Literary Miscellany

by Alex Palmer

  —Aaron the Moor, Titus Andronicus

  “I have given suck, and know

  How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:

  I would, while it was smiling in my face,

  Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,

  And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you.”

  —Lady Macbeth, Macbeth

  “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

  —O’Brien, 1984

  “It would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me.”

  —The Misfit, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

  “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner ... War is god.”

  —Judge Holden, Blood Meridian

  “I’m utterly insane.”

  —Patrick Bateman, American Psycho

  The greatest villain in all of literature may very well be Milton’s portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost (1667). As Satan, he is, of course, irredeemably evil; and yet, Milton humanizes him. Beginning as a regal lord of the underworld, Satan transforms over the course of the epic into a lowly, vicious snake. Satan combines the evil (and occasional silliness) of the early devils as well as the more complex, seductive, and even sympathetic quality of the revenge tragedy villains, though in his case he’s out for vengeance against all of humanity. In this way, he combines all the basic characteristics of the villains who preceded him over the previous three hundred years, tragically declaring, “Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good.”

  The villain becomes much less common for decades after Paradise Lost (perhaps after Milton, writers knew they had best sit it out for a century), but returns with a vengeance in nineteenth-century melodrama. In these works, the villain reverts back into a satanic and slightly idiotic character to be hissed at and booed—this is when black hats, capes, and curly mustaches became the standard uniform.

  This era also saw the rise of the far more complicated gothic villains. Often these could be the scary creeps that were typical in the revenge tragedies of earlier eras (dukes and monks bent on ruining the lives of the innocent heroines), but then there are those much more ambiguous figures who dance between being enemy and lover.

  For example, there’s Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), who plays the romantic lead through the first volume, only to lose the girl and turn into a bitter villain bent on revenge in the second volume. Edward Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, published the same year, does something of the opposite, transforming from an unfriendly character with a shady history into the heroic savior. They are what critic Deborah Lutz describes as “dangerous lovers” who both attract and repulse while keeping the reader eagerly flipping pages.

  Did You Know?

  Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s brilliant nemesis, and reputedly the first “supervillain” in literature, is based on two very different real-life sources. The first is Adam Worth, a German American criminal mastermind. Dubbed “the Napoleon of crime” by Scotland Yard, he was known as one of the greatest thieves of the nineteenth century. Second was the famous (and law-abiding) American astronomer Simon Newcomb. The real-life counterpart shared much with Moriarty, including a genius for mathematics, published papers on the binomial theorem (published when very young), and later work on the orbits of asteroids. Moriarity is truly an amalgam of good and evil influences.

  These gothic villains in many ways typify the reader’s own “love to hate” relationships with literature’s great scoundrels. As authors continued to create wonderfully awful characters, from Count Dracula to Lord Voldemort, these villains continued to frighten and intrigue. Even while Voldemort claims the mantle of “the most powerful Dark Wizard who ever lived,” it’s hard not to think that for all his intimidation tactics, he’s still got nothing on Milton’s Satan.

  WHY DID ROMANTICS LOVE TERROR (AND NOT HORROR)?

  Gothic fiction and ghost stories

  While scary stories go back to ancient folktales, and perhaps earlier, in the Romantic period, stories meant to terrify really took off. Part of this had to do with the Augustan period that preceded the Romantic era: While writers of the early eighteenth century embraced classicism and rationality, the Romantics turned to nature and the imagination for inspiration and freedom from their too-orderly surroundings. The Romantic era, which kicked off roughly around the middle of the eighteenth century, embraced strong emotions and sought out the sublime and a creative energy that went beyond the earthly and everyday. As it welcomed these supernatural elements, Romanticism also ushered in the heyday of the spooky. Gothic fiction, the genre that combined horror and romance and thrived for the following century, was the main by-product of these trends.

  The genre evolved in the eighteenth century, beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), with its evil lord and mysterious and seemingly supernatural events and settings. While neoclassical style and architecture was all about orderliness and proportion, gothic style was about power, awe, and magnitude, and it was a hit with readers.

  The genre really hit its stride with Ann Radcliffe, whose novels The Romance of the Forest (1791), Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797) made the gothic more palatable for a mass audience. By incorporating a more virtuous heroine and explaining the supernatural events taking place at the end of the story, it offered a compelling read with a moral message. The book was a smash and opened the floodgates to a torrent of other Gothic works, with twenty to thirty titles produced each year.

