Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  1848

  Anne publishes The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in June. Three months later, Branwell dies, possibly of tuberculosis or chronic bronchitis, aggravated by drink and/or drugs. Three months later, Emily dies of tuberculosis and complications from a cold she caught at Patrick’s funeral.

  1849

  Anne dies of tuberculosis in May. Five months later, Charlotte publishes Shirley.

  1853

  Charlotte publishes Villette.

  1855

  Charlotte dies of tuberculosis and/or extreme morning sickness.

  1861

  Patrick Brontë dies at the age of 84, having never remarried, and having outlived all of his children.

  Matt Cardin

  Of the three “Bell Brothers” novels, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were immediately successful, selling very well and receiving so much attention that the Brontës found it impossible to avoid revealing their true identities. These two novels, though quite different from each other, both represent very significant developments for Gothic literature. Agnes Grey was less well received, and it was Anne Brontë’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), that proved to be the more successful of her works.

  Jane Eyre tells the story of an orphan girl, the title character, who becomes relatively independent and takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. There is a strong attraction between Jane and her employer, Mr. Edward Rochester, but she refuses to become involved with him on an unequal footing. Rochester is a darkly charismatic Gothic character who conceals a terrible secret: his own interracial marriage and the fact that his wife, now insane, is confined to the attic of his estate. What Jane initially takes for signs of a possible haunting are in fact the sounds and actions of this mad wife. Much of the supernatural is invoked, only to be explained away, in the course of Jane Eyre, but at one point Jane does appear to receive a psychic message, a cry for help, from the far-off Rochester. Jane Eyre’s independence and strength of character, her refusal to abandon herself either for pleasure, by running away with Rochester and becoming his mistress, or for the sake of duty, by marrying her austere missionary cousin, St. John, establishes her as a significant feminist character in English literature.

  Charlotte Brontë’s next novel, Shirley (1849), is centered on two female characters, Shirley, who is strong willed and financially independent, and Caroline, who is self-effacing and meekly submissive. Later in her life, Charlotte Brontë published an autobiographical novel, Villette (1853). During the early 1840s, she had worked at a school in Belgium, and there she fell in love with the director of the school, who was already married. Villette tells a modified version of this story. This novel is less strongly Gothic in flavor, although it does include a scene in which the protagonist, Lucy Snowe, sees what she believes to be the ghost of a nun.

  Of the three sisters, Charlotte was the one who came closest to fulfilling the public role of the contemporary novelist, attending literary events in London and meeting other prominent authors, notably William Makepeace Thackeray. Emily, on the other hand, shunned publicity, avoided people, and remained for the most part close to home. Anne was not much in demand until her second novel was published, by which time her health had already begun to fail.

  Wuthering Heights (1847), published a few months after Jane Eyre, recounts the story of two Yorkshire families over several generations, centered on the doomed love of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, an orphan discovered and adopted by Catherine’s father. Heathcliff develops into a brooding and occasionally sinister character, largely as a result of Catherine’s decision to marry the elegant Edgar Linton instead of him. In a sense, aspects of character that Charlotte imbued into Rochester are divided into two characters by Emily. Edgar acquires the aristocratic finish and status, while Heathcliff is given the passion and the pride. Supernatural elements are slightly stronger in Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff seems to be haunted by visions of Catherine after her death, and the ghostly couple may appear on the moors. The narrator of the overall narrative encounters the ghost of Catherine before any of the story has been revealed to him, which is arguably the most unequivocal example of a supernatural event in the novel. Wuthering Heights also makes use of nonsupernatural Gothic elements, such as the struggle for the inheritance of property, the association of weather and landscape with human emotions, and the extensive use of stories within stories. Where Jane Eyre is retold by Jane herself, Wuthering Heights is a story told by a stranger, relayed by him from a trusted old family retainer.

  Anne’s Agnes Grey is the most directly autobiographical of the first “Bell” novels, telling the tale of a young woman who goes to work as a governess for a wealthy family in order to prove herself capable of supporting her own family. In both Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gothic attributes are much less obvious than in Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights; in both of Anne Brontë’s novels, the most recognizably Gothic feature is the morally bankrupt wealthy or aristocratic family, and the image of the country estate as fertile ground for the cultivation of selfishness and secret vice.

