by Matt Cardin
The ghost story need not only be cautionary in theme; it relies, too, upon nuanced psychological and temporal techniques to unnerve its reader. Many of the most popular ghost stories are associated with the festive period: a time at which the ghosts of the past visit to intervene in the present. A prominent example in this regard, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), now predominantly remembered for the redemption of its central miserly character Ebenezer Scrooge, contains, too, a series of disturbing passages that culminate in death’s apparition as a ghost from the future (to cite Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, “the time is out of joint” in Dickens’s famous tale). Perhaps the most unnerving of Dickens’s short ghost stories is “The Signal-Man” (1866). In this uncanny tale, a horrific apparition appears to an isolated signalman only to lure him to his death. The BBC’s adaptation of this story, with a screenplay provided by Andrew Davies and direction by Lawrence Gordon Clark, is one of the highlights of the corporation’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. Other adaptations in this series include tales originally penned by M. R. James and his important nineteenth-century precursor, writing in the Irish tradition, Sheridan Le Fanu. The continued adaptation of these classics of the genre suggests that their themes still resonate with contemporary anxieties surrounding the return of the repressed.
Indeed, since the 1950s, many modern, enduring ghost stories have been added to the literary canon, and these often invite film and television adaptations. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) continues and updates the Female Gothic; Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983) returns to the Gothic tradition of M. R. James; and Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger (2009) draws from a range of nineteenth-century American, Victorian, and Edwardian ghostly standards in its charting of the fall of the aristocratic Ayres family in Clement Attlee’s post–World War II England. American modern and contemporary horror is replete, too, with powerful stories in which ghostliness, or the return of the dead, is intertwined with the psychological dissolution of characters, including Stephen King’s The Shining (1977), Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park (2005). Thus, even if we may regard the ghost story as a genre that was most welcomed by readerships of the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, its endurance and influence upon modern Gothic and horror literature remains significant and its possibilities barely exhausted.
Matt Foley
See also: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Part One, Horror through History: Horror in the Ancient World; Part Three, Reference Entries: “The Demon Lover”; Ghost Story; Hartley, L. P.; The Haunted House or Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; House of Leaves; In a Glass Darkly; James, M. R.; Poe, Edgar Allan; “The Sand-man”; The Shining; Spiritualism; The Uncanny; Wharton, Edith; The Woman in Black; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”
Further Reading
Briggs, Julia. 1977. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber and Faber.
Foley, Matt. 2011. “Bowen’s Thoughts on the Ghost Story.” The Gothic Imagination at University of Stirling, January 5. http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/bowens-thoughts-on-the-ghost-story.
Gargano, James. 1990. “Henry James and the Question of Poe’s Maturity.” In Poe and His Times: The Artist and His Milieu, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, 247–255. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society. http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19901x.htm.
Hay, Simon. 2011. A History of the Modern British Ghost Story. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
James, Henry. 2001. “Author’s Preface to The Turn of the Screw.” In Ghost Stories of Henry James, edited by Martin Scofield, 3–10. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions.
“Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Ghost Story Challenge.” 2014. British Library, May 15. http://www.bl.uk/teaching-resources/shelley-frankenstein-the-ghost-story-challenge.
Sinclair, May. [1926] 2006. “The Villa Désirée.” In H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural, edited by Stephen Jones, 427–442. New York: Pegasus Books.
Smith, Andrew. 2010. The Ghost Story, 1840–1920: A Cultural History. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Wallace, Diana. 2004. “Uncanny Stories: The Ghost Story as Female Gothic.” Gothic Studies 6.1: 57–68.
THE GOTHIC LITERARY TRADITION
Horror fiction, as we understand it today, would be unthinkable without the genesis of a Gothic literary tradition in the eighteenth century and its development throughout the nineteenth and twentieth. In fact, after the cinematic successes of Universal’s horror films in the 1930s and Hammer Horror in the 1950s and 1960s, the most relevant of which were adaptations of the Gothic novels Dracula (1897) and Frankenstein (1818), the term “Gothic” is often used to designate work that would be more easily defined as “horror.” Even then, a distinction is often traced between the Gothic, perceived as a subtle and suggestive literary form connected to the uncanny and the sublime, and horror, understood as its more graphic, visceral, explicit, and shocking cousin. This also means that horror is often devalued as a descriptive term in favor of the more sober and literary Gothic. It is possible, however, to distinguish between the two and to see the Gothic as an artistic mode that conjures up a series of recognizable tropes, characters, settings, images, and stock situations, and horror as constituting a solid genre, that is, a type of artistic manifestation marked much less clearly by its constituents than by the overall emotion it attempts to convey, namely, fear in its various manifestations (shock, dread, suspense, and disgust, among others). This terminological difficulty is, however, proof of the extent to which the Gothic literary tradition and horror fiction overlap.
