rounded up by Jasmine Hamdan’s song “Hal.” Through the sensuousness of the couple’s existence, the film further departs from the usual vampire narratives. The two lovers (as well as Marlowe) live simple, unostentatious lives; the only “excess” they give themselves to is of a cultural kind—collecting rare musical instruments, vinyl records, books, and photographs: elements deemed to help the spirit stand the test of time, to strengthen it, and to give temporal duration a meaning. Unlike Vanessa Ives, who returns to God after having succumbed to the advances of Dracula, the Dark Lord, Adam and Eve in Only Lovers Left Alive are vampires that have left these Christian binaries behind. They do not carry the memory of primeval myth, the Dark Ages, and the lurking Demimonde where Satan threatens the calm heterosexual order with monstrous sexual desires—and, therefore, they do not need to be punished or killed in horrific body displays marked by excessive hemorrhage. In Penny Dreadful, nods to female self-determination, above all in the characters of Vanessa Ives and Brona Croft, are limited by the generic tropes of the “penny blood.” For Adam and Eve, these connoisseurs of culture, it is the memory of taste and elegiac erudition rather than feral gory urges or evil bloodlust that has divorced them from a zombified modernity. Having binge-watched Penny Dreadful, viewers have been bodily assaulted by an entertainment world whose multimedial stimuli and illusions delight in treading the familiar ground of Gothic horror. Returning from the camera’s curating gaze, the viewer has witnessed scenarios that yoke all the pleasures of the syncretic Demimonde together. After Only Lovers Left Alive, one may wish for an extension of the temporary benign interference by living vampires—for a hybridization, then, of our “zombified” existence with leisurely permanent artistic memories. Here, we can cast the temporary hybridity between the viewer’s subjectivity and the fictional reality as desirable and Utopian. The much-maligned ending of Penny Dreadful sends the viewer out into a material world without the heroic sacrifice and beckoning darkness provided by the vicarious memory of a vampiric Demimonde.

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Notes 1. Examples of de-Othered vampires include Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and 1960s “family” horror television series such as The Addams Family (1964–1965; film reboot, 1991–1998) and The Munsters (1964–1965; TV reboot, 1988–1991) (see Abbott 187–190). More recent examples of generic meta-mixing include Van Helsing (2004), the vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows (2014), and Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’s three-part miniseries Dracula (2020). 2. Sophie Mantrant suggests Chandler is a composite character that also reworks Jekyll/Hyde and Dracula’s Quincey Morris as modelled on Buffalo Bill (170).

Works Cited Abbott, Stacey. “‘Look Who’s Got a Case of Dark Prince Envy’: Dracula, Televisuality and the Golden Age(s) of TV Horror.” Horror Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2017, pp. 183–204. Anidjar, Gil. Blood: A Critique of Christianity. Columbia UP, 2014. Beresford, Matthew. From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth. Reaktion Books, 2008. Cosma, Valer Simion. “Dincolo de mitul modern al vampirilor: strigoii în lumea t ̦ărănească a românilor ardeleni din secolele XVIII–XIX.” Geografii identitare— identităt ̦i culturale. Vol. I.  Simpozionul multicultural “Diva Deva.” Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2014, pp. 99–116. Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas. Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, translated by Willard R. Trask, U of Chicago P, 1978. Groys, Boris. “Fundamentalismus als Mittelweg zwischen Hoch- und Massenkultur.” Logik der Sammlung. Am Ende des musealen Zeitalters, Carl Hanser Verlag, Edition Akzente, 1997, pp. 63–80. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. Gothic and the Comic Turn. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Hutchings, Peter. Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. Manchester UP, 1993. Mantrant, Sophie. “Jack the Ripper in the Age of Trauma: Ethan Chandler in Penny Dreadful, Season One.” Filming the Past, Screening the Present. Neo-­ Victorian Screen Adaptations, edited by Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 169–178. “Mănăstirea Argeșului.” Poezii populare ale românilor, collected and edited by Vasile Alecsandri. Minerva, 1908, pp. 122–128.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A.  Johnson and Michael Smith, Northwestern UPress, 1993, pp. 121–162. ———. Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Donald A.  Landes. Routledge, 2012. Poore, Benjamin. “The Transformed Beast: Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic.” Victoriographies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 62–81. Posada, Tim. “Old Monsters, Old Curses: The New Hysterical Woman and Penny Dreadful.” Neo-Victorian Madness, edited by Susan Maier and Brenda Ayres, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 229–251. Schäfer, Dennis. “Nosferatu Revisited: Monstrous Female Agency in Penny Dreadful.” Gender Forum, no. 60, 2016, pp. 41–56. Sobchack, Vivian. “The Active Eye: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Vision.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video, vol. 12, no. 3, 2009, pp. 21–36. Steinhardt, Nicolae. Primejdia mar̆ turisirii. Convorbiri cu Ioan Pintea. Editura Dacia, 1993.

CHAPTER 7

“The Dead Place”: Cosmopolitan Gothic in Penny Dreadful’s London Kendall R. Phillips

Penny Dreadful is the apocalyptic tale of two ancient gods poised to bring about the end of the world. Amunet, in the human form of Vanessa Ives, is the goddess known as “the hidden one.” Her potential consort, Amun-Ra, the “original serpent prince,” arrives in the form of the vampire Dracula. Their union would transform Amunet into the Mother of Evil, and, as Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle explains, “all light would end. The world would live in darkness. The hidden ones would emerge and rule” [Episode 1.2]. This epic tale of ancient cosmic horror entangles various literary and historical figures from the nineteenth century and spans the globe, with characters traveling back and forth between England, Africa, and the United States. The bulk of the series, however, occurs in London and the city is the site of most of the major events in the narrative, which raises an interesting question. Why London? For a tale that embraces ancient Egyptian mythology, African exploration, and the American West,

K. R. Phillips (*) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_7

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why does the capital of England become the crucial site for most of the action and the ultimate battleground upon which the final struggle is undertaken? The narrative of Penny Dreadful offers some clues. London seems to be a central site of the Demimonde, a liminal space where the world of the supernatural and the normal world overlap. Near the midway point of the first episode of Penny Dreadful, Vanessa Ives explains this space to her new partner, the American Ethan Chandler. The two characters, along with Sir Malcolm Murray, have traveled through crowded Dickensian streets, dingy opium dens, and underground tunnels to engage in a battle with a group of vampires. Vanessa asks, “Do you believe there is a Demimonde, Mr. Chandler? A half world between what we know and what we fear? A place in the shadows, rarely seen but deeply felt. Do you believe that?” When Ethan affirms his belief in such a place, Vanessa confirms, “That’s where we were last night.” While there is no suggestion that London is the only location for the Demimonde, it does seem to serve as a kind of geographic epicenter or, perhaps better, a center of gravity around which other Gothic entities and spaces constellate. As Sinan Akilli and Seda Öz put it, the Demimonde “creates the core for all other characters’ identities,” as each is drawn to London to resolve their personal conflicts (16). It is also notable that many of the literary sources for the series originated during the Victorian era, in which London loomed large as a site of fictional monsters, murder, and mystery. Peter Hutchings calls this fictional image of London “Horror London” and notes how it was popularized in the horror films of the 1930s. While the creative team behind Penny Dreadful were explicit that they “wanted to try to avoid things we had seen so many times, over and over, of typical Victorian London” (qtd. in Gosling 12), it seems clear they were heavily influenced by these earlier literary and cinematic images. In the end, as Chris Louttit notes, the series blends historical verisimilitude, earlier literary and cinematic depictions, and newly imagined spaces in ways that complicate and interrogate the city’s historical and literary image more than merely reproducing it. As Louttit puts it, Penny Dreadful works to “remap our image of Victorian London” and, in so doing, create a space for reflecting on the ways the city’s image has been constructed and reconstructed across time (11). One interesting dynamic in Penny Dreadful’s remapping of the various Victorian-era characters, images, and motifs is the decidedly cosmopolitan nature of its Gothic geography. Gothic literature has consistently depicted the unsettling encounter with some Other, and in the narratives from the

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Victorian era, the unsettling Other was often from some other country or region. The examples of exotic and threatening Others are numerous: Dracula’s desire to mix his eastern European blood with English society in Stoker’s novel, the supernatural influence of Indian artifacts in D.W. Griffith’s The Hindoo Dagger (1909), and the curse of lyncanthropy brought back from the “Orient” in Werewolf of London (1935). These narratives, however, typically focused on an encounter with a single Other. As suggested, Penny Dreadful embraces a wide spectrum of mythologies, traditions, and cultures and, in this way, maps a decidedly cosmopolitan Gothic onto the city of London. In this chapter, I examine Penny Dreadful’s cosmopolitan framing of its diegetic Demimonde and the way the series draws upon various Gothic traditions from around the globe. In order to examine the rhetorical dynamics of this cosmopolitan Gothic framing of London, I begin by exploring the decidedly global nature of the monstrous threats in Penny Dreadful and the ways the city of London and England’s Imperial past are implicated in their convergence. Following this, I focus on how characters within the series navigate the labyrinthine streets of Cosmopolitan London. In the final section, I turn to the conclusion of the series and examine the way all the narrative arcs within the series lead back to London as the site of the final confrontation.

Cosmopolitan Gothic and the Echoes of Empire In many ways, Penny Dreadful’s London looks and feels like any number of earlier fictional iterations, such as the dark streets of Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927), or the squalid lodging quarters of the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell (2001), but the first several minutes of the series’ first episode signal that these tropes will be mixed in with other aspects of the city’s history. The opening moments of Episode 1.1 feature a mother’s tense journey down the darkened hallway of her squalid tenement, a kerosene lamp her only source of light. Her private moments in the privy are abruptly interrupted by some unseen menace that drags her screaming through a window. Her daughter discovers the scene and her scream shifts to the opening credits. Traditional Horror London aesthetics persist after the stylized credit sequence as the scene shifts to a woman in black praying before a crucifix. This woman, whom we later learn is Vanessa Ives, falls into a kind of trance as a spider crawls down from the cross.

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Then the scene shifts. A cowboy drawing a six-shooter appears, blurry from the speed of his draw. The gun fires and a series of objects explode, including a cigar dangling from the mouth of a white man costumed in stereotypical Native American dress. An establishing shot reveals a Wild West show on a green space with a somewhat incongruous title reading “London September 22, 1891.” The presence of the “Colonel Brewster’s Wild West Show” provides an entry point for one of our protagonists, Ethan Chandler, but also draws our attention to London’s place in the global geography of the nineteenth century. London is positioned here as the gateway between Europe and the “new world” of America. Indeed, as Ethan ends a tryst with a female admirer, he explains he cannot continue the affair because the American show is heading off to Paris. As noted, Gothic narratives have traditionally depicted the intermingling of different cultures and the experiences of those traveling abroad. Indeed, as John Langan contends, the growing awareness of global travel and a sense of cosmopolitanism were integral to the development of Gothic literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Langan puts it, “the Gothic engages in a continuing and profound dialogue with the cosmopolitan for the length of its history; one that continues still” (60). Across multiple media forms and many decades, this dialogue has explored our anxieties about the limits of our shared humanity and the encounter with difference as well as questioning the imperatives of modernity for an increasingly homogenized and interconnected global culture built upon science, commerce, and finance. In his examination of Gothic depictions of Japan, Michael Blouin terms this collection of tropes about global encounters and superstitions the “cosmopolitan Gothic” and contends that in these narratives, “specters of modernity materialize in tropes of the fantastic” (26). The modernist fantasy of globalization that gave rise to the cosmopolitan ethic manifests repeatedly across the opening 30 minutes of “Night Work” [Episode 1.1]. In short order, we encounter a stereotypically squalid Dickensian flat, the American Wild West show, Chinatown with its grim opium dens, underground tunnels filled with eastern European vampires, contemporary medicine in the autopsy room, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Sir Malcolm’s Senegalese servant, Sembene. In a whirlwind half hour, viewers are immersed into the world of Penny Dreadful’s version of Gothic London, and it is a decidedly multicultural depiction that emphasizes London’s place not merely as gateway between Europe and America but as a central hub on a growing global network. Framed within a

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cosmopolitan Gothic, this globalized London serves not as a site of a coherent and totalizing global culture but, rather, as a disjointed assemblage of shadowy fragments. These various cultural Gothic elements, whether Egyptian gods or shadowy opium dens, are presented not as a coherent mythological world but, rather, as a chaotic world of diverse and divergent traditions and threats. The opening of the series, and indeed all three seasons, would consistently work to undermine any global coherence and embrace the ambiguous spaces in between cultural traditions. In this regard, London serves as the exemplar of a cosmopolitan Gothic which, as Blouin observes, consistently subverts the totalizing “attempt to comprehend cultural difference” (23). The tension between this modernist impetus towards totalizing coherence and the sense that such coherence is always illusory haunts many of the source novels from which Penny Dreadful draws. As Tabish Khair observes, Gothic literature arising in both Britain and in the colonies engaged a deep debate around issues of Empire and identity. Gothic narratives, Khair argues, operated in the space between a simple totalizing of identity as, say, citizens of the Empire and the colonializing tendency to “turn Otherness into sheer negativity. Blankness or a waiting-to-be-thesameness” (158). Penny Dreadful continues this complicated engagement with the logic of Empire through its choice of the locations of Gothic encounters. The British Museum serves as the site at which we get our first glimpse of the larger supernatural plot of Amunet and Amun-ra. Sir Malcolm meets with Dr. Frankenstein in The Explorer’s Club, complete with white waiters dressed in costumes from the India of the British Raj. These sites all serve as reminders of the Imperial fantasy of global coherence and are often where the shadows of Otherness manifest, a grim reminder of the complexity of, as Khair puts it, “the problematic of sameness and difference” (157). While various cultures intersect in the streets of London, they do not do so in controlled or expected ways. Shadowy danger lurks in the corners of the Empire’s capital city. Thought of in this way, London serves not as the center point of a coherent and comprehensible map of the global Gothic but as a center of gravity around which these various traditions and myths orbit. Perhaps the best textual evidence for this reading of London’s role in the series occurs in “Séance” [Episode 1.2]. Vanessa Ives and Sir Malcolm have been invited to a fete at the home of Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle. The British Museum, the scholar muses, is no place for real scholarship and so their deeper conversation about the mysterious hieroglyphics carved into the skin of a

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vampire will occur during the party. As Vanessa moves through the crowded room, her eyes fall upon a new character, Oscar Wilde’s immortal Dorian Gray. As Dorian and Vanessa begin conversing, he suggests she is skeptical. When she asks what there is to be skeptical of, Dorian responds: “About the room. Rather aggressive in the chinoiserie and geographically capricious to say the least. In this one room, there’s Japanese, Siamese, Egyptian, Balinese, and something I take to be last season’s panto of Aladdin.” Geographic capriciousness is deeply embedded into the cosmopolitan dream of free movement around the globe and easy intercourse with diverse cultures, which are all rendered coherent and navigable through the force of Empire. And, yet, as Dorian observes, there is something haphazard and disjointed in this logic. The haphazard mixture of diverse cultural artifacts and facsimiles is woven into a coherent artifice that is, in the end, not quite believable. Immediately after this observation, Madam Kali, a racially and culturally ambiguous spirit medium, is ushered in, and a séance is held in the very room about which Dorian expressed such skepticism. It is during this séance that the figure of Amunet first appears and the core narrative arc that will drive the series for its three seasons is laid out for the viewing audience. At the heart of this artificial and capricious geography, the promise of Imperial order will be confronted by the Others that will not be absorbed into its cosmopolitan dream. The Gothic Flâneur in London’s Labyrinth It is perhaps fitting that Dorian Gray is the one to observe the odd confluence of diverse cultures. Oscar Wilde’s immortal and untouchable figure moves throughout the series with a notable level of disinterest. Indeed, even in the series’ climax, in which the fate of humanity lies in the balance, Dorian stays on the outside, confident that whatever the fate of the world, he will always simply remain “looking down on a decaying world” [Episode 3.9]. Jamieson Ridenhour observes Dorian’s “role as detached observer” in Wilde’s original novel and contends that his character was heavily influenced by the cultural idea of the flaneur, whose “idleness and languor” facilitated a form of distracted and disinterested meandering. Indeed, of all the characters in Penny Dreadful, Dorian seems the most comfortable in any setting. His immortality, an almost caricatured version of Imperial privilege, allows him to wander anywhere in London, whether grand estate or underground sex dungeon, without fear or hesitation.

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For most other characters in the series, the streets of London are not so easily navigated. The characters of Penny Dreadful spend a good deal of time moving through London, from the “the dockside opium dens and labyrinthine slums” to the well-appointed opulence of grand houses and clubs (Witchard and Phillips 3). In the Victorian literary tradition, as Ridenhour puts it, “to walk in Gothic London is to give up any idea of map or guide; it is to duck the head and enter a labyrinth which is, as Dickens says of Seven Dials, more treacherous than any Gordian knot or Thebian trial” (80). Those wandering London’s foggy streets may easily become “lost and terrified, at constant risk of encountering the grotesque and Gothic dwellers at the heart of the maze” (Ridenhour 80). Penny Dreadful draws upon this literary tradition as its characters walk the labyrinthine and culturally diverse streets of London, and, in this regard, it is notable how differently characters navigate these shadowy streets. There are those who are outsiders to the city and, like Baudelaire’s flaneur in London, at constant risk of becoming lost and terrified. There are also the monsters who easily walk the shadowy streets that serve as their home. Finally, there are those who serve as a kind of Gothic flaneur, familiar enough with the Demimonde spaces of Gothic London to make their way into its heart and skilled enough to make it out again. The introduction of Ethan Chandler provides an interesting example of the outsider who must navigate the labyrinth that is London. While introduced as a skilled gun fighter and man of the world, it is clear that he is out of place in cosmopolitan London. During their initial conversation, Vanessa seeks to employ Ethan as a hired gun for her nocturnal journey into London’s underworld. When Vanessa tells him to meet her at an address, Ethan replies, “I don’t know London” [Episode 1.1]. This statement is not only an indication of his lack of knowledge of the city’s map but also a sign that he is unaware of the Gothic entities lurking therein. During his harrowing initial introduction to the strange and Gothic realm of London after dark, those initial 30 minutes of Episode 1.1 discussed above, Ethan encounters a variety of strange and nightmarish elements drawn from a wide spectrum of global culture. By the end of the episode, he is clearly shaken by these encounters and when Vanessa asks if he is interested in continuing their quest into the Demimonde of London, he is reluctant. As they part ways, Vanessa accepts his reluctance and says, “If you find yourself in that Demimonde we spoke of and seek to escape it, you know my address.”

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While initially reluctant, Ethan abandons the Wild West show and remains in London. He takes up residence at the docks where he eventually finds employment as an overseer. That he chooses to reside at the docks makes some geographic sense as the docks provide the clearest path out of London and back to his homeland in America. But throughout the first two seasons, Ethan remains in London, joining his fate with Vanessa and Sir Malcolm in their pursuit of the monstrous forces lurking therein. The Gothic monsters of Penny Dreadful also navigate the labyrinthine streets of London but without Ethan’s hesitation or fear. Indeed, they are more comfortable than even the regular denizens of London, who know that the familiar spaces of their city can be transformed by the presence of these monstrous entities. The mother using her privy in the first episode and the prostitute resting on a park bench in the opening moments of Episode 1.2 are both regular travelers on the streets of London, but the familiar is quickly rendered strange and threatening by those who make their home in the dark shadows of the city. As Jamieson Ridenhour notes, in Gothic literature “the monsters that roam the labyrinth are completely at home there” (94). Dracula is a prime example of this freedom. Finally appearing in Season 3, Dracula moves as freely through the upper strata of society as he does through the foggy streets of the city’s slums. The vampire hordes that Dracula commands also move easily through the streets where they represent the apex predator, at least until the final episodes. They are able to infiltrate the more established spaces of proper society as when in Episode 3.8 they ambush the protagonists inside Sir Malcolm’s home. The witches who dominate Season 2 are also, like Dracula, able to pass easily and unnoticed between the diurnal and nocturnal worlds of the city. Even the more sympathetic monsters in Penny Dreadful enjoy a certain freedom of movement. The Creature, the first undead creation of Dr. Frankenstein, explains to his creator, “I learned to stay in the shadows to protect such a heart as this you gave me” [Episode 1.3]. In those shadows, the Creature finds a temporary home among the troupe at the Grand Guignol Theatre. The Grand Guignol was, of course, a real theater in Paris that specialized in the gruesome and macabre, but the creators of Penny Dreadful transport the fictional space to their Gothic London. This geographic pastiche fits with the show’s broader interest in remapping London’s imaginary spaces. As Louttit notes, “Like the Grand Guignol, the Victorian London of Penny Dreadful has some sort of connection to a historical reality, but at the same time is twisted and ultimately adapted to

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fit the mood of the show” (9). It is also useful to note that this blending of Paris and London also fits with the cosmopolitan aesthetic I have been tracing in the production of the series, an aesthetic in which various global traditions mix uneasily within the city’s streets. The character of Lily provides another interesting example of the relationship between monstrosity and the city streets in which they dwell. She first appears as Brona, a sex worker who befriends Ethan. After her murder, Dr. Frankenstein resurrects her as Lily, an intended bride for the disgruntled and lonely Creature. Lily meets Dorian Gray in the Grand Guignol Theatre, and in his company she too is able to navigate the various spaces of London, the foggy streets of the East End, or the fabulous homes of Bloomsbury. Dorian, however, eventually becomes disturbed by her plans to lead a female revolution and hands her over to Dr. Frankenstein who, with the assistance of his colleague Dr. Jekyll, plans to transform her personality into one of obedience and docility. In a last-ditch effort to prevent her personality from being chemically erased, Lily insists her monstrosity came from the twisted streets of the city. She contends, “I am the sum part of one woman’s days, no more no less. That woman has known pain and outrage so terrible that it’s made her into this misshapen thing” [Episode 3.8]. Of particular interest here is the story she recounts to Dr. Frankenstein of a wintry night when she left her infant daughter, Sarah, in search of a john. In an emotional monologue she recalls finding a client, “a rough bastard,” who refused to pay and then struck her: “I felt this sting across my temple. I saw the world fall on its side. I can see myself lying there in the street, too weak to get up and not weak enough to die. Why didn’t I just get up. It was all I had to do, just get up. Get fucking up!” Sarah dies alone in their freezing flat, and the scars of this horrific experience led the resurrected Lily to become a murderous revolutionary. As Brona fell onto the cold city street, her world turned upside down and she began her entry into the Gothic underworld of the Demimonde. As she succumbed to the monstrous violence of the London Gothic’s labyrinth, she was unable to rise as herself. After the death of her daughter, she floated in a liminal state, alive but dead inside, and after her physical death and resurrection, she came fully back to life, scars and all, as a monstrous figure, finally at home in the dark spaces of the city. Others navigate these dark spaces without fully losing their humanity. These characters are what I would term the Gothic flaneurs, an early iteration of what I have elsewhere labeled the “Gothic investigator” (Phillips). These human figures combine their knowledge of the Gothic mysteries

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with a level of cultural privilege to maneuver through both diurnal and nocturnal worlds. Sir Malcolm provides an idealized version of this Gothic flaneur, and his connection to the cosmopolitan ideals of the British Empire are explicit within the series. Sir Malcolm’s continuous references to his time in Africa and India establish him as an exemplar of British Imperial logic, and his confidence when traveling the streets of London, whether meeting detectives in Scotland Yard or vampires in Chinatown, suggests his cosmopolitan ethic. Sir Malcolm also exhibits a key characteristic shared by all the Gothic flaneurs in the series, a willingness to explore the fringes of knowledge. Seeking to recruit Dr. Frankenstein to his team, Sir Malcolm recounts, “I’ve spent most of my life in Africa, beholding wonders,” and urges the doctor to join him in exploring “that place where science and superstition walk hand in hand” [Episode 1.1]. Dr. Frankenstein possesses a similar mindset anchored in a blind faith in scientific progress. In this way, Sir Malcolm and Dr. Frankenstein represent the twin pillars of the modernist agenda, the geographic expansion of Imperial civilization, and the progress of scientific knowledge. This modernist agenda grounds both men as they venture into the Gothic streets in pursuit of their individual goals. Yet, for both characters this agenda comes with a price. During the séance in which Vanessa Ives is possessed, the possessing demon taunts Sir Malcolm for neglecting his children and allowing his oldest son to die of malaria in Africa. Similarly, in the dramatic sequence in which Lily reveals the traumatic death of her daughter, Dr. Frankenstein must reconcile himself to his own monstrosity. “Do you not see the cruelty of what you are doing, Victor?” Lily asks after observing that the doctor is far more monstrous than any of his creations. For both men, the effort to bring coherence and Imperial order to a diverse and complex world has come at the cost of loss, suffering, and cruelty. Both Sir Malcolm and Dr. Frankenstein struggle to reconcile their faith in the Imperial agenda of a coherent globe with their knowledge of the costs such an agenda incur. They are not alone. As the series reaches its final chapter, other characters appear who share in their Gothic flânerie: the psychologist Dr. Florence Seward and thanatologist Catriona Hartdegen. During their brief roles in the series, both characters demonstrate the key qualities of the Gothic flaneur, scientific knowledge and worldly experience. Dr. Seward, like Ethan, is an American from New York, and Catriona’s skill in combat marks her as an already experienced adventurer into the unknown (see Fig. 7.1).

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Fig. 7.1  The Gothic flaneurs assemble in cosmopolitan London [Episode 3.8]

As this small band of Gothic flaneurs prepares for the final battle with Dracula for the soul of Vanessa Ives, and the fate of the world, they are joined again by Ethan Chandler. Across the series, Ethan has transformed from hesitant visitor to the Demimonde of London to a confident and powerful monstrous figure. After returning to America to confront his werewolf curse, he travels back to London without hesitation or fear. He is no longer relegated to the docks, but strides into the center of London, a monstrous Gothic city that is now his home. Sealing the Gothic Gateway In the end, all the major characters converge on London in the series’ final episodes to face what Catriona Hartdegen calls “the end of days” [Episode 3.8]. The prophecy provided in the first episode of the series, of darkness spreading over the world and the hidden ones emerging to rule, seems to be occurring. This vision of an apocalypse, a rising of ancient exotic gods who destroy the civilized world, is deeply tied to the modernist fear circulating at least since the Victorian era, a fear that the façade of progress and civility cannot hold against the chaos of the world. Stephanie Green notes this connection: “The idea of the monster apocalypse in Penny Dreadful

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alludes to the vision of an epoch in which history, the idea of the past, is abandoned. The modern world is on the brink, ceasing to be as it is known, about to become something sublime, terrifyingly ineffable, almost beyond human imagining and therefore virtually beyond our capacity to resist” (271). As Green suggests, this apocalypse threatens to transform the entirety of the civilized world, and, fittingly, its epicenter is cosmopolitan London. The main characters of Penny Dreadful spend a good part of the third season away from London, with Ethan returning to America and Sir Malcolm to Africa. Despite these global wanderings, the centrality of London is foreshadowed by Episode 3.1, “The Day Tennyson Died.” By referencing the Victorian poet, the creators of Penny Dreadful seem intent on marking a breaking point in western history. As Ferdinand Lyle notes to Vanessa, “Tennyson has died. He who dined with Coleridge and walked with Wordsworth, our great poetic link to ages, gone.” Additionally, this explicit link to Tennyson also allows the series, as Nina Farizova observes, to write “itself both into the continuity of poetic tradition and into the spatio-temporal reality of historical London” (181). Indeed, Ferdinand quotes Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” a poem that mixes the waters of the Danube and the Severn, suggesting the intermingling of Europe and Britain. It is also notable that this poem also references the inevitable failings of human understanding and will: “Our little systems have their day;/ They have their day and cease to be.” As London has served as a center of gravity for various global Gothic traditions that have intermingled with the narrative, the final episodes suggest that this Imperial center too cannot hold. The heart of the cosmopolitan Empire, we learn at the beginning of Episode 3.8, is dead. As Sir Malcolm and Ethan, accompanied by Kaetenay, the Apache warrior who infected Ethan with the werewolf curse, arrive at the largely empty docks, they are told, “You’re better off getting back on that ship and going back where you come from. City’s like a graveyard now.” The usually bustling streets and alleyways of the city are empty save for a noxious and lingering fog, a corrupt version of the city’s stereotypical mist. As Catriona explains to Ethan upon his return, “It is not a fog, Mr. Chandler, it is a plague.” A cosmopolitan city requires a balance between the shadowy alleys and the well-lit grand ballrooms. Similarly, the Gothic Demimonde requires a balance between the nocturnal and the diurnal. In Penny Dreadful’s “end times,” the world has been tilted out of balance, and all the spaces of London have become engulfed by the nocturnal world of the hidden ones.

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Even Sir Malcolm’s grand estate at 8 Grandage Place is invaded by monstrous vampires. This London is no longer Demimonde but now entirely filled with, as Vanessa put it in Episode 1.1, “what we fear.” We see very few regular citizens, save for the corpses of those killed by the fog or the creatures of the night. Those who venture into the street now are either monsters or the brave Gothic flaneurs, now driven not by curiosity but by sheer survival. As Ethan prepares to venture out into the foggy streets to seek Dr. Frankenstein, Catriona urges him to wear a mask to protect himself. But neither he nor Kaetenay don protective gear; they are both now fully monsters and, as such, able to navigate the streets of the shadow world. The final showdown occurs in the heart of this shadow world, the lair of Dracula who, having taken possession of Vanessa, is poised to remap the world entirely. In Episode 3.9, the Gothic investigators seek to find Dracula’s lair by hypnotizing Renfield, one of Dracula’s servants. As Dr. Seward wanders with Renfield through his memories, we see familiar sites of Penny Dreadful’s London, the shadowy streets and the red lanterns of Chinatown. In one of these alleyways, just down from a spice market, Dracula awaits his triumph in an abandoned slaughterhouse. This is, as Renfield explains to Dr. Seward, “the dead place.” Penny Dreadful’s set designers go to great lengths to emphasize the deadness of these spaces. The streets are devoid of life, save for the undead, and littered with detritus. Buildings are partially collapsed, and the floors of the abandoned slaughterhouse are caved in and rotting. The final assault on Dracula’s lair is, fittingly, carried out on two fronts. The humans arm themselves with guns and enter on the first floor. The werewolves, Ethan and Kaetenay, enter from underneath. The Gothic split of diurnal and nocturnal worlds is literalized in their approach. The two parties fight their way through hordes of vampires before finally reuniting to try to rescue Vanessa from Dracula. Indeed, the real battle at the end of Penny Dreadful is for the soul of Vanessa Ives. As the group battles Dracula in the rotting center of London, Ethan slips away to find Vanessa, who, in many ways, embodied the complex space of the cosmopolitan Gothic. As Chloé Germaine Buckley observes, Vanessa’s body lies at a complex intersection of modern and Gothic traditions. Buckley writes, “a devout Catholic, her character also evokes early Gothic literature, which abjected and exoticized European Catholicism […]. Vanessa is also an unwilling spirit medium, and the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian deity, Amunet” (365). Vanessa’s very English body is, as Buckley notes, encoded with exoticized Catholicism,

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Egyptian occultism, and various connections to Gaelic and Welsh mysticism. In a way, Vanessa Ives is a literalized embodiment of the cosmopolitan dreams of Empire, a coherent melding of various cultures and traditions. But, as the series reiterates, this center cannot hold. As Ethan seeks to rescue Vanessa, she recognizes that the new world cannot maintain this façade of coherence and control. Ethan is the only one capable of ending the threat of darkness by killing Vanessa and closing the gateway. “Please, Ethan,” Vanessa begs, “let it end.” In a white-bricked room in a slaughterhouse in the center of London, Ethan kills Vanessa and closes the gateway between old worlds and the new.

Conclusion After Vanessa’s death, the streets of London are transformed back into their usual chaotic and populated state. The sun shines again. Police officers maintain order as crews clean up the rubble from the period of darkness and destruction. Dracula has receded back into the shadows and the threat of the nocturnal overwhelming the Gothic streets of London has ended. The Demimonde is returned to balance, and London returns to its liminal state, somewhere between the world of day and the world of night. Back in his drawing room, Sir Malcolm recollects, “In India where I traveled, they have such colorful gods. A dozen blue arms, one bejeweled, a dazzling and exhausting panorama of life—of lives lived again and again. Of reincarnated souls. Do you think such a thing is possible?” He queries whether reincarnation might be possible, but Ethan rejects the idea. Vanessa has suffered enough. There will be no comfort in other cultures or traditions; the gateway between their worlds is now closed. The Creature quotes Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode at the end of the episode, “The things that I have seen I now can see no more.” As with the poem, there is a sense of lost innocence at the end of the series, a recognition that the simple dream of a coherent and unified cosmopolitan globe remains out of reach. Those seeking to render the world legible and navigable through the lines of Imperial logic will, like our protagonists, find only death and loss. By the end, the restoration of London to normalcy is achieved by repelling or at least containing the exoticized Other, a theme prominent in Victorian-era literature and a theme that helped circulate a form of xenophobia. Such a xenophobic sentiment was, it is worth noting, also circulating in the west during the initial airing of Penny Dreadful. European

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reactions to the growing refugee crisis, American anti-immigrant sentiment, and the growing push for Britain to exit the European Union are all anxieties and fears circulating around the series as it screened on television sets throughout America and the United Kingdom. I observe this context not to charge the series with contributing to these political movements but to suggest that the depiction of the city of London as contested cosmopolitan space reflects historical and ongoing anxieties about the interconnectedness of global cultures. Early Gothic literature provided space for reflecting on, as Marlene Tromp, Maria Bachman, and Heid Kaufman put it, “Victorian anxieties about its own identity in a moment when [British society] was being reshaped by powerful new forces” (2). Penny Dreadful may provide a similar kind of space for reflecting on the aspirations and anxieties of global culture. Rajani Sudan notes that the expansion of Empire provoked tension between the attraction to foreign Others and a fear of them. As she writes, “The initial attraction of the foreign becomes frightening to the British subject, thus giving rise to the repudiation of the thing that provoked illicit or dangerous desire” (6). The flaneur’s desire to wander other parts of the globe freely provokes the related anxiety of others wandering freely on their part of that globe. For Sir Malcolm and Ethan, the final episode suggests they will abandon their global wanderings. Sir Malcolm laments, “never have I so wanted to run away. On some hunt or expedition to Africa, India. Anywhere but here.” When Ethan presses him on whether he will return to his global travels, Sir Malcolm insists, “No, I must find my life without [Vanessa]. Ms. Ives was the last link to who I was. I must find out who I am yet going to be.” Ethan resolves to also remain in London. “You’re my family,” he tells Sir Malcolm. With this resolution, London’s connection to the Gothic Others, the threatening gods of the old worlds, is severed. The dream of the Empire has ended. The question of whether the gateway to these other worlds should remain closed is, in the end, unresolved.

Works Cited Akilli, Sinan, and Seda Öz. “‘No More Let Life Divide…’: Victorian Metropolitan Confluence in Penny Dreadful.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 11, 2016, pp. 15–29. Blouin, Michael. Japan and the Cosmopolitan Gothic: Specters of Modernity. Springer, 2013.

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Farizova, Nina. “Romantic Poetry and the TV Series Form: The Rhyme of John Logan’s Penny Dreadful.” Adaptation, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 176–193. Germaine Buckley, Chloé. “A Tale of Two Women: The Female Grotesque in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 2020, pp. 361–380. Gosling, Sharon. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan, 2015. Green, Stephanie. “Vampire Apocalypse and the Evolutionary Sublime: The ‘End of Days’ in John Logan’s Penny Dreadful.” Continuum, vol. 35, no.2, 2021, pp. 1–12. Hutchings, Peter. “Horror London.” Journal of British Cinema and Television, vol. 5, no. 2, 2009, pp. 190–206. Khair, Tabish. The Gothic, Postcolonialism, and Otherness. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Langan, John. “‘Through the Gates of Darkness’: The Cosmopolitan Gothic of J. Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker.” Studies in the Fantastic, no. 1, 2008, pp. 59–70. Louttit, Chris. “Victorian London Redux: Adapting the Gothic Metropolis.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 2–14. Phillips, Kendall R. Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Wayne State UP, In Press. Phillips, Lawrence, and Anne Witchard, eds. London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination. Bloomsbury, 2010. Ridenhour, Jamieson. In Darkest London: The Gothic Cityscape in Victorian Literature. Scarecrow P, 2012. Sudan, Rajani. Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature, 1720–1850. U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. Tromp, Marlene, Maria K. Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman, eds. Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia. The Ohio State UP, 2013.

CHAPTER 8

Adapting the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection Will Scheibel

“Do you believe the past can return?” asks Vanessa Ives in Episode 2.1 of Penny Dreadful. “More than that,” replies Sembene. “It never leaves us.” What can be said of the characters in Penny Dreadful might also be said of Penny Dreadful itself, which is steeped in intertextual references to media of the past. As much as the series owes to its canonical literary sources, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and a litany of Romantic poems to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a fuller discussion of the series as an adaptation needs to account for the less culturally prestigious (although popularly beloved) influences of Hollywood monster movies. According to an interview with Collider published before the premiere of Penny Dreadful on Showtime in 2014, creator and showrunner John Logan identified himself as “a total monster geek” and explained how writing the series on spec developed out of three experiences that converged through ideas about monstrosity: his rediscovery of Shelley’s Frankenstein after an immersion in Romantic

W. Scheibel (*) Department of English, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_8

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poetry ten years earlier; his coping with social ostracization while growing up gay in the U.S.; and his childhood as an avid monster-movie fan (Radish). There was precedence for Penny Dreadful’s monster rally in the Universal Classic Monsters (UCM) film cycle that captivated Logan during his youth. The cycle not only included Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Werewolf of London (1935) but also a second phase of B-sequels and crossover films in the 1940s aimed at a younger audience, such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945). In their book Monstrous Progeny, Lester D. Friedman and Allison B.  Kavey observe that “the Universal film monsters know and interact with each other. They inhabit the same fictional and timeless universe, allowing them to make guest appearances in each other’s movies, and the actors portraying them […] form a stock company of sorts.” Universal briefly revived this trend in the early twenty-first century with the action-­ adventure blockbuster Van Helsing (2004) (105). The appeal of monsters for Logan is therefore complex and tied to a deep personal history that intersects with a long film history. “I think it’s because the monsters break my heart,” he told Collider (Radish). He elaborated with the following: Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was. […] And gradually I remembered the old Universal horror movies of the ’40s where, all of a sudden, they would start mixing and matching the Wolfman with Dracula and with Frankenstein. (Radish)

These iconic movie monsters are analogous to the actors of the Grand Guignol, whom Logan’s Creature watches from backstage in Episode 1.3 titled “Resurrection.” “Night after night, the players died gruesomely,” the Creature tells Dr. Frankenstein in his voice-over narration, “and then came back to life again for the next show. They were undying. Like me, creatures of perpetual resurrection.” The Creature’s narration demands that his creator face the repercussions of reanimating and then rejecting human life, but it also speaks to a greater truth about the character for a television audience aware of his

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previous incarnations. Friedman and Kavey point out that the 1931 Frankenstein film derived from a would-be staging of Peggy Webling’s Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre in the U.S., a British play first performed in 1927, heavily revised by playwright John L. Balderston for the stateside version and, of course, based on Shelley’s novel. Although Balderston’s adaptation never made it to the U.S. stage, Universal acquired the rights to produce a film from the theatrical material (86–87). “Like Frankenstein,” write Friedman and Kavey, “Webling and Balderston stitched together parts sliced from older stage productions and appended a few new elements to fashion their drama, a process replicated by Universal’s screenwriters and directors, who freely embellished Shelley’s novel and Webling/Balderston’s version in their screen adaptation” (104). After the success of the 1931 film, the Monster returned for three sequels (The Bride of Frankenstein [1935], Son of Frankenstein [1939], The Ghost of Frankenstein [1942]), three crossover films (Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula), and finally a parody (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein [1948]). It would seem that the Monster was indestructible indeed, as each entry in the cycle found increasingly preposterous ways of resurrecting him—in The Ghost of Frankenstein, he even receives a brain transplant from Ygor. Beyond the UCM films themselves, the enduring presence of the Creature/Monster in popular culture is a testament to the character’s legacy, proving that he remains very much alive.1 Frankenstein’s laboratory is reopened once again in Penny Dreadful, but here the immortality of the Creature and his fellow monsters is taken up not as plot devices alone but as formal and thematic concerns in a uniquely self-conscious exercise in adaptation. Penny Dreadful is not an official continuation of the UCM storylines in the way that a television series might function within a narratively expansive media franchise (it is not a Universal property) nor is it a total reimagining of the UCM. Rather, the series refracts characters and storylines from literature and film into television, creating an uncanny relationship with what Julie Grossman calls its “home texts” (12). This essay draws from “the uncanny” in the Freudian sense, not as unknown and therefore strange, but as “unhomely.” While Penny Dreadful takes characters from the UCM cycle and gives them different origin stories that interconnect in new ways, the series ultimately finds these characters destined to repeat narrative scenarios that have transpired in earlier texts, rendering their “universe” strangely familiar to the viewer. The process of adaptation in Penny Dreadful is not

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rooted in deferential fidelity or brazen infidelity, but in an intertextual déjà vu.

