Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Yet Dracula has also proved a more ambivalent and open symbol than he was perhaps intended by his creator. Though a masculine sexual predator, against whom the Crew of Light must safeguard their women, he is also feminized as a degenerate, racial other. Patrick Bratlinger notes that through the count’s advances on Lucy and Mina, Dracula constructs the myth of a “demonic invasion” from the colonies of the British Empire (Bratlinger 1988, 234). Halberstam also notes that Dracula’s perverse sexuality is racialized as Jewish, showing that Stoker’s description of the count reflects the anti-Semitism of the period. Feminist and queer rewritings of Dracula often seek to make plain the punitive misogyny and racism of the source material, or else to draw out its ambiguities. Angela Carter’s story “The Loves of Lady Purple” (1974) shows the female vampire a victim of abjection and othering before she turns on her creator and revives herself by drinking his blood. Lady Purple offers a model for a host of powerful lady vampires in horror fiction ever since, from Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned to the fiction of Poppy Z. Brite. Helen Oyeyemi’s novel White Is for Witching (2010) also concerns itself with female vampirism and tackles racist fears still extant in British culture. Set in a British border town at the forefront of contemporary discussions of immigration, White Is for Witching casts white Miranda as a vampiric figure who cannot help but drain her black girlfriend, Ore. As well as suggesting the continuing damage racist discourses do to nonwhite subjects, White Is for Witching also resurrects the figure of Carmilla in Miranda’s desire for Ore. The two girls experience their vampiric coupling as pleasurable, and Miranda’s desire to consume Ore works to transgress both racist boundaries between self and other, as well as norms of femininity and heterosexuality.

  In contrast to the feminized figure of the vampire, the werewolves of horror fiction often serve as an image of unambiguous hypermasculinity. However, the hypermasculine werewolves of contemporary horror fiction such as Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries (2001–2014) (popularized in HBO’s television adaptation, True Blood [2008–2014]) or Underworld (2003) belie the complex history of the werewolf in horror literature. In Victorian fiction, female werewolves were as common as their male counterparts. In Clemence Housman’s “The Werewolf” (1890), a wandering stranger called White Fell uses her feminine sexuality to seduce a Scandinavian warrior before revealing herself as a fierce and deadly wolf, luring him to his doom. Frederick Marryat’s “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” (1839) portrays a similarly transgressive female, who seduces a widowed trapper in order to consume his children. Though they kill the wolf, the father and remaining son are punished for their transgressions against nature and women (it is revealed that the widower killed his first wife) with madness and death. Chantal Bourgault du Coudray notes that female werewolves in these early stories are characterized by “unrepentant hedonism and physicality,” whereas their male counterparts are “psychologized . . . reflecting the widespread association of masculinity with the mind.” This mind/body division in werewolf fiction guarantees the male’s salvation, “whereas the demonic female werewolf was always destroyed” (Bourgault du Coudray 2006, 55–56). Similar to the stories of female vampires, these tales of the werewolf construct and condemn “aberrant” female behavior and sexuality, but at the same time reveal transgression as an empowering possibility.

  The 2001 B-movie horror film Ginger Snaps offers an interesting reworking of the complex gender politics of the werewolf in its reimagining of the werewolf as an adolescent girl. The film knowingly offers multiple readings of its monster: a metaphor for incipient teenage female sexuality, a response to the double standards in what feminists have called Western rape culture (that is, the normalization of sexual coercion and violence against women), and a morality tale about the dangers of unprotected sex, among others. The film opens with a montage of images of fetishized young female victimhood common in horror film as the protagonists reenact sexualized and horrific death scenes for a school art project. As the film progresses, however, its teenage protagonist, Ginger, morphs from a fetishized victim of horror into a violent, hedonistic, and sexually voracious monster, a transformation that is both psychological and physical. The film flirts with images of the monstrous feminine, but also critiques these images as well as bitterly commenting on the limited social roles into which girls and young women are asked to place themselves. Ginger’s death at the climax of the film means that the figure of the werewolf retains its essential ambivalence. For Ginger, becoming a werewolf is neither definitely empowering, nor wholly punitive.

  Halberstam argues that the monsters of Gothic and horror fiction are radically open to interpretation. Monsters are “overdetermined” because they incorporate fragments of otherness from a multitude of sources into one body (Halberstam 1995, 92). Because its monsters cause such “interpretive mayhem” (2), horror, in both its classic and contemporary incarnations, offers a space to interrogate and challenge normative constructions of gender and sexuality. As a form it is available to any number of readings of gender and sexuality, even where individual texts may initially seek to reinforce gender norms or punish transgressions. Through the continued reinventions of its monsters, horror fiction offers a space in which to negotiate, challenge, and reimagine ideas about sexuality and gender into the contemporary moment.