The Gothic is roughly agreed to begin with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), although certain aspects of William Shakespeare’s plays, revenge tragedies, and graveyard poetry have been identified as clear precursors by critics. A purely historicist view would insist that the Gothic ends in 1820 with the rather late Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin, but the more popular view is that the Gothic is best understood as an artistic mode that has been present in literature throughout the last 250 years and which has adapted to various societal changes to maintain its relevance, and has further hybridized with genres like science fiction or noir. Walpole’s novel initially pretended to pass for an English translation by the fictional William Marshall of a 1529 manuscript by one Onuphrio Muralto, canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto, printed in Naples but found in the north of England. It was only after the success the novel experienced that Walpole felt daring enough to include his name on the second edition and explain his intention of “blend[ing] the two types of romance, the ancient and the modern” (Walpole 2014, 9), that is, the fantasy of the chivalric romance with the social accuracy of the novel of sensibility. This second edition of 1765, more importantly, bore a significant subtitle: A Gothic Story. Many of the trappings of the Gothic, literal and figurative, are already present in this early novel, from the underground passages and the lugubrious medieval castle to the presence of the ghost of the past and the persecution of the damsel in distress. The reception of the novel would sour, however, after the fake manuscript ploy was revealed, for there was no follow-up Gothic novel for more than a decade until The Champion of Virtue (1777) was published anonymously, first by Clara Reeve and subsequently under the new title of The Old English Baron.
It would be in the hands of several female writers—Reeve, but also Sophia and Harriet Lee, Regina Maria Roche, Eliza Parsons, and Charlotte Turner Smith—that the Gothic would develop throughout the late eighteenth century, sometimes incorporating heavy didacticism and moralistic messages. No writer contributed more to the development of the Gothic than Ann Radcliffe, who, with the publication of her fourth novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), became the best paid novelist of her time. She is seen as the writer who popularized the use of “the explained supernatural” in her own brand of Got
hic fiction, where seemingly supernatural phenomena eventually would be revealed to have been tricks, hoaxes, or coincidences. It was precisely this preference for a technique that would dispel horrors, rather than hone in on them, that has, retrospectively, been understood to differentiate her writing (taken to be a token of Female Gothic) from that of more visceral and shocking authors like Matthew Lewis, whose The Monk (1796) was a convoluted tale of the demonic seduction of a priest interspersed with gory episodes that include a bleeding apparition, a decomposing child, and a trampled nun. Lewis’s novel, which caused a massive uproar upon publication and had to be purged of its most sacrilegious passages, infused new blood into the Gothic and is a key book in the so-called German School of Terror, influenced by German romances. Its notorious shock ethic means we could rethink The Monk as a first example of the horror novel, but always in retrospect, for, as Dale Townshend has noted, horror “was yet to be generically formulated as such, and was unthinkable outside of the broader ‘Gothic’ mode in literature in which it first took shape” (Townshend 2016, 20).
This is not to say that there were no contemporary debates around horror and terror. In fact, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are precisely when these debates began to germinate, if not coalesce. Works by Anna Laetitia Aikin, James Beattie, and Nathan Drake began to sound the possible pleasures of horror, as well as its workings, especially after the publication of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). This treatise included a lengthy discussion of the sources of terror (and thus, of the sublime, the highest expression of which is astonishment), and included sections dedicated to “obscurity,” “vastness,” or “pain.” Its ideas would hold sway, and the sublime has become both a tool through which to understand eighteenth-century Gothic and a theoretical concept worth studying in its own right. Radcliffe herself, in an excerpt from her posthumous novel Gaston de Blondeville (1826) that was published in New Monthly Magazine that same year, attempted a first distinction between terror and horror, a distinction premised on affect (the emotional effects of the literary piece) that, it would seem, has partly evolved into the twenty-first-century misconception that the Gothic should be connected to the eerie and the uncanny, and horror with the shocking and explicit.