“I Know This Place, I’ve Been Here Before”: Home Texts and Unhomely Adaptations Sigmund Freud’s theorization of the uncanny is well trodden ground, so this short review will summarize only the key claims most germane to what I am calling “unhomely adaptations” in general and to Penny Dreadful in particular. If uncanny is the most approximate English meaning of the German word unheimlich (literally “unhomely”), it does not reflect the close etymological slippages between the unheimlich and the heimlich, leading Freud to conclude that the uncanny must be understood in relationship to rather than as the opposite of the homely or familiar. He defines the uncanny as a return of the repressed that is “felt to be frightening” (147), explaining, “for this uncanny element is not something new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” (148). For example, he suggests that “waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata” produce the same uncanny sensation as the sights of “epileptic fits and the manifestations of insanity, because these arouse in the onlooker vague notions of automatic—mechanical—processes that lie hidden behind the familiar image of a living person” (135). The indeterminacy between the human and the artificial is also not unlike the uncanny effects of dead bodies, premature burials, severed or detached limbs and heads, and body parts possessed with apparently independent activity—the indeterminacy between the animate and the inanimate and the living and the dead (150). Perhaps unwittingly deploying Freudian terminology, Universal capitalized on this fear to promote The Mummy and advertised “Karloff the Uncanny” as the star of the film. Relatedly, the uncanny lies in blurred lines between reality and fantasy. Freud puts this experience in terms of “the old animistic view of the universe, a view characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with human spirits,” thus resulting in “the attribution of carefully graded magical powers (mana) to alien persons and things” (147) and the fear that such powers might aid people intending to harm. We are frightened not because of a naïve belief in this animistic view, he clarifies, but because we seem confronted with the reality of a belief we have disavowed, if only on

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a conscious level (154–155). The fear of ghosts and spirits, revenants, haunted houses, and “the omnipotence of thought” is all sprung from the uncanniness of the supernatural (148). Another classic example is the fear of the double (the doppelgänger), or “the appearance of persons who have to be regarded as identical because they look alike,” which presumes a telepathic relationship between two people “so that the one becomes co-­ owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions and experience” (141–142). Freud notes that the double raises the specter of one’s uncertainty over oneself, a self that may be “duplicated, divided and interchanged” (142). For our purposes, the most important quality of the uncanny is perhaps the most straightforwardly comprehensible. According to Freud, the feeling of “helplessness we experience in certain dream-states” might be brought on by repetition (144), or more specifically, what he calls a “compulsion to repeat” (145). When one is lost in the woods or an unfamiliar town and searches for a recognizable path or landmark, only to continue returning to the same place, or when one fumbles in a darkened room for a door or light switch, but keeps grasping the same piece of furniture, repetition becomes uncanny. This “unintended repetition,” he supposes, “transforms what would otherwise seem quite harmless into something uncanny and forces us to entertain the idea of the fateful and the inescapable, when we should normally speak of ‘chance’” (144). There is a long tradition of the uncanny in screen horror, but Penny Dreadful shares less in common with what Kendall R. Phillips terms the “American uncanny,” originating with the formation of classical narrative cinema between 1912 and 1917, than with the uncanny quality of the Anglo-American Gothic television series, which began immediately after World War II and has continued into the present. Phillips defines the American uncanny as a “narrative logic” in which “supernatural entities were almost always explained away as tricks, hoaxes, or dreams,” often to the audience before the characters who experience these entities as supernatural (89). By contrast, as Helen Wheatley claims, the serial-Gothic textuality of television produces the uncanny “in its repetitions and returns, in an aesthetic which combines traditionally realist, familiarizing programme making and non-naturalistic, disorienting filming and editing, in Gothic television’s familiar characters and plotting (the presence of doppelgangers, ghosts, premonitions and flashbacks, and so on), and even in the generic hybridity of the Gothic text.” Wheatley also posits that by constantly referring to its everyday reception context (the conventional Gothic setting of the home), Gothic television reminds audiences “that

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this is terror/horror television which takes place, and is viewed, within a domestic milieu” (7). To call Penny Dreadful “uncanny” might then seem fairly obvious given its status as a Gothic horror series that follows many conventions of the genre. The Murray mansion provides the domestic setting, a permeable space invaded by a vampire, witches, and Dracula’s familiars. Vanessa’s clairvoyant powers as a spiritualist and her violent possessions make her an archetypal uncanny protagonist (she is trained as a “daywalker,” Penny Dreadful’s version of a “good witch,” and her sigil is a scorpion). In Episode 1.5, she is presumed mad and committed to the Banning Clinic. Between Dracula and werewolf-Ethan, there is no shortage of mutilated or dismembered bodies, and the series includes not one but three reanimated corpses that emerge from Frankenstein’s laboratory: the Creature, Proteus, and Lily. Gladys Murray is driven to suicide by visions of her deceased children, who rise from their graves like zombies in Episode 2.5 and later join zombie-Gladys terrorizing Malcolm in Episodes 2.8 and 2.9. In Season 2, the Creature finds new employment at Putney’s Family Waxworks, while Evelyn Poole, the leader of the witches, creates fetish dolls that uncannily resemble Malcolm and Vanessa. The entire cosmology of Penny Dreadful follows an animistic system of beliefs. Episode 1.1 confirms the existence of what Vanessa calls a Demimonde: “A half-world between what we know and what we fear. A place in the shadows, rarely seen, but deeply felt.” We will learn that Vanessa is the reincarnation of a powerful ancient goddess (the Mother of Evil) and that a union with either the demon Lucifer or his earthbound brother Dracula would bring about the end of humankind. Over the course of the series, Vanessa does battle with each of them as they contend for her submission, and Ethan struggles with accepting his destiny as Vanessa’s spiritual ally, “The Hound of God,” in keeping the dark forces at bay. After analyzing the prophecy transcribed on his collection of relics, the Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle surmises, “the Demon, the Hound, the Scorpion…endlessly circling one another” [Episode 2.7]. Doublings and repetitions are also prevalent in the series, but not always in the service of uncanny effects. Nina Farizova has persuasively argued that Logan, inspired by Romantic poetry, “organized Penny Dreadful as a complex structure of all-pervasive rhyming” (177) and that a “‘rhyme’ happens on multiple, interlacing levels. This includes several things that can be described by such alternative terms as recurring motifs, parallel structures, or doubling and mirroring” (182). The collection of relics

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inscribed with the “Verbis Diablo” (the language of the Devil) forms clues to decode the series, as Lyle notices the “neurotic” repetition of a phrase in different languages (“It’s like a poem waiting to be rhymed,” he remarks in Episode 2.5) (182). Farizova maps how lovers in the series function both as “doppelgängers” and “rhyming couplets,” such as in the romantic triangles that “turn into polygonal relationships, crossing over one another, rhyming tempestuously” (188) and in the cross-cutting of different sexual couplings at the climax of Episode 2.5 (190). Moreover, the series contains characters who are “mirrors for themselves,” doubling Vanessa Ives with the Mother of Evil, Joan Clayton with Dr. Seward (Vanessa’s mentor and psychiatrist, respectively, both played by Patti LuPone), Brona Croft with Lily Frankenstein, and the orderly at the Banning Clinic with the Creature, who goes by the names Caliban and John Clare at various points (188). This list could also include the doubling of Dr. Jekyll with Lord Hyde, Dracula with Dr. Sweet, and Lawrence Talbot with his Wild West show persona Ethan Chandler (doubled yet again as a werewolf!). Characters mirror each other, as well, beginning with Frankenstein and the Creature as Shelley envisioned and continuing throughout the series with “daywalker” Joan Clayton and “nightcomer” Evelyn Poole, Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll, British explorer Malcolm Murray and western-U.S. settler Jared Talbot (“It’s like looking in a mirror,” Jared says to Malcom in Episode 3.5), and Vanessa and Mina, who are, after all, “closer than sisters” [Episode 1.5]. In other respects, however, I want to propose that we might consider repetitions in Penny Dreadful uncanny, not because they necessarily arouse fear in the viewer but because they create textual disturbances that unsettle the canons of fidelity and originality in the process of adaptation. Wheatley insists that the uncanny in Gothic television is “located in the moments […] in which the familiar traditions and conventions of television are made strange, when television’s predominant genres and styles are both referred to and inverted” (7–8). But what happens when a text renders the familiar traditions and conventions of adaptation strange? Or, to pose this question another way, how can a text make the always already strange possibilities of adaptation manifest by referring to and inverting its most traditional practices? To be clear, I am not arguing that Penny Dreadful is especially instructive in this way for how it disregards fidelity to its sources, but for how it defamiliarizes them. We might think of Penny Dreadful in Julie Grossman’s Frankensteinian terms as the “hideous progeny” of (among other sources)

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the UCM cycle. “Hideous progeny” as a metaphor for adaptation evokes both “stories that don’t, won’t, or cannot die” and “figures that ‘feed’—as the vampire and zombie do in particular—on past stories in order to survive” (9). Like a monstrous outsider, “Adaptation attempts to dialectically revisit a source text, recognizing that it cannot go ‘home’ again” (10). Yet, adaptations estranged from their “home texts” can still galvanize the reader/viewer’s relationship to previous sources by engineering this recognition-­ through-disorientation. As Grossman maintains, “Exiled from the ‘home text’ and any faithful relationship to it, adaptations make their own way. With his/her/its instinct for survival, this ‘hideous progeny’ will carry familiar stories into the future, even as that journey is uncomfortable to witness” (12). Recalling Freud’s thesis that “the uncanny [the ‘unhomely’] is what was once familiar [‘homely,’ ‘homey’]—i.e., “I know this place, I’ve been here before” (151)—an unhomely adaptation makes this return to the “home text” both a compulsory obsession and an impossible goal. For any adaptation, returning to the “home text” may be to some degree inevitable, but in the Gothic text, the ambivalence over what it means to return and still the repeated attempts to do so renew the generic investment in the uncanny that connects Gothic adaptation with Gothic source. Strict Freudians might take issue with my use of the uncanny, itself a somewhat liberal adaptation of Freud’s original essay. Yet, Wheatley has demonstrated how such reformulations of the uncanny can teach us about the congruity between the strange and the familiar in Gothic texts that do not primarily seek to arouse fear (e.g., sitcoms such as The Addams Family [ABC, 1964–1966] and The Munsters [CBS, 1964–1966]). A textual “double” for the UCM cycle, Penny Dreadful confronts the viewer with “the constant recurrence of the same thing, […] the same characters, the same misdeeds even the same names, through successive generations” (Freud 142). If “A Good Cast is Worth Repeating,” as Universal’s preface read in the end credits of its films from the early 1930s, so too are good monsters, and the following analysis looks at how Penny Dreadful “represses” them to ensure their ever more uncanny return.

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House of Vanessa Ives: John Logan’s Monster Mash(up) As Vanessa pores over the “Verbis Diablo” with Frankenstein, she reflects on her encounter with the Creature in London’s underground cholera-­ quarantine and soup kitchen. “We met in the strangest way,” she tells the doctor, asking, “Is it random we met, I wonder? Or is there a hidden design, like these relics?” [Episode 2.6]. Vanessa does not yet know that the Creature, who identifies himself as John Clare, is in fact the orderly who cared for her at the Banning Clinic. There are several “hidden designs” at work in Penny Dreadful, some of which are the source novels themselves. During the first season, Vanessa starts rewriting the epistolary narrative of Stoker’s Dracula through daily letters to Mina, never sent, but written the way the season unfolds in serialized continuity with “the ending of one letter becoming the beginning of the next, an endless ribbon of words” [Episode 1.5]. Critic David Crow describes the first season as a kind of alternate version of the novel that gives Stoker’s main characters new (if not totally unrecognizable) identities: Quincey Morris becomes Ethan Chandler, Dr. Seward becomes Dr. Frankenstein, and Lord Godalming becomes Sir Malcolm Murray.2 Mina exists in Penny Dreadful as Dracula’s victim in the first season and has more in common with Stoker’s Lucy Westenra, “the sweet and beloved best friend of the story’s actual female protagonist for whom life comes much harder.” By contrast, Logan’s Vanessa fulfils the role of the literary Mina, “the strong-willed, modern woman around whom all men coalesce in admiration, and like Stoker’s heroine, there is something so special about this protagonist that even the Dead are moved to obsess over her” (Crow). Logan does not set up a hierarchy privileging literary over cinematic sources but combines characters and storylines into new narrative continuities while dispensing with others. For example, he incorporates Shelley’s eloquent Creature, not Universal’s groaning Monster, whereas Lawrence Talbot originated in Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941), not a work of literature. In one of Logan’s boldest decisions, he introduces Dr. Van Helsing in Episode 1.4 as Frankenstein’s mentor, only to kill him off at the hands of the Creature in Episode 1.6 (Edward Van Sloan, the same actor who played Van Helsing in the 1931 Dracula film, also played Frankenstein’s mentor Dr. Waldman the same year). Calling Van Helsing’s surprise death “a provocation, fan to fan,” Logan explained, “yes, I

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cherish the sacred texts, but we are not creating or recreating the sacred texts,” inviting fans to see where the series elides with and, in “liberating” moments, breaks from its sources (“Full Penny Dreadful Panel”). The murder of Van Helsing secures Vanessa’s role as the primary opponent of Dracula, the structuring absence of the first season. Conversely, seemingly revisionist decisions such as Frankenstein’s creation of the gentle, childlike Proteus in Episodes 1.1 and 1.2 are jettisoned to reestablish the prominence of the Shelleyesque Creature. Episode 1.2 introduces the Creature as Frankenstein’s “first born,” who returns home and destroys Proteus to usurp his place in the storyline. The composite characters who inhabit Penny Dreadful also disrupt notions of textual “purity” that any one distinct source might be thought to possess. Frankenstein’s schoolmate Henry Clerval from the Shelley novel is now Henry Jekyll, a character created by Robert Louis Stevenson.3 Shelley’s Justine, the servant of the Frankenstein home whom Victor’s “cousin” Elizabeth adores, is now the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, whom Lily recruits for a war against the Victorian patriarchy (note that Victor refers to Lily as his “cousin”). The one-armed police inspector Krogh from Son of Frankenstein is now the one-armed police inspector Rusk in the Talbot storyline. And although Lawrence Talbot is named after Universal’s most popular lycanthrope, he looks more like the titular character in Werewolf of London, the studio’s first werewolf film (see Figs. 8.1 and 8.2). Logan advised prosthetics designer Nick Dudman to follow Jack

Figs. 8.1 and 8.2  Although Lawrence Talbot is named after Universal’s most popular lycanthrope, he looks more like the titular character in Werewolf of London, the studio’s first werewolf film [Episode 2.10]

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Pierce’s minimalist makeup in that 1935 film, which, for all of its theatricality, allowed actor Henry Hull to achieve a certain level of realism onscreen. Hull’s werewolf was less a “transformed beast” than “the same man with slightly more beast-like characteristics” (Gosling 172). Yet, Logan’s scrambling of well-known characters and scattering them across a wider canvas only intensifies the uncanny designs that bind them together. Frankenstein’s old friend is still unable to pull him back from the edge of madness (in Penny Dreadful, Jekyll collaborates with Frankenstein on his unethical experiments). Justine is still condemned, not from the wrongful conviction of murder in Shelley’s novel but from the failure of Lily’s uprising (in Episode 3.8, Justine asks Dorian Gray to kill her to escape the lifetime of prostitution that awaits). The inspector is still in relentless pursuit of a monster who has left bodies in his wake (in Episode 2.9, Rusk compares his evidence against Ethan to the uncanny sensation of a phantom limb, “something not quite real, but completely true”). Talbot still despairs from the guilt and shame of his uncontrollable transformations that release a violent animal when the moon is full. If the UCM characters always found a way “home,” Logan’s characters represent one of the latest iterations in this continued process of reassemblage. House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula announced literal homecomings for UCM characters at the same time as they brought Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, and Talbot back to their “home” studio before they took their curtain call in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Logan’s approach is in some ways consistent with Universal’s own poetic license in the continuity of casting the UCM films, for which literary fidelity was never an overriding concern. After starring as Dracula in the 1931 film, Bela Lugosi appeared as Ygor in Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein, as the fortune-teller/werewolf who turns Lawrence Talbot into the Wolf Man and as the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (remember that the Monster was carrying Ygor’s brain by this point). Boris Karloff played the Monster in the first three Frankenstein films and then returned to the series as a new mad-doctor character in House of Frankenstein while Glenn Strange took over as the Monster. The most stable presence was Lon Chaney Jr., who played Talbot in The Wolf Man and the Monster in The Ghost of Frankenstein, but reprised the former role whenever the studio called for it. By swapping its stars in and out of these roles, Universal inadvertently made its major characters doubles for one another, and attentive viewers will notice the same

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liberties taken with the actors who turn up throughout the cycle in supporting parts. The parallel relationship between Frankenstein’s “undying monster” and Talbot’s “wolf man” is articulated most explicitly in the UCM crossover films as a series of Frankenstein surrogates endeavor to restore the Monster’s life, while Talbot yearns for death to release him from his curse. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House of Frankenstein, and House of Dracula are all essentially variations on this plot, although by eliding how either Dracula or Talbot survived House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula is practically both a sequel and a remake. Repetition in the UCM therefore serves two paradoxical functions. At the diegetic level, it is a curse that can only be broken through death or destruction, suggesting a tragic inevitability for our doomed monsters. But at the extra-diegetic level, repetition is a source of narrative pleasure for the viewer, enabling a return to these problematically sympathetic characters and a continuation of their stories (however predictable). Penny Dreadful builds on this tradition from the UCM cycle, not simply by recycling the formula yet again but by re-­ presenting characters and storylines that UCM fans would know. The Creature’s storyline is especially complicated in that it works from both the UCM cycle and the Shelley novel, sometimes at once. Universal’s Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein follow the Monster’s unsuccessful attempts at finding human affection and companionship, such as his encounters with “Little Maria” and the blind hermit, but these scenes are also variations on episodes that occur in the novel. Shelley’s Creature saves a girl from drowning in the river and, after trying to help her regain consciousness, endures a gunshot from her guardian who misinterprets his actions as threatening. The 1931 film has the Monster accidentally drown Maria while playing with her on the shore of a lake and then face a torch-­ and-­pitchfork mob led by her devastated father. In the novel, the Creature takes refuge next to a cottage that houses a blind man named De Lacey, his son Felix, and De Lacey’s daughter Agatha. For a period of months in hiding, the Creature enjoys listening to their music and learns to speak by observing them talk and read aloud. Hoping to befriend the family, he introduces himself to De Lacey while Felix and Agatha are away, but when they return to find the Creature in their home, Felix attacks him and causes him to flee. One of the most famous moments in Bride is the Monster’s happening upon a cottage in the woods, where the blind hermit in residence invites him to stay. The hermit plays music and teaches him rudimentary English, but when a pair of hunters discovers the Monster

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and try to shoot him, he accidentally burns down the cabin in an effort to defend himself. Penny Dreadful conflates scenes in two of the Creature’s narrative arcs: his employment at Putney’s Family Waxworks in the second season and his reunion with his family in the third season. Oscar Putney hires him to construct tableaus of gory crime scenes and perform custodial duties for his museum. The sculptor of the waxworks, Oscar’s blind daughter Lavinia, appears empathetic to the suffering of others and takes a seemingly benevolent interest in the Creature. What he does not realize is that the Putneys plan to exhibit him as a live subject in their new “freak show,” and in Episode 2.9, Lavinia traps him in a cell in the museum basement. The Creature eventually seeks out his real family from his previous life as an orderly at the Banning Clinic. After tracking his wife Marjorie and young son Jack to their new apartment, the Creature hides in their attic and observes their life in poverty. Marjorie now works in a factory and Jack has developed a lung disease. To their shock, the Creature introduces himself and tells them his story. Almost as soon as he begins looking forward to resuming his previous life with his family, Jack dies and Marjorie implores him to take the body to Frankenstein in the hopes that Jack might be revived. The Creature instead disposes his body in the River Thames, knowing that Marjorie will believe he refused to save their son and will not welcome him back. Jack’s riverine burial in Episode 3.9 is reminiscent of Maria’s drowning, a connection reinforced by Jack’s comment in Episode 3.8 that he cannot swim. Family is either illusory or impermanent for the Creature, as it is for Universal’s Monster, and he remains without a home in a hostile country. Talbot’s equally melancholy storyline in Penny Dreadful runs parallel, but in the opposite direction, as he attempts to divorce himself from the traditional family structure into which he was born. Although the series does not confirm that Ethan is a werewolf until Episode 1.8 or that his real name is Lawrence Talbot until Episode 2.9, it hints at these revelations overtly. The brutal murders in Episode 1.1 are attributed to the return of “Jack the Ripper,” but Ethan’s suspicious appearance at the murder site and his concerned interest in the crime implies some sort of connection. A sex worker is mysteriously murdered in the cold open of Episode 1.2, and in the next scene, Ethan awakens outside of the Mariner’s Inn to find claw marks on his palms. Later in Episode 1.3, he is able to commune with wolves at the London Zoo, and when Dorian takes him to a rat-baiting in Episode 1.4, he is horrified by the spectacle of terriers savaging rats. Even

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the opening-credits montage associates him with canid hair and teeth. Ethan is also an inversion of Universal’s “Larry” Talbot. Instead of a UK-born expatriate living in the U.S., who returns home to his family estate in a quiet Welsh village, Ethan is a U.S.-born expatriate living in the U.K., who returns home to his family ranch in the desolate New Mexico territory. Introduced as a sharpshooter performing in London, Ethan gradually aligns more with Larry’s self-loathing monster than a conventional romantic hero, partly through his sexual relationships with the tubercular sex worker Brona in the first season and Evelyn’s daughter Hecate in the third season. “We’ve all done things to survive,” he assures Brona. “There are such sins at my back it would kill me to turn around” [Episode 1.4]. To what exactly Ethan refers is not yet clear, but this confession of guilt recalls Larry’s hopeless desire to end his life in the UCM cycle. Ethan loves Brona for her passion undeterred by the misery she has suffered, and he does not waver in his commitment even when she admonishes that they begin physically distancing to protect his health. In an explicit sex scene in Episode 1.3, he shifts to missionary position and kisses her tenderly on the lips, allowing her to breathe onto his face. When she meets Vanessa in Episode 1.4, Brona wrongly assumes Ethan would prefer a woman with Vanessa’s social and physical privileges. As Brona tells him in a moment of anger, “You’re fuckin’ a skeleton every night, for Chrissake. There’s no goddamn future in it for either of us.” Ethan is not living for the future, and he identifies with death and the dying. If Brona represents virtue-in-suffering for Ethan (her name means “sadness” in Gaelic), Hecate fuels his rage and promises a transgressive alternative to his family’s Christian teachings that he believes have failed him. Ethan’s backstory unravels in the third season as if in response to his question to Dorian in Episode 1.4, “You ever wish you could be someone else? Just run away from your life?” We learn that Ethan is someone else, haunted by a past life that continues to impinge on the present. Logan’s Lawrence Talbot fought in the American Indian Wars as a soldier in the U.S. Cavalry, enlisted by his father, who wanted to “make a man” of his youngest son. After participating in the massacre of an Apache tribe, the guilt-ridden Lawrence killed his commanding officer and begged the remaining Apaches to take his own life. The Apache werewolf Kaetenay, a counterpart to the fortune-teller/werewolf in The Wolf Man, cursed him with lycanthropy instead (a fate worse than death). Once adopted by the Apaches, Lawrence fought alongside them, and, in an uncanny repetition

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of the earlier massacre, they invaded the Talbot ranch and killed his mother, brother, and sister. Encouraging Ethan’s vengeful intentions of returning to the ranch to murder his father, Hecate convinces him that God chose to watch and laugh at these traumatic events rather than intervene. Ethan accedes to her appeals in Episode 3.5, temporarily persuaded that Lucifer will free him of his guilt and that he will be able to create a new world with Hecate in an unholy union. The final confrontation between Ethan and his father Jared [Episodes 3.5 and 3.6] most firmly links Penny Dreadful to the psychodynamics of Larry’s storyline in The Wolf Man. Following an 18-year absence, Larry returns to Talbot Castle to visit his emotionally distant father Sir John when Larry’s older brother (Sir John’s heir and namesake) dies in a hunting accident. Their reconciliation is cut short when a fortune-teller/werewolf named Bela bites Larry, turning him into the titular “wolf man,” and he learns about his affliction from Bela’s mother Maleva. Sir John dismisses Larry’s belief in werewolves and assumes he has fallen under the influence of village superstitions, reasoning that such transformations only occur in the mind. When the police question Larry in the deaths of Bela and a local gravedigger, Sir John is primarily concerned with Larry proving his innocence to clear his aristocratic family name. Mistaking Larry for a wild animal that the police have begun hunting on the Talbot land, Sir John kills Larry and later dies from grief.4 The film positions Larry between his xenophobic father, a man of science (implied to be an astronomer) and Christian faith, and the compassionate Romani fortune-teller Maleva, who fulfils a maternal role for Larry in the absence of a mother. Sir John and Maleva, respectively, personify the film’s dichotomous conflicts: masculine versus feminine, western Europe versus eastern Europe, organized religion versus folk culture, and intellect versus emotion. Ethan’s relationship with Jared plays out another unreconciled conflict with an Imperial father, ending with the dissolution of the Talbot legacy (Malcolm kills Jared, his double). The showdown at the Talbot ranch forces Ethan and Jared to relive their earlier trauma of the Apache attack, just as Larry’s death on the grounds of Talbot Castle restages the “hunting accident” in which Sir John lost his eldest son. Both in The Wolf Man and Penny Dreadful, the Talbot fathers are the guardians of patriarchal authority on the verge of collapse. Ethan briefly occupies the same space as the Creature when they separately visit Vanessa’s grave in Episode 3.9, the final episode of the original series, unaware that both of their lives have revolved around the same

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woman. As Ethan turns his back to exit the cemetery, the Creature comes out from hiding behind a wall to pay his respects to Vanessa. This barely missed meeting of Frankenstein’s monster and the wolf man is a poignant reminder of how their lives have been imbricated onscreen long before Penny Dreadful, even when their paths do not directly cross. They reside in the same “home texts,” and their perpetual resurrection guarantees that their stories can always be repeated with countless variations. Universal exploited a comfortably repeatable formula with its classic monster movies and is currently in the process of rebooting and rebranding the cycle (Ito). Penny Dreadful is an example of an adaptation in which that compulsive repetition serves the Gothic project of its literary and cinematic sources, asking its viewers to see the “unhomely” in the familiar. Scenarios repeat and return these characters to their locus of origins, no matter how far they seem to have strayed. We know this place. We have been here before.

Notes 1. For more on the cultural legacy of Frankenstein, see the following: Cutchins and Perry, Friedman and Kavey, and Horton. 2. I would add that Fenton, although a relatively minor character in Penny Dreadful, stands-in for Renfield until the “real” Renfield is introduced in the third season. 3. A student of Asian languages, Henry Clerval dreams of traveling to India. In Logan’s version, Henry Jekyll is Indian. 4. Sir John’s death (possibly suicide) is not revealed until Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman when a full moon brings Larry’s exhumed body back to life.

Works Cited Crow, David. “Penny Dreadful: A Twisted Reflection of the Dracula Story.” Den of Geek, 21 Oct. 2016, https://www.denofgeek.com/culture/ penny-­dreadful-­a-­twisted-­reflection-­of-­the-­dracula-­story/. Cutchins, Dennis, and Dennis R.  Perry, editors. Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture. Manchester UP, 2018. Farizova, Nina. “Romantic Poetry and the TV Series Form: The Rhyme of John Logan’s Penny Dreadful.” Adaptation, vol. 13, no. 2, 2020, pp. 176–193. Friedman, Lester D., and Allison B.  Kavey. Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives. Rutgers UP, 2016. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Penguin, 2003.

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“Full Penny Dreadful Panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2014 SDCC.” YouTube, uploaded by Inside the Magic, 26 July 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=avbxA5sNisA. Gosling, Sharon. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan Books, 2015. Grossman, Julie. Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Horton, Robert. Frankenstein. Wallflower P, 2014. Ito, Robert. “There’s No Dark Universe Anymore, Just One Monster After Another.” New York Times, 27 Feb. 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/02/27/movies/the-­invisible-­man-­universal.html. Phillips, Kendall R. A Place of Darkness: The Rhetoric of Horror in Early American Cinema. U of Texas P, 2018. Radish, Christina. “John Logan Talks Penny Dreadful, Exploring Sexuality, and Planning the Series Well Into the Future.” Collider, 18 Jan. 2014, https:// collider.com/john-­logan-­penny-­dreadful-­interview/. Wheatley, Helen. Gothic Television. Manchester UP, 2006.

PART III

The Monster Unbound: Theatrical Performance, Western Dime Novels, and TV Noir

CHAPTER 9

Penny Dreadful and the Stage: Lessons in Horror and Heritage Shannon Wells-Lassagne

Many scholars, notably those interested in adaptation and transmediality, have remarked on the evocative nature of Penny Dreadful’s title: by referencing a lowbrow form of sensationalistic fiction from the nineteenth century (indeed, by having Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing display the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire to Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein), series creator John Logan insisted on his devotion to authentic details from the period, a playful relationship to the fiction’s many source texts, as well as an affirmation of its postmodern status, bridging the gap between high and low culture. As fascinating as this allusion and its ramifications for the series may be, equally compelling is the drama’s treatment of the performing arts within the diegesis. This is most obvious in the foregrounding of the Grand Guignol theater in Season 1, an anachronistic reference1 that serves as a home and place of employment for Frankenstein’s Creature,2 a source of entertainment for Brona and Ethan, and the location for the final S. Wells-Lassagne (*) Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_9

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showdown between the “heroes” and their antagonists, but throughout the series, the performing arts are central to the narrative: after the pilot’s cold open presenting a brutal killing, we are witness to Ethan’s performance as a sharpshooter and performer in a Wild West show; in Season 2 of the series, Caliban finds work at a wax museum offering representations of recent crimes, while the principal antagonist of the season, Evelyn Poole, first displays her talents as a medium [Episode 1.2], before showing herself to be the ultimate ventriloquist, creating mannequins of the different protagonists and imbuing them with life; and in the final season, Vanessa woos her new love interest (none other than Dracula himself) by bringing him to a magic lantern show. Beyond these major examples, of course, the series is full of references to puppet shows, photography sessions, and Shakespearean characters—this is a world where performance is everywhere. My contention is that this emphasis on performance serves to highlight both the form and the content of this series, and indeed of entertainment more generally. By placing well-known horror figures in relation to different performance media and traditions, Penny Dreadful insists on heritage as well as horror: first in its relation to and reliance on past forms; then in its place as both period adaptation and postmodern “quality” television; and finally in its relationship with its viewers and its medium.

Victorian Legacies: The Heritage of Performance in Penny Dreadful As is perhaps unsurprising for a period fiction reliant on some of the best-­ known literary characters from yesteryear, one of the most obvious relationships between the series and the theater is in the attention it pays to past traditions of performance, and how these traditions still impact visual storytelling today. The references to canonical characters, not just from novels but also from plays, are obvious in Frankenstein’s first progeny, Caliban and Proteus: our mad scientist actually allows Proteus to choose his name from a collection of the Bard’s works [Episode 1.2]. Ethan Chandler also accrues a Shakespearean nickname; Dorian Gray refers to him as “rude mechanical” Bottom, an allusion to the comic character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605) ([Episode 1.4], Mustafa 45)—and indeed, given the relative isolation of the Dorian character from the majority of the narrative arcs of the series, one might argue that his inclusion in this “monster mashup” could be attributed in particular to the reputation

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of its author Oscar Wilde as a dramatist rather than a novelist. The insistence on the theatrical, which reaches beyond the Grand Guignol setting and attaches itself to our characters, evokes the inextricable nature of the ties binding these literary characters and their theatrical adaptations: as Lisette Lopez Szwydky reminds us in her book Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, the very popularity of the novel form is in part due to draconian measures of censorship imposed on the theater first by the Licensing Act of 1737 and then by the Theatres Regulation Act of 1843 (34–37)—but in addition to this, of course, the novels themselves often acquired an audience through theatergoers eager to read the source text of their favorite plays: “Because of the relative speed with which novels and current events were adapted for the London stage, it’s reasonable to assume that with a few exceptions, most theatergoers were not familiar with the source texts being dramatized” (40). Though authors like Dickens famously denigrated the work of theatrical adaptors as plagiarism, leading to his efforts in favor of intellectual property laws and international copyright (84–85), Szwydky focuses notably on the source text that provides the largest number of characters, Frankenstein (1818), whose 15 theatrical adaptations allowed for a second edition of a very small initial (and anonymous) publication, making it more available for a reading public (5). Several of the source texts used in the series initially came to public attention through the stage, whether it be Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) or Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) (Szwydky, “Frankenstein’s” 25). If novel and stage were interdependent forms in the nineteenth century, Thomas Leitch notes that film owes a similar debt to the stage, notably in relation to the Gothic figures peopling Penny Dreadful: The most celebrated 1930s Hollywood adaptations […] move from adapting plays to adapting novels. This pattern has been obscured by the fact that so many 1930s adaptations of novels drew their material not directly from those novels but from theatrical dramatizations of them. The list of early sound novelistic adaptations that are actually early sound theatrical adaptations ranges from monster movies like Dracula [Tod Browning, 1931], Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) to romances like Becky Sharp (Rouben Mamoulian, 1935), Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940), and of course Camille [George Cukor, 1936], which Dumas had dramatized from his own novel. (110)

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From this perspective, the many references to classic film become significant to the series and its homage to the stage. These allusions are both recurrent and significant, images that will inevitably be memorable to the viewer, whether they’re familiar with the original references or not. For example, the presence of a first monstrous vampire-figure in Episode 1.1 (see Fig. 9.1) cannot fail to evoke Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), with a physiognomy that is itself in shades of grey like its black and white filmic predecessor. Likewise, Season 3’s Dracula owes much to the Francis Ford Coppola film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), but one of the most pointed references, where Dracula and his beloved (Mina Harker in Coppola, Vanessa Ives in Penny Dreadful) attend a magic lantern show, obviously refers back to classic film in both iterations: Penny Dreadful’s choice of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) evokes another groundbreaking filmic predecessor, Georges Méliès, whose Voyage dans la Lune (1902) was similarly inspired by Verne and his From the Earth to the Moon (1865). Characters like Ethan Chandler’s werewolf may have initially been inspired by penny dreadfuls like Wagner the Werewolf (1847) or The Were Wolf (1896) (Lee and King, Aquilina), but were better known on stage and screen, a fact that seems to be highlighted by the revelation of his true name, Ethan Lawrence Talbot, referencing the werewolf-character played by Lon Chaney Jr. for Universal

Fig. 9.1  Penny Dreadful cites Nosferatu [Episode 1.1]

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Pictures. The fact that the actor’s father, Lon Chaney, was famous for his incarnation of the titular Phantom of the Opera (1925), a role that Caliban seems to take on in his work as stage rat and unhappy suitor of the star of his respective stage, is unlikely to be a coincidence; nor is the imagery of Caliban luxuriating in the light of the stage [Episode 1.3] (see Fig. 9.2), a shot that echoes the acts of Proteus in the previous episode, and of course the first actions of Frankenstein’s monster in the James Whale adaptation. Indeed, it is significant that though the character breaks with the Boris Karloff-inspired image of Frankenstein’s monster, hewing closer to Shelley’s original description, or the appearance of Lon Chaney’s rendition of the Phantom of the Opera, his makeup, and particularly his black lips, are reminiscent of the extreme makeup used by actors in the early days of film and television, a point highlighted by his attempts to make himself more presentable with stage makeup [Episode 1.8]. Likewise, beyond Season 1 and its foregrounding of the theatrical, the importance of waxworks and ventriloquism in Season 2 might also be seen as a reference to Maurice Tourneur’s film Figures de Cire (1914), itself based on the Grand Guignol’s most famous playwright, André de Lorde. The seduction of Sir Malcolm Murray by Evelyne Poole might also be associated with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919)—an association made all the more interesting as it was one of the rare examples of silent film

Fig. 9.2  Caliban luxuriates in the light of the stage [Episode 1.3]

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adapted to the Grand Guignol stage (Hand and Wilson 17, Gordon 50). The character herself, it might be argued, represents a play on this relationship between theater and film, given that Poole’s motivation (a desire to remain eternally young) constitutes a reference to Grande Dame Guignol cinema, a filmic subgenre that Peter Shelley defines through the place of the titular “grande dame as [an] unstable antagonist [that] may pine for a lost youth and glory [… as well as] a refusal to accept reality and the natural process of life[, which] exemplifies the fear of aging and death” (8). Of course, as was mentioned above, it is not only horror that is present in the theatrical performances of Penny Dreadful; indeed, our first experience of the theater is a Wild West show (“Col Brewster’s Wild West Show and Emporium of American Curiosities”), featuring protagonist Ethan Chandler, and the theme of the Western runs throughout the series through this character’s sharpshooting skills, culminating in his return to the West in Season 3. Though this genre is not on the list that Thomas Leitch provides in the above quote, it too confirms his thesis that theater was a crucial influence on film in its new rendition on screen: What first led audiences and critics to see “authenticity” in The Invaders [1912] and other [Thomas] Ince Westerns seems to have been their reliance on the formula of the Wild West show […]. Ince openly borrowed from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West pageant in the 1912 film of Custer’s Last Fight, as well as in obvious impersonations of Buffalo Bill himself in other Ince films. (Simmon 61–62)

Though this reference to Ince is implicit in Penny Dreadful’s Wild West show, where Ethan impersonates a survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn, our first view of the character makes an obvious reference to an even more famous early Western film, Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), and its final shot of its outlaw firing at the camera [Episode 1.1] (see Fig. 9.3)—incidentally a film that took both its title and premise from a recently revived stage play by Scott Marble (Musser 256). Given all these references to stage and screen, the status of the Grand Guignol (and to a lesser extent, the Wild West show) is no longer anecdotal; rather, it becomes an homage to past traditions of performance and their impact on the fictions of today. Indeed, both onscreen performances are remarkable in their refusal to allow the viewer any of the verisimilitude one imagines the audience experiencing; in both cases, the camera takes

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Fig. 9.3  Penny Dreadful cites The Great Train Robbery [Episode 1.1]

pains to show stagecraft from defamiliarizing angles, and to cut away to avoid an impression of narrative continuity. In Ethan’s performance [Episode 1.1], the camera focuses on close-ups of his sharpshooting skills laying waste to the different props around him. The close-ups contrast with extreme long shots of the fairgrounds as a whole or the stands full of spectators, while his ostentatious makeup and false hair complement a dramatic oration that is reminiscent of revival tent preachers, very much at odds with his tone after having finished his tale. All of these elements create significant distance with any desire to willingly suspend one’s disbelief. Likewise, when the viewer is finally treated to a performance at the Grand Guignol theater [Episode 1.4], the performance itself is given short shrift; like the previous performance in the Wild West show, Penny Dreadful shows actors in thick makeup and outrageous costumes, with a wooden delivery of lines that keeps television viewers at arm’s length. Instead, time is largely spent on the efforts of stagehands like Caliban behind the scenes to create the drama on stage. Most significantly, perhaps, our final encounter with the Grand Guignol theater [Episode 1.8] ultimately shows a setting that offers only technical elements and aesthetics, where any theatrical content has been set aside for the final showdown with Mina Harker. This point is made explicit in the play rehearsal that begins the episode, where content is secondary to technique: “Die die die, line line line. Watch your marks, here, darling.”

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This is relevant to the actual Grand Guignol and its impact on performances in the dramatic arts long after its popularity had waned; the Parisian theater remains famous for its contribution to theatrical effects. Stage technician Paul Ratineau became famous not only for his special effects to create the gore the Grand Guignol became known for, including a specific formula for realistic stage blood, but also for his groundbreaking work in sound effects, some of which are still used in foley today (Hand and Wilson 52). As such, The Transformed Beast becomes a lovely homage to the debt film and television owe both to theater in general, and to the Grand Guignol in particular, in terms of subject matter, imagery, and technical performance.