  Radcliffe aimed to elicit terror from her readers but held back on horrific details, which proved an effective combination. In her essay, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” the author explains why she makes this choice:

  Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one.

  There were authors at the time with a different agenda. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) lies more firmly in the “horror” side of gothic literature, featuring graphic scenes of rape, murder, and incest.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who embraced the gothic aesthetic in his “mystery poems,” including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel,” declared, “Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher.” Yikes.

  Moral Exchange

  Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who wrote the 1773 essay “The Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,” famously commented that Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is in need of a moral. He replied that, “In my own judgment the poem had too much” moral.

  John Keats admired the effect of gothic literature, incorporating elements in poems such as “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” with its mysterious gothic ladies, and “The Eve of St. Agnes,” despite his teasing comment to a friend that, “I intend to tip you the Damosel Radcliffe—I’ll cavern you, and grotto you, and waterfall you, and wood you, and water you, and immense-rock you, and tremendous sound you, and solitude you.”

  Shakes Does It Again

  In “On the Supernatural,” Radcliffe credits Shakespeare with some of the scariest scenes in literature. She writes that the first appearance of the ghost of Hamlet’s father is “above every ideal,” and that, “Every minute circumstance of the scene between those watching on the platform, and of that between them and Horatio ... [leads] on toward that high curiosity and thr
illing awe with which we witness the conclusion of the scene.”

  Perhaps the most iconic moment of ghost-storytelling in the history of literature took place when a group of Romantic writers gathered in the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori sat with Lord Byron, who had rented the villa for the summer. While it may have been the middle of June, the year 1816 was actually considered the “Year Without a Summer” due to its abnormal climate, which kept the writers inside as massive storms and flooding assaulted the continent.

  In this appropriately gothic atmosphere, the four challenged each other to write their most frightening stories. The storytelling sprouted what would become Polidori’s The Vampyre, which transformed the vampire of folklore into the modern aristocratic monster we think of today and spawned a whole subgenre of vampiric fiction; as well as, of course, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s hard to find a more perfect embodiment of terror’s creative power over the Romantics.

  Gothic’s popularity dissipated as the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott became the standard for the reading public, and the genre became more of a source of amusement for readers, particularly after Jane Austen’s mock-gothic Northanger Abbey (1817). The novel about a seventeen-year-old girl with a love of gothic fiction and the frightful images she invents indicated the level of saturation gothic had reached at the time, yet it is more widely read today than the works she was mocking.

  Did You Know?

  Among the gothic novels discussed in Northanger Abbey are The Castle of Wolfenbach, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, and Horrid Mysteries. Though it was assumed these were satiric titles invented by Austen, researchers recently discovered they are in fact early gothic works. Valancourt Books has since reprinted them in all their lurid detail.

  Scary stories shifted in style during the Victorian age, with authors incorporating gothic elements into a range of different works. Dickens played with ghosts and ideas of moral retribution in A Christmas Carol (1843), and Charlotte Brontë incorporated the “madwoman in the attic” into Jane Eyre (1847). Henry James, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Gaskell each incorporated elements of the supernatural and gothic into their works, while Edgar Allan Poe created his own brand of macabre.

  Fear continued to be a valuable tool for writers late in the century as they used supernatural elements to explore ideas about burgeoning scientific discoveries as well as moral corruption. Works like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) tapped into a fear that was based not on the past, with its ancient castles and mysteries, but on the frightening possibilities of the future.

  Did You Know?

  One of the final classic gothic novels is C. R. Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), about a man who sells his soul for prolonged life. Following his trial, Oscar Wilde adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth in honor of Maturin’s title character, but perhaps also a tip of his hat to the author, who happened to be his great uncle.

  The Southern gothic tradition of the mid-twentieth century further updated the genre by transplanting gothic archetypes into the modern world of the American South. Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers, among others, used grotesque characters and an ominous sense of terror to provide a backdrop for their investigations of morality and decay.

  With the continuing demand for spine-tingling tales, both at the bookstore and in the movie theater, optimism about the future of fear in literature seems justified.