Major Gothic Novels: A Timeline
1764
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
1778
The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve (first published anonymously as The Champion of Virtue in 1777)
1786
Vathek by William Thomas Beckford
1794
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
1796
The Monk by Matthew Lewis
1798
Wieland, or The Transformation by Charles Brockden Brown
1818
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
1820
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin
1845
The Mysteries of London by George W. M. Reynolds
1847
Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë; Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
1859
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
1886
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
1897
Dracula by Bram Stoker; The Beetle by Richard Marsh
1910
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
1938
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
1954
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
1976
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
1979
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
1983
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill
1987
Beloved by Toni Morrison
1995
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson
2000
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
2001
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
2004
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
2005
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
2009
The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Matt Cardin and Xavier Aldana Reyes
After the famous ghost story challenge at the Villa Diodati yielded two of the most significant and long-living of horror monsters, Frankenstein’s creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the aristocratic vampire in John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), the Gothic would travel in two directions in the mid-to-late nineteenth century: inward, in order to explore the dark recesses of the mind—especially in Edgar Allan Poe’s paranoid fictions and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)—and toward urban centers, especially in penny dreadfuls like George W. M. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1845) and James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampire (1847), cheap serial publications that included lurid topics and sometimes supernatural phenomena. The Gothic would hybridize with the suspense story in the sensation novel, the best examples of which are Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), and would be further shaped by the Decadent movement (especially Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans) and by fears directly connected to degeneration (H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast,” 1890) and the fall of the British Empire (Richard Marsh, H. Rider Haggard). By the end of the nineteenth century, Gothic fiction had largely shed its medieval trappings and adopted modern ones, to the point where we might want to question why novels like The Beetle (1897) are referred to as Gothic and not as straightforward horror. However, horror had yet to coalesce into a distinct genre. H. P. Lovecraft’s study Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927), where recent “weird” (another interstitial, slippery term) writers like William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, or Arthur Machen are presented as part of a longer literary tradition reaching back to Walpole, would be the first to connect the various strands of the Gothic–horror continuum, albeit with the main purpose of claiming the value of the weird, and not of theorizing horror as a category.
A precedent was set in 1937 with the development of the “H for Horrific” certificate, used to identify the films that followed Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein, and which was intended to inform audiences about the dangerous nature of that material. It is safe to say that horror developed much more readily as a cinematic category and was subsequently applied to certain types of fiction, even when some of these, as was the case with a number of the short stories collected in The Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959–1989), would have been referred to previously as Gothic or weird. The banning of horror comics in the 1950s, again on the grounds that these texts could have deleterious effects on the young, brought the debates more readily onto the publishing industry, and by the 1980s, it is possible to speak of a burgeoning and “booming” horror market, with designated genre spaces in bookshops and publishers like Tor developing horror lines. The success throughout the late 1970s and 1980s of horror auteurs like Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Ramsey Campbell, as well as extreme fiction (“splatterpunk”), served to entrench the dividing line between the Gothic (Anne Rice, Angela Carter) and horror, even when a number of “splatterpunk” (extreme horror) novels would seemingly return to well-known Gothic monsters like the vampire.
Where exactly the Gothic and horror may lie within the modern and contemporary period has been the subject of much debate. Gothic studies has been steadily institutionalized in academia through a dedicated stream of publications since the early 1980s, but especially in the 1990s, which saw the founding of the International Gothic Association and the publication, in 1999, of the first issue of the specialist journal Gothic Studies. This interest in th
e Gothic has permeated education, to the point where the Gothic is an option in British A-levels (high school examinations), it is present in most degrees in Britain and the United States, and it can be further studied through specialist master’s degrees. The Gothic has also experienced a public resurgence, with the British Film Institute and the British Library running Gothic-themed seasons and exhibitions (2013–2014 and 2014–2015, respectively). All this investment in the legitimization of the Gothic has naturally led to a concomitant reevaluation of horror fiction (and film), and to studies on its history, such as Darryl Jones’s Horror: A Thematic History in Film and Fiction (2002), Horror Fiction: An Introduction (2005), and the edited collection Horror: A Literary History (2016), as well as S. T. Joshi’s Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (2014), which includes a number of horror texts.
For all that, the difference between the Gothic and horror is still less than clear. It would seem that we must either extricate the Gothic (as an aesthetic and thematic marker) from horror (as an emotive and affective one), or else celebrate their overlaps.