Showtime: The Performance of Heritage in Penny Dreadful Of course, the very specificity of these period references to the theater are also representative of Penny Dreadful’s ambiguous status as both heritage and “quality” television. While Andrew Higson’s denunciation of a latent conservatism in British period film may seem at odds with the series’ (largely anachronistic) message of inclusivity, the “pictorialist museum aesthetic” (39) he sees as characteristic of the genre and its inherent nostalgia is inescapably present. By collecting what are arguably some of the most famous literary characters in the public domain (the same type of characters that have often been featured in various period adaptations) and foregrounding different popular forms of entertainment in the nineteenth century that have since more or less died out (not just the Wild West show or the Grand Guignol, but penny dreadfuls and waxworks), the theater itself participates in recreating this period for the viewer. Indeed, arguably the very emphasis on the spectacular nature of the theatrical performances is in and of itself historically accurate: The most visible effect of [the Theatres Regulation Act of 1843] was the immediate shift to a theater driven by spectacle. Popular theater continued to thrive, aimed at a new, broader audience who came more for the entertainment than for the politics. […] The variety of entertainments was a draw for many—theaters, music halls, waxworks museums, and fairs were spaces of innovation where the latest technologies were put on display to delight and awe. The stage, as an accessible and ubiquitous space for visually driven entertainment, became an exhibition arena for new developments in lighting, machinery, set design, costuming, and special effects […]. (Szwydky, Transmedia Adaptation 38)

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The emphasis on theatrical trickery becomes a characteristic example of what Kamilla Elliott has referred to as “hypercorrect material realism” (177) typical of period adaptations, thus highlighting its place as heritage television. At the same time, Dietmar Böhnke rightly argues that the choice of the Grand Guignol to represent this theatricality, with its inherent taboo-­ breaking in terms of sex and violence, ultimately harkens back to Penny Dreadful’s own status as “quality television.” As Böhnke writes, “One could perhaps argue that this type of gory, sexy and violent show is only possible nowadays on pay-TV platforms, which may thus be the real inheritors of the Victorian ‘penny dreadful’ format” (134). The debate over defining “quality” television is endless (and the quotations marks surrounding the term a deliberate choice), but the series does seem to foreground the emphasis on the commercial nature of the arts, the cost of what Böhnke refers to as “pay-TV,” both in its depiction of the entertainment and in its diegetic universe: thus the series makes a point to show Ethan paying for their tickets upon entering the Grand Guignol theater, and then refreshments once inside [Episode 1.4]; Mr. Putney gives a speech about the cost-effectiveness of the new waxworks he intends to create [Episode 2.4]; and Ethan is found by Rusk, the policeman leading the investigation into the murders Ethan committed as a werewolf, by focusing on the material requirements of Chandler’s profession as a sharpshooter for the theater, and catching him making purchases at a firearms store (“What’s the one thing a sharpshooter is sure to need? [… brings out flyer of the Wild West show] Bullets” [Episode 2.5]). By repeatedly focusing on the commercial nature of these theatrical endeavors, on what it costs to make them and the profit they can bring, the creative team inevitably suggests a parallel with the series itself as a Showtime series with high production values, a commercial product that is expected to make a similar profit for its creators, its production company, and its channel; this intent is all the more explicit in the inclusion of several ads on the walls of buildings, including a repeated “Bovril” ad, a deliberate choice to make clear both at this time in the past and in the television fictions of the present, commercialism is inherent to process of making art. In this case, the theatrical is not just an homage to visual storytellers of the past, or a historical detail solidifying the series’ efforts at authenticity; the theater becomes a mise en abyme of the fiction itself. Indeed, it is significant that the emphasis on the artifice of The Transformed Beast at the Grand Guignol [Episode 1.4] is foregrounded through the filmic

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techniques available to the contemporary production; the repeated cross-­ cutting, from the stage, to the audience, to the backstage work, cuts off our suspension of disbelief for the theatrical narrative, but also parallels the techniques of the first with the new possibilities offered by film narratives (by the early film canon it highlights elsewhere). The scene following the Grand Guignol performance, when Dorian Gray takes Ethan to see gambling around a dog catching and killing rats [Episode 1.4], makes this emphasis on filmic storytelling and rhythm even more obvious: the gamblers stamp their feet/canes, and the repetitive sound foregrounds the cross-cutting among the spectators, the ruthless actions of the dog, and Ethan’s reaction. This idea of a rhythm to visual storytelling of course calls to mind the classic three acts of the television episode, for example, but it also could be seen as referring back to the theater, either in Caliban’s description of the eternal resurrection of the theatrical characters, night after night, something with which he can easily identify [Episode 1.3], or in the way that the Grand Guignol itself functions. Indeed, the theater was known for what it referred to as the douche écossaise, a program of short plays that varied in genre, from comedy to horror, from “hot” to “cold,” in order to increase the impact of the latter (Hand and Wilson 6); in keeping with that tradition, the viewer of Penny Dreadful is explicitly told that the end of The Transformed Beast is simply an intermission before the next story begins. This idea of an eternal return, of short narratives linked together by character or place, is of course reminiscent of serialized narratives in general and television in particular. Likewise, these theatrical techniques that have become synonymous with the Grand Guignol seem a simple diegetic parallel to the many “bonus” videos available online and on DVD/Blu-rays about the special effects, costuming, makeup, and set design that brought Penny Dreadful’s universe to life. The interaction among different forms of entertainment, from the rivalry between the different waxworks, Putney’s and Madame Tussaud’s [Episode 2.1], to the recreation of penny dreadfuls like Sweeney Todd for the Grand Guignol [1.3], or of the latest gruesome murder from the newspapers for the waxworks [Episodes 2.1 and 2.4] and the interaction between history and fiction in the depiction of American history as a Wild West show [Episode 1.1], could also be seen as a representation of Penny Dreadful’s own attitude towards both its literary predecessors (nineteenth-­ century Gothic) and its filmic ones (as a television version of Universal’s monster mash-ups), making the cast of characters into a troupe of repertory players, whose stories vary in importance from one week to the next.

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Indeed, through the character of Ethan Chandler, we could say that the series literally re-enacts the events of the theater: The Transformed Beast, it turns out, is the story of Ethan’s lycanthropic nature (though he kills his love not as a werewolf, but as a man trying to save his beloved’s soul [Episode 3.9]); his Wild West show becomes the background of his Season 3 return to the American West, complete with a “great train robbery” (where the prize is Ethan himself [Episode 3.1]) and a Searchers-style massacre of a white population (by Satan-worshipping Hecate rather than any Native American tribe [Episode 3.3]). Both of these theatrical re-­ enactments, of course, are preceded by the Putney Waxworks of Season 2, which recreates the Mariner’s Inn massacre committed by Ethan in the Season 1 finale [Episode 2.6]. The show thus repeatedly dramatizes the complex relationship not only between life and art—but on a metatextual level, between one art and another.

Performance and Spectatorship in Penny Dreadful If the mise en abyme between the theater and the series is diegetic, structural, and aesthetic, I would argue it is also thematic. Notably important here are the values of inclusivity that Vincent initially declares to be inherent to the medium: “There is a place where the malformed find grace, where the hideous can be beautiful, where strangeness is not shunned, but celebrated. This place is the theater” [Episode 1.3]. In a series that insists that the monsters are not the supernatural creatures, but our own darkest impulses, and that foregrounds the need for tolerance for the monstrous in all the characters, Vincent’s sentiment seems to echo through the fiction as a whole. The idea of humanizing the anti-hero may be characteristic of Penny Dreadful’s status as “quality television,” but the emblematic nature of these monsters makes the impact of this message all the more powerful. Indeed, given the way that these different forms of entertainment all ultimately fail in their empathic impulses towards Caliban, both in the theater, and then in the waxworks, we could say that the series goes further than this ideal of the theater, in a sort of emotional parallel to film theorist André Bazin’s distinction between the theater and the cinema, the latter of which lacks the boundaries imposed in the former.3 Although Caliban ultimately never gets the “found family” that the other characters experience, the viewer feels the sympathy that is otherwise largely absent (Ladwig).

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Indeed, Frankenstein’s other surviving progeny, Brona/Lily, clarifies this point in her relationship to the theater. Brona’s initial reaction to the theater is wide-eyed wonder, and her reactions to the surprise of the werewolf’s transformation and his violent attack on his beloved make clear that she sympathizes entirely with the young girl, remarking on her beauty (a compliment that Ethan then attributes to Brona herself). Her response to events onstage seems untutored and genuine, though she goes on to laugh at her fright and dismay once the scene is over. The rest of the audience, we see, is largely similarly enthralled, first by the pyrotechnics, and then by the doomed love story and its bloody conclusion: however artificial the contemporary viewer might feel the stage performance is, clearly there is suspension of disbelief for the diegetic spectator. When Brona argues with Ethan in her shame and embarrassment about meeting his high-society friends (one of them, Dorian, a former client), all of whom share a certain amused condescension for the spectacle she’s been so moved by, she rushes away from the scene, collapsing on the side of the street as she coughs up blood. The camera work makes clear the parallel between her plight and that of the ingenue in The Transformed Beast, as the high-angle dolly shot of her collapse echoes the camera movement and view of the ingenue as her throat spurts out blood; this link is made even clearer as she clutches her similarly bloody handkerchief. However, the reaction of the passers-by is uninterested, an effect made all the more impersonal in the framing that shows first only the tops of their heads, and then only the legs of the pedestrians hurrying past. However believable the theatrical performance has been, the play is attempting to teach empathy amongst the blood spray—much like the series itself professes to do. Indeed, what the series makes clear in its emphasis on the theater is that just as Penny Dreadful is a world filled with different forms of entertainment, it is above all a world where all is performance. To a certain extent this is true of each of the well-known public domain characters: when our protagonists are named Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll, or Van Helsing, the viewers’ expectations of the character enforce a sense of the limitations of each of these roles, whether those expectations are upended (like Dr. Seward) or not. Within the diegesis, this is particularly true of Ethan Chandler, who hides his identity as a werewolf; as Dorian tells him, “You play your part to perfection. But I suppose we all play parts” [Episode 1.4]. Each of the characters is shown to be conforming to society’s expectations, and hiding a dark secret, for fear of an unforgiving audience. Even

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Dorian himself, who professes to enjoy the gaze of the portraits that line his walls [Episode 1.6], ultimately takes the life of Angelique, the only character ever to see his aging portrait [Episode 2.8]. In the final two seasons of the series, this performance takes on a decidedly Butlerian tone, as Brona’s rebirth as Lily highlights gender and class as performance. The change in accent and mannerisms from one incarnation to the next highlights the importance of social expectations, while a Vertigo (1958)-inspired scene of Frankenstein bequeathing “proper” clothes to his new beloved [Episode 2.4] suggests that the pressure to perform is both public and personal. The theatricality of gender is made explicit, first, in Vincent’s comments on his lead actress Maud, who insists on Caliban’s dismissal after he attempts to force himself on her: “Given half a chance, I’d keep you and sack her, but the public demands the ingenue. I am a slave to the public” [Episode 1.8]. Later, in a repetition of the very first episode, an overwhelming number of nameless Brides of Dracula hide in the same theater. With their blonde hair and white clothes, all of them are more or less identical to Mina Harker—the character for whom the protagonists have spent the season searching. Lily’s violent refusal of this role towards the end of the season might suggest the possibility of release from performance, but the penultimate episode, where it is revealed that she had yet another role as a mother [Episode 3.8], suggests that performance is inescapable; indeed, the fact that Penny Dreadful offers a rare example of Frankenstein’s creature(s) remembering their past(s) insists on the different roles that each character plays over the course of the story. Given the importance of performance in the series, both as an art form and as a social norm, the argument over Brona and Ethan’s differing reactions to the play takes on a different meaning: as a professional entertainer, Ethan’s ability to see through the theatrical illusion threatens Brona’s own attempted performance as the stoic cynic in the face of her impending death. All of the art forms that Penny Dreadful offers up in its narrative are ultimately unconvincing to the contemporary viewer, be it theater, waxworks, puppet shows, magic lanterns, or portraits, insisting therefore on the necessary artifice of any “reality effect;” however, despite their limitations, they seem to offer an opportunity to glimpse oneself (like Brona, or Ethan), and to empathize with others. Like Van Helsing’s comments about Varney the Vampire, they may have “missed the facts, but […] caught the truth” [Episode 1.6]. Given Penny Dreadful’s own over-the-­ top aesthetic, it seems logical to imagine that the series is making a similar plea for its own utility despite (m)any flaws.

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As a truly postmodern series where popular culture rubs elbows with canon, where “quality television” quotes Romantic poetry and opens episodes with orgies, Penny Dreadful provides endless fodder for analysis. However, in focusing on the theater, and its forms that become ever more immersive for its viewers from one season to the next, ever closer to television storytelling itself, the series thus offers an homage to traditions past, a recognition of its own present, and a message to be passed on to future viewers. From the beginning to the end of the series, narrative and theater are inextricable, as “kindness and a home” [Episode 1.3] or as the End of Days: “the drama always ends the same way: the curtain falls on a stage bedecked with bodies, and there is nothing but silence. And death holds all dominion” [Episode 3.7]. Both, it seems, are true—of the theater, and of Penny Dreadful.

Notes 1. The series supposedly begins in 1891, and though there was a British version of the Grand Guignol theater, it existed in London in the 1920s—and indeed began in Paris in 1897 (Gordon 18). 2. I will be referring to the character as Caliban and not his later name John Clare, both for brevity’s sake and because this moniker better suits this study of the theatrical. 3. As Bazin writes, “There are no wings to the screen. There could not be without destroying its specific illusion, which is to make of a revolver or of a face the very center of the universe. In contrast to the stage the space of the screen is centrifugal” (105).

Works Cited Aquilina, Conrad. “Penny Dreadful: Dismembering and Assembling the Victorian Gothic.” Schlock Magazine, 2014, https://www.schlockmagazine.net/ 2014/10/15/penny-­d readful-­d ismembering-­a nd-­a ssembling-­t he­victorian-­gothic/. Bazin, André. “Theater and Cinema—Part Two.” 1951. What is Cinema: Volume One, translated by Hugh Gray, U of California P, 2005, pp. 95–124. Böhnke, Dietmar. “The ‘Grand Guignol’ Approach to Adapting the Victorians: Penny Dreadful and the Multiple Adaptations of Globalised Popular Neo-­ Victorianism.” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-Victorian Adaptations, edited by Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigts-Virchow, WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 123–140.

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Elliott, Kamilla. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge UP, 2003. Gordon, Mel. Theater of Fear and Horror: The Grisly Spectacle of The Grand Guignol of Paris 1898–1962. Feral House, 2016. Hand, Richard J., and Michael Wilson. Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. 2nd edn., U of Exeter P, 2010. Higson, Andrew. English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980. Oxford UP, 2003. Ladwig, Colleen Fenno. “Content to Suffer Alone: Generating Sympathy in Frankenstein and Penny Dreadful.” Literature/Film Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1, 2019, https://lfq.salisbury.edu/_issues/47_1/content_to_suffer_alone_generating_sympathy_in_frankenstein_and_penny_dreadful.html. Lee, Alison and Frederick D.  King. “From Text, to Myth, to Meme: Penny Dreadful and Adaptation.” Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, no. 82, 2015, https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.2343. Leitch, Thomas. “Adaptation, the Genre.” Adaptation, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008, pp. 106–120. Musser, Charles. Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S.  Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. U of California P, 1991. Mustafa, Jamil. “Representations of Masculinity in Neo-Victorian Film and Television.” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018, pp. 38–64. Shelley, Peter. Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from Baby Jane to Mother. McFarland, 2009. Simmon, Scott. The Invention of the Western Film: A Cultural History of the Genre’s First Half-Century. Cambridge UP, 2003. Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio State UP, 2020. ———. “Frankenstein’s Spectacular Nineteenth-Century Stage History and Legacy.” Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture, edited by Dennis R. Cutchins and Dennis R. Perry, Manchester UP, 2018, pp. 23–44.

CHAPTER 10

Ethan Chandler, Penny Dreadful, and the Dime Novel; or, Dancing with American Werewolves in London Ann M. Ryan

In May 2016, Season 3 of Penny Dreadful premiered and excited a less than enthusiastic response from some members of its fanbase, one of whom suggested that the producers had “twisted” the original premise of the show, abandoning its European context in order “to become American.” Unlike the previous seasons, the third iteration of Penny Dreadful seemed to this disgruntled viewer to be a betrayal of “Penny Dreadful the original,” and more interestingly, a violation of a uniquely British narrative. “Can we have nothing to ourselves?” asks this aggrieved fan, “I’m sick and tired of americanising [sic]” (lasherman). Leaving aside the irony that American culture itself is a kind of Frankenstein’s creature, the byproduct of four hundred years of British Imperialism, Penny Dreadful didn’t eventually, grudgingly, unwillingly concede to an American ideology and aesthetic; it was always so. As writer

A. M. Ryan (*) Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_10

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and producer John Logan adapts the classic narratives of the European Gothic—placing in dialogue Dracula (1897), Frankenstein (1818), and The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891), with just an aside from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)—he finds himself wrestling with the central question of American identity, a question that haunts all efforts at adaptation: how new can a New World be? While the third and final season may arrive at an American landscape, the series as a whole—from beginning to end—embraces formulaic affirmations of the American West; and this brand of the American cowboy-hero may be more legitimately Gothic than any monster wandering the streets of London. Within the first ten minutes of the pilot episode, the character of Ethan Chandler steps out of the Western dime novel, bringing with him not just an ivory-handled pistol and a deadly eye but the moral imperative of American exceptionalism. The series labors to adapt the Gothic narratives of European culture, and perhaps to critique the power structures that frame those narratives: to empower women, redeem monsters, redraw the boundaries that separate the civilized from the savage, upend the privileges of Empire, and question the authority of patriarchs and patriarchy. Ethan Chandler’s storyline, however, reestablishes those hierarchies. The series ends as do so many American dime novels: the dark lady is punished (or dead); the heroic virgin is dead (and/or ravaged); what’s native is collectively punished, ravaged, and dead; what’s savage, wild, transgressive, or dangerous has been contained. And, as is fitting in such narratives, the lone (and lonely) ranger is left to fight another battle on another day: Ethan Chandler begins the series and ends it as well. So, our disgruntled fan may have more to complain about than first meets the eye: Penny Dreadful is—from the moment Ethan spins his six-shooter—an American dime novel in disguise.

The Western Hero Ethan Chandler’s literary roots extend beyond Western films, past the theatrical extravaganza of the Wild West show and past even the formulaic narratives of the Western dime novel. Like many of the heroes of American popular culture, Ethan is the literary descendent of James Fennimore Cooper’s Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo, aka Straight-Tongue, aka Hawkeye, aka The Deerslayer, aka La Longue Carabine, aka Leatherstocking. The shape shifting of Ethan—from leading-man to wolf-man—is not unlike the multiple aliases and manifestations of Natty Bumppo; it marks the liminal space where the rules and norms of Western civilization—and

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more particularly the strictures of traditional masculinity—can be exchanged for the pleasures and excesses of “The West.” Cooper’s Hawkeye moves easily between the civilized world of Eastern villages and the wild, untamed, unpolluted world of the frontier. His speech sometimes reflects a knowledge of and appreciation for the history and culture of Western civilization; at other times, he speaks in a poetic diction that would have impressed Walt Whitman; and just as often, he sounds like Andy Devine, playing a scene in Stagecoach (1939). Logan cultivates a similar vernacular mutability in Ethan Chandler. Just as he easily shifts from shooting up vampire dens to admiring the paintings in Dorian Gray’s salon, Ethan speaks with a Western drawl in one scene and like a character in a Walter Scott novel in the next. When he first meets Vanessa Ives, and she challenges the veracity of his Wild West narrative, Ethan responds, “What we call a tall tale, darlin’.” And when Vanessa admits that she needs “some night work,” Ethan deploys his charm and his slang, “Honey, don’t we all?” [Episode 1.1]. Later he accuses Dr. Frankenstein of “puttin’ on airs” and when he meets Brona for the first time, and he describes his “trade,” he speaks a line that could have come from a nineteenth-century dime novel about Wild Bill Hickock or a film featuring John Wayne or Clint Eastwood: “I could shoot the ace out of a card at 50 paces” [Episode 1.2]. Yet as the series progresses, Ethan’s American vernacular and accent soften, at times disappearing entirely, and his speech becomes as formal and elevated as that of Sir Malcolm. When confronted by Dracula in the final episode, Ethan declares, “I understand very little of the forces of my life. Those things that have shaped me and cursed me. But I know that my destiny is joined with hers. I will not stop” [Episode 3.8]. (No contractions, no dropped -ing endings; there’s not a “y’all” or a “fixin’ to” or a “pardner” to be heard.) This linguistic flexibility is an aspect of the dime-novel hero, and it suggests a deeper longing on the part of American culture to imagine a kind of masculinity that’s both civilized and wild, educated and authentic, man and beast. Despite the success with which Ethan performs the part of “innocent abroad,” both Vanessa and Dorian quickly recognize the performative nature of his American persona. While Ethan expounds upon his role in the Battle of Little Big Horn, targets cigar-store Indians with his pistol, and beguiles young ladies with a wink, Vanessa targets Ethan with an eye that’s just as precise as his:

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Vanessa: You didn’t tell the truth. By my reckoning, you were a boy when General Custer died and ‘tis well known there were no survivors. Ethan: What we call a tall tale, darlin’. Vanessa: Exceedingly tall. Ethan: Vice of my nation. We’re storytellers. Join me, won’t you? You saw my exhibition? Vanessa: Highly impressive, especially your finale. [Episode 1.1] Although the camera doesn’t record it, Vanessa has somehow seen Ethan having sex with the woman he spots in the audience. In a savvy insight— consistent with her soothsaying powers—Vanessa connects Ethan’s cowboy persona with his dominating sexual performance, suggesting that both are equally artificial, a conclusion that even the young woman reaches at the end of their assignation: Ethan: Young Woman:

Just know that you have made my visit here truly memorable. I shall never forget you. Perhaps you’d like to know my name then. [Episode 1.1]

Ethan drops a “darlin’”—the calling card of his Western persona—on both Vanessa and his first paramour, but it fails to communicate either affection or authenticity. Vanessa quickly provides the exposition that suggests who the “real” Ethan may be: “Expensive watch, but threadbare jacket; sentimental about the money you used to have. Your eye is steady, but your left hand tremors…I see a man who’s been accustomed to wealth, but has given himself to excess and the unbridled pleasures of youth. A man much more complicated than he likes to appear” [Episode 1.1]. In the initial dialogue between Vanessa and Ethan, it seems that the series is going to unmask Ethan, and by implication a certain kind of American masculinity: the straight-shooting, straight-talking, straight American hero. Logan continues to mine the tension between an overt performance of heterosexual masculinity and something less scripted and normative later in Season 1, when Ethan is seduced and revealed by Dorian Gray. Having been spurned by Brona, Ethan leaves the theater with Dorian to attend a rat-baiting contest, where gamblers bet on how many rats the dog “Flash Jack” can kill. Ethan is overcome with anxiety—presumably recognizing his own monstrosity in the killing spree. He races to the bar, where he’s confronted by some stereotypically haughty Englishman: “Not your sort

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of thing, is it? I say, I was speaking to you.” Ethan responds, “Don’t talk to me,” which reveals his American accent. The Englishman responds, “Oh. American. Well, perhaps you don’t understand gentlemen’s sport. You’re in Britain now. We do things we like as we like, you hear?” Another Englishman demands, “Answer him, you rude thing” [Episode 1.4]. What follows is a predictable contest between two masculinities: the rude, rough American and the weaker, more effete Englishman. The dime-novel hero often contends with men—aristocratic, educated, or wealthy—who are feminized by comparison. For example, in Deadwood Dick: Prince of the Road; or The Black Rider of the Black Hills (1877), the protagonist, Ned Harris—aka “Deadwood Dick”—is hunted by the Filmores, father and son, who will be revealed at the end of the novel as his “dastardly” uncle and cousin. Written into their attire and physical description are all the emblems of the newly emerging capitalist, urban, American man: “He [Filmore] was elegantly attired, his costume being of the finest cloth and of the very latest cut: boots patent leathers, and hat glossy as a mirror; diamonds gleamed and sparkled on his immaculate shirt bosom” (Wheeler 308). A post-Emersonian, post-Thoreauvian icon of self-reliance and simplicity, the cowboy/hero rides in an unencumbered state—culturally and materially—but not always, perhaps, psychologically. Ethan’s rejection of his privileged past is in keeping with the haunted backstory that frames dime-novel characters like Deadwood Dick, as well as later incarnations in Western films from John Carradine’s nostalgic Hatfield in Stagecoach to the genteel dance moves of Alan Ladd in Shane (1953), or even the non-­ specific urbanity of Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven (1960). When John Logan describes his hopes for Ethan Chandler, it’s an exposition that works into any number of dime-novel heroes: “You’re meeting a brash, cocky American, on top of the world. But by the end of the first hour, you realize there are demons lurking” (qtd. in Gosling 19). Ethan Chandler is a version of this type of Western hero, whose past is laden with both material and familial burdens, a sharp contrast with his present state and the rude “bad-ass” persona he has cultivated. In response to being verbally and physically insulted, Ethan brawls with three members of the English upper class, all dressed in evening wear. Here, John Logan condenses two tropes of the classic Western: the hero defending his code of honor; and the humiliation of the civilized man by the wild American. In The Shootist (1976), John Wayne’s J.B.  Books instructs the young Gillom, played by Ron Howard, in the ways of Western manhood. Gillom asks, “How did you ever kill so many men?” Books

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responds, “Lived most of my life in the wild country, and I set a code of laws to live by. I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people. I require the same from them.” When Ethan warns, “Don’t talk to me” and “Don’t touch me,” he evokes this iconic code. It would seem, at the end of this fight, that Ethan Chandler has brought the “wild country” to the back alleys of London, and in the process established his powerful brand of American manhood, only to have it dismantled by Dorian Gray in the next scene. While the final image from that scene shows Ethan surrounded by his opponents, the next shot finds Ethan at the home of Dorian Gray, more or less unscathed, as he surveys the opulence of Gray’s boudoir. While Dorian prepares an aperitif of absinthe, they discuss fine art: Dorian: Do you like pictures? Ethan:  Mostly the ones of the buxom ladies that hang above saloon bars. Dorian: You play your part to perfection, Mr. Chandler. Ethan: What part’s that? Dorian: Rude mechanical. Rugged Westerner. But I suppose we all play parts. Ethan: What’s yours? Dorian: Human. [Episode 1.4] Dorian’s breezy dismissal of the “rugged Westerner” and his admission that we all “play parts” evokes an American cowboy of a far different variety. On the cover of Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman stands with his fedora cocked, his working-man’s shirt open at the neck—revealing a tantalizing bit of throat and chest—hand on one hip, at once languid and provocative (see Fig.  10.1); the pose is a declaration of an authentic American manhood, but also clearly a performance, a role Whitman inhabits as much as he inherits. Similarly, Ethan Chandler’s rudeness is a cultivated vernacular. In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson describes an ontological state that is inseparable from the kind of masculinity celebrated by the Western narrative: A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition, as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is

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Fig. 10.1  Walt Whitman strikes a pose on the cover of Leaves of Grass, a performative declaration of an authentic American manhood right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. (135)

When his English opponent describes Ethan as a “rude thing,” he affirms what seems to be Ethan’s ghosting of European culture, his rejection of those “dead institutions” and their ephemeral values. Ethan’s status as “one of the roughs” is, however, less fixed than it appears (Whitman, “Song of Myself” 698). From the moment he meets Dorian Gray to their eventual sexual encounter, Ethan struggles with the

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nature of his own authenticity. After being rejected by Brona, Ethan turns to Dorian and asks, “You ever wish you could be someone else?” [Episode 1.4]. This yearning query reflects the conundrum of the Western hero. While an icon of self-reliance and self-determination, he struggles with an identity that can never be redeemed or domesticated. In the final moments of Shane, Alan Ladd’s Shane concedes, “A man has to be what he is, Joey. Can’t break the mold.” Clint Eastwood’s William Munny will always be a drunk and a killer; Butch and Sundance will always be outlaws and on-the-­ run; and John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards—one of Ethan Chandler’s cinematic forebearers (see Fig. 10.2)—will always be alone and alienated. At least in this early part of the narrative, Logan seems willing to give Ethan Chandler the opportunity to adapt the role he’s inherited. During his conversation with Dorian Gray, and the seduction that follows, Ethan experiences visions of his true self: the bloodshed he’s caused in his werewolf incarnation; the betrayal of and by his father; the cruelty of hunting beasts and monsters of all sorts; and Brona’s own “Liebestod,” her love for Ethan and her impending death. Of course, part of Dorian Gray’s peculiar allure seems to be the promise of a traumatic sexual experience. In her encounter with Dorian, Brona is humiliated, bloodied, and yet aroused, while Vanessa is given—along with a fabulous orgasm and a fine

Fig. 10.2  Ethan Chandler strikes a pose reminiscent of his cinematic forebearer Ethan Edwards in the last scene of The Searchers [Episode 2.9]

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dinner—a vision of her own demonic nature. After an initial moment of violence, however, where Ethan grabs Dorian by the throat, what follows between them is relatively tame and tender foreplay. In his seduction of Ethan Chandler, Dorian Gray invites the possibility not only of a fluid sexuality, but also an inherently fluid identity, which positions him to be less a corrupting influence for Ethan than a liberating one. Dorian’s performance of humanity, in this instance, is more an expression of his modernity than his monstrosity. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman intones, “Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!/ Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!/Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!” (193). Ethan appears to have been called “by his nighest name”; Dorian recognizes desires in Ethan that are precluded by his performance as Western hero. In the final frames of this episode, Ethan displays a vulnerability which suggests that he’s prepared to play a new part in an old story. This adventure with Dorian—one part absinthe, two parts sexual awakening—has the potential to reimagine Ethan Chandler as a new American man, one whom Whitman might celebrate. And yet, unlike Brona and Vanessa, both of whom are traumatized by Dorian, Ethan seems hardly changed: he remains the heteronormative heartthrob, the cowboy-outlaw hero. Logan introduces same-sex desire to suggest the adaptive power of the series, but then abandons that narrative thread. In many dime novels, the female character is doomed by her sexual fate; Calamity Jane, for example, is an outcast because, as Deadwood Dick confides, “she was ruined” (Wheeler 292). Penny Dreadful is similarly fueled by the imperative to punish Vanessa Ives for her transgressive desires, first for Captain Branson, then for Dorian, then for Dr. Sweet/ Dracula. And while Ethan is harangued a bit by the demonically possessed Vanessa—“He fucked you, didn’t he? Goddam, did you enjoy it?!”—his sexual adventure with Dorian is, ultimately, little more than a one-night stand [Episode 1.7]. The episodic nature of the dime novel is often driven by the plot device of disguise and revelation: heroes are masked and unmasked; “true” identities and familial relations are hidden and then exposed. In this early sexual encounter between these characters, John Logan seems poised not merely to disarm and disrobe Ethan, but to unmask the conventional nature of the dime-novel hero. What would it mean, the series seems to ask, if the homoerotic desires that so often frame relations between men in the Western—Shane and Joe Starrett, Butch and Sundance, or their nineteenth-century counterparts, Wild Bill Hickock

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and Buffalo Bill—were brought out of the closet and into the script? In the episodes that follow, however, the homosexual is replaced by the far less threatening homosocial, and Ethan’s desire for a lover is transformed into a longing for brothers and “friends.”

The Dark Sidekick After taking Dorian as a lover, Ethan returns to the home of Sir Malcom and to Sembene who will eventually be replaced by Kaetenay, another dark muse, confidant, and spiritual mentor. While Ethan spends a good deal of time attempting to rescue Vanessa from the clutches of some demonic beast or lover, he forms intense relationships with his male companions. In one of his earliest conversations with Sir Malcolm, Kaetenay describes Ethan as “he who is my almost son,” and then urges Sir Malcolm “our son needs us” [Episode 3.1]. Logan clearly imagines this fluid creation of family ties to be one of the adaptive innovations of the series; yet when framed by issues of race, this movement into “Other” tribes is part of a troubling narrative in American culture. Getting to become a “brother from another mother” allows our hero to escape his place in history as a white man. Ethan’s attraction to Sembene is the first step in this cultural strip tease. Ethan brings him a meal, while Sembene sits by Vanessa’s bedroom door, an exchange that begins their friendship and incidentally marks the return of Ethan’s Western vernacular: “I picked up the rudiments of cooking on the trail back home. I always thought myself a dab hand with the spices” [Episode 1.7] (see Fig.  10.3). The mise-en-scène will become familiar. When Ethan asks Sembene to chain him to the wall in the basement, he tells him to sit nearby, “Whatever happens, do not move from that chair.” Sembene replies, “And what am I to do?” [Episode 2.6]. We can imagine Danny Sapani, the talented actor who plays Sembene, asking the same question. Ethan responds, “Watch.” “Sitting and watching” become the physical manifestation of the ideological space reserved for characters marked as racially “Other” in Penny Dreadful; they are made to serve and bear witness to white lives. Sembene sits in a chair by Vanessa’s door, just as he sits and watches Ethan’s transformation. When asked what his “story” is—a question that perhaps John Logan could have explored more deeply—Sembene replies, “I have no story” [Episode 1.7]. Sembene is a generic character, “an African,” whose origins are as non-descript as his story is non-specific. As the only Black character in the series, he occupies a fairly well-trod path in the world of Western films and American cinema.

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Fig. 10.3  Ethan and Sembene sit by Vanessa’s door [Episode 1.7]

Like Pompey in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) or Josh Deets in Lonesome Dove (1989), or any number of Black characters popularly known as “Magical Negros,” Sembene exists in the narrative to illuminate the white characters, and ultimately, to die in an effort to protect them. After Ethan has emerged from his transformation into the werewolf, Sembene declares “I know you, my friend, Ethan Chandler. I see inside you” [Episode 1.7]. The primary function of this Black character is to reveal the interiority of the white hero, and to affirm his inherent goodness. Sembene assures Ethan, “Is it a blessing, the purpose of which we cannot yet see? I say this is what it is” [Episode 1.7]. Before the role of dark sidekick is taken up by Kaetenay, Sembene tells Ethan that he had been a slave trader in his home country, but that he had found kindness “among the unkind” in the house of Sir Malcolm, the only indication that he has his own inner life and struggles. He shares this information while sharpening a machete in the kitchen, the incongruity of which indicates the ambivalent space of the character in both the narrative and the American culture from which he emerges. The first dime novels were published in 1860 by Irwin P. Beadle & Co. on the very eve of the Civil War. While the dime novel negotiates a range of white racial attitudes about “the Other”—from fear, to anxiety, to guilt, to animus, to desire—in general it does so without the use of

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Black characters. Where the Civil War is referenced, it’s often to narrate “The Lost Cause” mythology by heroizing former Confederate soldiers-­ turned outlaws like Frank and Jesse James. While Native American characters allow white authors to justify the conquest of the West and the violent treatment of Native communities, they also, more broadly, allow dime-­ novel authors to channel racist attitudes about African Americans as well. There’s a “Tonto” space in the dime novel, reserved for any dark character who serves the hero. Penny Dreadful continues this typecasting. After Sembene is killed by Ethan, Kaetenay steps in to guide Ethan through the next phase of his “enlightenment.” Native Americans frequently appear in dime novels as “red devils,” intent on massacring defenseless homesteaders and capturing beautiful virgins; yet just as often they’re drawn with a doomed nobility as befits the mark of a dying race. In Deadwood Dick, for example, Fearless Frank—one of the two disguised heroes in the novel—admires Sitting Bull as much as he is repelled by him. While riding across the prairie—dressed in his signature red leather buckskin—Fearless Frank beholds the following: a sight that made the blood boil in his veins. Securely bound with her face toward a stake, was a young girl—a maiden of perhaps seventeen summers, whom, at a single glance, one might surmise was remarkably pretty. She was stripped to the waist, and upon her snow-white back were numerous welts from which trickled diminutive rivulets of crimson. (Wheeler 278)

Naturally, our hero leaps to the rescue of this half-naked, unconscious, bloodied young woman—taking a moment to note that she is, nevertheless, quite attractive—and he comes face to face with “the fiend incarnate—Sitting Bull” (279). The two adversaries are known to each other, “‘is that you, chief? You, and at such work as this?’” (297) After just a few words from Fearless Frank—a “dastardly deed” here and a “For shame, I say” there—Sitting Bull regrets his actions and releases the girl: “‘The Scarlet Boy is right […]. Sitting Bull listens to his words as he would to those of a brother [; …] he is the friend of the great chief and his warriors’” (297). Sitting Bull also recalls the help that “the Scarlet Boy” gave to him in a time of need: “‘From that hour Sitting Bull was your friend—is your friend, now and will be as long as the red-men exist as a tribe’” (298). Speaking in the third person, an emblem of his own alienation, Sitting Bull evokes the possible annihilation of his race, “‘so long as the red-men exist as a tribe’” (298). The passage conflates battle lines and moral values:

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Sitting Bull and his people are diabolical and must, therefore, be defeated. Yet, even as the demise of Native peoples appears both necessary and inevitable, the fictional representations of Indian leaders—Cochise, Geronimo, and foremost Sitting Bull—elicit sympathy and respect. So, while our dime novel hero defends the unconscious virgin, whose “snow-white” skin has been stained “red,” he is also welcomed into the Native American community as a brother. While the sentimentality of these cross-cultural friendships may be appealing, particularly to a white audience, they are positioned as a payoff. To compensate for the guilt of Native American genocide, Western narratives offer inter-racial friendships as a kind of healing balm. In the final scene of the film Dances with Wolves (1990), while John Dunbar, aka “Dances with Wolves,” leaves the Sioux village for the last time, “Wind in His Hair” shouts from high atop a hill, “Do you see that I am your friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?” After this emotional farewell, the camera records the approach of the cavalry, positioned—it would seem—to discover the winter camp of the tribe. The movie ends, and a coda scrolls to the top of the screen: “Thirteen years later, their homes destroyed, their buffalo gone, the last band of free Sioux submitted to the white authority at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. The great horse culture of the plains was gone and the American frontier was soon to pass into history.” The tribe will be either imprisoned or destroyed, but at least, the film implies, Dunbar’s Native American friendships will be lasting. Ideologically, it’s a suspect bargain and one that Penny Dreadful repeats uncritically. Sembene is locked in a room with Ethan, who will soon transform into the wolf; rather than kill Ethan, Sembene allows the “wolf” to devour him instead. Shortly before this deadly transformation, Sembene declares to Ethan, “I am just a man. You have been chosen by God. My friend, Ethan Chandler” [Episode 2.9]. Often speaking in the cadence of the dime-­ novel Indian, Kaetenay finally reveals that he, too, is possessed by the wolf. He reflects, “I believed this was a great gift from God. That I had been given the power to save my people. I was wrong. The soldiers kept coming. My people kept dying. But then a vision was sent to me about a man with a true heart. A son. Only then did I understand my true purpose. It was not to save my people. It was to give you the power to save all people.” [Episode 3.9]. In the world of Penny Dreadful, the eradication of the Native American people is represented, much as it is in the dime novel, as a necessary step

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toward the final defeat of evil. Kaetenay’s “gift” appears futile when directed against American Manifest Destiny; and so, it is redeployed to save Vanessa Ives—another snow-white woman—and to empower Ethan Chandler—the better Apache. “I have seen it in a vision,” declares Kaetenay, speaking in his native language, “And it was foretold by our ancestors. That one Apache can save us all, and you are that Apache, my son” [Episode 3.7]. Despite the history of bloodshed that Kaetenay and Ethan share, Ethan inexplicably emerges as the better Apache, as well as a messianic figure who will redeem humanity. Once again, a dark companion has seen “inside” Ethan and what’s revealed is sacred, chosen, “blessed.” After Sembene first sees “the wolf” he claims that such things are known in his homeland; speaking in Swahili, he describes them as “Uchawi Mabadiliko,” which means “magic change.” The Penny Dreadful script, however, translates it as “the changing of one skin into another,” which indirectly captures the monstrosity not of Ethan as werewolf, but of Ethan as white man. Ethan’s transformation into the best, truest Apache is represented as a kind of penance for the genocide he commits long before he becomes a beloved monster. The dime novel also explores the attractions of “changing one skin into another.” It cultivates a racially hybrid identity for white male characters: they exchange suits and ties for fringe and buckskin; they acquire native languages and ways; and they travel the West detached from a past that either they long to forget or that the dime-novel author refuses to reveal. In his transformation into an Apache, Ethan’s white identity is subsumed and functionally disappears, making him less wolf-man than invisible man. The dime novel celebrates “The West” as an imaginative space, which allows American readers to evade its actual history. Sophie Mantrant, in her essay on Ethan Chandler as a rewriting of Jack the Ripper, notes the way in which Ethan’s suffering becomes as important as the trauma of his victims: “Penny Dreadful has it both ways, while acknowledging and condemning the wrongdoings of the past, it asks that the killers should be seen as sufferers too” (176). As the series focuses our attention on Ethan’s anguish, the historical context for that suffering fades; the cultural battle ground transforms into a tormented psyche: “The series valorizes damaged subjectivity and makes all of its main white characters haunted selves in need of healing” (177). Ethan’s performance in the Wild West show represents the violence and bloodshed of the West as a deeply personal, traumatic memory at its worst, or a piece of theater at its best. Vanessa Ives highlights this tension when she reminds Ethan that he would have been

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a boy during the Battle of Little Big Horn. Set in the twilight of Victorian England, Penny Dreadful occupies a liminal space between the ending of one empire and the arrival of another; the removal and/or the eradication of Native American communities paves the way for that shift in global power. By 1890, according to the eleventh U.S. census, “the frontier— defined as habitable area with fewer than two inhabitants per square mile—has disappeared,” a reality that is much more than a statistic for Native American communities (Brown 48). That same year, the Lakota Sioux gather at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota to perform the “Ghost Dance,” a ritual invocation of the spirits of their ancestors, part of a religious movement that joined Christian theology with Sioux traditional beliefs. Local homesteaders became alarmed, and the Seventh Cavalry is sent to quell what was not an uprising. On December 29, 1890, over three hundred Sioux are killed—including scores of children—many by machine guns which the army placed around and above the encampment. In the week prior to the Wounded Knee massacre, Sitting Bull is seized by police outside his home on the Standing Rock reservation and killed while his followers resist his arrest. While Ethan Chandler has been presented as a savior figure, none of these battles, or any of the other late-nineteenth-century conflicts in the West, are referenced in the series. Even in its return to the New Mexico territory, Penny Dreadful assumes the historical perspective of the dime novel: the battle for the West is already over and the Native American people are little more than ghosts. Kaetenay and Ethan do not engage any resistance on behalf of “their” tribe; in fact, Ethan refuses to fight until “the last fucking Apache” is dead. He insists, “My people are in London now” [Episode 3.7]. The “now” of the American West, however, doesn’t much interest Ethan, or for that matter, John Logan. While many fans were troubled by Ethan’s adventures in the United States, it’s the return to London that undercuts the adaptive potential of Penny Dreadful. Rather than reimagine the role of the faithful retainer and dark sidekick— moving him, perhaps to a starring role—Penny Dreadful continues the work of the dime novel. Sembene and Kaetenay are accessories in Ethan’s journey through the world of the ethnic Other. Ethan’s non-white identity is just one more costume, just as his friendships with Sembene and Kaetenay are replaced by his new-found English family: “my people are in London.” As Ethan journeys toward his heroic destiny, the Black and Native American characters are there simply to carry his bags.