  WHY DO SOME DETECTIVES USE THEIR MINDS AND OTHERS THEIR FISTS?

  The crime-solving skills of Holmes, Marlowe, and more

  Crime solvers come in all shapes and sizes, from elderly spinsters to hardened private eyes, which may explain why detective stories continue to be devoured by readers regardless of age and taste. Any detective worth his or her salt gets the bad guy, but they have used drastically different tactics to do so, from keen observation to morally questionable trickery or brute force.

  Edgar Allan Poe created the first literary detective, C. Auguste Dupin, in his 1841 story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Dupin is an intellectual and an avid reader who spots significance in minute details. He uses what he calls “ratiocination” to follow the criminal’s thought process and seemingly read minds, all while dazzling his friend (the narrator of the story), and showing up the bumbling police force.

  Did You Know?

  In 1821 Thomas de Quincy published an essay called “Murder, Considered As One of the Fine Arts” in which he runs through the canon of aesthetically pleasing killings, beginning with Cain’s murder of Abel (“the father of the art”). His work on this and other works about criminal detection such as The Avenger have earned him some credit as a forerunner of detective fiction.

  Sound familiar?

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledges the influence of Poe in the first story featuring the character who would quickly become the most famous detective of all time. In A Study in Scarlet, Doctor Watson compares his friend Sherlock Holmes to Dupin, to which the less-than-humble Holmes replies, “No doubt you think you are complimenting me ... In my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow.”

  While Holmes is best known for his intellect, Conan Doyle made it clear that he was no brainy weakling. In The Sign of Four, the detective describes his early skill in bare-knuckle fighting, and the story The Adventure of the Gloria Scott mentions that he was trained as a boxer. Holmes goes mano a mano with opponents several times, explaining to Doctor Watson that he escaped Professor Moriarty by using baritsu, a Japanese system of martial arts.

  Did You Know?

  Arthur Conan Doyle’s father did the original drawings for A Study in Scarlet, but they portrayed Sherlock Holmes as portly and squat, an odd interpretation of the character his son described. For the later pieces published in The Stand magazine, Sidney Paget was brought in to illustrate, making Holmes the slim dandy readers have come to love.

  Holmes had other precursors and contemporaries, almost all British, including Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket in Bleak House (1853), the first detective to appear in an English novel, and Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff, reputedly the finest detective in England, in The Moonstone (1868).

  Father Brown, who appears in more than fifty of G. K. Chesterton’s short stories, was inspired by Holmes, but is a much different sort than the detective. Short and stout, he uses intuition to put himself in the mind of the killer, rather than deduction, and is a deeply religious man who uses his knowledge of men’s sins to help him understand the criminals he pursues.

  Together, these varied characters helped to usher in what is considered the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” between 1920 and 1940, when the novel grew to be the prominent form of the detective story under the pens of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allingham (women writers dominated the genre throughout this period). As with the earlier stories, these followed the basic structure of tightly formed tales, taking place in a country house or some other isolated location, where a body is found, an assortment of red herrings are presented, and the story wraps up with the detective dramatically revealing the killer.

  The Original Sleuth

  It has been argued that the first detective we find in fiction is Oedipus. Like many of the great detective stories, the play begins with a crime as the King is murdered and Oedipus must find the killer through interrogating witnesses and deciphering clues. Of course, finding himself guilty of the crime likely presented problems for having Oedipus return in later episodes.

  Detective fiction became, much like the crossword puzzles that were exploding in popularity around the same time, a sort of parlor game for the British audience still recovering from World War I. The aristocratic social values of the characters are threatened by the evil deeds of the killer, but order is soon restored through the reason and the cleverness of the d
etective. As the investigator outs the murderer, he (or occasionally she) also exonerates the rest of the characters, allowing life to smoothly resume as it was.

  As the keepers of order, the detectives are dignified and disciplined themselves, like the impeccably neat Hercule Poirot of Christie’s hugely popular whodunnits, or Sayers’s aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. The narratives also had a clear, predictable structure, perhaps best laid out by crime writer Ronald Knox’s “Ten Commandments” for detective stories:

  The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.

  All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

  Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

  No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

  No Chinaman must figure in the story.

  No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

  The detective himself must not commit the crime.

  The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.

  The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.