  Chloé Germaine Buckley

  See also: Horror Criticism; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Vampire Fiction from Dracula to Lestat and Beyond; Part Three, Reference Entries: Brite, Poppy Z.; Carmilla; Carter, Angela; Dracula; du Maurier, Daphne; Interview with the Vampire; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Rice, Anne; Shelley, Mary; Stoker, Bram; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft.

  Further Reading

  Botting, Fred. 2008. Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions. London: Routledge.

  Bourgault du Coudray, Chantal. 2006. The Curse of the Werewolf: Fantasy, Horror and the Beast Within. London: I. B. Tauris.

  Bratlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism 1830–1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

  Craft, Christopher. 1984. “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8: 107–133.

  Creed, Barbara. 1993. Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

  Easley, Alexis, and Shannon Scott, eds. 2013. Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction. Kansas City, MO: Valancourt.

  Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

  Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. 2006. “Introduction” to Women and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 1–14. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  Moers, Ellen. 1985. Literary Women: The Great Writers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Mulvey-Roberts, Marie. 2016. “The Female Gothic Body.” In Women and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 106–119. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  Priestley, Chris. 2011. Mister Creecher. London: Bloomsbury.

  Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1986. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen.

  Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1992. Frankenstein. London: Penguin.

  Wisker, Gina. 2016. “Female Vampirism.” In Women and the Gothic, edited by Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, 150–165. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

  GHOST STORIES

  In its strict sense, the ghost story genre includes tales of haunting that rely upon supernatural or unexplained presences to invoke fear, create suspense, and challenge rationality. Intuitively, the ghost story may be considered a literature of terror rather than horror. Full of occluded spaces and unspoken secrets, the mode often relies upon suspense or creeping fear, which are perhaps followed by revelations, to invoke and maintain its
macabre effects. Yet, in a number of examples from the long history of ghost stories that have come to constitute the “classic” tradition, horrific figures are rendered at the corner of the reader’s vision, so to speak. Even the most formalistic of ghost story writers, the influential Cambridge don M. R. James, invokes the horrific, for instance, in the white, obscure apparition that pursues the antiquarian Parkins in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904), or in the dark figure that creeps and steals along the living painting of “The Mezzotint” (1904). Forming a particularly important strand to Victorian, modern, and contemporary Gothic, the short ghost story very rarely explains away the supernatural in its pages, and the malignity that propels the narrative often resonates with readers long after they have finished the tale’s last line. Yet, ghost stories are not merely contained in the short story form, and many of the texts mentioned below are novellas or have film, television, or radio adaptations that are just as powerful as their literary originals.

  The first modern ghost stories may be credited as being published in the German tradition. Perhaps the most famous is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man” (1816). Hoffmann’s story is a horrific tale of doubling that Sigmund Freud would come to draw from in his formulation of the “uncanny” in 1919 when he was particularly intrigued by two of Hoffmann’s central, strange figures: Coppelius and Olympia. A discomforting return of the repressed for Freud, the feeling of the uncanny arises when a sense of the homely is invaded by the unhomely. Purists may not regard “The Sand-man” as the same type of story that we associate with the British ghost story tradition, but the ghost as an unhomely guest within a narrative is a well-established trope, and many of the early ghostly British tales themselves appear within longer host narratives; for instance, Sir Walter Scott’s embedded narrative “Wandering Willie’s Tale” within his Redgauntlet (1824). The ghost story as it came to be recognized as a distinct literary genre in the British tradition dates back to Scott’s short story “The Tapestried Chamber” (1828), which was penned for the Christmas annual The Keepsake for 1829.

  Of course, ghosts are folkloric in origin, and the oral tradition of telling such stories was the genesis of two key texts in the development of horror: those monstrous tales that arose from the retreat of Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori to the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816. After evenings of German ghost story telling, followed by discussions of galvanism between Byron’s guests, Mary Shelley was visited by the monstrous visions of the waking dream that inspired Frankenstein (1818/1831), while the physician John Polidori drew inspiration from Bryon’s own writing to pen “The Vampyre,” the first modern vampire tale. The opening decades of the nineteenth century were just as important to the American tradition of horror. Washington Irving published his “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in 1820. In the years that followed, the ghost story as a genre developed fully alongside the literary magazine cultures of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian periods, as well as resonating with practices of spiritualism investigated by, for instance, the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in London in 1882.

  The exact temporal framing of the ghost story genre’s heyday or high point is disputable—reasonable estimates tend to lie within the period 1840–1930—but, certainly, from the late Victorian period into the mid-twentieth century there was a conscious theorizing of the form in Anglo-American letters, one that engaged with many of the cultural anxieties of the age. In an essay arguing that the ghost story should employ an unexplained supernatural or malign force, Henry James, one of the greatest writers of the ghostly tale, suggests the skill and care—indeed, the literariness—with which the best of these stories have been fashioned. In the “Author’s Preface” to his The Turn of the Screw (1898), James professes his aesthetic preference for rendering what he termed the “withheld glimpse,” a technique that allows readers’ minds to create the horror in a story for themselves: “Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications” (James 2001, 8). For James, readers may be most disturbed by a tale when they furnish it with horrors made complete in their own imaginations.