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Conclusion: The American Monster While the werewolf is a creature that first emerges in European folklore, it also finds a home in the New World. American literature and popular culture are replete with heroic male characters who are somehow crossed with animal energy, iconography, power, or instinct: from Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s “Big Bear of Arkansas,” to Davy Crockett in his coonskin cap, to the more contemporary incarnations of Batman, Spiderman, and the Black Panther. In one of the more bizarre moments in Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), for example, Hawkeye has killed a bear and then proceeds to wear the skin as a disguise, so convincingly that even his compatriots assume he’s a beast. As a werewolf, Ethan inherits this cultural trope. Like the duality of Ethan’s Apache identification, his wolf-man persona allows him to maintain a series of other contradictory states: civilized and savage, cowboy and Indian, victim and savior, and above all, guilty and innocent. Like the other main characters in Penny Dreadful, Ethan feels damned and doomed, yet unlike Vanessa Ives, Dr. Frankenstein, or Sir Malcolm, he has no control over the carnage he’s caused, and in many cases, is only dimly aware of the damage he’s done. Ethan’s post-maul amnesia is a get-out-of-jail free pass, morally if not legally. In “Nature,” Emerson explores a loss of self and the forgetting of all others, as one measure of the sublime. While walking across a “bare common,” all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all […]. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. (6)

Emerson describes a self that is both divided—separate from all narrow strictures of identity—and yet also whole, in complete harmony with the wilderness and the meaning of nature. The hallmark of this experience is a deep forgetfulness: “to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance” (6). In his experience as the wolf, Ethan is granted this same escape from identity; “all mean egotism” vanishes. While Ethan experiences it as trauma, Sembene and Kaetenay insist upon its sublimity and read it as a gift.

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In one of the earliest dime novels, Malaeska; The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1839), by Ann Stephens, Emerson’s sublime appears first as an ecstatic response to the wilderness, and then as a more troubling amorality, what Edgar Allan Poe represents as the aesthetics of criminal abandon. The novel is, in many ways, atypical of the genre: it features a Native American woman as the lead character; it creates bonds of kinship between white and Native women; and it imagines a space for female characters that’s separate from men. Nevertheless, it also traffics in stereotypical representations of Native peoples and accepts their extermination as an inevitability. In an early scene, for example, Arthur Jones, a newcomer “who had been a schoolmaster in the Bay State” finds himself alone in the wilds of upstate New York: “Another step, and the waterfall was before him. It was sublime, but beautiful—oh, very beautiful—that little body of water […]. As the hunter became more calm, he remarked how harmoniously the beautiful and sublime were blended in the scene” (65). After becoming “more calm,” Arthur is immediately attacked by “a half-naked savage.” Arthur fires and “the savage sent forth a fierce, wild yell of agony.” What happens next is emblematic of the way the dime novel often associates “the sublime” with a delirious embrace of violence: With an impulse of fierce excitement, he leaped over the intervening rocks and stood by the slain savage. He was lying with his face to the earth, quite dead; Jones drew forth his knife and lifting the long, black hair, cut it away from the crown. With the trophy in his hand, he sprang across the ravine. The fearless spirit of a madness seemed upon him. (66)

Once he steps beyond the confines of civilization, effectively crossing his own version of Emerson’s “bare common,” Arthur Jones kills without remorse and—like a madman in a Poe story—he feels confident in his right to do so. As he leaps and springs over rocks and off cliffs, Arthur moves like an animal in the forest, and as he scalps his foe, Arthur becomes indistinguishable from “the savage” he has just slain. What is, perhaps, most relevant to the world of Penny Dreadful is that Arthur’s violence has no consequence for him within the narrative; he experiences no guilt, no prosecution, no hardship of any sort. Arthur goes on to become husband, father, businessman, hero. Ethan Chandler’s transformation into the wolf similarly reflects this somewhat perverse reading of the Emersonian sublime. The frenzied violence of the wolf doesn’t adhere to Ethan in any meaningful way.1 While

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he experiences guilt, it doesn’t alter his heroic stature in the narrative, nor does it change the perception that these deaths are simply necessary casualties in the battle against evil. Tempted by satanic forces, Vanessa yields to her desires, while Sir Malcolm and Dr. Frankenstein are driven by ambition and grief to violate codes of honor and the laws of nature. In each of these cases, even as the narrative claims that they are more sinned against than sinning, their choices are conscious, and they’re held accountable for them. As the werewolf, by contrast, Ethan is a kind of secondary victim; even his pre-wolf participation in the massacre of the Chiricahua Apache seems the fault of his overbearing father. And so, the wolf preserves what may be most American about Ethan Chandler: his ability to forget—or at least his inability to remember—the crimes he has committed, leaving him to act the part of the hero. The American dime novel, unlike its British counterpart, the penny dreadful, is tied to a broader political agenda, namely, American Imperialism and Manifest Destiny. While the cowboy/ scout/outlaw/hero enjoys a series of contradictory identities—Native and white, savage and sophisticate, boy and man—his role in the narrative is to expand and police the boundaries of the same civilization he longs to escape. The dime-novel hero rescues the virgin and returns her to the farm; he kills the “savage” and defends the wagon train; he shoots the buffalo, wears the bearskin, speaks the language of the Indian—his “brother” and “friend”—all while mourning the necessary passing of the West. As a werewolf, Ethan Chandler embodies these same contradictory desires and conflicting personas. In a letter to Vanessa, Sir Malcolm declares that Africa has lost its “romance,” and after her death, he resists the impulse to “run away on some hunt or expedition.” Sir Malcolm hangs up his Pith helmet, signaling, as does the death of Tennyson, the end of the Victorian era, and shortly after, the end of the British Empire. This power vacuum is short-­ lived; Ethan Chandler steps in as surrogate-son and ideological heir. As he walks about Sir Malcolm’s home after the death of Vanessa and the defeat of Dracula, he gazes at the stained glass and opulent interior seemingly for the first time. “Will you stay, Ethan?” asks Sir Malcolm, “You’re my family,” Ethan replies. In the final scene, as they gather at Vanessa’s grave, Ethan is no longer dressed in his Western gear. No longer a “rude thing,” he wears the coat and cravat of an English gentleman and even his hair is combed and lacquered. Standing behind him are other, perhaps more radical candidates to be the heir apparent: Wes Studi’s brooding Kaetenay, or Perdita Weeks’ impressive Catriona Hartdegen, or especially Dr.

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Seward, played by Patti LuPone—a far different kind of American wolf. And while Josh Hartnett plays the part of Ethan Chandler with great sensitivity, the role will not allow for an original performance. To adapt the dime novel is to threaten an American identity that’s as deeply entrenched as it is highly marketable. In the character of Ethan Chandler, Penny Dreadful dreams an American dream that often has toxic consequences in the wide world beyond fiction. The American dime novel creates an imaginative space where the hero can be both colonizer and colonized, where he can hold the truth to be self-evident that “all men are created equal,” and then feel justified in killing or enslaving those who are different, where he can enjoy the sublime ecstasies of the wild without “going native,” where he can be both hero and monster at the same time. The problem with the final season of Penny Dreadful is not the American setting; it’s American history, which we long to believe is a dime novel.

Note 1. Sophie Mantrant makes a similar point in her perceptive essay “Jack the Ripper in the Age of Trauma: Ethan Chandler in Penny Dreadful, Season One.” She explores the problematic ways in which the series deploys theories of “perpetrator trauma” to absolve Ethan—and the colonializing history he represents—of responsibility, if not guilt, writing, “The series rewrites the serial murder as traumatized man acting against his own will. It goes further, re-writing him as traumatized, but loving and loveable good-­looking man” (175). The disruption of Chandler’s identity by the werewolf, according to Mantrant, allows for the “morally disturbing consequence” of absolving him of any real guilt.

Works Cited Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Library, 2000. Gosling, Sharon. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan Books, 2015. Mantrant, Sophie. “Jack the Ripper in the Age of Trauma: Ethan Chandler in Penny Dreadful, Season One.” Filming the Past, Screening the Present: Neo-­ Victorian Adaptations, ed. Shannon Wells-Lassagne and Eckart Voigt, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2021, pp. 169–178. Larshermans. “Larshermans Reviews.” 29 April 2020. IMDb, .

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Stephens, Ann. “Malaeska; the Indian Wife of the White Hunter.” Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns, edited by Bill Brown, Bedford Books, 1997, pp. 53–164. Wheeler, Edward. “Deadwood Dick, the Prince of the Road; or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills,” Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns, edited by Bill Brown. Bedford Publishing, 1997, pp. 269–358. Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman: The Complete Poems. Penguin, 2004.

CHAPTER 11

Dreadful Noir, Adaptation, and City of Angels: “Monsters, All, Are We Not?” Julie Grossman and Phillip Novak

City of Angels (Showtime, hereafter CoA), the 2020 spinoff of Penny Dreadful, represents a deeper journey into adaptation whose aim to project the theme of monsters into multiple historical moments (1930s, 2020) met with resistance from viewers familiar with the original series. Reimagining the mashup of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) as a story about Mexican immigration to southern California in the early twentieth century, CoA pressed up against the borders of fans’—and some critics’— willingness to see the supernatural elements of the earlier series adapted into Mexican folklore and Victorian monsters becoming fascists and Nazis. The show presents a dizzying amalgamation of multiple histories: Los Angeles’s equivocal “dream” of a melting pot; the rise of Nazism in the 1930s; and the anti-immigration crusade led by Donald Trump and U.S.  Republicans in the 2010s. Just as the original Penny Dreadful

J. Grossman (*) • P. Novak Departments of English and Communication and Film Studies, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_11

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traveled far from its multiple sources, the 2020 spinoff becomes an intriguing case study of the extent to which audiences are open to textual ­(dis) continuities, transformations, and migrations. This chapter explores how CoA expands the borders of the earlier monster stories: the show addresses foundational myths in film noir, grafting the monster figures from Penny Dreadful onto noir character patterns and a story of corrupt social and political institutions, and blending those noir monsters with supernatural characters from Mexican folklore. Like other contemporary serial adaptations that explore suffering and repetition embedded in the detective figure (in Perry Mason [HBO, 2020–], True Detective [HBO, 2014–2019], and Mare of Easttown [HBO, 2021–], for example), CoA offers a noir origins story of the traumatized detective figure and the themes of corruption and death that underwrite it. It also magnifies (in the Magda character and her various avatars) the shape-shifting power of the femme fatale, with Natalie Dormer migrating from one role of the duplicitous fatal woman to a multiplied figure of disruption. The series’ main mode of adaptation being expansion, it takes one of its primary source texts, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and splinters its elements into an array of mirroring facets.

“Where Strangeness is Not Shunned But Celebrated”: Adapting to City of Angels Although critics’ views of CoA were mixed, the most common response among the professionals was a kind of guarded hopefulness, a view perhaps most succinctly expressed in the subtitle to Adrian Horton’s review for The Guardian describing the show as “magnetic but messy.” The critics thus adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Average viewers, by contrast, did not want to wait and see. After an initial bout of curiosity, noting feelings of betrayal and a sense that the show’s creators were trying to cash in on the original series’ popularity in order to do some “woke” political proselytizing, they abandoned the series en masse.1 Monsters, so the feeling seemed to go, just aren’t what they used to be.2 In our view, then, the spinoff emerges as another misunderstood “Creature,” exemplifying, first, how continuing texts adapt to present not only earlier sources but new environments and contexts. Second, CoA demonstrates how textual changes pose visceral challenges for viewers who nostalgically romanticize “original” sources and often resist extending themselves to ferret out the continuities among texts and the insights

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generated by the adaptation. We would suggest that Logan’s preoccupation with unloved creatures who seek warmth and acceptance applies to texts as well as the humans or the undead creatures we might turn away from for their “hideousness.” As Molly warmly insists to Tiago in Episode 7, when he admits to his own monstrous behavior—his complexity of motive and character and transgressive acts—“I meet you as you are.” So, too, a show like CoA bids engaged viewers to address its newer cast of monsters. When, in the final episode, Tiago tells Molly about the “Night of the Dead”—“We reach out to the dead and tell them that we love them”—he might as well be talking about CoA’s callback of Penny Dreadful, as well as Chinatown, or Penny Dreadful’s own conversations with Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll, and Dorian Gray. With its recasting of the monsters in Penny Dreadful, CoA emphasizes the power of adaptations to participate in the afterlives of texts, capturing the ambiguous state of textuality in which the figures (texts, humans) continue alongside us, haunting us in their refracted form, like the Mexican folklore ghosts and supernatural figures circulating within CoA itself. Both the haunting and the refracting will be points of focus when we turn to a closer consideration of CoA’s adaptive practices. But perhaps the most affecting textual haunting of CoA by Penny Dreadful resides in the performances of Rory Kinnear, whose multiple roles throughout the show force the viewer to grapple with complexities of character and uncanny reanimation. In CoA, Kinnear plays German immigrant Peter Krupp, who assumes the name Peter Craft and takes up work as a pediatrician in Los Angeles, where he also leads the German-American Bund. In casting Kinnear as Craft, Logan establishes Penny Dreadful’s Creature as the foundation of the new role. In CoA, we see the same halting snicker by the actor—not a chuckle of joy or contempt but of vulnerability, where a laugh is interrupted by a sense of its inappropriateness or the character’s unsureness. We see the same surprised, aching desire when Craft looks at Elsa that we saw when the Creature looks at Brona/Lily, the same tendency toward inwardness, internal debate. One scene in CoA seems to make the resonance and adaptation of Penny Dreadful’s Creature explicit (and richer). Craft is telling the story to Elsa and the children about first experiencing cinema in Essen, Germany before World War I: “it was the first time I saw the world you see and I knew I could go there, ride on trains and dance—everything that wasn’t my life” [Episode 9]. This seems a key moment in the development of Craft’s character, as it points to his

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Romanticism, his desire for an escape to an ideal place, a “new” incarnation in America. The scene mirrors the Creature’s discovery of theater in the first season of Penny Dreadful, where Caliban is schooled by Vincent Brand in the powers of theater to allow for escape, acceptance, and transformation: “There is a place where the malformed find grace. Where the hideous can be beautiful. Where strangeness is not shunned but celebrated. This place is the theater” [Episode 3]. Both characters—the Creature and Craft—are at odds with themselves, oriented toward life, peace, and wanting love, while also oriented toward destruction because of either the resistance they meet or a violent past that is embedded within their characters. Their desire for freedom and a transformed self and world is the emotional center of both shows. Kinnear’s uncanny performance in these roles thus enacts the artistic transformation that symbolizes the only positive route for transformation available to these characters in an inhospitable, censorious, and hostile world. It is only in performance where freedom and meaningful expressiveness lie. In this context, it is worth noting Nathan Lane’s unlikely appearance as a hardboiled detective in CoA. In 2010, the New York Times called Lane “the greatest stage entertainer of the decade,” a compliment at which the actor bristled. “Is that all there is?” he wondered (Lane). Known for his star turns in films such as The Birdcage (1996) and Broadway revivals such as Guys and Dolls (1992) and The Producers (2001), the actor wanted opportunities to practice the craft of acting beyond musical comedy. Following his appearances on stage in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (2012), then cast very much against his persona when he played the toxic Roy Cohn in Angels in America (2018), Lane certainly taps into the actor’s “likability” as Lewis Michener in CoA. However, in also adapting the hardboiled detective into a Jewish Noir focused on trauma, Lane, by his impressive performance, reinforces the show’s interest in an expressiveness that relies on an adaptive spirit and agency, as Lane himself as a performer adapted across media and genre. If so many of the characters in CoA, following the character patterns in Penny Dreadful, are trapped in their roles—Sister Molly in her radio-­ evangelist persona, Charlton Townsend in an overweight body, Ethan in the Wolf Man, Vanessa in thrall to Satan—it is in the performances of the actors in CoA where creativity and a sense of freedom reside. Thus, it shouldn’t surprise us that the season includes vibrant song and dance numbers: Molly’s arresting radio performances at the Joyful Voices Ministry; Tiago and his mother Maria’s charming dance outside the

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Crimson Cat; Mateo, Rio, and Fly Rico’s exuberant Latino swing-dance numbers inside the club; Townsend’s tap dance in his apartment; and Patti LuPone’s appearance in the gay bar singing “Stardust Melody.” LuPone, like Natalie Dormer as Magda and Adriana Barraza playing the powerful and charismatic mother-figure Maria Vega, carries on a legacy established in Penny Dreadful by Eva Green as Vanessa Ives and LuPone herself (as Joan Clayton and Dr. Seward): dynamic, charismatic female performances that symbolize and also argue for a blurred line between performance and identity, demonstrating a flexibility and expressiveness tragically unavailable to the women characters in their roles within the diegesis. Indeed, both Penny Dreadful and CoA foreground powerful, smart, and clever women, including older figures such as Dottie Minter and Councilperson Beverly Beck. But it is Dormer’s multiple performances in CoA that most embody the show’s interest in female power and charisma. Dormer performs four powerful female roles that not only harken back to the centrality of female power in Green’s leading performance, but also demonstrate Logan’s interest in dangerous and thrilling female power as rooted in performance, since “the real” within the diegesis of the stories is shown to be woefully, tragically unsatisfactory. There is thus a productive tension between CoA’s diegesis and the extra-diegetic in the sense that while reinvention of the self is not possible in one, it is possible in the other. This is the difference between art and life, an insight of course allegorized in the story of Dorian Gray. However, that capacity to imagine and to transform both things and self is a ground itself for creating the possibility for reinvention. Culturally, as Penny Dreadful and CoA suggest, theater and screen art can help societies and their citizens reinvent. Adaptation becomes a crucial aspect of this equation because it enacts but also more broadly metaphorizes a realization of that ideal of reinvention. Texts, humans, and societies can be reconceived and reimagined, especially if authors, audiences, and citizens can confront and grapple with the monstrousness Logan insists must always define what it is to be in the world and, as for Mary Shelley and the Creature themselves, what it is to be a creative and empathic human.

Cherchez la Femme There are several ways in which Magda and her avatars tap into the complexity of the fatal woman figure in film noir. First, she is like many so-­ called femmes fatales, a spurned woman, who turns to vengeance as a

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desperate means of reclaiming control, such as Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts) in Mulholland Drive (2001), driven to violence after being rejected and psychologically tortured by her lover Camilla Rhodes (Laura Harring). In CoA, it becomes clear at the end of the season that Magda is motivated by her sister having turned from her: in Episode 7, Magda asks her sister, “remember how it was when you loved me?” Even the deadly Magda is presented as traumatized by the loss of love, linking her role as destroyer with other monsters such as Penny Dreadful’s Creature who act out as a result of feeling unloved and rejected. In one sense, Magda’s rejection by her sister parallels noir viewers’ desire to fix the deadly woman as simply destructive, without looking at the contexts that define her fatality (see Grossman, 2009 and 2020), or the revelations that emerge from her machinations (men are weak; humans are susceptible to evil—as Magda says to her sister, “I give mankind what it wants and you hate me”). Like Linda Fiorentino’s brutally manipulative Bridget Gregory in The Last Seduction (1994), Magda draws out the worst impulses in others, giving crimes born of human frailty the air to breathe and grow, reminding us of the monstrosity embedded within all of us. Magda’s machinations are not just a product of her evil; they are a sign of the proclivities of human beings to be their worst selves when threatened or provoked, a theme that preoccupies the entirety of Penny Dreadful, including its spinoff. Consider Magda’s shape-shifted avatars: Alex Malone, the mousy right-­ hand assistant to the desperate Townsend; Elsa, the bewitching German consort to Peter Craft; and Rio, the androgynous Pachuco who kills Fly Rico then seduces Mateo into assuming power, all in the context of just having incited a self-destructive riot. All of Magda’s incarnations are monster figures in the sense that they cause chaos and ruination and bring out the worst in those around them. However, like the classic femme fatale in film noir, Magda and her other personae are designed not just to destroy but to deconstruct: to call attention to the corrupt and toxic forms of authority that dominate the marginalized or less powerful in daily life. It is obvious enough that Alex is a catalyst for Townsend’s furious desire to prove his evil father wrong in thinking him “weak.” Like Alex’s manipulation of Townsend’s sense of failed masculinity, with his self-consciousness and anxieties surrounding being gay in a homophobic culture and his desire, as a large, ungainly man, to be a dancer, Elsa’s seduction of Peter Craft plays on his wish for control.

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Craft breaks from his peers in the Bund in wanting to eschew Nazi hatred, yearning for peace and isolation from the battles in Europe. Craft wants to live peacefully and take care of his family. His Romanticism, while presented as a positive character trait in his reminiscence of first going to the movies (see above), also has its dark side. Craft shares Scottie Ferguson’s mistaken fantasy in Vertigo (1958) that he can save the woman from her troubles; in CoA, the male protagonist’s Romanticism is also seen in his over-investment in America as the “new” land. “Leave the old world to itself,” Craft says of Europe. As the show demonstrates in its conjuring up of the historical and the literary past, everything new is old again. History repeats itself, and texts continue and resurface over time. Craft isn’t alert to these repetitions because of a Romantic belief in a futurism divorced from the past. The villains in CoA have themselves adapted to the present in a repetition of the past, a warning about the significance of understanding history as repetition to keep the real monsters at bay. It is Craft’s Romanticism that makes him vulnerable to Elsa’s manipulation, and it should be no surprise that he reads Gone with the Wind (1936) on the beach, indulging his desire for a Romanticized American history uncontaminated by racism. Elsa and her monster-son Frank pretend to be vulnerable (the victims of an abusive father/husband), infiltrating Craft’s family and seducing him into becoming a fixed notion of the strong man, which ends up defined in the only way potent masculinity could be defined for a German in the context of CoA—as Nazism. Like Magda, texts are shape-shifting in their adaptive energies. With its obsession with being “one’s self,” Penny Dreadful—throughout its three seasons and TV spinoff—suggests that no one self, no one text, is fixed. We, and they, are subject to contexts and conditions over which we sometimes don’t have, or struggle to, control. The texts of Victorian horror novels are reshaped in Penny Dreadful, and the idea of the humanity of the monster—so poignantly portrayed by Rory Kinnear in his role as the Creature and the orderly in Penny Dreadful—is adapted into CoA with Kinnear’s complex representation of Peter Craft. The poetry in the Creature—who takes the name of lesser-known Romantic poet John Clare—is at the heart of Logan’s understanding of how embedded within humanity the monster is. Obviously enough, we’re not meant to endorse killers and Nazi sensibilities; however, the show does challenge viewers to see more than the ideology, finding the human in everyone, despite how awful the character is. This idea is reflected directly in Kurt, Goss’s henchperson, whose reply to Townsend’s assertion of Kurt’s identity registers

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the show’s insistence on multiplicity: “You’re American,” Townsend observes; Kurt responds, “I’m a lot of things” [Episode 4]. Penny Dreadful values empathy, complexity, and a flexibility of character that is symbolized in the power of performance (especially by women) in all four seasons.

“You May Think You Know What You’re Dealing With”: Adapting toward Complexity Although the continuities we’ve been tracing between CoA and Penny Dreadful were not apparent to many viewers, they are surely there to be seen if one is open to adaptation (in all its elasticity) rather than expecting simple repetition. We now want to focus on the multifarious ways CoA engages and adapts another of its primary source texts, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Because the relation between adaptation and source text is, in fact, multifaceted, we will deploy several different metaphors in our attempt to describe CoA’s adaptive practices. First, however, it is worth pausing to consider the intricacy of CoA’s engagement with the Polanski film. Some of the allusions and evocations are, of course, overt and obvious, and critics reviewing the series often noted the connection between the two texts. Events in each case are set at roughly the same time and in the same place. The plots of both center around construction projects designed to produce—and procure for interested parties—the future of Los Angeles (and by extension the U.S.). And the overall aesthetic of the show, with the exception of a handful of scenes, is so similar to that of Chinatown, with its sepia-toned cinematography featuring muted browns and yellows, that clips of the former could probably be spliced into the latter without drawing much attention. But a host of allusions to Chinatown are much more specific: maps and diagrams and the Hall of Records figure into both plots; Alameda Street is symbolic space central to both; Molly Finnister sports the same marcelled bob that Evelyn Mulwray wears, and Molly and Evelyn both drive canary yellow Packard convertibles; names resonate, so that the last name of the man in CoA who owns the public transportation system and who sits at the center of political and economic power, Townsend, evokes the name of the man who wrote the movie’s justly celebrated script (Towne), and the name of the main Nazi in CoA (Goss) rhymes with that of the principal ogre in Chinatown (Cross). But the two texts are more intertwined than even all that would suggest. For example, bits of dialogue, reframed and repurposed, carry over: the expression “Cherchez la femme” and permutations

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of “I’ve still got a few teeth left in my head,” and “You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me you don’t,” make their way from film to series. Tiago, talking to Molly after finding out about her affair with Hazlett, uses the same phrase Jake uses in questioning Evelyn after finding out about Katherine: “I want the truth.” And in both cases, women’s truths are more convoluted than the male detectives are prepared to comprehend. The use CoA makes of Chinatown is, however, more diffuse, subtle, and complex than this list of direct allusions suggests. And the relation between the two texts, because of the complexity, is difficult to describe. Different metaphors work to reveal different aspects of the adaptation, providing different types of insights into how it feels to think about the two texts in relation. One might say, for example, that the film exerts a kind of gravitational pull on the series. What we mean by this is that it sometimes seems, when watching CoA, that one is actually watching Polanski’s movie. The scene where Jake attends the public hearing aimed at considering the building of the Alto Vallejo Dam, for example, finds its counterpart in CoA when the City Council meets to discuss the construction of the Arroyo Seco motorway: both gatherings are attended by angry working-class folk opposed to the projects and, at both, the chair of the committee loudly bangs a gavel and shouts the crowds down. The scenes are so similar in terms of look, feel, and narrative content that they seem to belong to the same text: one half expects to see an embittered shepherd parading his flock through Townsend’s meeting. The chief effect of what we are calling here the gravitational pull of the movie on the series is to produce a sense of fatedness—the fated feeling of, say, a repetition-­ compulsion or of a socio-cultural syndrome (the constant historical restaging, for example, of our inability to accommodate difference). Another way we might figure the relation of CoA to Chinatown is by thinking of that relation as a form of haunting (to return to a metaphor we used earlier). One feels the presence of the latter in—or behind or around— the former: it’s there and not there. In another essay in this volume, Will Scheibel describes the use Penny Dreadful makes of the many home texts it plays off, and with, in terms of the Freudian “uncanny.” Something similar pertains here. When we watch CoA, we are repeatedly made to experience an uncanny sense of doubling, of being in two different space/ times at once. The sense of haunting we refer to here mainly affects moments where framing and score work to evoke the moods, the feeling tones, of Chinatown. These moments are fleeting but intensely emotional,

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and they occur with some frequency. The most striking example occurs in Episode 3 when Molly, who has become interested in Tiago but who has not yet become romantically involved with him, seeks him out—detective-­ like. The scene opens with a shot through the windshield of Molly’s Packard. We see Tiago walking across the street, away from the police station. The score from Chinatown gets powerfully evoked: as musician Andrea Scheibel noted to us in an email exchange, “The high-pitched strings playing two notes back-to-back in the opening of ‘Love Theme from Chinatown’ are almost the exact same notes (definitely the same instrumentation) used in CoA when Sister Molly is watching Tiago from her car.” 3 The shot pans to follow Tiago and we realize that the camera is situated just behind Molly, a bit over her shoulder. We are seeing what she sees from an angle that is not quite coincident with, but suggests, her point of view. The setup is one of the most common in Chinatown, where much of the time we see what Jake sees from just this position (Polan 111). The framing and music produce a feeling of mystery, a sense of treading on dangerous ground. Because of the ghost-presence of the earlier text, it is hard not to feel that something is off, or that something is up: the characters, unknowingly, are headed for trouble, perhaps even tragedy. In our view, however, the metaphor that best captures the relation between source and adaptation is that of a prism: imagine the narrative content of Chinatown as a white light being shot through a prism. The light splinters. Elements get separated out, redirected. Instead of one light, we have dozens. They all derive from their source and thus recall that source, but have different frequencies, produce divergent effects. There are hosts of such refracted elements. Jake Gittes, in Chinatown, is a disillusioned Romantic, the Janus-faced embodiment of idealism perpetually giving way to cynicism (see Novak). Through the prism of CoA, Jake bifurcates, becomes two, Tiago and Lewis—the former, vulnerable and trusting (and boyishly handsome to the point of near parody); the latter, as hardboiled as they get (“Look away, child, look away,” he tells Tiago in an effort to explain his capacity for violence). Chinatown’s main monster, Noah Cross, is made even more multiple, in that there are at least four different avatars of Cross in the series: Charlton Townsend; Townsend’s tyrannical father; the ruthless Miss Adelaide; and Richard Goss, architect and Nazi operative. The character of Evelyn Mulwray refracts differently. Instead of splintering and multiplying the character, CoA in this case condenses. Although Molly, as noted, is cast in the mold

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of Evelyn Mulwray, she is also made, through the platinum (rather than ash) blonde of her hair, to resemble Evelyn’s sister-daughter Katherine, who, despite her origins in incest, is the one truly innocent character in the movie. Like Evelyn, Molly has her secrets, and, like Evelyn, she both is, and is open about being, a woman with a past. But, at the same time, Molly shares some of Katherine’s child-likeness. In some cases, as here, the aim of what we are calling a refraction is to put more emphasis on one aspect of the adapted character, to set the character, if you will, in a slightly different light—thus fulfilling one of the fundamental aims of adaptation, shifting our perspectives on characters, types of characters, and texts we think we know. Molly’s physical resemblance to both Evelyn and Katherine, for example, serves to underscore how closely mother and daughter, in Polanski’s film, resemble one another and draws our attention to the heartbreaking vulnerability of all three characters, who, despite varying degrees of strength and willingness to fight back, are all victimized by people who do, or should, love them. For the most part, however, the process of prismatic adaptation works to complicate already complicated narratives and character constructions and to problematize moral judgments. To stay with Molly for the moment: her fate is similar to Evelyn’s in that both characters die near the ends of the texts in which they appear. And in both cases, they die because they have been abandoned by those near to them. In Chinatown, Jake is the proximate cause of Evelyn’s accidental killing: having failed to trust her, he then leads her into the convoluted situation that gets her shot. One might argue that Tiago is similarly to blame for Molly’s death: in the aftermath of the race riot that starts the series’ last episode, Molly, clearly at the edges of psychological collapse, pleads with Tiago to run away with her. “Look at me,” she says. “You can see the cracks, can’t you? I can feel them all the time.” Traumatized by the riot and the beating he has taken at the hands of some white sailors, Tiago at first resists, then relents, and the two seem on the cusp of escaping what has always seemed like fated tragedy: “So we disappear?” he asks. “We disappear,” she replies. But then the phone rings and Lewis calls Tiago back to his duty. Molly, left to her own devices, painfully reassumes the burden of her double identity and returns to the church, where she learns that her mother had Hazlett and his family murdered. Feeling trapped and alone, she slits her wrists in the baptismal pool at the church. Again, one might be tempted to say that Tiago, in failing to take seriously enough Molly’s plea to run away, is as responsible as Jake is for the death of the woman he loves.

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But Tiago fails Molly, not out of selfishness and self-protectiveness, as is the case with Jake, but out of a sense of responsibility to his partner and to his own family. His actions do, indirectly, contribute to Molly’s suicide. But under the specific circumstances into which he has been placed, he can’t really do anything but what he does. Tiago recognizes that Molly is troubled, but he can’t know that, shortly after he and Molly part, Adelaide will confess to her daughter the part she, Adelaide, played in Hazlett’s murder. After putting in motion a plan to save Evelyn and Katherine, Jake foolishly forces a confrontation with Cross, whom Jake knows to be ruthless and capable. He should know that such a confrontation is likely to go badly. Tiago, by contrast, has no reason to anticipate the tragedy that is to come. In a sense, he does fail Molly, in that he doesn’t do the one thing that would save her; but he is not really wrong to do what he does. In both film and series, a woman we care about dies. But in the case of the series, it is harder to assign blame. Consider Adelaide in this regard. Noah Cross is an unambiguous fiend. He wants to own, to possess, everything—the water, the police force, the city, the city’s future, his daughter, his daughter/granddaughter. He cares nothing about Evelyn or her death; throughout, he merely pursues his desires. Adelaide’s motives are more mixed. On the one hand, she acts out of self-interest. She has Hazlett murdered, at least in part, to keep Molly tied to the church, because keeping Molly tied to the church will ensure that the money keeps flowing. But it is also clear that Adelaide thinks she is acting in Molly’s best interest and, more importantly, that she loves her daughter—a point made patent when Adelaide discovers Molly’s body floating in the baptismal pool, surrounded by a cloud of blood. Adelaide screams in anguish, wades into the pool, cradles her daughter’s lifeless body. Even though CoA depicts her as monstrous, it nonetheless works to generate sympathy for her in her grief. And, unlike Cross, she is capable of grieving. In Chinatown, Jake is to blame for Evelyn’s death. Cross is evil incarnate. Through the prism of CoA, the guilt of both detective and parent become diffused. Lines blur. This seems to us one of the chief aims of the series: to trouble any desire we might harbor to trade in absolutes. Granted, of course, that two of the Cross avatars, Goss and Townsend Sr., are as committedly evil as is their progenitor. But Adelaide, as we’ve said, retains her humanity. And Charlton Townsend, the most important of the Cross avatars (in terms both of screen time and centrality to the plot) is, as we have suggested briefly earlier, designedly ambiguous. On the one hand, he is a narcissistic

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tyrant who has no qualms about exploiting the suffering of others to further his political career. He is smugly racist, as is made evident when he talks with Alex about wiping out a Chicano neighborhood with one road project and a predominantly Black community with another. He repeatedly asks his Nazi associates to murder his chief rival on the City Council. And he is thin-skinned, vindictive, selfish, and immature. On the other hand, his hypersensitivity clearly stems from an insecurity born from a history of parental abuse (in the one encounter we see between Townsend and his father, the latter refers to his son as a “fat queer” and calls him “weak”). Despite the power Townsend wields, he is, by virtue of his sexual orientation, a marginalized character, like the show’s other characters—a victim as well as a victimizer, a point that could also be made about a host of other characters. The portrait of Townsend as ogre gets significantly modified, moreover, by the depiction of his love affair with Kurt. And the most charming moment in the whole of the series is the sequence where we watch Townsend, buoyed by his love for Kurt, doing a bit of soft-shoe in his living-room (see Fig.  11.1). How, exactly, are we meant to feel about this man who possesses the capacity for both vindictive violence and

Fig. 11.1  Charlton Townsend, buoyed by his love for Kurt, does a bit of soft-­ shoe in his living-room in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels [Episode 5]

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tenderness, who bullies others but is bullied in turn by his father, who starts out wanting to be Fred Astaire but somehow ends up aspiring to be an American Mussolini? It is difficult to say. We conclude with a consideration of a character whose relative insignificance serves to underscore the series’ commitment to complex characterization and its insistence on problematizing moral judgment: Brian Koenig, boy physicist. Brian’s counterpart in Chinatown is Hollis Mulwray—who is an engineer, of course, not a scientist, but who, like Brian, has been charged with the task of figuring out how to build something: in Mulwray’s case, a dam; in Brian’s, a rocket. Mulwray’s integrity is a point of reference throughout the movie: early on, for example, we learn that it was Mulwray who, in opposition to Cross, insisted that Water and Power belong to the people; during the City Council hearing, we learn that he won’t build the Alto Vallejo Dam because a similar dam whose construction he oversaw gave way with disastrous results. Mulwray’s decency serves the narrative of Chinatown as an index of Jake’s blindness, his inability to see that things are sometimes better than they seem. He is a reference point for one kind of complexity—Brian, in CoA, for another. Unlike Mulwray, Brian doesn’t concern himself with consequences. Whether what he is planning is a rocket for Hitler or a bomb with the potential capacity to “set the atmosphere on fire,” Brian pursues his projects through to the end. Depending on how hard a line one wants to take, the purity of his science-mindedness is either amoral or immoral, but it is unambiguously dangerous. Lewis says that he “is like a kid with a hand grenade.” Brian, moreover, is self-centered and self-aggrandizing in childish ways. He likes the Nazis, he says, because “they actually appreciate [his] work”; and he notes with evident self-satisfaction that figuring out the V-2 rocket “wasn’t that hard.” But the series makes a point of making Brian’s dangerous child-likeness charming as well as chilling. Dottie, for example, develops a real affection for him. When Lewis, Tiago, and Benny Burman are getting ready to bundle Brian off to Mexico, then New York, Dottie gives him a bag full of Yoo-Hoos and says to Maria, when the men are driving away, “They break your heart, don’t they, these kids?” a line that anticipates Brian’s death but also works to register the extent to which Dottie has come to feel like a mother to her young charge. The most affecting sequence in the whole of the series, the climax of Episode 10, gains the bulk of its poignancy, moreover, from the scene in which Lewis decides that Brian is sufficiently dangerous that he needs to be killed. The sequence cuts together three separate elements: Maria

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comforting Josefina when the latter discovers that joining Molly’s church hasn’t done much to change her or her life; Molly’s suicide and her mother’s discovery of the body; and Brian’s death. In theory, Molly’s suicide should be the focus of the sequence, the element that galvanizes the whole. In fact, it is the scene of Lewis walking Brian down to the beach in order to kill him that somehow manages to carry the emotional weight. A significant part of the sequence’s impact, of course, has to do with the lullaby that Maria sings to Josefina and that we hear in sound bridges over the other scenes as well. It is beautiful and, in the various contexts represented, heart-wrenching. Three children, to varying degrees, suffer. Three parental figures seek, in very different ways, to provide comfort. Maria cradles the newly disillusioned Josefina in her arms and sings to her. Adelaide, wailing, wades into the baptismal pool to gather Molly into her arms. Lewis tells Brian to look up at the stars. But, again, it’s this last that has the most impact. When Brian tells Benny, Tiago, and Lewis that he has solved the problem of the rocket and is now working on a nuclear bomb, Lewis reluctantly realizes that Brian has to be eliminated. He stops the car, asks Brian to walk with him down to the beach. The two stand near the water, waves glittering in moonlight behind them. Lewis says, “Look at all the stars, kid. Isn’t that beautiful?” Brian, seeming his most boyish, gazes up in wonder as we see Lewis, in the background reaching for his gun. “Beautiful,” Brian repeats. A bluish white from the moon highlights the contours of his face, like the tops of the waves. Maria’s lullaby plays as, from a distance now, we see the flash and hear the report of the shots fired. Despite the fact that Brian is a relatively minor character (he appears very briefly in just a few episodes), and despite the fact that for most of the time we do see him he is presented as a spoiled child, the series is at pains to make his death meaningful and to complicate our sense of him as a character. When he is killed, what gets emphasized is the innocence, the openness to beauty and wonder, of his child-likeness—not the narcissism. We have been focusing here on the complexity of just those characters adopted and adapted from Chinatown. But this complexity is a hallmark of the series as a whole. Fly Rico is a rebel, but he is pragmatic enough to recognize that he can’t be a revolutionary. Maria is simultaneously ferocious and tender. Mateo kills a cop, then is haunted by guilt. Most importantly and strikingly, Peter Craft is a sympathetic character, in fact a point of identification, despite being a German nationalist and Nazi. By means of both its depiction of these characters and its adaptive practices, CoA accomplishes what those source texts also seek to accomplish: the

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inculcation in the viewer of a broader sense of the world and of the people in it, a heightened capacity for empathy and a concomitant hesitancy about passing facile moral judgments, and a more refined ethical and aesthetic sensibility.

Notes 1. The premiere of CoA attracted a healthy, though not robust, viewership of 448,000 (TV Series Finale), nowhere near the averages Penny Dreadful produced in its first season, but not awful. But then the number of viewers dropped by nearly 30% for Episode 2—and remained in the general terrain of 300,000 for the rest of the season. 2. Like the critics, but to a greater degree, viewers found CoA to be confusing and confused: “It’s literally a mess. It would be better as a straight forward [sic] 30’s murder mystery” (frankie 08908). What the viewers missed most were the Victoriana, the familiarity of the fictional characters, and the original series’ firm situation in the genre of fantasy. “If you’re hoping [CoA will] be even remotely like the first penny dreadful,” one viewer advised, “it won’t be. Barely any supernatural or fantasy” (Kiki M). A point that nearly all the negative reviews make is the seeming bait and switch from, as one reviewer has it, “an encyclopedic trip into the world of monsters and the supernatural,” to “yet another politicised drama with racial undertones” (s3276169). 3. Lacking the requisite musical training, we asked Andrea for help identifying the allusions to Chinatown that we were hearing in CoA. Since the kinds of connections Andrea discovered add another layer of complexity to our discussion of the links between the two texts, they are worth noting at greater length: (1) The only pop song on the Chinatown soundtrack, “I Can’t Get Started,” featured during the scene when Jack Nicholson is putting the watches on either side of the car tires, is sung by Sister Molly in CoA the first time Tiago sees her in the church; (2) There’s a theme using harp glissandos on both soundtracks, prominently featured in CoA on the piece, “At the Fair”; and (3) Composer for CoA, John Paesano, worked under composers Jerry Goldsmith (composer for Chinatown) and John Williams, providing additional music for Goldsmith and orchestrating for Williams.

Works Cited frankie 08908. Comment on “This Is Not Penny Dreadful,” IMDB, 6 May 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10361016. Grossman, Julie. The Femme Fatale, Rutgers UP, 2020.

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———. Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for her Close-Up, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Horton, Adrian. “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels review—Magnetic But Messy Escapism.” The Guardian, 23 Apr 2020, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-­ radio/2020/apr/23/penny-dreadful-city-of-angels-review-los-angeles. Kiki M.  Comment on “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels.” Rotten Tomatoes, 8 Mar 2021, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/penny_dreadful_city_of_ angels/s01. Lane, Nathan. “Interview with Martha Teichner.” CBS Sunday Morning, 12 Apr. 2020. Novak, Phillip, “The Chinatown Syndrome.” Criticism, vol. 49, no. 3, 2007, pp. 255–83. “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels: Season One Ratings,” TV Series Finale, 22 Aug. 2020, https://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-­show/penny-­dreadful-­city-­of-­angels-­season­one-­ratings. Polan, Dana, “Chinatown: Politics as Perspective: Perspective as Politics.” The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, ed. John Orr and Elzbieta Ostrowska, Wallflower P, 2006, pp. 108–120. s3276169. Comment on “A missed opportunity…” IMDB, 27 Apr. 2020, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10361016. Scheibel, Andrea. Email correspondence with the authors, 18 Oct. 2021. Scheibel, Will. “Adapting the Universal Classic Monsters in Penny Dreadful: An Uncanny Resurrection.” Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster, ed. Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 121–137.

PART IV

Meanings of Monstrosity: Identity, Difference, and Experience

CHAPTER 12

Penny Dreadful’s Palimpsestuous Bride of Frankenstein Lissette Lopez Szwydky

Frankenstein’s Bride, with her iconic, lightning-streaked hairdo, is the most widely recognizable female monster in the Gothic horror tradition, and Showtime’s Penny Dreadful is arguably the most substantive and transformative treatment of this character in film and television to date. A complex character built upon a series of fictional and historical composites, Penny Dreadful’s Bride (Brona/Lily) builds on earlier characterizations of Frankenstein’s Bride in film and television. Penny Dreadful explicitly draws on a screen history that includes The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), The Bride (1985), Frankenhooker (1990), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994). By drawing on these earlier adaptations, Penny Dreadful fashions its own neo-­ Victorian addition to the Frankenstein culture-text and the cultural history of its characters. Through both its historical setting and its narrative arc, Penny Dreadful traces The Bride’s transmedia adaptations back to early

L. L. Szwydky (*) University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_12

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feminist origins, specifically to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first feminist philosophers. Linda Hutcheon and Gerard Genette have likened adaptation and intertextual storytelling practices to a palimpsest where earlier versions are obscured but never completely erased. Previous versions are still visible through the most recent layer, even when the new adaptation seeks to create a new form distinct from its predecessors. More recently, the palimpsest metaphor has also been used to explain how neo-Victorian works across form and media function as a type of historical layering where “The palimpsest offers a compelling image of the presence of a ghostly, partially legible past bleeding through contemporary textual productions. It also speaks to the layers of meaning that accrue in the process of transnational adaptation and appropriation […] across linguistic, geohistorical, and temporal boundaries” (Jones and Mitchell 7). Regardless of medium, neo-­ Victorian storytelling is a process of historical adaptation, temporally engaging the past through a presentist lens and contemporary technology. The result is two historical moments mediated through a figurative palimpsest made up of the “complex overlayering of works, images, and texts— that the Victorians themselves developed through their illustrated books and periodicals and cartoons,” a practice that continues today through the various forms and media available in the twenty-first century (Jones and Mitchell 8). Neo-Victorian adaptations of literary works add a layer of adaptation focused on storytelling, character development, and other forms of transmedia world building grounded in what Marie-Laure Ryan calls “narrative proliferation” where multiple stories inhabit a single, well-­ developed fictional story world (43). These points intensify when discussing culture-texts adapted many times across decades, centuries, or even millennia, as we see in ancient myths, legends, and stories in the popular domain (Szwydky). The palimpsest metaphor allows us to engage with work that adapts not only the so-called original text, but also the multiple versions in between connecting primary sources to their adaptations across forms, media, and time. Negotiating the cultural histories of these iconic characters is central to Penny Dreadful. As series creator and showrunner John Logan explains, “The characters have been devalued over the years because we’re so familiar with them. […] What we’re trying to do is bring them back to their original state when they were truly provocative and frightening” (“Inside Penny Dreadful”). However, despite Logan’s aims to free the originals

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from their respective transmedia histories, previous adaptations of these culture-texts peek through the fabric of Showtime’s neo-Victorian, Gothic mash-up. A closer look reveals deep familiarity with Frankenstein’s extensive film and television adaptation history. Thematic trends such as a narrative focus on consent, hypersexualized storylines, and gendered histories of trauma reveal the multi-layered palimpsest upon which Penny Dreadful explores The Bride’s character through an intersectional feminist approach rooted in gender and class.

The Bride: A Palimpsest of Consent, Class, and Hypersexualization Largely situated within a framework of consent, choice, and agency, The Bride’s character arc in Penny Dreadful can be traced to The Bride’s ephemeral appearance in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. When Victor Frankenstein breaks his promise to create a mate for his Creature, a decision he rationalizes through terms of consent, he says, “she had not [agreed to be his mate]; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation” (174). In Shelley’s novel, Victor’s own fears and insecurities drive him to destroy the Female Creature’s body before reanimation. In her first appearance on screen in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein, The Bride’s brief storyline also hinges on consent, as she immediately rejects her intended mate. A similar focus on choice and agency informs The Bride’s character arc across Penny Dreadful’s three seasons. An in-depth analysis of any recurring Penny Dreadful character requires a Frankensteinian exercise in excavation and reassemblage, especially of The Bride, who goes through multiple transformations throughout the series. First introduced as Brona Croft and later reanimated as Lily Frankenstein (both played by Billie Piper), The Bride is an active, well-­ developed character—starting as an immigrant sex worker and eventually becoming an immortal with super-strength. Penny Dreadful’s Victor Frankenstein doesn’t reanimate The Bride until the Season 2 premiere; however, the transformation of the fiercely independent Brona Croft into the revolutionary Lily Frankenstein begins while she is still alive. Although Victor and his Creature presume that The Bride’s reanimated body and fabricated identity will provide a blank slate upon which to impose their

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will, Lily gradually remembers her previous life as Brona, whose personal histories of trauma and abuse (indicated by her name’s Gaelic meaning, sadness) inform The Bride’s motivations throughout the series.1 An object of desire, Brona is differently construed and possessed by each man with whom she interacts. From her introductory scene in Episode 1.2, Brona immediately charms her soon-to-be lover Ethan Chandler. In her next appearance, she is hired by Dorian Gray for nude modeling at his elegant mansion. When a fit of consumption makes Brona cough up blood, Dorian’s bored interest in her intensifies into sadistic sexual attraction, as he confesses, “I’ve never fucked a dying creature before. Do you feel things more deeply, I wonder? Do you feel pain?” Later, at the marketplace, Brona meets Victor and Proteus, who offers her freshly roasted chestnuts and bids her to “enjoy the fairy lights,” to which Brona responds with a smile: “I always do.” Through this assemblage of interactions with men, Brona’s introduction establishes her as both a sexual object and agent. Penny Dreadful’s gendered representation of The Bride combines hypersexualized imagery with liberatory rhetoric rooted in neoliberal ideology to create what Rosalind Gill calls a “postfeminist sensibility.” Gill writes the following: Where once sexualized representations of women in the media presented them as passive, mute objects of an assumed male gaze, today sexualization works somewhat differently […]. Women are not straightforwardly objectified but are presented as active, desiring sexual subjects who choose to present themselves in a seemingly objectified manner […]. [It] represents a shift in the way that power operates: a shift from an external, male judging gaze to a self-policing narcissistic gaze. (258)

For Gill, “notions of choice […] are central to the postfeminist sensibility” in contemporary media where “a grammar of individualism underpins” representations in ways that “even experiences of racism or homophobia or domestic violence are framed in exclusively personal terms in a way that turns the idea of the personal as political on its head” (259). Gill’s emphasis on individualism is notable here for, as much as Penny Dreadful is an ensemble drama, the two main women characters on the show rarely interact with one another. Series protagonist Vanessa Ives never recognizes Lily as Brona, even though Vanessa interacts with “both” women. Their intertwined lives include shared lovers and friendships, but they operate

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individualistically throughout the series, divided by class differences. While Vanessa is violently institutionalized multiple times in the series and often seen in postures that evoke the visual history of The Bride in adaptation, Brona’s brutal position within systemic poverty ultimately decides her fate to become The Bride. For example, defined by class-based circumstances that problematize individualist rhetoric about agency and choice, Brona’s “choice” of sex work is situated as the viable alternative to a life of domestic abuse legitimatized through the institution of marriage. In a pillow-talk scene with Ethan, Brona reveals her mother’s insistence that she marry an abusive man to have financial stability: “Same day I walked down Leopold Street off the Shankill Road and fucked a stranger for money” [Episode 1.4]. Despite her empowering performances in multiple spaces, Brona is subject to the material realities of her poverty and her declining health, both of which make her a target for a much more sinister destiny. By the Season 1 finale, Brona’s fate has been sealed by gender, illness, and poverty. Victor makes Brona’s death bed when, incapable of restoring her health, he instead selfishly frames killing her in terms of consent. Victor offers his vision of what lies beyond: “I believe in a place between heaven and hell, between the living and the dead. A glorious place of everlasting rebirth, perhaps even salvation. Do you believe in such a place? [Brona nods faintly.] Now, there is a … a price to pay for such a passage, as there is with all things. I know that you’ll pay it easily.” In a grotesque combination of physician, priest, debt collector, and executioner, Victor smothers Brona with her own already blood-stained pillow, forcing her into an after/life tied to him. This sinister act of “mercy” leaves a chilling effect on the viewer. The murder plays out slowly, as the camera cuts in-and-out at different stylized angles for roughly 25  seconds, ending with Victor checking Brona’s pulse and pronouncing her dead just as Ethan returns. As he leaves Ethan to grieve, Victor’s true motivations crystallize with dead-pan delivery of the following lines: “Her passing was a thing of grace, I promise you. Spend your time with her. And don’t worry, I’ll take care of the body” [Episode 1.8]. A few Frankenstein screen adaptations and extensions that predate Penny Dreadful introduce viewers to The Bride before she is animated, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where Elizabeth Lavenza (played by Helena Bonham Carter) is reanimated as The Bride near the end of the film. Frankenstein Created Woman, the third of seven Frankenstein films produced by Hammer Studios between 1957 and 1974, marks the most

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developed backstory for the Female Creature (prior to Penny Dreadful), following a series of traumatic events in the life of Christina (played by Susan Denberg), a young woman who is disfigured and disabled. Surviving various acts of cruelty at the hands of the three rich men, she targets them for revenge once she is reanimated. In the made-for-television domestic drama Frankenstein: The True Story, viewers witness the accidental death of Agatha DeLacey (played by Jane Seymour) and follow her reanimation as Prima, the sinister and seductive femme fatale who is also differently victimized by Polidori, Victor, and the male Creature before she is viciously and publicly destroyed in a ballroom scene. Penny Dreadful uniquely explores and contextualizes The Bride’s pre-­ creation backstory as a form of social critique, situating Brona/Lily’s corporeal transformation through a sustained lens of bodily consent. In Brona’s death scene, Victor suffocates her in the very bed she shares with Ethan as a consenting partner. Even the sex she has with paying johns is cast as a conscientious choice, despite being grounded in financial necessity. However, Brona never consents to die at Victor’s hands nor to what becomes of her body postmortem. The ethics of sexual consent evolve in Seasons 2 and 3 alongside the series’ further adaptation of source texts and earlier films. Before Brona is reanimated as The Bride near the end of Episode 2.1, her nude, unconscious body is objectified and sexually assaulted by Victor when he is alone with Brona’s corpse. These scenes are notable for their visual similarities to Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), also known as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, a satirical sexploitation film best known for its irreverent mixture of gore and camp, which focuses on Frankenstein’s obsession with creating a superhuman race by mating his creatures. Flesh for Frankenstein’s comic absurdities, however, are undercut by its graphic representations of necrophilia and sexual violence, especially as Frankenstein and his assistant rape and mutilate The Bride (played by Dalila Di Lazarro). Penny Dreadful takes visual cues from these earlier adaptations through the imagery of water tanks and marble nudes taken straight from Frankenstein: The True Story and Flesh for Frankenstein. Moreover, Flesh for Frankenstein provides direct visual inspiration for close-ups of Victor fondling Brona’s breasts before she is reanimated. Even as a corpse on the brink of radical transformation, The Bride’s body is an object of desire at odds with her agency in Penny Dreadful’s adaptation of the character.

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Pygmalion’s “Perfect” Woman The subtitle of Shelley’s 1818 novel establishes Victor Frankenstein as “the Modern Prometheus.” However, most adaptations that feature The Bride additionally transform Victor into a modern Pygmalion, in a scientific twist on the Greek myth where the artist Pygmalion falls in love with his ivory sculpture Galatea, whom he marries when she is brought to life by Aphrodite. In The Bride’s film and television history, there are two recurring plot variations on the Pygmalion mash-up trend that Penny Dreadful engages. The first variation highlights Frankenstein’s obsession with creating a “perfect human.” In Penny Dreadful Victor commits to molding Lily into his image of ideal, feminine beauty, even dying her hair blond in an apparent inspiration from Frankenstein Created Woman, where the female creature’s hair is unintentionally turned blonde during the reanimation process. In Penny Dreadful, Victor immediately notices that his evolving reanimation process has unexpectedly replaced Brona’s working-­class, Irish accent with a middle-class English one [Episode 2.2], a moment seemingly inspired by another modernization of the Greek myth, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), and its film adaptation My Fair Lady (1964), which center around the social education of Eliza Doolittle at the hands of linguistics professor Dr. Henry Higgins. Mimicking the men who “care” for her, Lily quickly assimilates into London’s middle- and upper-class society by learning how to act like a “proper lady,” much like Eliza in Pygmalion. Penny Dreadful’s Pygmalion storyline also borrows from Frankenstein: The True Story and The Bride, both of which ground The Bride’s story in domestication gone awry, particularly when her feminine frills receive a feminist makeover. While under Victor’s tutelage in Penny Dreadful, Lily is typically dressed in white or pastels—a light color palette that darkens once she leaves him. (Behind-the-scenes commentary available on DVD/ Blu-ray releases reveals that Lily’s Season 2 costuming and makeup were chosen to convey doll-like qualities.) The symbolism of Victorian dress is explored while Victor tailors Lily’s first gown, explaining the gendered conventions of high-heeled shoes and corsets (Fig. 12.1): Lily: So, women wear corsets so they don’t exert themselves? … What would be the danger if they did?

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Fig. 12.1  Victor Frankenstein and Lily discuss the physical and figurative constraints of nineteenth-century women’s fashion [Episode 2.4]

Victor: Lily:

They’d take over the world. The only way we men prevent that is by keeping women corseted—in theory and in practice. They’re meant to flatter the figure. To a man’s eye, anyway. All we do is for men, isn’t it? Keep their houses … raise their children … flatter them with our pain … [Episode 2.4]

The conversation initiates Lily’s feminist awakening and provides a philosophical framework for the revolution she starts in Season 3. As The Bride looks down on Victor from both a literal and figurative pedestal, Lily is characterized as an active agent in these otherwise objectifying scenes, demonstrating her knowledge that she can manipulate men by wearing high-heeled shoes, flattering their egos, and pleasing them sexually. In the second recurring Pygmalion variation from Frankenstein’s film and television history, Victor’s infatuation develops into an aggressive love triangle between the scientist and his two creations, such as in The Bride and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Such variations redeploy the Creature’s

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foreshadowing and often adapted threat to Victor—“I will be with you on your wedding night.”—repeated several times in Shelley’s 1818 novel. In The Bride of Frankenstein, The Bride rushes for the protection of her Creator as she recoils from her intended mate in the few minutes that she appears on screen. In fact, as Elizabeth Young notes, the double entendre of Whale’s title intensifies the triangulation of desire by questioning whose “bride” she is meant to be, as the film makes very clear that Frankenstein refers to the scientist, not his creation (407). Young Frankenstein (1974), Frankenhooker, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein even go so far as to conflate The Bride with Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s actual fiancé, underscoring the duality. Penny Dreadful’s male Creature fails to anticipate how his creator will become his romantic rival, and the focus on choice and consent evolves as the Frankenstein men fight for Lily’s affection. Victor tells the Creature that Lily must decide whether she loves and accepts her intended, and the Creature agrees that Lily “must care for me of her own accord” [Episode 2.5]. Victor (disingenuously) presents their courtship through an ethical imperative, implying that the two men must take the moral high ground for Lily to consent to any romantic relationship. Ironically, both the Creature and Victor claim virtuous intent and yet manipulate the situation. The Creature lies regularly when he speaks to Lily, something he doesn’t do with any other character, in hopes of implanting beautiful “memories” that will make her “choose” him. Despite paying lip service to consent, both men commit to domesticating Brona/Lily for their own physical, emotional, and intellectual pleasures. By the end of Episode 2.5, Victor establishes himself as the more desirable suitor. During an intense lightning storm, Lily jumps into Victor’s bed and seduces him. He pauses briefly to reconsider the situationship, but ultimately has sex with Lily. She guides his hands over her scars and breasts, finally “consenting” to sexual suggestions that—unbeknownst to her—Victor began grooming before she came into consciousness. The morning after they have sex, Lily cooks breakfast as Victor watches from the bed, suggesting a picture-perfect scene of domesticity from Victor’s perspective. Built on a foundation of lies, Victor’s vision of domestic bliss is tested publicly when Dorian throws a ball, and Victor decides that Lily is ready for a proper date. As Lily grows comfortable and confident in society more broadly, Victor becomes increasingly insecure. Several scenes at the ball show the couple in the background, where muffled bickering and tense body language depict Victor as a controlling, jealous spouse. Lily’s first

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entrance into London society thus explicitly casts her as a victim of domestic abuse, which parallels the traumas of her previous life, where Brona chose the risky life of a sex worker over financial “protection” provided by an abusive husband. Like Brona before her, Lily soon finds the strength to leave her abuser and upgrades Frankenstein’s house for Dorian’s mansion. In Penny Dreadful, possessiveness, abuse, and outright cruelty develop from Pygmalion’s obsession. Victor’s main goal in Season 3 is to “reclaim” Lily from Dorian with the help of his friend Henry Jekyll, who is introduced strictly for The Bride’s Season 3 arc. Jekyll uses his proficiency in chemistry to create a drug strong enough to subdue Lily, and he plans to use his expertise in psychology to turn her into a “perfect,” “calm,” and “happy” woman. Indeed, the Jekyll-Frankenstein collaboration is loaded with sinister tones of sexual predation, blurring distinctions between the discourse of two brilliant scientists and the conspiracy of two premeditating rapists. In an early conversation, Jekyll offers to “tame her, domesticate her, leave her purring like a kitten in your lap. Would you want that?” [Episode 3.1]. When Jekyll gives Frankenstein the drug that they will use to knock Lily unconscious, he assures, “she will be unconscious in two breaths …. And then she’ll be yours, old boy” [Episode 3.7]. Although Frankenstein questions this aggressive approach at first, he easily convinces himself that there is no alternative. The two men conspire with Dorian (who has grown tired of Lily’s working-class women’s revolution) to subdue Lily and transport her for specialized “treatments” in Jekyll’s lab under London’s infamous Bedlam Hospital.

Gendered Trauma and a “Revolution in Female Manners” Weaved into Penny Dreadful’s supernatural stories are real fears that preoccupied minds in the nineteenth century, a period known for its industrial, political, and social revolutions. The series opens with a mother and child being viciously torn apart, framing the Gothic story world through a lens of gendered violence and trauma. From high childhood mortality rates to the lack of professional opportunities for women that led to the extremely high number of sex workers in Victorian London, the series highlights the dangers of poverty for women. These realities are infused into Season 3 as Lily plans a revolution led by sex workers. For Lily and her army of survivor-soldiers, abusive men are the true monsters that need

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to be slain. In an interview for Entertainment Weekly, Logan elaborates on Lily’s historical and socio-economic contexts: “[T]he character really is about examining what it was to be […] an underclass woman in Victorian society […]. Because […] we deal with Gothic horror, Lily is able to rebel against the conformity of Victorian society […] in a truly transgressive way, which is through violence” (Connolly). Logan’s emphasis on violence fits within neo-Victorian genre conventions driven by twenty-first century fascinations with sex and gore. Imagining Lily as the leader of a violent revolution is a form of feminist wish-fulfillment better aligned with postfeminist sensibilities than nineteenth-century possibilities, and the extent to which her violence is “transgressive” is debatable. Although she manages to save women along the way, as a “revolution” the action is short-lived and easily dispersed once Dorian drugs Lily and “commits” her to the care of Frankenstein and Jekyll. Though she possesses supernatural strength and immortality, Lily’s strongest weapon against the men are her powers of persuasion, her ability to not just revolt against her oppressors, but also to justify her rage and revolution philosophically (like Shelley’s version of the Creature in the 1818 novel), which inspires other women to join her cause. The turning point in Lily’s transformation from domestic doll to feminist revolutionary comes in the form of an eight-minute monologue that establishes her ethical superiority—and sublime power—over her enemies. When the Creature confronts her about staying out all night with Dorian and manipulating Victor with her charms, Lily lets her male counterpart know that she will not take orders from any man, but might accept him as an equal partner: We flatter our men with our pain. We bow before them. We make ourselves dolls for their amusement. We lose our dignity in corsets and high shoes and gossip and the slavery of marriage! […] Never again will I kneel to any man. Now they shall kneel to me, as you do, monster. […] I want a man unlike all other men. My brother, my equal. […] We were created to rule, my love. […] We are the conquerors. We are the pure blood. We are steel and sinew both. We are the next one thousand years. We are the dead. [Episode 2.8]

When the scene opens, she is depicted as vulnerable, but by mid-speech she towers over the Creature, who cowers through most of Lily’s impassioned monologue. Although she threatens violence, the truly terrifying power of Lily’s speech is the way that she establishes an ethical and moral

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superiority over men, characterizing them collectively as rapists and abusers unworthy of womankind. She is focused on a future of “steel and sinew,” and that future is (nearly exclusively) female. The scene marks one of many moments where Lily inverts gendered expectations, establishing herself both as a physical and philosophical force. By articulating the ethics that her inform her rage, Penny Dreadful’s version of The Bride departs from most of her film and television predecessors.2 The Bride’s film history is defined primarily through failed attempts to speak for herself. In her six-minute appearance at the end of The Bride of Frankenstein, The Bride is animated and immediately rejects the Creature through her only communicative utterances in the film—a startled hiss, two piercing screams, and a final angry roar. The dejected Creature then blows up the laboratory after delivering the film’s closing lines: “We belong dead.” Penny Dreadful adapts and revises this line for Lily as, “We are the dead.” However, instead of dying at the hands of her betrothed as she does in Whale’s film, in Penny Dreadful, Lily is reborn through this speech act that presents her as a revolutionary who rejects her intended and chooses a partner who will support her ambitions. Lily’s speeches and dialogues throughout Seasons 2 and 3 establish her as a leader who stirs the passions and challenges the status quo. During the dressing scene depicted in Fig.  1 [Episode 2.4], Lily’s questions about corsets and high-heeled shoes invoke similar critiques that early feminist advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley’s mother) advances in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), criticizing social emphasis on women’s bodies rather than their intellects. Although Victor critiques the way that society controls women through corsets and other constraints, he nonetheless styles Lily to “flatter the figure” and thus privileges beauty over brains. For Wollstonecraft, women are treated as objects of beauty instead of as rational beings because of “a false system of education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men,” Jean Jacques Rousseau among them, “who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives” (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 71). Like Wollstonecraft, Lily rejects the foundational premises between the separate-spheres ideology; however, instead of rejecting societal norms, Lily weaponizes gendered conventions, much in the way that Wollstonecraft warns against in her eighteenth-century manifesto. Whenever Lily rages against the “slavery of marriage,” she invokes a phrase used regularly by Wollstonecraft in all of her writings, as well as by

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Wollstonecraft’s husband William Godwin, who argued in Political Justice (1793) that the institution of marriage should be abolished. Lily’s vision of a women-led war on men makes literal Wollstonecraft’s famous demand for a “REVOLUTION in female manners,” a phrase that the eighteenth-­ century philosopher used as a call to action for a national system of education for girls (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 113, 281). Where Wollstonecraft hoped to radically reform systemic barriers, Lily wants to burn the entire man-made system to the ground. The tension between these feminist positions is depicted when Lily and Justine watch a group of suffragettes publicly beaten by police for advertising an open meeting on votes for women. Lily: Our enemies are the same, but they seek equality. Justine: And we? Lily: Mastery. They’re all so awfully clamorous, all this marching around in public and waving placards? … How do you accomplish anything in this life? By craft. By stealth. By poison. By the throat quietly slit in the dead of the night. By the careful and silent accumulation of power. [Episode 3.3] By advocating for violence instead of reform, Lily’s philosophy contrasts Wollstonecraft’s focus on education and community-based alternatives to marriage. Despite this key difference between the historical Wollstonecraft and the fictional Lily, both women are branded as radicals because their gender politics upheave the status quo. As Lily later explains to her assembled army, “We are not women who crawl. We are not women who kneel. And for this, we will be branded radicals—revolutionists. Women who are strong, and refuse to be degraded, and choose to protect themselves, are called monsters. That is the world’s crime, not ours” [Episode 3.6]. For Lily, the only way to end women’s poverty and abuse is by forcefully stripping men of their power and transferring it into the hands of women. Early feminist writing often focused on poverty, abuse, prostitution, and medical treatments, and Penny Dreadful’s return to similar sites aligns with Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s critiques of systemic injustices. One notable overlap between the eighteenth-century philosophers and the twenty-first century television series is the focus on asylums—a staple of Gothic genre conventions—as spaces of gender-specific abuse, as described in Wollstonecraft’s novella Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), one of the first works of fiction to criticize medicine and asylums as

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institutionalized spaces that legitimized abuse and violence against women and the poor. Taking critical cues from its historical sources, Penny Dreadful makes the disproportionate cruelty of institutionalized medicine and psychology explicit. In Season 3, the asylum orderly caring for Vanessa defends the cruel medical treatments saying, “It’s not torture what they’re doing. It’s science. It’s meant to make you better,” but Vanessa rejects his rationale as sexist: “It’s meant to make me normal—like all the other women you know, compliant, obedience, a cog in an intricate social machine […] and no more” [Episode 3.4]. Lily makes a similar argument while trapped in Jekyll’s experimental lab where the men intend to “cure” her by erasing her memories. Lily compares this to a fate worse than death: “I shall be unmade. Become a non-person. I would rather die who I am than live as your demure little wife” [Episode 3.8]. Lily exposes Victor’s proposed “treatments” as an unmaking of a personality deemed monstrous because it refuses to conform to society’s expectations for women. In this scene, Lily echoes Wollstonecraft’s frequent critique of patriarchal ideology that renders women as children, an approach that Victor wholly embraces when it comes to Lily. Like the heroine of Wollstonecraft’s Maria, Vanessa and Lily each find themselves unjustifiably committed to asylums—against their will—by family or lovers, highlighting how domestic relationships are made dangerous by social institutions with neither based on women’s choice nor consent. While both women are eventually able to endure or escape these cruel medical “treatments,” neither dismantles the circumstances of their gendered identity. Reviewing the series’ final episodes, Megen de Bruin-Molé notes that Penny Dreadful gives its protagonist Vanessa a “Gothic” fate by dying in her lover’s arms, while The Bride’s ending is “subversive” and “powerful.” Instead of being killed off, “the female Creature speaks, and lives to speak another day. She is allowed to escape into the world, with all her anger and violence and emotion. With all her monstrous femininity. Who knows what delightful, irrational, and monstrously female things she will do in the world?” (“Neo-Victorian”). Lily’s open ending is full of feminist possibilities. Nevertheless, it’s important to note, as Bruin-Molé and others have observed, that Lily’s final “escape” uncovers the very real limits of her feminist revolution. Despite her super-strength and immortality, Lily cannot overpower the drugs that subdue her nor break the physical chains that bind her in the basement of Bedlam Asylum. Even if she were human, she would still not be protected by the legal system that allowed men to

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institutionalize their wives and wards against their will. Lily finds that, once again, her strongest weapons in this final “battle” with Victor are her powers of persuasion, much like the historical feminists that came before her. However, problematically, her most effective argument renders her a complicated figure who ultimately needs to be “legitimized” by motherhood to exist beyond the boundaries of her monstrous femininity. As the series ends, Brona/Lily’s character reveals palimpsestic layers from both Frankenstein and the life of its forward-thinking, progressive author. As a rhetorically savvy agent of rebellion and revolution, Lily parallels the male Creature in Shelley’s 1818 novel. Like her predecessor who is “lost in darkness and distance” but not dead at the end of the novel, Lily chooses a future (presumably) filled with feminist activism spurred by the various representative traumas she experienced as Brona. Mary Shelley’s presence in Frankenstein’s transmedia adaptation history is wide ranging, and Bruin-Molé has shown how depictions of Shelley in film and television most frequently represent her as a feminized genius who is “procreative” rather than “creative,” driven primarily through her close (sexual) proximity to (mostly) male Romantic writers (“‘Hail, Mary,”). Likewise, Shelley’s implicit representation in Penny Dreadful is hypersexualized or focused on her as a “mother” figure tied to Brona/Lily. Details that parallel the writer’s tragic life are woven into Brona/Lily’s traumatic backstory and revealed in the series’ final episodes when Lily fights to retain the memory of her deceased daughter as Victor endeavors to transform her into his blank-slate Bride. As a mourning mother, Brona/Lily becomes an “everywoman” figure confronting the high childhood mortality rates in the nineteenth century. The specific details of this trauma also echo the circumstances of the death of Shelley’s first daughter, who died within weeks of her premature birth a year before the young author started working on Frankenstein. While Shelley’s diaries typically suppressed emotional, private details, several entries describe the traumatic experience of losing her first child that Ellen Moers and others connect to her creation of Frankenstein. In one frequently quoted entry from 1815, Shelley writes, “Dreamt that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby” (Feldman and Scott-Kilvert 70). Brona’s baby freezing to death next to an extinguished fire evokes Shelley’s dream of reviving her dead infant. Understandably, both women are haunted by these transformative memories.

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As bereaved mothers and survivors, both the historical author and her fictional descendant find comfort in the idea of community as the best mechanism to improve women’s lives. Shelley communicates this need both literally and allegorically in her 1818 novel. A similar vision guides Wollstonecraft’s eighteenth-century novella Maria, which centers on the upper-class protagonist (institutionalized by her husband) developing a friendship with Jemima, a working-class attendant at the asylum, based on their shared stories of survivorship. In Penny Dreadful, Lily’s army of women, all of whom have survived similar forms of abuse, represents a form of feminist wish-fulfillment grounded in community-based models. One of Lily’s most tender moments happens when she befriends a bereaved mother at the cemetery, informing her that “the day a good woman will have to undergo such indignity is almost past. We will not have to suffer our children to starve and freeze and die dishonored on cold hills” [Episode 3.7]. The scene closes on the tombstone of “Sarah Croft, 1890–1891, Beloved Daughter” signaling Lily’s words were not only a gesture of compassion, but also one of identification and solidarity. Lily understands her identity as an amalgamation of her most emotionally powerful and formative experiences. Her internalization of women’s pain and suffering guides her vision of a collective revolution throughout the series. Lily refuses to follow in the Creature’s pessimistic footsteps. When Victor offers to “take away the pain,” Lily responds, “You don’t know. There are some wounds that can never heal. There are scars that make us who we are. But without them, we don’t exist” [Episode 3.8]. Similarly, Lily’s final decision to leave Dorian is rooted in his decision to suppress all emotions as a coping mechanism to deal with immortality and its loneliness. When Lily blames herself for Justine’s death, Dorian advises, “Be kind to yourself, Lily. Passion will undo the best of us and lead only to tragedy. It’s ever thus for those who care so deeply” [Episode 3.9]. Unlike Victor and Dorian, Lily’s relationship to her emotions is existential; she would rather die than live a passionless life and opts for an open-­ ended future of her own making.

Conclusion At times, the extent to which the women characters are hypersexualized undermines Penny Dreadful’s explicitly feminist aims. This problem, as Antonija Primorac explains, is prevalent in neo-Victorian adaptations, which stage “a superficial liberation of the Victorian woman” and thus

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“reinforce the stereotypical view of the Victorian era as repressed both in terms of gender and sexuality, while […] distract[ing] the audience’s attention from its own retro-sexist, conservative treatment of women’s agency in which women are reduced to their bodies” (47). In many ways, Penny Dreadful’s graphic depictions of sex and violence align with the genre conventions of neo-Victorian fiction and media, as well as the Gothic across forms and media from the eighteenth century through the present (Halberstam; Hoeveler; Heiland). Through the generic conventions of Gothic horror, the series explores women characters who, despite their nineteenth-century fictional settings, speak directly to the broader socio-cultural context of the twenty-first century. Penny Dreadful’s neo-­ Victorian, Gothic story world functions as a feminist wish-fulfillment exposing centuries of abuses toward women. As much as Penny Dreadful problematically embraces a liberatory rhetoric tailored for a twenty-first century postfeminist sensibility that rationalizes hypersexualized depictions of women by emphasizing choice and individualism, the series also offers a counterpoint grounded in a broader sense of community aligned with feminist philosophy from the eighteenth century through the present. Ultimately, Brona/Lily embodies much of Romanticism’s revolutionary spirit, although she rejects its masculine ideas of individualism for a model of feminist community. In Penny Dreadful, The Bride is not only an agent of individualistic revenge (as in some of her earlier incarnations), but also of revolution through organized, cooperative action. This emphasis on community defines Lily’s character arc and the series’ feminist possibilities in a postfeminist media context. Unlike the heroine’s failure to survive the series finale, Lily walks away from the Gothic story world into which she was written, much like her nineteenth-century male predecessor, gesturing toward a future of unknown possibilities. Brona/Lily thus leaves her mark not only on Penny Dreadful’s neo-Victorian, Gothic mash-up story world, but also on the palimpsest of The Bride in popular culture, where she will no doubt inspire and shape future versions of this iconic character.

Notes 1. In Penny Dreadful, the male Creature is given the stage name Caliban by the manager of the Grand Guignol in Season 1. The Creature later renames himself after the lesser-known Romantic poet John Clare in Season 2. I use the term Creature/Clare throughout the essay to distinguish Penny

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Dreadful’s version of the male Creature to previous versions in print, film, and television. 2. Eva in The Bride (1985) is the most articulate of The Brides before Penny Dreadful but she never resorts to violence nor revolutionary rhetoric in the film.

Works Cited de Bruin-Molé, Megen. “‘Hail, Mary, the Mother of Science Fiction’ Popular Fictionalisations of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in Film and Television, 1935–2018.” Science Fiction Film and Television, vol. 11, no. 2, 2018, pp. 233–55. ———. “Neo-Victorian Review—‘Perpetual Night’ and ‘The Blessed Dark’: Penny Dreadful Finale (S3E8&9).” The Victorianist, 8 Jul. 2016, victorianist. wordpress.com/2016/07/08/neo-victorian-review-perpetual-night-andthe-blessed-dark-penny-dreadful-­­finale-s3e89/ Connolly, Kelly. “EW’s Best of 2015: How Penny Dreadful crafted Lily’s big speech.” Entertainment Weekly, December 29, 2015, n.p., ew.com/article/2015/12/29/best-­of-­2015-­penny-­dreadful-­john-­logan-­lily-­speech/ Genette, Gerard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. 1982. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, U of Nebraska P, 1997. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Polity, 2007. Godwin, William. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 1793. Oxford UP, 2013. Halberstam, J. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Hieland, Donna. Gender and Gothic: An Introduction. Blackwell, 2004. Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. Penn State UP, 1998. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006. “Inside Penny Dreadful.” YouTube Channel, Penny Dreadful on Showtime, 10 May 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiKoAySh_eI&ab_channel=Penny DreadfulonSHOWTIME Jones, Anna Maria, and Rebecca N. Mitchell, eds. Drawing on the Victorians: The Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts. Ohio UP, 2017. Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic.” Literary Women: The Great Writers 1976. Oxford UP, 1985, pp. 90–98. Primorac, Antonija. Neo-Victorianism on Screen: Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations of Victorian Women. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “The Aesthetics of Proliferation.” World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries, edited by Marta Boni, Amsterdam UP, 2017, pp. 31–46. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. 1818. Edited by D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 3rd ed., Broadview, 2012.

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Shelley, Mary. The Journals of Mary Shelley, vol. 1, edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, Oxford UP, 1987. Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century. Ohio State UP, 2020. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman. 1798. Norton, 1994. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. A Vindication of The Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. Edited by Janet Todd, Oxford UP, 2004. Young, Elizabeth. “Here Comes the Bride: Wedding, Gender, and Race in Bride of Frankenstein.” Feminist Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, 1991, pp. 403–37.

CHAPTER 13

Predators Far and Near: The Sadean Gothic in Penny Dreadful Lindsay Hallam

In Episode 3.2 of Penny Dreadful, season regulars Dorian Gray and Lily Frankenstein prepare for an evening of sinful decadence, arriving at a party filled with other wealthy aristocrats whose tastes are apparently similar to theirs. A young woman, naked and afraid, is brought shivering before them. She is to be the night’s entertainment, her torture played out for the audience’s pleasure. The scene begins in a manner reminiscent of the work of the Marquis de Sade; it is no surprise then that the young victim’s name turns out to be Justine, the same name given to the titular heroine of his 1791 novel. The evening takes a turn, though, as Lily and Dorian save Justine and take her as their new companion. In Sade’s source novel, Justine is the epitome of incorruptible innocence, destined to be continually abused. Yet in Penny Dreadful’s reimagining, several aspects of Sade’s work are adapted and revised. Further incorporating elements from Sade’s other novels Juliette (1797) and Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), this subplot is the

L. Hallam (*) University of East London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_13

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first to reference his work directly, but I will argue that his influence has been present throughout the series. First, I will outline key aspects of Sade’s philosophy, which emerged at a time of great societal upheaval, driven by a fundamental shift in thinking about humanity’s place as a part of Nature rather than an expression of the divine. Sade’s works interrogated society’s institutions, exposing them as corrupt, with freedom from these constraints only possible through crime and transgression. I will then further discuss how this philosophy was expressed through fiction, sharing many aspects with Gothic literature, which similarly explores darker aspects of the self and society through the representation of violence and perversion. This fusion of the Gothic and the Sadean in Penny Dreadful will be examined primarily through the representations of Justine, a character directly referencing Sade, and her guardians Lily Frankenstein and Dorian Gray, who both fit into the mold of the Sadean libertine (see Fig. 13.1). Finally, I will situate Penny Dreadful itself as a Sadean text, melding high and low cultural forms through its appropriation of penny dreadful literature within the context of contemporary “quality television.”

Fig. 13.1  The character Justine directly references the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, and her guardians Lily Frankenstein and Dorian Gray both fit into the mold of the Sadean libertine [Episode 3.6]

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Before continuing, clarification is needed on the ways in which Sade’s philosophy is being used in my analysis. While there are elements of Sade’s philosophy that call for the rejection of religious and patriarchal repression and the defiance of societal norms, there is another aspect of his thinking that accepts, and even advocates for, abuse and violence. While I argue that Sade is an influence, this does not mean that I myself or showrunner John Logan endorses Sade’s worldview. Indeed, given the fact that the series uses the character of Justine but then changes her fate signals that this appropriation of Sade is part of a complex negotiation and interrogation of his ideas, similar to how the series adapts and revises other stories and characters from Gothic literature.