  Published half a century after Henry James’s “Preface,” a particularly cogent theorization of the ghostly tale is found in the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s preface to a 1952 collection of ghost stories edited by Cynthia Asquith. Bowen, whose most well-read collections of stories include her debut Encounters (1923) and the post–World War II collection The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), contends that the ghost story addresses the unspeakable: that which cannot be uttered without trepidation and fear. As with Henry James, it seems that Bowen takes a typically modernist approach to understanding the ghost story: understatement and aesthetic refinement are privileged over horror in her formulation that “modern” ghost stories should “abjure the over-fantastic and grotesque, operating, instead, through series of happenings whose horror lies in their being just, just out of the true” (cited in Foley 2011). Yet there are modernist writers, such as D. H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, and Edith Wharton, who generate a sense of dread and disease that are close to horror.

  A Timeline of Important Ghost Stories, 1816–1945

  Summer 1816

  Recognized as the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1831) and John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), the famous ghost story competition occurs at the Villa Diodati, Lake Geneva.

  1817

  E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story collection Die Nachtstücke (The Night Pieces) is published in Berlin. It opens with his influential “The Sand-man.”

  1820

  Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” appears in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

  1829

  Sir Walter Scott’s “The Tapestried Chamber” is published in the Christmas annual The Keepsake for 1829.

  1842

  Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mask of the Red Death” (later revised in 1845 as “The Masque of the Red Death”) appears in the May volume of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine.

  1843

  Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is published by Chapman & Hall on December 19 in London.

  1855

  Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” is commissioned by Dickens for the Christmas issue of Household Words.

  1866

  Charles Dickens’s “The Signal-Man” is published in the Christmas number of All the Year Round.

  1872

  J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly is published; it includes M. R. James’s favorite Le Fanu ghost story, “The Familiar.”

  1898

  Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is published in his The Two Magics by the Macmillan Company in New York.

  1904

  M. R. James’s first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, is published, which includes “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.”

  1910

  Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” is first published in The Century Magazine in January.

  1914

  Arthur Machen’s ghostly war story “The Bowmen” is published on September 29.

  1926

  Cynthia Asquith’s The Ghost Book is published. It includes contributions by May Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence. Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood.

  1945

  Elizabeth Bowen’s collection of wartime ghost stories, The Demon Lover, is published.

  Somewhat misguidedly, James once wrote of his distaste for what he termed the “primitive” mindset of those who indulged in the writings of the American master of the Gothic horror short story: Edgar Allan Poe (Gargano 1990). Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), with its bodiless specter, can be considered a ghost story in the strictest of terms. Yet, more generally, when the repressed returns in Poe its nature is intentionally ambiguous. In “The Black Cat” (1843), his gruesome tale of haunting that stag
es the return of the seemingly vanquished, the protagonist of the story is overcome by a dark, psychological force—what he terms in the opening meditation of the story as “the spirit of PERVERSENESS”; in turn, he becomes compelled to mutilate his cat Pluto by gouging out one of its eyes and then hanging the feline from a tree. The narrator soon encounters an uncanny double of Pluto in a tavern: this cat, missing an eye, has a patch of mutable white hair on its chest that soon takes on the shape of a noose. As the narrator tries to murder Pluto’s double with an axe, his wife intervenes, only to be murdered herself. The story’s supernatural element, its claim to being a ghost story, is validated when the vengeful apparition of Pluto’s double reveals the whereabouts of the narrator’s wife to police. By the end of the narrative the law restores order but there is an ambiguous, Gothic remainder left over: just what gave Pluto’s uncanny double its powers of malignity?

  Affirming its intimate relationship with the evolution of the Gothic from the Victorian period onward, the ghost story has also been said to continue the Female Gothic mode: a genre that critics identify as beginning during the Romantic period in novel form. The critic Diana Wallace argues that the ghost story “allowed women writers special kinds of freedom” with which “to offer critiques of male power and sexuality” (Wallace 2004, 57). The more nuanced appropriations of this standard involve “a rewriting of the Gothic elements of the Bluebeard story, especially the figure of the husband” (Wallace 2004, 58). Such an example is found in May Sinclair’s “The Villa Désirée,” which, collected by Cynthia Asquith for her The Ghost Book (1926), includes a paradoxical figure of ghostly monstrosity. Alone in the bedroom of the Villa Désirée, the space in which a murderous calamity had once befallen her husband Louis’s first betrothed, Mildred is visited by a composite and monstrous apparition, “its body . . . unfinished, rudimentary, not quite born” (Sinclair 2006, 438), with a face that gives the impression of absolute horror. In this otherwise restrained ghost story, horror comes to signal the danger posed to independent, feminine identity by patriarchal tyranny.