The Sadean Libertine Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was born in 1740 and died in 1814, a period that saw world-changing events such as the French Revolution, as well as significant cultural moments such as the Enlightenment and the emergence of Gothic literature. In his work as a writer and philosopher, Sade encapsulated the monumental shift in thinking that occurred at this time, from believing in the infallibility of God as a being who created the world and instilled the systems of power according to His will, to the rise of reason, rational thought, and science to explain the natural world and people’s place within it. With the French Revolution, “the divine right of kings” was obliterated, but what was put in place of it was not a land of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but a Reign of Terror where many battled for dominance and much blood was spilled. We see in Sade’s work these extremes played out in tales where there is a strict hierarchy of those who dominate and those forced to submit, a hierarchy put in place not by God, but by Nature. Sade’s philosophy is predicated on the notion that there is no God and therefore we have no soul. There is nothing beyond our own bodies and their urges, which should not be repressed as society dictates: “I’ll tell you I am not aware of having any soul, that I’m acquainted with and feel nothing but my body” (Sade, Juliette 44). Sade often presents this idea that we must cast off societal constraints and religious repression in an ironic form, with many of his most ardent libertines being members of the Christian church. Juliette, for example, begins in a convent, where Juliette is taught the ways of the libertine by the abbess Madame Delbene, who proclaims:

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Social ordinances in virtually every instance are promulgated by those who never deign to consult the members of society, they are restrictions we all of us cordially hate, they are common sense’s contradictions: absurd myths lacking any reality save in the eyes of the fools who don’t mind submitting to them, fairy tales which in the eyes of reason and intelligence merit scorn only […]. (10)

Having these words spoken by a nun illustrates the inherent corruption in the institutions of both church and state, as those who enforce the laws seldom heed them. Instead, the libertine follows Nature, which is seen as the source of all instincts and desires. Thus, when the libertine acts, they are merely following Nature. Within Sade’s philosophy, Nature is without morality since morality is something created by humans, subject to change over time and according to geographic location. Nature is similarly “in ceaseless flux and action” (Sade, Juliette 171), but this means that no one act can be deemed either right or wrong: “Absurd to say the mania offends nature; can it be so, when ‘tis she who puts it in our head? Can she dictate what degrades her?” (Sade, Juliette 230). The Sadean libertine feels no remorse for their crimes, just as any act of Nature feels nothing for the destruction it causes, nor does an animal feel remorse for killing another in order to ensure its own survival and sustenance. For Sade, the human is not superior to the animal for it is an animal, and “the laws that govern animals” are “in much stricter conformance with Nature” (Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom 218). As in the animal kingdom, in Sade’s view humanity is similarly divided into the categories of predator and prey. Those that follow Nature and indulge their vices are rewarded, while those who follow the virtuous path and obey societal rules are punished and preyed upon. It is fitting then that the character of Justine is introduced in Penny Dreadful in an episode entitled “Predators Far and Near,” with this dichotomy of predator/prey played with throughout the series, often expressed through animal imagery. Alongside the opening scene of the episode, which presents the spectacle of a flock of predators encircling their prey, this episode also portrays the growing attraction between Vanessa Ives and Dr. Alexander Sweet, a zoologist working in a museum. As Vanessa and Dr. Sweet converse, they are surrounded by taxidermized animals, both predators and prey enclosed in glass. This image of animals, frozen in motion and caged, expresses the repression enforced by Victorian society, a repression that is unleashed when characters give into their natural (and supernatural) urges.

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Vanessa sits in on one of Dr. Sweet’s lectures on the scorpion, which just happens to be Vanessa’s animal talisman. The scorpion, a small but fierce predator, embodies the wild and dark side of Vanessa’s nature with which she continually battles. For Vanessa, her animal nature is bound to notions of evil and the demonic, and throughout the series she fights to save her soul, a fight that is won through her death and ascension to a Heavenly state. By contrast, the trajectory of Lily, and her previous iteration Brona, is one that is bound to the corporeal. As Chloé Germaine Buckley states: In death, Vanessa is aligned with spirit not body, completing her elevation from female grotesque to classical body, closing off the mobility her position as a grotesque afforded. In contrast, Brona/Lily remains anchored to her body, a body implicated in the economic exchange of prostitution, gendered violence and political struggle. (12)

While Vanessa’s death makes her transcendent, Brona’s death makes her monstrous, as she is taken by Dr. Frankenstein and resurrected as Lily. It is only after death that Brona/Lily begins to transform from prey to predator. For Sade, by following Nature we must follow its perpetual cycles of creation and destruction. Indeed, violence and destruction are essential: “destruction is the soil and light that renews her and where she thrives; it is upon crime she subsists; it is, in a word, through death she lives” (Sade, Juliette 172). This statement can also be applied to Lily, who becomes powerful not only through her own death, but through crime, violence, and destruction. Her living-dead state presents a transgression against one of the most fundamental laws of nature, an act that ironically still aligns her with Sadean ideals. Sade called not only for Nature’s designs to be followed, but also for them to be thwarted as part of this trajectory toward death and destruction. A further way of obstructing nature’s plans is to subject them to a system of order. Sade writes, “Let us put a little order in these revels; measure is required even in the depths of infamy and delirium” (Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom 240). While Lily indulges her passions and desires, she is unlike her companion Dorian Gray in that it is at the service of a larger plan to overthrow the prevailing patriarchal order and instill her own. The character of Dorian Gray in Penny Dreadful, obviously based on the titular character of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891),

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is very much in the libertine mold. However, there is the element of the supernatural which is missing from Sade, with Dorian eternally youthful while a portrait in his attic continues to age. Unlike Lily, who has a clear purpose and ideology, Dorian is obsessed with the superficial, to the point of there being nothing below the surface. This allows him to act without feeling or remorse, and also drives him to more extreme sexual and violent behavior. As Sade attests: [B]elieve me when I tell you that the delights born of apathy are worth much more than those you get out of your sensibility; the latter can only touch the heart in one sense, the other titillates and overwhelms all of one’s being. In a word, is it possible to compare permissible pleasures with pleasures which, to far more piquant delights, join those inestimable joys that come of bursting socially imposed restraints and of the violation of every law? (Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom 342)

In the opening scene of Episode 1.4, we see Dorian take part in an orgy, and throughout the series he seduces most of the characters, both male and female as well as transgender. These transgressions though are fueled by a ceaseless apathy, a desire to flout convention and cause offense and outrage for the sake of it. Again, echoing Sade, “It is not the object of libertine intentions which fires us, but the idea of evil” (Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom 364). While Sade was known to write political pamphlets, his philosophical ideas were primarily expressed through fiction (and it is important to stress here that the philosophical ideas presented by Sade in this essay are explored only in the textual realm, as a way to examine representations of transgression). His libertine novels are now considered to be classics of pornography, fixated as they are on detailed descriptions of sexual scenarios that run the gamut of all manner of perversions and peccadillos, with no taboo left unexplored. But it is Sade’s obsession with sex as a form of violence, which is inflicted on another as a form of pain that sexually excites the perpetrator, that led to Sade’s name being adapted into the term “sadism,” used to describe a pathological condition. Sade himself can be considered a sadist, given his propensity for assaulting lower-class women and sex workers. Over the course of his life, Sade spent almost thirty-two years in prison for these criminal acts and other instances of sexual debauchery. He was imprisoned in the Bastille from 1784 to 1789, and during his stay wrote The 120 Days of Sodom (1785).

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He was transferred from the Bastille just ten days before it was stormed during the French Revolution, believing that his (unfinished) manuscript had been destroyed in the process. Later in life, Sade was arrested at the behest of Napoleon after he was identified as the author of two of his most famed novels, Justine and Juliette. These two novels are connected in that they are the tales of two sisters, one who follows the path of virtue (Justine), the other who follows the path of vice (Juliette). The two sisters are mirror images; many of their adventures are similar but what is different is how they react to the events and people around them. As Maurice Blanchot explains: We see this virtuous girl [Justine] who is forever being raped, beaten, tortured, the victim of a fate bent on her destruction. And when we read Juliette, we follow a depraved girl as she flies from pleasure to pleasure […]. [T]he two sisters’ stories are basically identical, that everything that happens to Justine also happens to Juliette, that both go through the same gauntlet of experiences and are put to the same painful tests. Juliette is also cast into prison, roundly flogged, sentenced to the rack, endlessly tortured. Hers is a hideous existence, but here is the rub: from these ills, these agonies, she derives pleasure; these tortures delight her. (49)

While Justine finds herself constantly victimized, Juliette seizes each moment as an opportunity for pleasure. When we first see the character of Justine in Penny Dreadful, she appears as a victim, much like her namesake, completely vulnerable and at the mercy of those around her who wish to do her harm for the sake of their own pleasure. Yet, through the intervention of Lily Frankenstein and Dorian Gray, Justine’s fate is changed and she begins a new life where she turns the violence done to her back on her perpetrators. While it can be argued that Justine in Penny Dreadful therefore becomes a character styled after Juliette, she can be more likened to Eugenie, the young heroine of Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom. In this story, Eugenie is instructed in the ways of sex by two older libertines, Dolmance and Madame de Saint-Ange. What is significant, though, is that the sexual situations Eugenie is taken through also involve acts of violence, culminating in a series of brutalities committed against Eugenie’s mother. Alongside these acts, as in all of Sade’s works, there are long philosophical monologues delivered by the characters detailing their worldview. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, the sexual acts are an integral part of these conversations

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that are presented in the form of lessons, functioning as a form of “education” and indoctrination into the libertine way of life. As Madame de Saint-Ange urges, this way of life goes against all the rules that society demands a woman follow: [I]t is necessary that when once she reaches the age of reason the girl be detached from the paternal household, and after having received a public education it is necessary that at the age of fifteen she be left her own mistress, to become what she wishes. She will be delivered unto vice? Ha! what does that matter? Are not the services a young girl renders in consenting to procure the happiness of all who apply to her, infinitely more important than those which, isolating herself, she performs for her husband? Woman’s destiny is to be wanton, like the bitch, the she-wolf; she must belong to all who claim her. Clearly, it is to outrage the fate Nature imposes upon women to fetter them by the absurd ties of a solitary marriage. (219)

Detailed here is a proclamation that a young woman should no longer be considered the property of her parents or her husband, that she should “become what she wishes,” with no regard for what society expects of her. For Justine in Penny Dreadful, Dorian and Lily act in much the same way by initiating Justine into their plans and encouraging her to take back power, although in this case it is not in order to attack the institution of the family but of the patriarchy. As with Eugenie, Justine’s initiation comes in the forms of both sex and violence. Justine tells Dorian and Lily of her plight, stating that she had been bought by a man at the age of twelve, who then later lent her out to others who abused her, before finally selling her to be publicly executed, with each person being charged a mere ten pounds to watch. Dorian and Lily then present her with the man in question and a knife and Justine enacts her own bloody and violent revenge. After the murder, the three then proceed to have sex, bathed in the man’s blood, an act that merges sex and death.

The Marquis de Sade and the Gothic Writing in the late eighteenth century, Sade was a contemporary of writers of the Gothic such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis. While Sade’s works, given that they relied so heavily on a philosophy linked to the supremacy of the natural world, did not contain anything supernatural

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or fantastical, there are still aspects that align his work with the Gothic. As E.J. Clery states, “The libertinism he advocated is cognate with ‘liberty,’ yet sexual freedom as he portrays it is invariably decked out in the gothic trappings of incarceration and tyranny” (86). Many of Sade’s tales take place in old castles, following young maidens who are imprisoned and endangered, their virtue always in peril. There are also plenty of seductive male characters who may at first appear good but then are revealed to be evil scoundrels compelled by the darkest of desires. The specter of incest, in the Gothic always lying beneath the surface in the subtextual, is brought front and center in Sade (as with all other manner of sexual taboos and transgressions), as in his short story “Eugenie de Franval,” where a man becomes obsessed with his own daughter. Will McMorran also acknowledges the Gothic elements in Sade: “Sade’s pornographic novels do share some features with the English gothic in terms of characters (virtuous heroines, debauched aristocrats and monks) and locations (isolated castles, dark forests, and even darker dungeons),” but remarks that “this has seemed a matter of coincidence rather than influence.” While there is no direct influence from Gothic writers in Sade’s libertine novels, Sade did write about the rise of the Gothic in his essay “Reflection on the Novel,” written in 1800. Speaking of “these new novels in which sorcery and phantasmagoria constitute practically the entire merit” (108), he goes on to make the observation that “this kind of fiction, whatever one may think of it, is assuredly not without merit: ‘twas the inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks which all of Europe has suffered” (109). Sade here is referencing in particular the French Revolution and the continuing aftereffects, further stating, “to compose works of interest, one had to call upon the aid of hell itself, and to find in the world of make-believe things wherewith one was fully familiar merely by delving into man’s daily life in this age of iron” (109). For Sade, the horror of these novels reflected the horrors that so many had experienced at that time. Such a statement makes Sade one of the first commentators to make this connection between the Gothic and the time and place from which it originates. Similarly, in Penny Dreadful we will see the tropes of the Gothic updated and revised to comment on twenty-first century issues. This updating is primarily expressed through the development of the character of Lily Frankenstein. Like Dorian, she is also immortal, having been resurrected by Dr. Frankenstein in Episode 1.8 as a mate for his Creature who has returned for revenge. Previously in Season 1, we saw Lily when she was alive as Brona, an Irish immigrant who turns to sex

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work as a means of survival but ultimately dies due to consumption. She meets Dorian for the first time in Episode 1.2 when he invites her to his house, proclaiming, “I always wanted to fuck a dying creature.” As they have sex, Brona accidentally coughs blood onto Dorian’s face, an act that clearly excites him. For the libertine, sex and death are bound up in violence. This moment is echoed and magnified later in Episode 3.3 when Dorian, Lily, and Justine have sex bathed in blood after committing murder, blood itself becoming a sexual fluid. In the transformation of Brona into Lily, we have an instance of doubling, a common Gothic trope. Despite sharing a body, they are opposites, much like Sade’s sisters Justine and Juliette. Like Justine, Brona is downtrodden, destined to live a life of suffering. In contrast, Lily comes into life as a monster, one of Frankenstein’s creations. Frankenstein falls in love with her, but as she learns more about the world, she soon begins to rail against the oppression she sees against her and all womankind. Similar to Juliette, Lily comes to own her sexuality, rejecting Frankenstein and taking up with Dorian in a bid to raise an all-woman army seeking to overthrow the patriarchy. In her own way, Lily is planning her own revolution in a bid for “liberty,” which she describes as “a bitch who must be bedded on a mattress of corpses” [Episode 3.3]. As Buckley argues, “Brona[/Lily] is a revolting body in the double sense of that word. As well as being presented as an object of grotesquerie, she revolts against the abject conditions in which she is placed” (12). Lily’s status as a revolutionary is inextricably linked to her corporeal status as grotesque, abject, and monstrous. She is a living corpse, often seen covered in blood; one of her revolutionary acts is to call for her followers to bring her the severed arms of men in an act of symbolic castration, signaling the beginning of her battle for female supremacy. Lily explains to Justine that women who refuse to be degraded and protect themselves are called monsters, echoing Angela Carter’s assertion in her book The Sadeian Woman, that “[a] free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Her freedom will be a condition of personal privilege that deprives those on which she exercises it of her own freedom. The most extreme kind of this deprivation is murder. These women murder” (30). Penny Dreadful takes a similar view of monstrosity, being not an aberration of nature but an expression of opposition against societal norms that are shown to be oppressive. Transgression becomes a means of rebellion.

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Dorian goes along with Lily at first but soon comes to tire of the crusade as things get more serious—and less centered on him and his pleasure. As he tells Lily in Episode 3.7, he has simply become bored: I’ve lived through so many revolutions, you see. It’s all so familiar to me, the wild eyes and the zealous ardour, the irresponsibility and the clatter. The noise of it all, from the tumbles on the way to the guillotine to the roaring mobs sacking the temples of Byzantium. So much noise in anarchy and it’s all so ultimately disappointing.

The reference to the guillotine is clearly alluding to the French Revolution, which, as mentioned earlier, Sade linked explicitly to the rise of the Gothic. Dorian conveys Gilles Deleuze’s point that the Sadean hero “appears to have set himself the task of thinking out the Death Instinct (pure negation) in a demonstrative form” (31), his life of excess creating a numbing effect that ultimately annihilates the self—there is as much depth to Dorian and his endless beauty as that of his two-dimensional portrait. While Sade wrote in the eighteenth century, the character of Dorian Gray and the penny dreadful originated in the nineteenth, the penny dreadful made available in the form of serials that could be purchased cheaply each weekly instalment. R.A.  Gilbert states that in these works, “extended descriptive passages made way for a constant succession of sensational events described in lurid terms” (215), with narrative being secondary to spectacle. This attention to spectacle rather than story development brings to mind Sade’s unfinished novel The 120 Days of Sodom, which, due to it not being completed, descends into a list of incredibly lurid and violent (and in some cases rather ridiculous) atrocities. It was these elements that Sade was most focused on.

A Dreadful Mix of High and Low Named after these cheap Gothic serials, the television series takes characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, the Wolf Man, and Dr. Jekyll, and melds them together, emphasizing their transgressiveness, their reveling in the spectacles of sex and violence. Further, it imbues them with a contemporary sensibility, but in a way that also teases out what was always there in these stories. The series thus combines together references to literary works written over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with further

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nods to the many adaptations of these works that have been produced for both film and television since the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Sade was writing in the last decade of the eighteenth century, while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula were published in 1818, 1891, and 1897, respectively. These works are all merged together into a late-nineteenth-century Victorian setting, in itself a monster created from many different parts— or, from another perspective, it is a Sadean narrative combining all manner of transgressions and perversions, which are then ordered within an organized system of episodes. Given it is a television series produced by cable network Showtime, Penny Dreadful is also an example of the new age of “quality television.” While the original penny dreadfuls were considered low cultural forms for their catering to the masses, contemporary cable drama series have been positioned as high culture. Unlike earlier forms of television, which were similarly looked down upon as presenting mindless entertainment, “quality television” has been compared both to classic literature from the likes of Charles Dickens, with its expanded scope and ability to develop complex narratives and characters, as well as to art-house cinema (see Martin). Benjamin Poore argues that this current discourse is referenced in Penny Dreadful’s title: [A] further layer of meaning to the title Penny Dreadful is that not only does it anticipate the joke about its own pulp origins, but it also makes an explicit, appropriating gesture towards all of television as being mere penny dreadful fiction. The joke can only work, in that sense, now that television is understood, post-The Sopranos, post-The Wire, post-Breaking Bad, as an art form, with identifiable showrunner-auteurs instead of undifferentiated hack writers (Martin 11). The joke only works, that is, because it is palpably no longer true: it bespeaks a new confidence in the medium. (68–69)

As Poore suggests, the title signals that the series will be taking a once-­ derided form and appropriating it into a new one—itself also once-­ derided—situating it as a part of the recent trend of shows that deconstruct genre conventions for an audience of educated and savvy viewers (see also American Horror Story [FX, 2011—]; Watchmen [HBO, 2019]; and Lovecraft Country [HBO, 2020]). This re-evaluation of previously disparaged texts again recalls the work of Sade, who was rediscovered in the twentieth century by a generation of

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intellectuals, such as George Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Simone de Beauvoir, who saw in Sade’s philosophy a way of thinking about humanity that confronted its darkest aspects. Guillaume Apollinaire famously declared Sade “the freest spirit who ever lived,” while Deleuze explains in Coldness and Cruelty, his book examining Sade and Leopold von Sacher Masoch, that “whether Sade and Masoch are ‘patients’ or clinicians or both, they are also great anthropologists, of the type whose work succeeds in embracing a whole conception of man, culture and nature; they are also great artists in that they discovered new forms of expression, new ways of thinking and feeling and an entirely original language” (16). Deleuze sees in Sade and Masoch something beyond just mere pornography; he sees in their work an attempt to examine the nature of existence and humanity’s capacity to reason, expressed in a completely new artistic form. Sade’s transgressions are of form as well as content. This reappraisal from intellectual elites further led to Sade being discovered and referenced in popular culture. In her book Cutting Edge: Art-­ Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde, Joan Hawkins explores the collision of high and low cultural forms in cinema, pinpointing Sade as a key figure in this discussion: Consider the works of the Marquis de Sade, whose books are sold in mainstream bookstores and adult bookstores and housed in university libraries. Sade’s works, which the intellectual elite view as masterful analyses of the mechanisms of power and economics are also—at least if we are to take their presence in adult bookstores and magazines seriously—still regarded as sexually arousing, as masturbatory aids. (6)

As Hawkins elucidates here, Sade stands at the crossroads of high and low culture, embraced by both the intellectual elite and suppliers of smut. In cinema, there have been several adaptations of his works, most notably Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) and various soft-core erotica adaptations by filmmaker Jess Franco. With Pasolini and Franco, we again see the melding of high and low culture: Pasolini was considered both an art-house auteur and a scandalous provocateur, with Saló subject to bans in several countries; Franco is often pigeonholed as a purveyor of trash, but his films incorporate elements of formal experimentation and philosophical reflection that mirror Sade’s melding of pornographic scenarios and theoretical discussion.

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Sade also has a history of being referenced in the horror genre, in The Skull (1965), Waxwork (1988), and Night Terrors (1993), and was clearly an influence on films such as Bloody Pit of Horror (1965), Hellraiser (1987), and Tenemos le carne/We Are the Flesh (2016), to name just a few. Examples of extreme cinema, such as the “torture porn” trend of the noughties and films from the New French Extremity, continue Sade’s exploration of all possible perversions and atrocities. Moving back to television, central to the development of “quality” or “complex” television is its status as “adult” entertainment, presenting images of sex and violence previously deemed taboo. Early examples of quality television such as Oz (HBO, 1997–2003) and The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) were groundbreaking not only as a result of the complexity of their narratives, but also because of their graphic representations of sex and violence, particularly scenes of sexual violence and misogyny. This aspect was pushed even further in the wildly popular Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–2019), which was often criticized for its overreliance on rape as both spectacle and a narrative device. The excesses of Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015) and American Horror Story can also be considered Sadean, with their focus on extreme acts of violence, often perpetrated by libertine characters, such as cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter or the vampire Countess of American Horror Story’s fourth season, who view their deeds as part of the expression of their personal philosophy. Such shocking representations are deemed acceptable through both their high cultural status and their target audience of intelligent and shrewd adults. Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper utilized a Sadean approach in their study of the reception of violent images in cinema by a knowledgeable cult audience, arguing the following: “Sade’s theories and experiments are paradigms of active rather than passive creation and reception. Here, the text’s audience is both enticed into its celebrations of evil and perversity before being shocked, misled or violently forced to reflect on their gratifications from the narrative proceedings” (238). What Mendik and Harper explain here is that excessive images work twofold: first by shocking its viewers and then forcing them to reflect on their relationship to these images. Just as Sade did in his written work, there is a confrontation with our own culpability and attraction to violence and sadism, a confrontation also present in the staging of violence in cable television series. It is this movement beyond mere titillation that demarcates the shift from low to high (although it can certainly be argued that

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there is an element of “having your cake and eating it, too,” with that aspect of titillation still being present). Penny Dreadful thus takes its place within this new tradition of quality television, wherein high and low forms meld together. The transgressiveness of its characters and scenarios, the graphic nature of its representations of sex and violence, and its appropriation of Gothic tropes owe a debt to Sade, who was one of the first to fuse high and low through a combination of pornography, horror, and philosophy. The characters of Dorian Gray and Lily Frankenstein both methodically experiment with different perversions and break all societal laws, in a manner derived from the Sadean libertine. Sade’s influence is thus present throughout the series, one of the many references to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature that are melded together in a series that revels in the transgressions inherent in the Gothic genre.

Works Cited Blanchot, Maurice. “Sade.” Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. Grove P, 1965, pp. 37–72. Buckley, Chloé Germaine. “A Tale of Two Women: The Female Grotesque in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 20, no. 3, 2019, pp. 361–380. Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography. Virago P, 1979. Clery, E.J. “Sade, Marquis de (1740–1814).” The Handbook of the Gothic. 2nd ed., edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 85–6. Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. Zone Books, 1989. Gilbert, R.A. “Penny Dreadfuls.” The Handbook of the Gothic. 2nd ed., edited by Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 215–6. Harper, Graeme, and Xavier Mendik. “The Chaotic Text and the Sadean Audience: Narrative Transgressions of a Contemporary Cult Film.” Unruly Pleasures: The Cult Film and its Critics, edited Xavier Mendik and Graeme Harper, FAB P, 2000, pp. 235–249. Hawkins, Joan. Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2000. Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Penguin, 2013. McMorran, Will. “I Translated the Marquis de Sade’s Only Gothic Novel into English.” The Conversation, 8 Oct. 18, 2021, https://theconversation. c o m / i -­t r a n s l a t e d -­t h e -­m a r q u i s -­d e -­s a d e s -­o n l y -­g o t h i c -­n o v e l -­i n t o -­ english-­169855.

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Poore, Benjamin. “The Transformed Beast: Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic.” Victoriographies, vol. 6, no. 1, 2016, pp. 62–81. Sade, Marquis de. The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. Grove P, 1987a. ———. Juliette. Grove P, 1968. ———. Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. Grove P, 1965. ———. “Reflections on the Novel.” The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, edited by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. Grove Press, 1987b, pp. 91–116.

CHAPTER 14

“All Those Sacred Midnight Things”: Queer Authorship, Veiled Desire, and Divine Transgression in Penny Dreadful James Bogdanski

Queerness has always suffused the marrow of Gothic tradition. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick places the Gothic at the queer vanguard, noting that “the Gothic was the first novelistic form in England to have close, relatively visible links to male homosexuality” (Between Men 91). Entwined with this is that not unrelated thematic upon which Gothic fiction centers itself: “the confrontation with the horror that is oneself, the horror that one’s relation to the world is painfully inappropriate and distorting to the privacy of the self” (Haggerty 53). As a bricolage of Gothic texts, Penny Dreadful inherits a complex queer legacy. In situating the abject figure within the Gothic, Kelly Hurley notes of Mary Douglas’s work on pollution and taboo that “the monstrosities of the fin-de-siècle Gothic are monstrous precisely because of their liminality” (24). This chapter considers the ways that John Logan, as queer creator of Penny Dreadful,

J. Bogdanski (*) Long Beach City College and El Camino College, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_14

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reappropriates the abject and the liminal in Penny Dreadful as signifiers of what I call the queer sublime—an almost hallowed state of difference— something Logan conceives of as desirable but inherently misunderstood, often by the characters who embody it most. Through recourse to a deracinated Catholicism and metaphorical “veiling” that conceals the monstrousness/queerness of his characters, either from themselves or from heteronormative Victorian society at large, Logan explores the taboo and fluid sexualities often unloosed in Gothic narratives. A central quartet—the demon-tormented clairvoyant Vanessa Ives, American gunslinger Ethan Chandler, immortal hedonist Dorian Gray, and Egyptologist dandy Ferdinand Lyle—uses this process of queer (un)veiling to negotiate mutable and often contradictory selves. Moreover, Logan invests even his self-avowedly straight characters, such as Victor Frankenstein, with transgressive longings that connote a veiled queer identity. The figurative image of the veil (in its Sedgwickian sense, “suffused with sexuality”) functions in Penny Dreadful as both a repressive and emancipatory device, frequently evoked via literal transformations into other(ed) selves (demonpossessed Vanessa; lycanthropic Ethan) (Conventions 143). In Logan’s cosmology, these figures of abjection who occupy its dark terrain are therefore impossibly aware of the flesh and its intrinsic mutability—the body as simultaneously both inviolate object and corrupted vessel. To this end, Penny Dreadful finds itself in productive intertextual dialogue with the Frankenstein films of James Whale, one of the show’s many queer progenitors. Just as Whale imbues Frankenstein’s creature with corporeal strangeness, Logan foregrounds the body as a site of queer potentiality, collapsing distinctions between the sacred and the profane through destabilizing acts of self-creation. Yet this does not amount to a reductive analogy of simply reading the monstrous as queer. Traditional avatars of monstrosity, such as Lucifer and Dracula, emerge as forces of compulsory heteronormativity in Penny Dreadful. In opposition to these, Logan, like Whale before him, seeks to define a liminal space (the queer sublime) where his “beautiful monsters” may reside in all their tragic glory. “Queerness” as a codified signifier of homosexuality began to emerge only in the final years of the nineteenth century. This can present usage problems for discussing fictional works, like Penny Dreadful, set during the late-Victorian period but created during a time when the concept of queer identity has been expansively re-envisioned by the LGBTQ community. For the purposes of this chapter, Harry M.  Benshoff’s elegant formulation of queerness will be used. Benshoff defines queerness as that

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which “opposes binary oppositions […,] disrupts narrative equilibrium and sets in motion a questioning of the status quo” (4–5). He goes further: “Queer even challenges ‘the Platonic parameters of Being—the borders of life and death.’ Queer suggests death over life by focusing on non-procreative sexual behaviors […]” (5). Such an impulse recurs frequently in Penny Dreadful, with Victor seeming to echo Benshoff when explaining to Imperial adventurer Sir Malcolm Murray his lifelong obsession with “piercing the tissue that separates life from death” [Episode 1.1]. Here, Victor’s words mark one of the show’s first allusions to veiling. Read simply as masculine hubris, they might connote hymenal penetration, hardly dissimilar to Malcolm’s expeditions into uncharted virgin territory. But Victor insists on a difference. His fascination is with the tissue/ veil itself, which has the power to conceal and reveal. Like Victor’s resurrected children, neither alive nor dead, the veil signifies liminality. For Logan, liminality portends pathos. Victor’s rending of the veil brings him untold suffering yet Malcolm (who never learns of Victor’s “experiments”) commends him for being “unafraid to pull back the skin and look beneath” [Episode 1.1]. (Un)veiling carries risks of censure but also kinship. “In the Gothic view,” Sedgwick notes, “individual identity, including sexual identity, is social and relational rather than original or private; it is established only ex post facto, by recognition” (Coherence 142). As a Gothic motif, the veil functions as “primarily a boundary and a disguise for something else,” especially sexuality (143). “[T]he 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). While not explicitly conceived with monstrosity in mind, Sedgwick’s conceit speaks  to  the interstitial  natures  of Logan’s characters, who are trapped/drawn between selves and between worlds. Some characters, like Ethan, whose repressed werewolf self remains hidden even from him until the end of Season 1, don these veils unconsciously. Others, like Lyle and Vanessa, intentionally veil sexual aspects of themselves. Logan’s use of veiling, though, is not wholly synonymous with the practice of closeting. The veil is porous. Closeting is more like a mask. Whereas a mask conceals, obscuring the face completely, indeed, presenting a contrasting surface capable of deception, the veil is, by design, liminal—a threshold that denies the gaze while inviting it, simultaneously penetrable and protective, but not oppressive in the ecliptic style of a mask which effaces/replaces the self.

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Vanessa is the first to initiate Ethan into this larger veiled society of fellow queer beings which she terms the Demimonde and describes as “a place in the shadows, rarely seen but deeply felt” [Episode 1.1]. The Demimonde serves as a habitation for cursed things; it is also a liminal space akin to a queer underworld where Vanessa and others can express their “monstered selves.” As Benshoff notes, homosexual “underworlds” emerged in many European cities during the latter half of the nineteenth century (contemporaneous with Penny Dreadful’s fin-de-siècle setting) (18). Logan seems aware of the historical valences of such spaces for fostering queer socialization as it forms the nexus that unites nearly all his outcasts in their initial outing to rescue Sir Malcolm’s daughter Mina. By implying that Vanessa, Ethan, and their ilk belong to the Demimonde, the series underscores its interest in creating a queer family, with Sir Malcolm its patriarch, Ethan and Victor his surrogate sons, and Vanessa as mother/daughter (Primorac 154). Overlaying this, indeed concerned with the same themes of “contamination” that bind together this queer family, is a quasi-religious imperative to redefine their alterity in transcendent terms. Raised by strongly religious Irish parents, Logan’s spiritual views are refracted through a range of characters, with Vanessa’s Catholicism foregrounded most. She, uniquely, lacks a singular literary precursor, arguably making her the purest expression of Logan’s artistic intent concerning religion. Saverio Tomaiuolo links Vanessa’s Catholicism to her “deviant sexuality,” pointing to Vanessa’s first appearance in Penny Dreadful kneeling before a crucifix in her austere room at Sir Malcolm’s house. For Gothic novelists, “Roman Catholicism and sexual deviance were each suggestive of the other” (O’Malley 18). With her polymorphously perverse sexuality as her perpetual crucible, Vanessa seethes against the patriarchal doctrine of her faith while relying upon its institutional repression (abstinence) as a means of self-control (Primorac 154). As Malcolm’s African manservant Sembene remarks to Ethan, “She is without limits,” attesting to her uncontainability [Episode 2.9]. Logan shores up the heterosexist shortcomings of Catholicism with the humanism of the Romantic poets. No character espouses its tenets with more wistful conviction than Frankenstein’s Creature. In Episode 2.5, the Creature admits to Vanessa that though he has read the Bible, “the old parables and platitudes seemed anemic.” Poetry sustains him, so much so that he has taken the name of the poet John Clare (whom he contends “felt a singular affinity with the outcasts and the unloved”). As he recites Clare’s poem “I Am,” Vanessa intonates the next verse before the two

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finish it together like a kind of liturgy. Out of this consilient heterodoxy Logan’s queer sublime emerges. Victor, an atheist who initially scorns the supernatural, alludes to the queer sublime when he ministers to the dying prostitute Brona Croft, “I believe in a place between heaven and hell, between the living and the dead. A glorious place of everlasting rebirth, perhaps even salvation” [Episode 1.8]. This beautiful vision carries the taint of self-interest since Victor proceeds to smother Brona so he may resurrect her corpse for the Creature (who has threatened to kill Victor should he refuse to provide him with a mate). Despite Logan’s stated desire to rehabilitate the Creature and put it closer in line with Shelley’s novel after it had been “so badly used over the years in movies” (Miller), his authorial interest in the queer frisson between creator and creature aligns him closely with Whale, an openly gay director in Hollywood’s golden age whose incarnation of Shelley’s monster became definitive. Whale’s two entries in Universal’s Frankenstein series take impish delight in “erotic triangles,” a thematic arrangement revealing how “‘acceptable’ homosociality [can slide] into an overt homosexuality” (Young 409). For Sedgwick, the triangle discloses “a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power” (Between Men 25). In the straightest sense, then, trigonal erotic rivalries between two men vying for the affections of a woman are meant to resolve with a male/female union that reifies such social ties as natural and dispels anxieties surrounding male/male bonding. In Frankenstein (1931), the necrophilia-tinged extracurriculars of Henry Frankenstein (“Victor” in Shelley’s novel) cause great consternation amongst his loved ones, including Elizabeth, his betrothed. Whale uses an erotic triangle to deflect suspicion from Henry’s homosocial activities with his assistant, Fritz, and their newly unearthed male cadaver. By positioning Henry’s friend Victor Clerval (“Henry” in the novel) as a romantic rival, Whale contrives a sop to obligatory heterosexuality. On the night of Henry’s wedding, the Monster attacks Elizabeth, resulting in Henry leading a mob into the hills to give chase. Henry imparts the following words to Victor: “You stay here and look after Elizabeth. I leave her in your care, whatever happens. You understand? In your care.” Henry’s anesthetization of Elizabeth’s agency in this moment renders her a patient, entrusted by one doctor to another, in tacit acknowledgment of the (hetero) “treatment” Victor can provide that Henry cannot. It also siphons all sexual desire from Henry and Elizabeth’s bond. Like venom

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sucked from a wound, Henry is free of her to pursue a man. As Angela M.  Smith notes, the “normative relationship between Elizabeth and Victor” functions as a fallback pairing that will uphold the social order should Henry’s death drive propel him into the Monster’s arms (79). Whale’s Frankenstein films therefore reject the primacy of heterosexual couplings. Knocked unconscious by the Monster after a primal struggle atop barren terrain (perhaps symbolic of their non-procreative coupling), Henry, having left Elizabeth at the proverbial altar, is now transformed into an unwitting bride himself. The Monster carries him to a remote windmill, crossing its threshold as a groom would a bridal suite with docile wife slung across his arms. Both figures become for each other “the feared and desired other” (Sedgwick, Epistemology 187). In The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Whale dispenses with heteronormative failsafes completely. Gone is Victor as straight-man-in-waiting. In his place is Dr. Pretorius who, introduced to lead Henry astray once again, “oozes a gay camp aura” (Benshoff 50). It is no coincidence that Pretorius’s arrival is staged as an invasion of Henry’s bedchamber, literally sparing Henry from consummating his already delayed marriage. Also expunged from the narrative is Henry’s cantankerous father, Baron Frankenstein, with his criticisms of Henry’s lifestyle. Even the townspeople, whose livelihoods pivoted around Henry’s nuptials in the first film, are less a force of compulsory heterosexuality here. Without these social buttresses, Henry needn’t worry about “prying eyes” peering into his secrets. No more ashamed cries of “They must not see that!” as it concerns strange, undead male bodies on his floor. Henry has inherited the patriarchal mantle yet his queer desire, scarcely sublimated by his marriage to Elizabeth in a scene Whale declines to even stage or directly allude to, renders him indifferent to performative heterosexuality. Under Pretorius’s unscrupulous tutelage, Henry finds himself again part of a “queer ‘domestic’ couple,” lured anew with the promise of creating life sans woman (Benshoff 49). Whale’s queer sublime, then, functions for a time as a cocoon around Henry’s double life. For, despite Sedgwick’s warning that homosocial bonds entail a loss of male privilege (or at least carry that risk), Henry faces few consequences apart from his own compunction. The queer sublime is extended to the Monster on a much more conditional basis in Bride, one marked by Christian signifiers. Like Logan, Whale came from religious parents. The Whales, notably Mrs. Whale, were devout Methodists who attended church regularly, instilling in James a puritanical worldview (Curtis 1). In Bride, the villagers put the Monster

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“in chains, tie him to a pole and raise him up in the air like a wounded Christ on the cross” (Manuel 30). The spectacle of the Monster as “persecuted divinity” carries perverse intimations (36). Sutured together in defiance of nature and further disfigured by the flames of the windmill fire, the Monster is “difference made flesh,” the queer body personified (Cohen 7). To liken it to Christ’s suffering consecrates queer pain. Whale’s inversion of the sacred and the profane envisages a messianic queerness, one that exacts its own sacrificial end. During the film’s cataclysmic finale, the pleasure of seeing his eponymous mate dances briefly across the Monster’s face before the Bride rejects him, leading him to destroy the lab. The brush with an Other like himself should denote an inchoate queer moment in which two monstrous beings mirror each other’s unrepresentability in the social order, but Eleri Anona Watson observes that “such moments are none the less suffused with an abject horror, an inherently sublime pain and danger for the queer individual” (75). Whale’s original ending had Henry dying alongside his two creations and Pretorius (with Elizabeth predeceasing them all as the unwilling heart donor for the Bride), but alterations were made mere weeks before the film’s premiere (Denson 374). In the final cut, Henry is spared thanks to the timely arrival of Elizabeth. For Henry and Elizabeth to both perish would be a transgression too far, signaling as it would the collapse of a heteronormative future. Nevertheless, the reworking of Whale’s grimmer coda yields an aporia of queerness forsaken. Frames of Henry in the exploding lab remain in the final film even as he is shown outside fleeing, giving him a literal double, one whose wails— “I can’t leave them, I can’t”—express his attachment to the deviant beings he has created, the evanescing queer sublime. This permits Henry to sever his queer self, to bury it. By the same gesture, the double that chooses death renounces the salvation promised by heteronormativity. In Penny Dreadful, Logan excises Elizabeth from Victor’s story altogether, discarding the heterosexual tether that trailed him everywhere in Shelley and Whale’s versions, what Jack Halberstam calls “the domestic prison that threatens to entrap Frankenstein” (29). For a man desperately lonely, Logan’s Victor chooses to create not one but two male “monsters” in succession. Tellingly, Victor never expresses any prior interest in the female form as part of his experiments. Only at the Creature’s behest does Victor undertake the creation of a female subject, whose nakedness stirs his latent heterosexuality. Yet her artificiality—her very uncanniness— belies Victor’s libidinal drive. As one of his progeny, the incest taboo hangs

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over the female creation’s interactions with her creator—he fondles the breast of her “in-utero” cadaver as it soaks in a vat before reanimation and later introduces her as his cousin. While it may be tempting to read Lily as a fusion of the Bride and Elizabeth, the more germane fetish object is Victor’s mother, Caroline, in whose image he fashions her. Like Caroline, “Lily Frankenstein” has blonde hair, whereas the unwitting body donor Brona’s was reddish-­ brown, and speaks with an upper-class English accent, whereas Brona had an Irish brogue. Caroline’s traumatic death is shown in flashback as she curls beside a prepubescent Victor in bed, seemingly healthy, before suddenly vomiting blood in his face [Episode 1.3]. The scene recalls another, that of Brona coughing blood onto Dorian mid-coitus [Episode 1.2]. The conflation of death with sex lends their encounter a “thanatoerotic” quality, which also infuses the undead Lily’s defloration of Victor (Levitz 32). The oedipally disruptive death of Victor’s mother catalyzes his obsession with reanimation. After her funeral, Victor literally casts aside childish things and begins to study anatomy. Victor’s father is never mentioned, so in a Freudian sense, upon losing his mother, he is like the homosexual who “identifies himself with [the mother]; […] transforms himself into her, and now looks about for objects […] on which he can bestow such love and care as he experienced from his mother” (Bersani 53). Though controversial, this account of male homosexuality, which Freud developed in a 1910 study of Leonardo Da Vinci, remains germane to a figure like Victor, whose Promethean ambitions and ambiguous sexuality align him closely if imperfectly with the Renaissance inventor (not to mention the latter’s proposed creation of a proto-Frankensteinian mechanical knight). All three of Victor’s “children”—the “first-born” Creature, second son Proteus, and, finally, Lily—engender in him a queerness he does not readily accept. As fragments of him, as manifestations of “his mad dream” (as Edward Van Sloan’s character deems Frankenstein’s mania for reanimation in Whale’s 1931 film), Victor’s offspring are nothing less than his homosexual cathexis made flesh. Logan, like Shelley and Whale before him, accentuates the dark symmetry between Victor and his brood, suggesting that male parturition, in the Miltonian sense of creating something in one’s own image, mixes desire and self-loathing. The Creature (or rather a witch-conjured hallucination of him) references this ruptured wholeness, telling Victor, “I’m your other half … your truest self” [Episode 2.10]. For Halberstam, Victor’s “creation of ‘a being like myself’ [in Shelley’s novel] hints at the masturbatory and homosexual desires which

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[he] attempts to sanctify with the reproduction of another being” (42). But Victor’s rejection of the Creature in Logan’s retelling, his howling naked form reaching out for his creator’s caress, reads as homosexual panic. The search for “sameness” (analogous to same-sex desire) results in finding “other halves” that are always “inaccurate replications” (Bersani 113). For Victor, the horror may lie in too accurately replicating his own abjection, prompting him to reenact his mother’s “abandonment” of him as a child. Even the Creature admits his grotesquerie compared with Victor’s second-born Proteus, “elegant, both of form and limb” [Episode 1.3]. Emboldened to “experiment” again (each resurrection a sexual act, making the dead stand erect with electrical stimulation), Victor selects a specimen whose othered visage is more conducive to veiling. When a storm prematurely arouses Proteus from deathly slumber, Victor finds him naked swaddled in shadow. The camera—approximating Victor’s gaze— beholds Proteus’s sewn-together flesh with homoerotic reverence, entranced by the doctor’s “other half.” Achieving a moment of queer sublimity, the two exchange bodily fluids as Proteus touches the tear on Victor’s cheek and brings it to his own eye. In the next episode, Victor instructs Proteus on the mechanics of eating, putting a piece of bread in his own mouth, then tracing its invisible progress down his throat almost in pantomimic fellatio. Victor then places a piece in Proteus’s mouth with homo-Eucharistic flourish—twinned mimetic halves. The nature of Victor’s relationships to his creations is never disclosed to the series’ other main characters. During Victor’s first visit to Sir Malcolm’s house, Vanessa notices a volume of poetry in his medical bag. She recites the final stanza of Wordsworth’s “Lines Written in Early Spring,” with Victor finishing the verse. Afterward, a quizzical Malcolm asks, “What was all that poetry?” “Our young doctor has a secret,” Vanessa replies [Episode 1.2]. Encoded in this colloquy is their suspicion of Victor’s queerness and a degree of embarrassed misrecognition on Malcolm’s part, for he had earlier instructed Vanessa to unbutton the top of her dress, ostensibly to sway Victor with her feminine wiles. Poetry marks Victor as effeminate, calling into doubt his heterosexuality. It also suggests a suppleness in Malcolm’s patriarchal posturing as he eventually considers Victor a son, like his deceased son Peter. “He was much like you in a way,” Malcolm tells Victor [Episode 1.4]. Sensitive, sickly, and resistant to Vanessa’s advances, Peter died in Africa trying to prove his manhood. Traumatized

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by this loss, Sir Malcolm regards men of action like Ethan as disposable but Victor invaluable for his queerness. The queer romance between Victor and Proteus (his returning memories of his past life/wife notwithstanding) reaches its apogee when Victor escorts Proteus into the London streets for the first time [Episode 1.2]. Proteus delights in “fairy lights,” which are in fact gaslights. They encounter Ethan and Brona, prior to the latter’s murder by the good doctor, a couple whose courtship teases out similar valences in the Victor/Proteus pairing, together forming a queer quartet engaged in a veiled dance (their hidden selves being a werewolf, a prostitute, a resurrectionist, and the undead). Proteus’s subsequent death at the hands of Victor’s first-born Creature again echoes Victor’s mother’s. Penetrated from behind, Proteus’s chest bursts as the Creature’s hands force themselves through flesh and bone. The blood that splatters on Victor’s face with unexpected orgasmic intensity restages the originary loss of the mother and evinces the masochism inherent in all his relationships with his children. This fratricidal act condemns Victor to what Leo Bersani calls the “ecstatic suffering into which the human […] plunges when it is ‘pressed’ beyond a certain threshold of endurance” (24). Each rejection brings Victor low, from godhood to powerlessness, a kind of “self-shattering” (25). When Lily spurns him, shedding the demure veil of an amnesiac to reveal an altogether sui generis subjectivity, she shatters the illusion of (herself and Victor as) the (resurrected) mother. Although Victor persists in pathologizing Lily (“We’re going to make you into a proper woman”), it is her self-reclaimed motherhood that ultimately dissuades him from the sadism of chemically passivizing her [Episode 3.7]. Lily reveals she is already mother to a baby girl who froze to death unattended because a john knocked Lily unconscious rather than pay for her services. She pleads with Victor not to erase her memory of the maternal bond: “Her name was Sarah. Please don’t take her from me” [Episode 3.8]. Confronted with Lily-as-procreator, Victor finds himself re/dis-placed both as queer parent and child. His choice to unshackle Lily, knowing she will leave him as his mother left him—alone—is a willing embrace of Bersanian masochism, a “psychical strategy that partially defeats a biologically dysfunctional process of maturation” (25). By relinquishing the mother figure, Victor pulls back the final veil and ends his melancholia. Just as Vanessa sensed Victor’s veiled self, she sees through Ethan’s performative masculinity. His first appearance in the series is in

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hyper-­masculine drag—complete with long-haired wig, fake mustache, fringed jacket, cowboy hat—masquerading as “Buffalo Bill” in the “Wild West Show and Emporium of American Curiosities” (a label queering Ethan as a “curiosity”). Modeled on actual Wild West shows featuring “Buffalo Bill” Cody that drew large crowds in late-Victorian England, such performances presented a simulacrum of the American frontier for foreign consumption. Though carefully staged under grey English skies far from the untamed wilderness of the real American frontier, with “cowboys” who fired blanks, the artificiality and explicit performativity only enhanced the appeal of such Wild West shows (Rico 132). Watching from the stands, Vanessa appears amused by Ethan’s showmanship, intrigued by what she suspects lies beneath. Later, she approaches him at a bar and strips away his façade. “You play your role well, Mr. Chandler, but this is not who you are” [Episode 1.1]. She detects his concealed hand tremor, a contusion, and his resoled boots. “I see a man … much more complicated than he likes to appear” [Episode 1.1]. The masculinity Ethan projects in the Wild West show rests on an impossibility—Vanessa surmises correctly that he was not old enough to partake in the military campaigns of General Custer. Like Ethan, the image of the historical Cody “shifted between the categories of the authentic and the fraudulent, calling the very stability of those categories into question” (Rico 158). Outwardly, Ethan’s parody of frontier manhood operates very nearly as camp. He shoots a cigar from an Indian’s mouth, an image rife with phallic bravado and racialized emasculation. As he bids farewell to the audience, he announces, “I hope I have found some estimable favor among you gentlemen … and ladies,” a self-­ aware signaling of heterosexual desire from a man in wig and makeup [Episode 1.1]. Afterwards, he fornicates with a woman (presumably a fan), an unofficial encore to his drag show whereby the act of straight sex is meant for an audience of one. The verisimilitude Ethan hopes to achieve is confirmed when, after he promises to stay in touch, the woman asks whether he wants to know her name—his casual misogyny an obligatory signifier of what Dorian describes as the “rude, mechanical, rugged Westerner” [Episode 1.4]. When Ethan tells Brona, “I like things to be what they are,” he demonstrates total blindness to his own repressed nature [Episode 1.2]. As an actor in the Wild West show, his persona is predicated upon things being what they are not. Sembene, whom Ethan tasks with witnessing his lycanthropic transformation in order to name it (yet another

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“performance”), captures the mutability of self with his stoic observation: “Things become other things” [Episode 2.7]. Theatrical trappings continue to define Ethan’s existence after he joins Sir Malcolm’s employ. He goes by an assumed name (“Chandler”), dissembles about his exile from America, and is loath to acknowledge the “dark forces” inside him (despite evidence of his responsibility for a spate of grisly murders). Ironically, the Grand Guignol—milieu of “beautiful illusion”—is where Ethan’s monstrous secret is obliquely unveiled during a performance of The Transformed Beast, answering the question Dorian will later pose to Ethan of whether art can be honest. Seated in the theater, Ethan and Brona watch as an actor and actress stroll onstage in the moonlight. Suddenly, the actor “transforms” into a werewolf that slashes the actress’s neck. The uncanny tableau presents Ethan, like Hamlet’s Claudius, with his bloody transgressions. Except in Ethan’s case, bestial passions dwell in his unconscious. The longstanding Gothic association of bestial transformation with the id has a double resonance for gay men as “male homosexuality […] was (and still is) often conceived of within the popular gestalt as a form of degeneration or regression to baser, animalistic instincts” (Benshoff 55). Ethan’s lycanthropy is the sublimated queerness always within him, eagerly awaiting release, which, for most of the series, he regards negatively. When a possessed Vanessa divines Ethan’s sodomitical tryst with Dorian (“Did you fuck him or did he fuck you?” [Episode 1.7]), the exposure, both of the sodomy and Ethan’s possibly passive role, recalls Guy Hocquenghem’s dictum that “everything related to the anal is guilty” because of its association with passivity (129). It offends the hegemonic masculinity of the cowboy. The return of the repressed in Ethan’s case also enacts a queer fantasy connected to a kind of misogyny. His attachment to Brona is shadowed from the outset by his knowledge of her inevitable death from consumption. “You’re fucking a skeleton,” she says before deserting him in the street to be found by Dorian [Episode 1.4]. Ethan’s role as Brona’s lover—though heartfelt—is a limited-run engagement. The sex that Ethan ultimately initiates with Dorian is preceded by a subjective montage that includes flashes of the “dead” actress from The Transformed Beast. Syncopated with Isolde’s aria from the Liebestod, the gendered interplay of images (the “slain” actress) and sound (Isolde singing of her dead lover Tristan) form a perverse threnody to heterosexual love. The actress is further visually linked to Brona through her profuse hemorrhaging. While Ethan isn’t the one to kill Brona, his summoning of Victor results in her

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euthanasia. Any solidarity that existed between Ethan and Brona’s “diseased” bodies disintegrates in this exchange between men. Prefiguring her actual death, the demise of Brona’s “stage double” at the hands of a werewolf is a psychic manifestation of Ethan’s darkest impulses straining to be loosed from their heteronormative yoke. Interspliced with the eruption of Ethan’s same-sex desire, this fantasy rejects the heterosexual love object with annihilatory force. Nowhere is this heteronormative animus made clearer than when Ethan confesses to causing the deaths of his entire family (save his father), cutting what Lee Edelman calls “the thread of futurity” and the reproductive hopes contained therein (30). Logan hints at a restorative queer sublime in the series finale when Ethan chooses to reside with both Sir Malcolm and Kaetenay (who tells Malcolm that Ethan is “our son”). Of all the characters on Penny Dreadful, the straightjacket of compulsory heterosexuality assails none with such ruthless inexorability as Vanessa. For three seasons, she literally fends off the advances of Dracula and Lucifer, conceived of here as brothers/fallen angels. Lyle uncovers the reason for her desirability in ancient Egyptian scrolls indicating Vanessa is the reincarnated goddess Amunet, “the hidden one,” whose union with Amun-Ra would make her the Mother of Evil. Dracula and Lucifer seem interchangeable in this prophecy as the patriarchal Amun-Ra. Regardless, it establishes an erotic triangle placing Vanessa between men in the Sedgwickian sense. Their feuding spills into the open as they descend upon an institutionalized Vanessa, wooing her like rival bachelors [Episode 3.4]. Yet their amorous declarations cannot conceal her base instrumentality to their loftier aims. As Lyle explains, Dracula and Lucifer need Vanessa to invade heaven and topple God from His throne. Their hegemonic ambitions are therefore predicated upon a heterosexual “marriage,” with Vanessa as maternal vessel, muting the sexually deviant behavior traditionally associated with them. Whatever corruptive darkness they hope to unleash in Vanessa, what they offer her is “a Faustian pact of heterosexuality” (Masse 75). Logan has stated that Vanessa is the character who “most perfectly personifies what it is to be a ‘monster’ […]. [S]he is tormented […,] cursed with something that tears her to pieces inside, but it is that very thing that also makes her strong, powerful and liberated” (qtd. in Gosling 122). This tracks closely with how Logan has spoken of himself as a gay man: “[T]he thing that made me alien and different and monstrous to some people is also the thing that empowered me and gave me a sense of confidence and

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uniqueness and a drive toward individuality” (Thomas). Vanessa’s affliction as one prone to possession produces the show’s clearest defense of queerness in the Season 1 finale when she asks a priest for an exorcism. “If you have been touched by the Demon, it’s like being touched by the back hand of God. It makes you sacred in a way,” he tells her. “It makes you unique … with a kind of glory. The glory of suffering even […]. Do you really want to be normal?” Antonija Primorac reads this exchange as “an acceptance of difference, of queerness as (a God-given?) birth-right,” but concludes that “this interpretation fails to extend beyond Season One” (153). Yet Logan’s refusal to lock Vanessa into a heterosexual relationship, and Mina’s lingering presence/absence in later seasons, suggests that the queer ethos articulated in the Season 1 finale never fully dissipates. At issue for Primorac is the treatment of Vanessa’s sexuality. In almost all instances, Vanessa’s sex with men triggers demonic possession, rendering her abject. It happens after she loses her virginity to Mina’s fiancé and again when she breaks off coitus with Dorian. As Primorac argues, “Heterosexual contact here comes to signify a loss of (self-)control and a submission of one’s will to the will of the other” (155). That Vanessa’s fear of intimacy only manifests during heterosexual congress signifies a deviant sexuality struggling with the precepts of Catholic doctrine (155). After all, there is a gender fluidity to Vanessa’s possessed states. Who possesses her remains ambiguous—at times, Lucifer clearly violates her agency, but at others, the presence of the female Amunet seems to awaken within her. This internal androgyny receives its external complement when Vanessa is an asylum patient, her hair shorn, evoking Joan of Arc. Like St. Joan, Vanessa hears voices and is persecuted for the transitional state she occupies “because [such a state] is undefinable, because it is not a fixed position, [and] is considered dangerous” (Bronfen 201). As Vanessa confesses, “I didn’t counterfeit normality well enough” [Episode 2.4]. The episode “Closer than Sisters” [Episode 1.5] follows the style of an epistolary novel, with Vanessa writing undeliverable letters to the missing Mina. Its title recalls Shelley’s Frankenstein wherein Victor refers to his betrothed Elizabeth as “my more than sister” [Episode 1.5]. The phrasing in both cases implies a transgression and confusion of standard familial roles, one that modifies/expands the connotative capacity of “sister.” The word performs a semantic veiling of the love that dare not speak its name, the structuring absence of lesbian desire (see Fig. 14.1). Even Vanessa’s epistolic devotion (revealed as a chest full of unsent letters) bespeaks queerness within the Victorian world. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, in her

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Fig. 14.1  Vanessa’s relationship with Mina, one “closer than sisters,” evokes lesbian desire [Episode 1.5]

influential study of nineteenth-century female letter writing, found that same-sex correspondence facilitated the development of strong emotional ties between women that defied easy categorization within the prevailing social dichotomy of deviance and normality. Moreover, these intimate epistles tended to start in childhood and continue with undiminished intensity even once women married. A perpetual thread tying her to Mina, Vanessa’s letters are private and uncensored. As a desire founded on loss, Vanessa and Mina’s bond restages the Persephone myth. In it, Persephone, daughter of Demeter (goddess of the harvest) is abducted by Hades and dragged to the underworld to be his bride. Demeter’s all-consuming grief plunges the world into winter until Persephone is recovered, but having eaten Hades’s pomegranate seeds, Persephone must now spend a portion of every year in the underworld. Not only do Sir Malcolm, Ethan, and Sembene search for Mina in the chthonic bowels of a freighter named Persephone, the fact of that telling name reminds the viewer of the vessel Demeter in Stoker’s Dracula that brought the eponymous count to English shores [Episode 1.6]. Christine Downing argues that “the Demeter-Persephone myth represents lesbian love, with its struggle between merger and differentiation between two women” (Kulish and Holtzman 43). Vanessa fits neatly into the Demeter

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role since Malcolm’s wife does not participate in the quest to retrieve Mina. Her diction, too, acquires a Demeterian cast when speaking of Mina’s kidnapping: “We here have been brutalized by loss.” Primorac finds their queerness frustrated by the narrative because “their desire can only erupt onscreen by proxy” yet the melancholic longing of one woman for another is precisely what constitutes queerness in the Persephone myth (151). Mina’s liminality— “hovering between our world and [Dracula’s]”— links her to Vanessa, whose clairvoyance enables private encounters with Mina [Episode 1.3]. Furthermore, it is the Hades figure (the Master/ Dracula) who thwarts their physical intimacy, enslaving Mina by feeding her his blood. Long after Sir Malcolm kills the vampirized  Mina, she remains an underlying cause of Vanessa’s psychosexual symptoms. Vanessa acquires two female mentors—the “Cut-wife”/abortionist/ “daywalker” Joan Clayton and later Dr. Florence Seward (a descendent of Clayton’s). She seeks refuge with both women when her “unique nature” becomes too great to bear. Joan (coded as lesbian), using witchery, gleans the queerness of Vanessa’s sisterly affection when she references “this girl you kissed … Mina,” encouraging her to “feel her lips now” [Episode 2.3]. Seward’s therapeutic methods unearth how Vanessa’s treatments at the Banning Clinic were meant to “make [her] normal, like all the women you know” [Episode 3.4]. These sapphic signifiers indicate a melancholic integration of Mina into Vanessa. Psychically, Vanessa suffers Mina’s loss three times to three Hades figures: Mina’s fiancé Captain Branson, Dracula, and Sir Malcolm. Espying Mina with Captain Branson in the Murray estate hedgemaze, Vanessa’s interruption causes their clasped hands to part. The logic of a labyrinth is to stymie one’s passage to the other side (there is no “straightness” in a labyrinth, only a queering of geometric space). Vanessa’s nocturnal seduction of Captain Branson is a similar queer contortion, re-/misdirecting his desire for Mina and preventing her “abduction” by marriage into the heterosexual order. Indeed, Vanessa dreads the ontological erasure that a patrilineal union would enforce upon Mina as “Mrs. Charles Branson”— “Perhaps you didn’t mind this loss of self. Perhaps I minded it for you” [Episode 1.5]. This concession, eventually granted—Vanessa addresses envelopes to “Mrs. Mina Harker”—is something of a feint, a veil concealing queer recognition within Vanessa’s endearment “Mina mine.” It is little wonder then that just as Vanessa is about to assume the Persephone role as Dracula’s bride, the series introduces thanatologist Catriona

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Hartdegen as a Demeter-like figure. First seen clad head-to-toe in a fencing outfit, Catriona’s gender remains veiled until she “castrates”/disarms her male opponent, using his own sword. Dispensing with formalities, she has Vanessa call her “Catriona … or for you, ‘Cat,’ as in ‘cat-o’-nine-­ tails.’” [Episode 3.7]. In her capacity as Persephone, Vanessa’s death in the series finale ostensibly reinforces “the cultural myth that death is woman’s apotheosis” (Bronfen 183). Having triggered plagues and perpetual night by succumbing to Dracula, her suicide corresponds to the communal sacrifice Elisabeth Bronfen describes above. The “member of the community draws all the evil or pollution onto its body and purifies the city metonymically through her or his destruction” (196). Moments after Vanessa’s demise, the darkness abates. Primorac criticizes it as an act that “renormativises the show’s excesses and brings the narrative […] back into the patriarchal order” (157). But Vanessa’s death can be read as a further reworking of the Persephone myth, one that decouples it from heteronormativity. Far from embodying a “negative depiction of motherhood,” her resistance to Dracula and Lucifer is a refusal to submit to structures that offer only essentialized female identities (Primorac 156). Both desire her as Mother of Evil, with Dracula imploring, “Be truly who you are … my bride” [Episode 3.4]. Such reductive patriarchal prescriptivism seeks control of the female body, an object medievally framed by Lucifer’s servant Evelyn when she calls Vanessa a “prize” and “goods and services” [Episodes 2.1 and 2.8]. Evelyn  (a fearsome witch with her own coven) even puts a slain baby’s heart in a Vanessa-shaped doll as part of Lucifer’s macabre plot. The doll-as-double totemically infantilizes Vanessa and perversely implies female selfhood depends on maternity (the doll comes to life only after the baby’s heart quickens in its chest). Reproduction again defines Vanessa when Kaetenay labels her a “great fertile bitch of evil” [Episode 3.7]. Vanessa rejects these overtures, stating, “I’d make a horrible wife” [Episode 3.4]. She “aborts” the Lucifer-possessed doll with the apotropaic coup de grâce: “Beloved, know your master”—her very touch causing its disintegration [Episode 2.10]. When Dracula asks if she accepts him before biting her neck, her reply is a declaration of agency, not a ceding of it: “I accept myself” [Episode 3.7]. Indeed, Vanessa is a strangely muted figure post-coitus/bite, wan and withdrawn, hardly the uninhibited demoness promised by Dracula. These Hadean pairings necessitate a containment of her queerness. In her prophetically circumscribed role as bride, Vanessa evokes the

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heterosexual ideology that constrains the Bride (Elsa Lanchester) in The Bride of Frankenstein. Similarly positioned between men (Henry, Pretorius, and the Monster), the Bride “betrays the fear that all female bodies are in fact unspeakably monstrous—and in this monstrosity, unspeakably powerful” (Young 412). While the Bride in Whale’s film does not choose her own death as Vanessa does, her “shriek of refusal” when introduced to her intended mate is “a rejection of the systems of circulation that would disembody, dismember, exchange, and erase [her]” (412). It also sounds a discordant note—queer and apocalyptic—presaging a partial collapse of the prevailing order. In her mythological guise, Vanessa’s death at Ethan’s hands is a metaphorical release of Persephone from the underworld, from heteronormative captivity. With Vanessa dressed in white, the scene functions as tragic parody of a wedding (yet another Whalean overtone). Rather than submit to an eternity as Dracula’s bride, she designates Ethan makeshift bridegroom. In this deathly pas de deux, Vanessa draws his revolver for him, repurposing his performative masculinity from the Wild West show to absent herself forever from the erotic triangle. This outcome differs from the defeat of Lucifer during the finale of Season 2 where Vanessa rejects the pleasing connubial reverie of a “normal” life with Ethan as trickery sculpted by the devil’s hand (in exchange, she would be Lucifer’s bride once her mortal life ended). An aesthetic sameness links a diabolic daydream of Vanessa and Ethan with their two children to the flashback scene of Malcolm’s return from Africa when a prepubescent Vanessa, Mina, and Peter flock to him. All wear matching cream-colored clothes. Yet both tableaux are heteronormative fantasies. Malcolm’s paternal sheen fades when Vanessa discovers his tryst with her mother. Logan, then, refuses to imbue the heteronormative family with salvific qualities—true salvation lies elsewhere. But the solidarity of the queer sublime Ethan offers Vanessa in her final moments—“You’re not alone. You never were.”—fails as anything but a temporary bulwark against compulsory heterosexuality’s unceasing assaults [Episode 3.9]. In Woman and the Demon, Nina Auerbach writes, “The female demonic knows no social boundaries and no fond regrets. Instead, in its purest form it is animated by a longing […] for transcendence” (104). Transcendence is all Vanessa is allowed to attain. In a way, the Creature’s parting lament in Whale’s Bride—“We belong dead”—palimpsestically limns the Creature’s voiceover of Wordsworth’s Initimations Ode during Vanessa’s funeral in Logan’s epic. The series’ final image is the Creature weeping atop her fresh grave. Emerging from the failure of his own heterosexual family, he

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becomes a revenant affirming that “[h]omosexuality haunts the ‘normal world’” (Hoquenham 36). He mourns those excluded from it.

Works Cited Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Harvard UP, 1984. Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester UP, 1997. Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave?: And Other Essays. U Chicago P, 2009. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester UP, 1992. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 3–25. Curtis, James. James Whale. Scarecrow P, 1982. Denson, Shane. Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface. Columbia UP, 2014. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke UP, 2004. Friedman, Lester D., and Allison Kavey. Monstrous Progeny: A History of the Frankenstein Narratives. Amsterdam UP, 2016. Gosling, Sharon. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan Books, 2015. Haggerty, George. Queer Gothic. U of Illinois P, 2006. Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge UP, 2004. Johnson, Barbara. “My Monster/My Self.” Diacritics, vol. 12, no. 2, 1982, pp. 2–10. Kahane, Claire. “The Gothic Mirror.” The (M)Other Tongue Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, edited by Shirley Nelson Garner et al., Cornell UP, 1985, pp. 334–51. Kulish, Nancy, and Deanna Holtzman. A Story of Her Own: The Female Oedipus Complex Reexamined and Renamed. Jason Aronson, 2008. Levitz, Tamara. Modernist Mysteries: Persephone. Oxford U Press, 2012. Manguel, Alberto. Bride of Frankenstein. BFI, 1997. Masse, Michelle. In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic. 2nd ed., Cornell UP, 1992. Miller, Stuart. “‘We Feel a Kinship With the Creature.’” The New York Times, 26 Oct. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/theater/frankenstein-­mel-­ brooks-­kenneth-­branagh.html. Mishra, Vijay. The Gothic Sublime. State U of New York P, 1994.

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Moses, Toby. “Penny Dreadful Writer John Logan on Cultural Appropriation: ‘Writers Have to Dream Freely.’” The Guardian, 22 June 2020, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/18/john-­l ogan-­p enny-­d readfulgladiator-­writers-­dream-­freely. O’Malley, Patrick. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge UP, 2006. Primorac, Antonija. Neo-Victorianism on Screen: Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations of Victorian Women. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 2nd ed., Columbia UP, 2016. ———. Epistemology of the Closet. 2nd ed., U of California P, 2008. ———. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. Methuen, 1986. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Nick Groom. Frankenstein: Or ‘The Modern Prometheus’: The 1818 Text (Oxford World’s Classics). 3rd ed., Oxford UP, 2020. Smith, Angela. Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema. Columbia UP, 2012. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 1, 1975, pp. 1–29,. Thomas, June. “‘The Thing That Made Me Monstrous to Some People Is Also the Thing That Empowered Me.’” Slate, 9 May 2014, slate.com/human-­ interest/2014/05/penny-­d readfuls-­j ohn-­l ogan-­w hy-­a -­g ay-­w riter-­f eels-­a -­ kinship-­with-­frankensteins-­creature.html. Watson, Eleri Anona. “‘We Were a Nothingness Shot with Gleams of What Might Be. But No More’: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and the Queer Sublime.” Katherine Mansfield and Bliss and Other Stories, edited by Enda Duffy et al., Edinburgh UP, 2020, pp. 74–90. Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure of Psychology and Transcendence. Johns Hopkins UP, 1976. Whale, James, director. Frankenstein. Universal, 1931. Whale, James, director. Bride of Frankenstein. Universal, 1935. Young, Elizabeth. “Here Comes the Bride: Wedding Gender and Race in Bride of Frankenstein.” Feminist Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, 1991, pp. 403–37.

CHAPTER 15

Borderland Identities in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels Seda Öz

For as long as stories have been committed to film, the role of space and place, their impact on the characters inhabiting them, and the socio-­ cultural dynamics they create, have been central to Hollywood’s narrative structure. Genres like Westerns, gangster movies, and film noir grew specifically to explore human experiences within the bounds of distinct spatial settings. While the narrative structure of a Western is defined by its relationship to the frontier myth, Westward expansion, and the domination over landscape, film noir and gangster movies are defined by their characters’ relationship to the modern city, usually borrowing their stories from newspaper headlines and real-life events. In all these genres, films tell the story of the space along with all the material and immaterial objects that occupy it, including figures of the Other, the criminal, or the gangster. In these stories, space becomes a meta-narrative or meta-protagonist for the characters who dwell in it, and a setting in which we encounter the tensions between cowboys and Indians, criminals and detectives, North

S. Öz (*) University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7_15

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Americans and Mexicans, and, monsters and humans. Exploring film genres’ use of American space, Daniel Agacinski analyzes the relationship between man and space born out of the “spatial inscription” of the genre. He claims that “space, being both the set of objects on which character can act, and the context in which any of his action may take place […] stands not only as a setting or a scenery but works as a sign: the sign that one is entitled to expect a certain kind of a story” (20–21). In the case of Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, this “certain kind of a story” becomes the story of the city itself: 1930s Los Angeles consuming itself and its inhabitants with racial and capitalist ideologies. The city that used to be described as a “creation through which humans have come to exercise control or dominion over the spatial dimension of their existence” (Clapp 4) now becomes the dominant mechanism that asserts its monstrous self-existence and creates its own characters, who are alienated from their communities or themselves. This use of space—how city becomes a character of its own, attains an identity, and creates monstrous characters out of its own body—was also prevalent in John Logan’s original Penny Dreadful, the source material for City of Angels. Since its premiere, Logan’s neo-Victorian Gothic television series has enjoyed immense success, evidenced by critical reviews, fan productions, television awards, and the sale of costumes, jewelry, and memorabilia. In the series, Logan envisions a London whose other name is the Demimonde, “a place between life and death, reminiscent of the sharp differences and the stark contrasts between the high and low societies of the metropolis” (Akıllı and Öz 16). In the world of Penny Dreadful, these dualities have been shown through spaces like the Docklands area, where the Mariner’s Inn massacre takes place and characters like Brona live; the soup kitchen that is located under the railways, which is a home for many homeless, and also stands as a contrast to the high society of Victorian London represented through Dorian Gray’s mansion; or the Explorer’s Club of Sir Malcolm. The narrative arc of the series is about monsters who were born as a result of the inequality, sorrow, and burden that nineteenth-­ century industrial London created. In the series, those monsters ranged from literal ones like Frankenstein’s monster (who adopts the name of the poet John Clare), Brona (who is reborn as Dr. Frankenstein’s “cousin” Lily), and Ethan Chandler (who is a werewolf), to figurative ones like Sir Malcolm (who has a morally indictable past). To explain the connection between the city and its monstrous characters, producer Chris King states that “London is a character in Penny Dreadful, and it’s also really

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important for the audience to feel like the world of Penny Dreadful is all of these various places—it’s the low end and it’s also high society and everywhere in between” (qtd. in Gosling 14). Four years later, in a testament to the ongoing popularity of the series, Logan released a spin-off titled Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, another monster story, but one that shifted in genre and temporospatiality. Penny Dreadful itself was adapting different stories, novels, and characters to its Victorian Gothic narrative. There were storylines and characters adapted from the ancient Egyptian text The Book of the Dead, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), the famous American showman Buffalo Bill, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). However, the series was not entirely dependent on these stories. Instead, through the “confluence” (Akıllı and Öz 25) of various narrative lines, it created its own story without necessarily having a single origin. In their introduction to Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots, R.  Barton Palmer and Amanda Ann Klein contend the following: Textual traditions are often understood as a succession of distinct singularities, that is, as individual texts with a claim to being considered unique. But in practice, individual texts are hardly self-contained in that sense, being joined by various bonds to other texts and often participating in more than one series or grouping. These multiplicities or textual pluralities take a number of distinct but hardly mutually exclusive forms, including adaptations, sequels, remakes, imitations, trilogies, reboots, series, spin-offs, and cycles. (1)

Far from being unique, John Logan’s new “place between life and death” is now 1930s’ Los Angeles, adapted from his earlier work. As Logan moves from railways in Penny Dreadful to motorways in City of Angels, and from Gothic fiction to detective fiction, he depicts a city composed of multiple characters that belong to different nationalities, classes, races, and realms. Although the city is seemingly represented as the borderland between Latinx and white Anglo-American  people, set on the backdrop of the building of freeways and its impact on ethnic communities, it is also the borderland between monsters and angels. The tension between different groups, whether they are humans or supernatural beings, creates the main conflict throughout the narrative. In other words, in City of Angels, Logan

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is reimagining possibilities for adaptation in a spatial sense, as the act of border crossings disrupts hegemonic notions and constructions of identity. The first scene of City of Angels features Mexican workers on the field, collecting the harvest and accompanied by Chavela Vargas’s song “La Llorona” (The Weeping Woman) in the background as yellow/orange tones dominate the screen. Later, we see shape-shifting demon Magda in her black leather cape and her sister Santa Muerte in her white lace dress, as each stands at the opposite side of the very same field, almost in the standoff fashion of Western movies. As the camera pans over the landscape, Magda says, “There will come a time when the world is ready for me, when nation will battle nation, when race will devour race, when brother will kill brother until not a soul is left,” and burns down the entire field [Episode 1]. The juxtaposition created with the Spanish-language song and the framing of these two supernatural characters in Western generic conventions reinforces the idea that the story will take place in a borderland, in which races, cultures, and languages will meet in hostile fashion. In the case of Mexico and the U.S., the border conflict started after the Mexican-American War of 1848. During this time, the word “border” itself gained political overtones associated with trespassing, intrusion, infringement, and separation to justify the Westward expansion of the U.S.  About the borderland between the two countries, Rosa-Linda Fregoso writes the following: If we translate the Spanish word for border, frontera, literally into English “frontier,” we open up its equally older usage in the Anglo-American imaginary. A central trope of Anglo-American desire for conquest and westward expansion, “frontier” metaphorically signifies “no-man’s land” (better yet, no-white-man’s-land, as in the Western genre), namely territories outside of white men’s jurisdiction and, therefore, land available for private appropriation. (65–66)

One of the main examples of this ideology in City of Angels is the construction of the Arroyo Seco Motorway, the first freeway made in the United States, that connects Los Angeles to Pasadena. In his analysis of the modern megalopolis, German historian Oswald Spengler writes, “The city is a world, is the world” (qtd. in Clapp 26), claiming that modern metropolitan cities are the microscopic representations of mainstream political and ideological hegemonies in the world. Stemming from this

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idea, from a macrocosmic perspective, the construction of the Arroyo Seco Motorway represents the ways in which the world that has just concluded a war that destroyed an entire generation of young people belonging to different nations is preparing itself for a second one, which will hinge around racial and ethnic discrimination. A microcosmic perspective suggests a socio-cultural dynamics of a city that is divided and born out of the destruction of ethnic communities and families, which is an extension of the same worldview of the early twentieth century. This is especially true in the case of 1920s Southern California, which went into a period of urban planning “with competing images of arcadia and utopia (the Edenic and the futuristic) speaking easily to a dominant Anglo culture’s views of an ideal society” (McClung 22). Accordingly, the Anglo-American racialized civic imaginary encouraged white middle-class home ownership that is ignorant of the historical development of the neighborhoods and created invisible borders between the white and Mexican parts of the city. The story of City of Angels takes place on these borders. Through the narrative of motorway construction, the series touches upon issues like segregation, population control, gentrification, and all the other inequalities and monstrous practices of the local politicians and power holders in Los Angeles. Accordingly, the tension between different groups and communities manifests itself in different characters, all of whom are living on metaphorical or literal borderlands, including Vega family siblings Raul, Tiago, Mateo, and Josefina, radio evangelist Sister Molly, head of the Los Angeles City Council’s Transportation Committee Charlton Townsend, and the head of the German-American Bund Peter Craft. Although family is not the first borderland one thinks of, it probably is one the most intimate, hence the most pressing on one’s identity. The Vega family siblings, all of whom embrace different identities, represent this dividing dynamic in City of Angels. José Angel Gutiérrez argues for four main characterizations Chicanos tend to embody, all of which are present in the Vega siblings: ones who consider themselves as Mexican (Raul); ones who believe in multicultural identities (Tiago); ones who consider themselves as a different ethnic community separate from Latinx and/or white (Mateo); and ones who see their Mexican heritage only as a symbolic signifier (Josefina) (28). Among all the siblings, Raul is the oldest one, who has the closest contact with his Mexican heritage and the only one with a Mexican accent, living in his village as a worker and fighting for the rights of his people, even against his brother Tiago, to whom

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he refers as the “the man in blue” [Episode 1]. The main character of the series, Tiago Vega, is the first Chicano detective in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Although Tiago grew up in a Mexican household, he is trying to assimilate into mainstream American culture, which in return puts him in an in-between situation, where he becomes a fragmented character that wants to hold on to both cultures and eventually fails. When he is in his home, he is accused by his older brother Raul of following the lead of the white man, and when he is in his work environment, he is harassed for being a pachuco. On his first day at his new job, Tiago is sent to investigate a murder case with his partner Lewis Michener, who is also an outsider, a Jew, and the only colleague in the police force who is sympathetic towards Tiago. When they arrive at the murder scene, they find a family whose hearts are ripped from their bodies and faces are painted in Day of the Dead calavera makeup, and a note written on the walls of the riverbend in Spanish that reads, “You take our heart, we take yours.” When they return to the police station, their boss says, “You don’t know how much I wished those bodies were Mexican. We’re looking at a race war,” which is a race war between Latinx and white people, and a race war that places Tiago right in the middle [Episode 1]. In Homi Bhabha’s terms, Tiago stands in a “Third Space,” which is an equivalent of “in-between” spaces (Location 1). According to Bhabha’s theory, the Third Space is a “passage” where “I and You” meet and, as a result, creates “ambivalence in the act of interpretation” (Location 156). It is a cultural practice in which hegemonic positions and the “hierarchical claims” of cultures are questioned. As a result of the unstable nature of the practice, binary oppositions and polarities are undervalued, which, in turn, creates hybridity (“Cultural” 157). Hybridity as such enhances polyphony not only in its literary meaning but also in its general, cultural meaning. For Benwell and Stokoe, hybridity is about the synthesis of different cultural identities and an “interethnic adoption of styles or codes of talk of an outgroup” that aims to “destabilize traditional binaries and myths of cultural homogeneity” (28). Although Bhabha’s theory was based on his observations on colonized nations, just as much as colonized spaces, borderlands also carry the potential of creating hybridity. The moments of transculturation, especially experienced by characters like Tiago, who are constantly exposing themselves to both sides, “center themselves along literal and figurative borders where the ‘person’ is crisscrossed by multiple identities” (Rosaldo 216). To describe himself and his frustration with identity politics, Tiago

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says, “My whole life I have been disappointing people. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in Santa Muerte. I don’t join the Union. I join the force. I am not Chicano enough. I am not white enough. I am not Catholic enough. I am not cop enough. I am not anything enough. But what I am is Tiago Vega” [Episose 9]. Tiago does not necessarily fit into both sides of his life, and yet he is not necessarily an outsider for those binaries either. Instead, his existence opens up possibilities for different forms of representation and cohabitation. Since hegemonic power structures are aware of hybridity’s transforming power on communities and spaces, they avoid creating an environment in which multiplicities cohabit and threaten their monolithic ideologies. Instead, hegemonic power structures of twentieth-­ century Western cultures reinforce the idea of border. That is why, although Tiago wants to exist in both sides with his hybrid identity, when the time comes, Lewis says, “In this life, you are a cowboy or you’re an Indian. You better fucking choose!” [Episode 1]. Eventually, he does choose and shoots his brother Raul during the riots against the motorway construction, which re-evokes Magda’s prophecy at the very beginning of the series where “brother [will] kill brother.” Tiago’s younger siblings Mateo and Josefina, in contrast, represent other ways of identity construction that exist in borderlands. Even though the younger siblings’ estrangement and frustration caused by the spatial construction they have been living in reached its peak with the same event (when a police officer sexually assaulted Josefina and made Mateo watch), they develop contrasting responses to their traumatic encounter with the Other. As Stuart Hall writes, “Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power” (70). Accordingly, against the hegemonic power he has been subjected to, Mateo decides to be a part of the pachuco subculture. Pachuquismo rejects both white and Latinx cultures and creates its own “counter-culture in response to the alienation and marginalization they [pachucos] felt in the U.S. [that is] expressed [through] a public rebelliousness toward both Anglo and Mexican traditions” (List 5). The main place in the series where we encounter the pachucos and pachucas is at the nightclub the Crimson Cat, frequented by Rio, another form of the shapeshifting demon Magda. The Crimson Cat as a space has a distinct character with its architecture, colors, and sound. It not only dominates the neighborhood in

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which it exists, but also separates itself from it by not looking like anything around it. With their zoot suits and their own dialect called caló, the characters whom the club hosts also add to the hybridity of the space. Bhabha defines hybridity as “a problematic of colonial representation […] that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority” (Location 156). This power that is held by the minorities is exercised by Mateo and his friends more than by any other Mexican-American characters and groups that are represented in the series. In a scene in which Mateo and Rio talk about the inequalities they are facing, acknowledging the power of their position and identity, Rio says, “We got to get a piece of that American dream. First, we make them look, then we make them scared. We’re Pachuco, we’re Chicano, we’re Aztec, we’re Spade, we’re Wop, we’re Dago, we’re Chink, we’re Queer, we’re everything they fear, and we go out dancing. Ninety years ago this place was Mexico. We found it, we made it, and now we take it back” [Episode 10]. In her article on the distinguishing traits of the border region, Emily Hicks writes, “the inhabitant of the border does not have a self-determined ‘subjectivity’ in the traditional European sense but rather is asked for I.D./refused medical service/threatened with deportation and directly affected economically and politically by Mexico-US relations.” These racialized social practices of everyday life are shown to the viewers when Mateo is forced to watch a police officer assault his sister; they are shown when he is harassed by the police officers once again at the hospital, as he waits for his brother Raul to get the medical help he needs. And they are shown when his friend Diego Lopez is arrested and hanged to a light outside of the club by the police officers. In response to these inequalities, the pachucos rebel in an attempt to take control of the city. When they are on the streets, burning cars, destroying shop windows, and killing people, the scene aestheticizes the violence via colors, music, and cinematography. Aestheticizing the violence that is taking place on the fields or in the streets makes the case that Los Angeles, the beautiful City of Angels, the city that is meticulously designed, is the proprietor of the monstrosity that is taking place. While Mateo is forming his identity through anarchy and by detaching himself from both his Mexican roots and North American upbringing, Josefina embraces an Anglo-American identity and religious devotion and peace. She joins the Joyful Voices, a predominantly white ministry led by

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a white icon. Josefina dyes her hair to look like the figures she sees in the magazines, changes her clothing to fit into mainstream culture, and tries to find peace and solace in the arms of Sister Molly. Whether Santa Muerte, the deity, or a mother like Maria, female figures in Mexican culture offer their children a root to hold onto, a feeling of belonging and unity by protecting the family. Moreover, people refer to Santa Muerte as La Madrina (Godmother) and consider her as a part of the family (Chesnut 5). Related to this idea, Rodolfo Gonzáles claims that “the key common denominator [that unites people] is nationalism […] [and] nationalism becomes La familia” (488). Therefore, Josefina’s exchange of her mother’s position in her life with Sister Molly indicates her separation from her national identity. Additionally, in the series, it is not just Mexican-American characters but almost every character that suffers because of the clash between who they want to be and how they should look and act. These expectations derive from their position in society and the impact of the space over them. In the case of Sister Molly, although she keeps up the appearance of a saint, in reality she is a suicidal character manipulated by her mother , who serves the needs and goals of the privileged white middle-class behind closed doors, acting as a tool in their lobbying activities to support their capitalistic endeavors. Accordingly, the scene in which Sister Molly commits suicide in her majestic temple, which is the biggest material representation of what she stands for, is a testament to the argument that this city and space kill what they create. Joyful Voices is not the only state apparatus that roots for American capitalism and monoculture in the series. Another character through whom the story of Los Angeles is told is councilman Charlton Townsend, who plays a central role in the construction of the Arroyo Seco Motorway. Although Townsend is holding the office, the main manipulative powers behind him are another one of Magda’s demonic forms, Alex Malone, and German politicians and businessmen who also work for the Third Reich in the reconstruction of Germany as they try to erase the history of Jewish communities. About the existence of Nazi infiltration in the series, Daniel D’Addario writes, “This series knows well that horror exists within the context of history—that, indeed, some of the greatest chills of all can be wrung from our real-life inhumanity as witnessed over time” (qtd. in Otterson). It is important to note that, historically, Nazi insurgents in the government were creeping towards their goal by specifically focusing on urban planning to change the spatial construction of the city to create an environment that would welcome separation and inequality. According to

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Greg Hise, since the 1920s, German private developers and construction companies were also holding positions in the Los Angeles City Planning Commission and intervening in policy-making procedures according to their benefit (8). This mechanism intertwined private capitalist economy and politics in the city, and decisions were made to meet the ideological and financial expectations of the power holders at the expense of minority communities. In other words, “the decentralized form for which Los Angeles is known and frequently damned is neither the effect of failed planning nor a lack of civic imagination. Rather, Los Angeles’s decentrism was the purposeful effort” (Schrank 242). Following the sociohistorical traits of the city of Los Angeles, the series touches upon this issue, as well. While the city is a “beast with a life of its own” (qtd. in Clapp 26) that keeps giving birth to various monstrous characters, the characters that are born of it are also feeding the beast through their actions in return, creating an endless cycle of horror. However, the endless cycle of horror is not unique to Los Angeles, but to the whole world. Another German character in the series, Peter Craft, is also haunted by the endless cycles of horrors—those he is carrying from his past, when he used to be a member of a family that created weapons of mass destruction for the Germans in World War I, and those he continues to create in his new life in Los Angeles. He is a pediatrician and the head of the white nationalist German Bund in Los Angeles, who, early in the season, shouts around the public spaces in the city, “America first, America always. Peace above all.” He lives with his wife and two sons, while Maria (Tiago’s mother) works as their maid. As a recently immigrated European, Craft occupies a liminal position in the series, but he also redraws borders between whites and people of color, living in a house that is architecturally reminiscient of Antebellum-plantation mansions and employing Brown help in Maria Vega, a Chicana woman. Apart from the fact that he is from Germany, the current enemy of the Unites States, Craft is given the privilege of acceptance, while Mexicans who have been present for hundreds of years are denied the very same privilege because of their race. Although there is a feeling of camaraderie between Maria and Peter, by allowing the German immigrant to take the place of an American master of the eighteenth century, the series adapts raced and classed organizations into 1930s’ Los Angeles. It creates the master/slave narrative once again in another city and establishes an American concept of race that decides who gets to become American and who will stay immigrant.

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Craft’s Nazi identity becomes even more apparent when Magda’s demonic alter ego Elsa Branson enters his life as his mistress. Introducing herself as a German housewife who is a victim of domestic violence, Magda speaks to fragile male ego to create chaos, forcing Craft to embrace his Nazi identity both in his political endeavors and in his house. As someone who says, “I was Berlin. Now I am Boyle Heights with the Jews,” Elsa changes the dynamic of the household the moment she arrives. Since Chicano identity is based on the notion of mestizaje (mixed blood) (Bodenheimar), it goes against the Nazi idea of pure blood. Accordingly, Elsa’s racism becomes even more visible towards Maria when she asks her to move into a room separate from the house, forbids her to be seen outside of the house or to admit any of her family members inside the house, and eventually forces Craft to fire her. Through Elsa, Magda reinforces white supremacy that is based on the appropriation of space and racial divide, just like she does in every other character’s life through her multiple figures. Although there are many different characters and storylines in the series, they all portray a tension and a duality in which they have been struggling. In the case of the Vega siblings, it is their Mexican-American identity that puts them into an ambivalent position. For Sister Molly, it is the tension between the life she wants to lead as a woman versus her image as a religious saint that her mother wishes her to maintain. For Charlton Townsend, it is the tension of balancing his position in the city council as a successful self-made man versus his father’s legacy that is overshadowing him, as well as the white, upper-middle-class heterosexual persona he needs to portray that goes against his sexual identity. And, for Peter Craft, it is the tension between his past, his family’s legacy, and his former name versus the new identity as a middle-class pediatrician he tries to embody in the U.S. According to Rosa-Linda Fregoso, “one’s identity is fragile as it moves into borderlands that are crisscrossed with a variety of languages and experiences. The subject who first crossed over is not the same subject who returns across borderline” (68). For the very same reason, there is not a single main character in City of Angels who does not suffer from displacement, both in the literal and metaphorical senses of the word. In 1930s’ Los Angeles, everyone is experiencing change, and “[t]hat very process of change, with its inevitable cultural collusions, social adjustments, and challenges to long-held traditions produced stories with real-­ life drama, that is, stories of city life that were not just stories of people, but of the city as well” (Clapp 108). Accordingly, although the main

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character of City of Angels is the shapeshifting monster Magda, one can also ask whether or not the real monster is the city itself. In relation to the monsters and their spatial construction, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen claims that monstrosity is a cultural construct that is born of the desires and anxieties of nations in given times. He writes the following: [T]he monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically “that which reveals,” “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again. (4)

At the beginning of the first episode, Magda tells her sister Santa Muerte, “All mankind needs to be the monster he truly is, is being told he can.” Thus, she works her way to that end. The story reveals, again and again, the racial history and imperialistic politics of the city. In the finale, first, the camera captures the skyscrapers in an extreme long shot, showing the audience the developing skyline of Los Angeles, and then moves towards the Latinx neighborhood that looks like a construction zone, which is on

Fig. 15.1  A Latinx neighborhood squares off against the Los Angeles police in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels [Episode 10]

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the verge of transition. As we see Latinx residents and the police force positioned against one another [Episode 10] (see Fig. 15.1), the side-byside positions of Charlton Townsend, Nazi infiltrators, and Adelaide Finnister represent the unification of ideological state apparatuses: local politics, international politics, and religion, respectively. By depicting the destruction of the Latinx neighborhood for the sake of constructing a motorway, the scene not only tells the audience that these hegemonic powers “covered up places, people, and histories, that [they] found unsettling” (Deverell 25), but also draws borders once again in between races, and sets up a decentralized, fragmented urban planning. Since monster stories are also historical and political products, it is unavoidable to acknowledge the similarities between this fictional supernatural city and the real Los Angeles. Related to this idea, critic Dannette Chavez observes how series creator John Logan “set out to capture humanity’s capacity for cruelty, be it through social engineering and redlining, developing weapons of mass destruction, or a criminal justice system that exists to protect one segment of the population while disproportionately punishing others.” Although Logan told his monster story first in early 1900s’ Victorian London through Penny Dreadful, and then adapted it to 1930s’ Los Angeles in City of Angels, it is not possible to ignore the series’ contemporary resonance and its connections to today’s Trump-ist efforts to homogenize the U.S. While adaptations, remakes, and spin-offs depend on their sources’ cultural memory and audience familiarity, they can also carry the liberatory power of being relevant for multiple temporal-spatialities through their social commentary. Thus, by doing a spin-off of Penny Dreadful, Logan banked on the capital he built with viewers of the source text to attract an audience ready to consume the story he wanted to tell about the contemporary monstrosities he saw in the Trump administration: monstrous acts committed against Latinx communities, from the caging of immigrant children, to the delegitimization of federally appointed Mexican-American judge Gonzalo Curiel, to the obsession with constructing a physical barrier at the border to represent the perpetual divide between white America and its neighbors to the south. That is why Logan is able to use the border politics of City of Angels to explore America’s cycle of racial Othering, and why he chooses, tongue-in-cheek, to end his series with Tiago’s claim, “This is not the United States of America.”

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Works Cited Agacinski, Daniel. “West and the City.” South Atlantic Review, vol. 76, no. 2, 2011, pp. 19–28. Akıllı, Sinan, and Seda Öz. “‘No More Let Life Divide…’: Victorian Metropolitan Confluence in Penny Dreadful.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 15–29. Anzaldúa, Gloria. “To Live in the Borderlands Means You.” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Aunt Luke Books, 1987, pp. 194–195. Benwell, B. and Elizabeth Stokoe. Discourse and Identity. Edinburgh UP, 2006. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Bhabha, Homi. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Difference.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Bill Ashroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Routledge, 2006, pp. 155–158. Bodenheimer, Rebecca. “Mestizaje in Latin America: Definition and History.” ThoughtCo, ThoughtCo, 22 Nov. 2019, https://www.thoughtco.com/ mestizaje-­in-­latin-­america-­4774419. Chavez, Danette. “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels Ends Its First Season in Spectacularly Inept Fashion.” A/V Club. 28 June 2020, https://www.avclub. com/penny-­dreadful-­city-­of-­angels-­ends-­its-­first-­season-­in-­1844197761. Chesnut, Robert Andrew. Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint. Oxford UP, 2018. Clapp, James A. The American City in the Cinema. Transaction Publishers, 2013. Cohen, Jeremy Jeffrey. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeremy Jeffrey Cohen, U of Minnesota P, 1996, pp. 3–25. Deverell, William. Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past. U of California P, 2004. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda. The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1993. Gonzáles, Rodolfo. “What Political Road for the Chicano Movement.” A Documentary History of Mexican Americans, edited by Wayne Moquin and Charles Van Doren, Praeger, 1971, p. 488. Gosling, Sharon. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan Books, 2015. Gutiérrez, José Angel. “The Chicano in Mexicano-Norte Americano Foreign Relations.” Chicano-Mexicano Relations, edited by Tatcho Mindiola Jr. and Max Martinez, U of Houston P, 1986, pp. 27–41. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 36, 1989, pp. 68–81. Hicks, Emily. “What the Broken Line is Not.” La Linea Quebrada/The Broken Line Troupe, no. 2, 1987, n.p.

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Hise, Greg. Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Klein, Amanda Ann, and Barton Palmer. “Introduction.” Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots: Multiplicities in Film and Television, U of Texas P, 2016, pp. 1–21. List, Christine. Chicano Images: Refiguring Ethnicity in Mainstream Film. Garland Publishing, 1996. McClung, William Alexander. Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles. U of California P, 2000. Otterson, Joe. “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels Canceled After One Season at Showtime.” Variety, 21 Aug. 2020, https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/ penny-­dreadful-­city-­of-­angels-­canceled-­showtime-­1234743649/ Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth. Beacon P, 1989. Schrank, Sarah. “Modern Urban Planning and the Civic Imagination: Historiographical Perspectives on Los Angeles” Journal of Planning History, vol. 7, no. 3, 2008, pp. 239–51.

Index

A Abbott, Stacey, 3, 91 Abjection, 18 Abraham Van Helsing (character, PD), 54, 129 Adam (character, Only Lovers Left Alive), 97–102 Adaptable TV (Griggs), 4 Adaptation theory, 6–7 Adaptations as ceaseless, 19 as inferior, 6 intertextual, 20, 123, 198, 254 as medium, 20–23, 27–29 metaphors for, 52 as monstrous, 26, 62, 63, 127, 178, 227 PD as ideal corpus, 4 people as, of what they read, 57–60 prismatic, 186 self-, 6, 24 spatial, 255 unhomely, 124

Addiction, 18 Agacinski, Daniel, 253 Akilli, Sinan, 106 Alexander Sweet (character, PD), 15–16, 73, 83 American exceptionalism, 157 American West, 170, 255–256 See also Dime novels Androgyny, 97 Anesthesia debate, 75–77 “Angel in the house,” 75, 81 Angelique (character, PD), 97 Anidjar, Gil, 89 Animism, 124, 126 Anthologies, 60–64 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 228 Aquinas, Thomas, 21 Archives, 49 Aristotle, 21 Arroyo Seco Motorway, 256 Asylums, 209–210 Auerbach, Nina, 73, 248

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Grossman, W. Scheibel (eds.), Penny Dreadful and Adaptation, Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12180-7

269

270 

INDEX

Austen, Jane, 60, 61 Ava (character, Only Lovers Left Alive), 100 B Benshoff, Harry M., 233, 234 Bentley, Richard, 53 Benwell, Bethan, 257 Beresford, Matthew, 95 Berlatsky, Noah, 38, 40 Bersani, Leo, 240 Bhabha, Homi, 257 Black characters, lack of, 166, 167 Blake, William, 55 Bleak House (Dickens), 26 Blithe Spirit (Coward), 28 Blood, 89–91, 93–95, 99–100, 224, 226 Blood Ball, 94 Blouin, Michael, 108 The body, 88–90, 101, 233 Böhnke, Dietmar, 149 Book of the Dead, 95 Bookshops, 54 Border crossings, 255, 258, 262 Borderlands in CoA opening sequence, 255 family as, 256–257 Mexico/US, 255–256 1920s Los Angeles, 256 race as, 261–262, 264, 265 as sources of hybridity, 257–260 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 144 The Bride, 203 Bride of Frankenstein (character, Frankenstein), 199 Bride of Frankenstein (character, movies), 197, 199, 201–204, 208, 236–238, 248 Bride of Frankenstein (character, PD) earlier characterizations of, 197

feminist storyline, 15, 206–213 pre-creation storyline, 199–201 Pygmalion storyline, 203–206 The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale), 199, 203, 204, 208, 236–238, 248 British Museum, 49, 109–110 Brona Croft (character, PD) agency, lack of, 201, 202 death, 201 Ethan’s relationship with, 134, 242 failure of rebellion, 96 individualism of, 200 London as source of monstrosity, 113, 253 as mother, 211 as object of desire, 200, 202 parallels with Shelley’s life, 211–212 as performer, 153 as prey, 221 Sadeian aspects, 225 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 247 Brown, Christian A., 39–40 Bruin-Molé, Megen de, 210 Buckley, Chloé Germaine, 117, 221 Burger, Gustav August, 54 C The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 145 Caliban (character), 144 Camera, as vampire, 89 Canonization, 53–56, 61 Capitalism, 260–261 Carter, Angela, 226 Catholicism, 234 Catriona Hartdegen (character, PD), 73, 114, 115, 246 Chaney, Lon Jr., 131, 144 Charles Branson (character, PD), 16, 244, 246 Chase, Richard, 27

 INDEX 

Chavez, Dannette, 264 Chicanos, representations of, 256 Chinatown, 177, 179, 184–191 Choice/agency, 201, 202, 205, 247 Christian blood, 89 Christianity as Anglo-American, 260 blood in, 90, 93 Catholicism and sexual deviance, 234 creation story, 97 James Whales, 237 in Sade’s works, 219–220 vampires as threat to, 96 vampires’ rejection of, 102 Christie, Agatha, 28 Christopher Marlowe (character, Only Lovers Left Alive), 99 Church, David, 85 City planning, 260 City, as world, 256 Civil War, 167 Clare, John, 16 Class, 152, 201, 203, 261 Clery, E.J., 224 Clover, Carol J., 81 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 263 Colaprico, Christie, 34 Coldness and Cruelty (Deleuze), 228 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 61 Collections, 49, 52–53, 65, 99, 126 Comic-Con, 37 Community, 209, 212, 213 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 28 Consent, 199, 201, 202, 205 Cosma, Simion, 90 Cosmology, 18 Cosmopolitan Gothic, 108, 117 Cosmopolitanism, 107–110 Coward, Noel, 28 Creation stories, 97

271

The Creature (character, Frankenstein), 58–60, 129, 132 The Creature (character, movies), 132, 208, 237 The Creature (character, PD) as adaptation of poetry, 56–58 as anthology, 64 as collection, 65 entrapped by Putney, 51 fate of, 81 film origins of, 132 first appearance of, 15 as flâneur, 112 on Grand Guignol, 122–123 as haunting CoA, 179–180 humanity of, 183 intersection with Chandler, 135 Lily as parallel of, 211 quotes poetry, 24, 55, 61, 118, 234 religious views of, 234 as romantic rival of Victor, 204–205 story arc, 133 Culianu, Ioan Petru, 90 Cultural fundamentalism, 97 Culture, high/low, 35, 97, 227–231 Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-Garde (Hawkins), 229 Cycles, Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes, and Reboots (Palmer & Klein), 254 D D’Addario, Daniel, 260 Dalton, Timothy, 35 Dance, 180 Dances with Wolves, 169 Dang, Ashmi, 34–38, 40–41 Daoism, 90 Dark Shadows, 3

272 

INDEX

“Dark sidekick,” 166–171 Deadwood Dick: Prince of the Road (Wheeler), 160, 168–169 Death instinct, 227 Definition, high vs low, 22 Deleuze, Gilles, 227, 228 Demimonde, 106, 116, 234–235, 253 Den of Geek, 39–40 Detective fiction, 255 Detectives, 177, 180, 256–257 Deverell, William, 264 Dexter, 33 Dickens, Charles, 26 Dickson, Carter, 28 Dime novels American Imperialism and, 173–175 Black people in, 167 episodic nature of, 165 historical perspective of, 170–171 as low culture, 5 Native Americans in, 167–171, 173 Penny Dreadful as, 3, 157 violence excused in, 173 Dobbs, Aaron, 33 Dolls, 247 Domestic abuse, 205–206, 262 Domesticity, 203, 205 Dorian Gray (character, PD) betrays Brona Croft, 113 betrays Lily, 82 emotional detachment, 212 gender fluidity, 97 as libertine, 221–222, 227 opinion of Lyle’s home, 109–110 as performer, 152 portrait gallery, 50–51 Sadeian aspects, 200 seduces Ethan Chandler, 162–166 story arc, 15 takes Ethan gambling, 149 Dormer, Natalie, 180 Doubling, 124, 126, 128, 131, 226

Douche ecossaise, 149 Downing, Christine, 245 Dracula (character, Dracula) army of women, 80 as embodiment of Victorian fears, 77–78 as modern monster, 72 as storyteller, 85 Dracula (character, Only Lovers Left Alive), 100 Dracula (character, PD) as Amun-Ra, 95 as embodiment of Victorian fears, 78 fate of, 81 final battle, 117–118 as flâneur, 112 as modern monster, 71 occult methods of, 82 relationship with Vanessa, 15, 73–75, 79, 247–248 as threat to Christian order, 96 Dracula (Stoker), 54, 71–72, 77–78, 85, 129, 227, 245 “The Dreadfuls” attitude towards corporate appropriation, 38 response to series finale, 40, 42–44 response to show, 38–40 show’s appeal to, 84 Showtime’s use of, 31 E Edelman, Lee, 242 Education, of women, 208–209 Egyptian mythology, 95, 126 Eliade, Mircea, 90, 97 Eliot, George, 26 Eliot, T.S., 22 Elliott, Kamilla, 6, 52, 149 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 172–173

 INDEX 

Empathy, 3, 38, 40, 74, 183 End of Days, 24, 73, 105, 115 Enlightenment, 219 Entanglement, 98–99 Erotic triangles, 204–205, 235, 242 Ethan Chandler (character, PD) cowboy persona, 158–162 duality of, 172–173 as embodiment of Manifest Destiny, 173–175 fate of, 119 fear of possession, 16 first appearance of, 108 as flâneur, 111–112, 115 goes gambling with Dorian Gray, 149, 160 intersection with the Creature, 135 kills Vanessa, 81 life story re-enacted in series, 151 masculinity of, 160–166, 248 as performer, 146, 152, 241–242 queerness and, 233–234, 241–242 reaction to play, 153 relationships with male companions, 166–171 relationship with Brona, 242 seduced by Dorian Gray, 162–166 story arc, 15, 133–136 suffering of, 170 Eugenie (character, Justine), 223–224 Eve (character, Only Lovers Left Alive), 97–102 Evelyn Poole (character, PD), 15, 52, 65, 145 Extracts, 61–62 Extreme cinema, 230 “Eye and Mind” (Ponty), 88–89 F Facebook, 37 Families

273

as borderlands, 256–257 the Creature’s, 133 Ethan Chandler’s, 134 in Only Lovers Left Alive, 101 queer, 234, 244 as unreliable foundations, 18 Vanessa’s daydream of, 248 women as protectors of, 260 Fan art, 36, 38, 41 Fans corporate exploitation of, 38 marketing team’s view of, 35, 36 as production strategy, 34 response to PD:CoA, 177, 178 response to series finale, 25 Showtime’s use of, 31–32, 34 Farizova, Nina, 116, 126 Feminism, 74, 79–82, 200–201, 208–210, 212–213 Femme fragile, 96 Femmes fatales, 93, 177, 181–182 Ferdinand Lyle (character, PD), 55, 83, 109, 116, 242 Figures de Cire, 145 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Leitch), 52 Film noir, 177, 180–182 Flâneurs, 110–116, 118 Flesh for Frankenstein (Warhol), 202 Florence Seward (character, PD), 17, 74, 82–83, 114, 117, 246 Ford, Sam, 32 Franco, Jess, 229 Frankenstein (Shelley) adaptations, 122 as anthology, 58–65 canonization of, 53 characters remixed by PD, 130–131 the Creature’s storyline in, 132 foreshadowing in, 204 letter-writing in, 244 publication history, 58, 227

274 

INDEX

Frankenstein (Whale), 235–236 Frankenstein Created Woman, 201, 203 Frankenstein movies, 122–124, 132–133, 197, 198, 203, 204, 235–238 Frankenstein: The True Story, 201, 203 Fregoso, Rosa-Linda, 262 French Revolution, 219, 225, 227 Freud, Sigmund, 83, 124–125, 128 Friedman, Lester D., 122 Frontier/frontera, 256 G Gaiman, Neil, 28 Gallico, Paul, 28 Game of Thrones, 33 Gender as performance, 152 Gender expectations, 207–208, 223–224 Gender fluidity, 97, 165, 233 Gender-related trauma, 206, 209–212 Genette, Gerard, 198 Gilbert, Annie, 37 Gilbert, R.A., 227 Gill, Rosalind, 200–201 Globalization, 108 Godwin, William, 208, 209 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 183 Gonzáles, Rodolfo, 260 Good Omens (Gaiman and Pratchett), 28 Goodreads, 36 The Gothic bestial transformation and, 242 Catholicism and sexual deviance, 234 contemporary, 6 conventions in PD, 126 cosmopolitan, 117

cosmopolitanism in dialog with, 107–110 hollowing out of, 91 as inspiration for PD, 2, 35, 53 queerness and, 233 reality vs dream/memory in, 84 Sade on, 225 Sadeian aspects, 218, 219, 224 Gothic TV, 4, 6 Grande Dame Guignol cinema, 145 Grand Guignol as mise en abyme, 149–150 movie monsters as analogs, 122 as part of Demimonde, 112–113 productions, 145, 148–151, 242 revelation of Ethan’s lycanthropy, 242 theatrical effects and, 146–148 The Great Train Robbery, 146 Green, Eva, 2, 36 Green, Joshua, 32 Green, Stephanie, 115 Greene, Graham, 28 Griggs, Yvonne, 4 Grossman, Julie, 26, 63, 123, 127 Groys, Boris, 97 Guerra, Marcelo, 36, 37, 43 Gutiérrez, José Angel, 256 H Halberstam, Jack, 238 Hall, Stuart, 258 Hammer Films, 2, 91, 201 The Hand of Mary Constable (Gallico), 28 Harper, Graeme, 230–231 Hawkins, Joan, 229 Hazlitt, William, 61–63 Healing, 73 Hearing, vs listening, 32 Hecate (character, PD), 134

 INDEX 

Henry Jekyll (character, PD), 15, 81, 130, 206 Hicks, Emily, 258 “Hideous progeny,” 63–64, 127 Higson, Andrew, 148 Hills, Matt, 4 Hise, Greg, 260 Hocquenghem, Guy, 242 Home Box Office (HBO), 33–34 Homeland, 33 Horror Gothic vs., 4 history as source of, 260 post-, 85 Sadeian aspects of, 230 on television, 3–6, 125 “Horror London,” 107 Houdini, Harry, 28 Hull, Henry, 130 Hutcheon, Linda, 28, 198 Hutchings, Peter, 106 Hybridity, 257–260 I Identity American, 157–158 blood as, 262 border crossing and, 255, 258 in borderlands, 258, 262 canonization and, 56 character as trope for, 25–27 escape from, 172–173 fluidity of, 26–27 hybridity and, 257–260 of individual texts, 29 questions of, 17–19, 23–24 Imperialism, 109–110, 113–114, 173–175, 256, 264 Ince, Thomas, 146 Intertextuality, 2–3, 254

275

J Jackson, Rosemary, 85 Japan, 108 Jarmusch, Jim, 87 Jekyll and Hyde, 75, 76 Jenkins, Henry, 20, 32 Jesus, 73, 237 Jewish people, 257, 260 Joan Clayton (character, PD), 17, 82, 246 John Clare (character, PD), 16, 57 John Talbot (character, PD), 135 Jones, Anna Maria, 198 Jowett, Lorna, 3 Joyful Voices, 260 Juliette (Sade), 217, 219–223, 226 Justine (character, Justine), 222–223, 226 Justine (character, PD), 80, 130, 131, 217, 219, 220, 223–224 Justine (Sade), 130, 217, 222–223, 226 K Kaetenay (character, PD) connection with Dracula, 73 curses Talbot with lycanthropy, 134 as “dark sidekick,” 169–170 first appearance of, 108 relationship with Ethan, 162 relationship with Vanessa, 79, 82 Karloff, Boris, 131 Kavey, Allison B., 122 Keene, Allison, 38 Khair, Tabish, 109 King, Chris, 253 Kinnear, Rory, 179, 183 Klein, Amanda Ann, 254 Knowledge, 84

276 

INDEX

L Labyrinths, 246 Lane, Nathan, 180 Langan, John, 108 Lavinia Putney (character, PD), 16 Lawrence Talbot (character, PD), 129–131, 133–135 Leader, Darian, 83 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, 91 Leitch, Thomas, 52, 143 “Lenore” (Burger), 54 Letter-writing, 244 Libertine philosophy, 219–220 Lies, 205–206 Lily Frankenstein (character, PD) consent and, 205 domestic abuse, 82, 205–206 domestication of, 114 fear of possession, 16 London as source of monstrosity, 113, 253 as parallel of the Creature, 211 as perfect woman, 203–206, 210 as predator, 221 as revolutionary, 79–80, 206–212, 226 Sadeian aspects, 224–227 Listening, 32, 43 Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny (Grossman), 63 Logan, John background, 2, 35 on being gay, 243 on Ethan Chandler, 160 fan criticism of, 42–43 Goodreads campaign, 36 on Lily’s context, 206 monster movies’ influence on, 121–122 on origins of PD, 2–3, 53 personal connection to PD, 25, 38

on rehabilitation of characters, 198, 235 religious views of, 234 on “sacred texts,” 129 on series finale, 24, 41 on Vanessa Ives, 74, 243 on werewolf makeup, 130 London characters’ navigation of, 110–116 cosmopolitanism of, 107–110 as epicenter of Demimonde, 106 “Horror London,” 106, 107 restoration to normalcy, 118–119, 247 as site of final showdown, 115–118 as source of monstrosity, 113, 253 Lord Byron, 57 Lorde, Audre, 81 Los Angeles, 255–256, 260–261, 264 “Lost Cause” mythology, 167 Louttit, Chris, 106, 112 Love, 18, 97, 181 Lucifer (character, PD), 71, 73 Lugosi, Bela, 131 Lynch, David, 72 M Madame Arcati (character), 28 Madame Kali (character, PD), 23–24, 27, 28, 94, 110 Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, 51 Madonna/Whore binary, 75–78 Magda (character, PD:CoA), 177, 181–182, 255, 262, 264 “Magical Negroes,” 166 Malcolm Murray (character, PD) attitude towards Victor, 239 fate of, 119, 174 as flâneur, 113–114 maps and books, 50

 INDEX 

quotes Keats, 55 on reincarnation, 118 seduction by Evelyn Poole, 145 story arc, 15 Maleva (character), 135 Mănăstirea Argeșului, 90 Mantrant, Sophie, 170 Marcus, Steven, 25 Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (Wollstonecraft), 209 Marriage, 208, 224, 246 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 201 Masculinity, 160–166, 183, 241 Masoch, Leopold von Sacher, 228 McClung, William Alexander, 256 McFarland, Melanie, 25 McLuhan, Marshall, 22–23 McNutt, Myles, 33, 34 Media, 21–23, 27 Medicine, 18 Mediums, 21–24, 27–29 Meikle, Kyle, 5 Memory, 18, 56, 87, 95, 99, 153 Mendik, Xavier, 230 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 88–89, 95 Mexico, 255–256 Middlemarch (Eliot), 26 Milton, John, 61, 63 Mina Harker (character, PD), 15, 17, 244–247 Minimalism, 85 The Ministry of Fear (Greene), 28 Mirroring, 126, 223, 226 Mise en abyme, 149–152 Mitchell, Rebecca N., 198 Monster movies, see Universal Classic Monsters Morality, 220 Motherhood, 211, 240, 247 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 26 Mulholland Drive, 181 The Mummy, 122, 124

277

Museums, 49, 51 Music, 101, 255 Musical numbers, 180 My Fair Lady, 203 N Native Americans, 168–171, 173 Nature, 220–221, 224 Nazis, 260 Neo-Gothic, 85 Neo-Victorian literature, 198 Nevins, David, 33, 34, 41–42 Newton, Isaac, 21 Normality, 38, 83, 118 North, Julian, 61 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 60 Nosferatu, 144 O The occult, 82–84 The 120 Days of Sodom (Sade), 222 Only Lovers Left Alive, 87, 90, 97–102 Oscar Putney (character, PD), 51, 133 Otherness, 25, 106, 109, 118, 166–168, 257, 258 “The other Victorians,” 25 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 26 Our Vampires, Ourselves (Auerbach), 73 Outsiders, 38, 40, 257 Öz, Seda, 106 P Pachucos, 258–260 Pachuquismo, 258 Palimpsest, 91, 198 Palmer, R. Barton, 7, 254 Paradise Lost (Milton), 61 Paris, 112

278 

INDEX

Participation, in media, 22 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 229 Patten, Dominic, 24 Penny bloods, 92–93, 102 Penny Dreadful about, 1 as alternate version of Dracula (Stoker), 129 as American dime novel, 157, 165 casting, 2–3 as collection, 148 as commercial product, 149 instability of characters, 92–93 as palimpsest, 91, 198 as Sadeian narrative, 227 Penny Dreadful: City of Angels audience response to, 177, 178 Chinatown connections, 177, 179, 184–191 female characters in, 180–182 Los Angeles, as character, 255–256, 260–261, 264 song and dance in, 180 textual haunting of, 178–180 “The Penny Dreadful Collection,” 53–55 Penny dreadfuls, 3, 5, 54, 92, 227 Performance, 141, 150, 152–153, 180 Persephone myth, 245–247 Peter Craft (character, PD:CoA), 179–180, 183, 261–262 Peters, John Durham, 21, 29 Phillips, Kendall R., 125 Philosophy in the Bedroom (Sade), 217, 220, 222–224 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 2, 26, 50, 227 Pierce, Jack, 130 Piper, Billie, 3 The Plague Court Murders (Dickson), 28 The Pleasures of Horror (Hills), 4

Poetry, Romantic in Frankenstein, 58, 61 influence of, 99 as inspiration for PD, 53 as mark of humanity, 183 as organizing structure of PD, 2, 126 quotation as canonization, 55 quoted in PD, 24, 54–56, 61, 118 as signifier of queerness, 239 Political Justice (Godwin), 208 Poore, Benjamin, 35, 38, 92, 228 Poovey, Mary, 75, 78 Portrait galleries, 50–51, 99 Posada, Tim, 96 Possession, 15–18, 23–24 Postfeminist sensibility, 200–201 “Post-horror,” 85 Poverty, 201, 206 Power border regions and, 258 identity and, 18 Lily’s view of, 80 political, 260–261, 264 toxic, 182 Vanessa/Dracula relationship, 74 Pratchett, Terry, 28 Predator/prey dichotomy, 220 Price, Leah, 61 Primorac, Antonija, 212, 243 Proteus (character, PD), 92, 129, 239, 240 Psychoanalysis, 72, 82–83 Publicity campaign, 35 Pygmalion (Shaw), 203 Pygmalion myth, 79, 203–206 Q Quality television, 33, 35–36, 228, 230–231 Queer sublime, 233, 235, 237, 242, 248

 INDEX 

Queerness Charlton Townsend (character, PD:CoA), 262 Demimonde as space for, 234–235 emergence as signifier, 233 Ethan Chandler, 233–234, 241–242 Gothic tradition and, 233 labyrinths as, 246 Vanessa Ives, 234–235, 242–249 Victor Frankenstein, 235, 238–240 in Whale’s movies, 235–238 R Radio, 23 Ratineau, Paul, 148 Raynes, Alice, 84 Reading, 57–61, 99–101 “Reflection on the Novel” (Sade), 225 Reincarnation, 118 Rejection, 181–182 Renfield (character, PD), 74, 117 Repetition, 125–128, 132 Repression, 220 Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Elliott), 52 Rhymes, 126 Rhythm, of visual storytelling, 149 Ridenhour, Jamieson, 110–112 Rim of the Pit (Talbot), 28 Romanian culture, 90 Romanticism, 183 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 198 S Sacrifice, 81, 90, 247 Sade, Marquis de film adaptations, 229–230 the Gothic and, 218, 224–227 novels of, 222–224 philosophy of, 219–222

279

quality television, 228, 230–231 rediscovery of, 228–229 The Sadeian Woman (Carter), 226 Sadism, 222 St. Clair, William, 53 Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini), 229 Salvation, 81–82 San Diego Comic-Con, 37 Sayers, Dorothy, 28 Schrank, Sarah, 260 Science, 72, 75, 82–84, 114, 210 Scientists, 73, 83 Scorpions, 221 S.C.U.M. Manifesto (Solanas), 80 Seances, 28, 94, 110 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 233, 235 Select British Poets (Hazlitt), 61–63 Self-adaptation, 6 Sembene (character, PD), 166–169 Serial fiction, 3, 19, 24, 25, 72, 125, 149 Series finale, 24–26, 40–43, 102 Sex trafficking, 79 Sexual encounters Brona/Ethan, 134, 200 Brona/Victor, 202 Dorian/Ethan, 162–166 Justine/Lily/Dorian, 224 Lily/Victor, 205 montage of, 19 Vanessa/Capt. Branson, 244 Vanessa/Dracula, 74 Sexual violence, 79, 93, 202, 206–208, 222–223, 230 Sexuality, female, 75–79, 94, 102 Shape-shifting, 92–93, 169, 182, 183 Shelley, Mary, 61–64, 197, 211–212 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 54, 61 Shock Theater, 3 The Shootist, 161 Showtime, 31–38

280 

INDEX

Simmon, Scott, 146 Sin, 18 The Sittaford Mystery (Christie), 28 Smith, Angela M., 235 Smith, W. Tyler, 76–77 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 244 Social expectations, 152 “Social listening,” 34, 36, 43 Social media, 34, 36–38, 41, 43 Solanas, Valerie, 80 The Sopranos, 33 The soul, 219 Sound effects, 148 Space, physical, 253–254 Speed, supernatural, 101 Spengler, Oswald, 256 Spooner, Catherine, 6 Stagecraft, 146–148 Starz channel, 33, 34 Steinhardt, Nicolae, 90 Stokoe, Elizabeth, 257 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 2 Strange, Glenn, 131 Suffragists, 80, 208–209 Supernatural, fear of, 124 Szwydky, Lissette, 148 T Talbot, Hake, 28 A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens), 26 Telegraph, 21 Telephone, 22 Television horror on, 3–6, 125 influences on PD, 3 as penny dreadful fiction, 228 quality, 33, 35–36, 228, 230–231 Tennyson, Alfred, 55, 116 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 26 Theatre

as aid to reinvention, 180, 181 centrality of, 154 commercial nature of, 149 Creature’s discovery of, 179 historical context, 148–149 homages to, 142–144, 146–147 mise en abyme effect, 149–152 pervasiveness of, 152–153 Theatrical effects, 148 Theorizing Adaptation (Elliott), 6 Third Space, 257 Thurman, Trace, 25 Tomaiuolo, Saverio, 234 The Transformed Beast, 148, 149, 151, 242 Transmediality, 20–21, 53, 198 Trollope, Anthony, 26 Tumblr, 38 TV horror, 3–6, 125 TV Horror (Jowett and Abbott), 3 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), 144 Twitter, 37 U The uncanny, 124–128 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McLuhan), 22 Universal Classic Monsters about, 122 characters remixed in PD, 130–131 Frankenstein, 122–124, 132–133, 235 influence on Logan, 122 the Mummy, 122, 124 PD as “hideous progeny” of, 127 PD’s attitude towards, 150 recasting of actors (doubling), 131 repetition in, 132 Wolf Man, 129, 132, 134–135 Unnatural Death (Sayers), 28

 INDEX 

V Vampire narratives, 87, 89, 90, 97–102 “Vampire state,” 89 Vampires bodily perception and, 88 characteristics of, 90–91 Christianity and, 89 cultural, 101 Egyptian mythology and, 95 humanity as, 99 memory and, 88, 99 movies as, 89 sanguinary modern, 91, 93–94 Van Sloan, Edward, 129 Vanessa Ives (character, PD) animal nature of, 221 bond with Mina, 245–247 casting, 2 cosmopolitanism of, 117 death of, 24, 81, 117, 247, 248 fan response to, 36, 40 as feminist, 80–81 as femme fragile, 96 gender dissolution and, 97 hypnosis episode, 72 as Lucy/Mina hybrid, 91, 244, 246 as medium, 95 as modern woman, 72 pathologization of, 94 poses evocative of The Bride, 200 possession of, 23, 28, 244 psychotherapy, 82 queerness and, 234–235, 242–249 quest for identity, 17–18 quotes poetry, 55, 239 relationship with Dracula, 73–75, 78, 247–248 sexuality of, 78–79 as Stoker’s Mina, 129 story arc, 15, 105

281

Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 26 Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood, 54, 91 Vega family, 256–258, 262 Veil imagery, 233–234, 239, 240, 244, 246 Vertigo, 152, 183 Victor Frankenstein (character, Frankenstein), 59, 61, 203 Victor Frankenstein (character, PD) abuse of Lily, 205–206, 210 competes for Lily’s affection, 204–205 fate of, 81 as flâneur, 114–115 kills Brona, 201 mother, 238, 240 queerness and, 235, 238–240 quotes poetry, 54, 239 recites Wordsworth, 55, 61 relationship with Lily, 79–80, 82, 208 veil imagery, 233, 239 on women’s dress, 203, 208 Victorian culture female sexuality, 78–79 modernist fears, 115, 206 museums/collections, 49, 51–52 repression, 220 women in, 75–78, 203–204 Victorian literature, 26–27, 39, 106, 150, 198 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft), 208–210 Vine, 37 Violence in dime novels, 173 sexual, 79, 93, 202, 206–208, 222–223, 230 transgressive, 206 Vision, 88

282 

INDEX

Visual style of Only Lovers Left Alive, 101 of Penny Dreadful, 93–95, 107–108, 117 of Penny Dreadful:City of Angels, 184, 255 of quality tv, 230–231 Volney, C.F., 59 W Warhol, Andy, 202 Wax museums, 26, 51, 124, 133, 145 Werewolf of London, 130 West, American, 170, 255–256 See also Dime novels Western hero, 158–163 Whale, James, 233, 235–238 Wheatley, Helen, 125, 127, 128 Whiteness, 166, 169, 262 Whitman, Walt, 162, 165 Wild west shows, 108, 146–147, 241 The Wolf Man, 129, 132, 134–135 Wolfson, Susan, 61 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 208–210, 212 Woman and the Demon (Auerbach), 248

Women education of, 208–209 femmes fatales, 93, 177, 181–182 letter-writing and, 244 libertine view of, 224 in Mexican culture, 260 as monsters, 81, 209, 210, 226, 248–249 as objects of beauty, 208 power as rooted in performance, 180 scientists’ view of, 73 sexualization of, 200–201, 212 stereotypes of, 93 thwarting of, 96 Victorian view of, 75–78, 203–204 Wood, Robin, 81 Woolf, Virginia, 26, 75 Wordsworth, William, 55, 61 X Xenophobia, 118 Z Zombies, 99, 100, 102