  Taken together, the Brontës are unusual in that they focus their attention on country life with barely a glance toward London, which looms so large in other works of nineteenth-century English fiction. As outsiders from the English countryside, who did not feel or respect the need to adopt a common or conventional perspective uncritically, they were Romantic in that they insisted on their own point of view. While William Wordsworth and the poets of the English Lake District were also emphatic about the validity of their rural point of view as a commentary on an increasingly alienated and urbanized English society, the Brontës still seemed to regard themselves as outsiders, and the horror theme of “outsideness” is strong with them. Their female characters are as morally centered as any Gothic heroines, but Agnes Grey, Catherine Earnshaw, and Jane Eyre are neither naïve nor weak. The intrepid hero of the Gothic novel is entirely absent from these novels, and, while the villains are still present, they are developed with a new degree of understanding and psychological care. The Gothic villain may be sympathetic, within limits, but with the Brontës there is a stronger sense that the darker attributes of the male characters may not be entirely unknown to the female characters as well. In particular a fierce pride and defiance of convention emerge in the Brontës’ novels, a clear sign of the influence of romanticism.

  The poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) was one of the most important Romantic figures for the Brontës, as indeed he was for the literary world at large, and many critics regard him as the model for both Rochester and Heathcliff. Byron was notorious for flouting social and moral conventions; a handsome and athletic man, he was in many ways like a modern pop star in his own time. His poetic works, which included Don Juan, Manfred, and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and which made ample use of Gothic imagery, were extremely popular. Nor was his use as a model for literary characters confined to the Brontës alone; he was a close friend of the gifted poet Percy Shelley and his wife Mary, the author of Frankenstein (published in 1818), and the character of Victor Frankenstein seems to have blended attributes of both Percy Shelley and Byron. Another friend of Byron’s, Dr. John Polidori, wrote one of the earlier examples of vampire literature, simply titled “The Vampyre,” and the character of the vampire, Lord Ruthven, was clearly modeled on Byron.

  Byron may be taken to exemplify what romanticism meant, in good measure, for the Brontës: an exhilarating, but dangerous, liberation from conventional ideas of morality, coupled with a more psychologically sophisticated understanding of character. The mysterious, largely unexplained “evil” of the older Gothic tale disappears, and instead the Brontës present us with characters who may do good for less than virtuous motives, and who may do evil through being overzealous in the pursuit of virtue. Their skepticism about moral absolutes, at least among human beings, does not cause them to dismiss the Gothic as Jane Austen did, but to look to the Gothic for ways to express a stormy and often obscure idea of human passi
ons and motivations, the mysterious problem of the will, which cannot be perfectly controlled by reason. While their female protagonists are clearly valorized, these novels have no purely exemplary characters or morally pure role models; instead, characters are morally complex, formed in a mixture of moral and psychological thinking. It may be that the Byronic model was the key for all three of the Brontës, enabling them to address grim themes and more violent passions.

  While the novels of the Brontës all build toward conventional endings involving marriage, all of their works are marked by pessimism about the possibility of lasting happiness and doubts about the value of mere contentment. Jane Eyre is able to marry Rochester only after he is maimed and nearly killed in a fire, while the marriages of the main characters in Anne’s novels only come after they have resigned all hope of achieving happiness. The marriages in Wuthering Heights come with dire repercussions, and only the final marriage of Hareton and the young Cathy seems to promise anything like a peaceful reconciliation.

  The influence of the Brontë sisters is remarkable. Not all popular works of the late 1840s went on to enduring fame, but theirs did. Wuthering Heights has been adapted for film and television numerous times and has appeared on the stage both in play and in operatic form. Jane Eyre has been adapted for film even more often and has also been presented on television and the stage. Anne Brontë’s works have also been dramatized, albeit less frequently. The fictional stories of the Brontës have been retold from the perspectives of other characters, sequels to their novels have been written, and both the Brontës themselves and their characters have entered popular culture. Their most important contribution to English literature might have been their forthright boldness in setting down and publicizing their stories, their franker treatment of the inequities and hypocrisies of English society, their use of sexual themes, their criticism of the institution of marriage, their unconventional piety, and their opinion of the domination of English society by men. Their contribution to horror literature was nothing less than an elevation of the psychological sophistication of the Gothic character, the introduction of a new kind of heroine, one who is virtuous, but conflicted, more active and passionate than her eighteenth-century predecessors. In the strong women of later horror fiction, characters like Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, and Catherine Earnshaw continue to be reflected.

  Michael Cisco

  See also: Byron, Lord; Byronic Hero; Gothic Hero/Villain.

  Further Reading

  Gaskell, Elizabeth. [1857] 1997. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. New York: Penguin.

  Losano, Antonia. 2002. “The Brontë Sisters: Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.” In British Writers: Retrospective Supplement 1, edited by Jay Parini, 49–62. Detroit, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

  Reef, Catherine. 2012. The Brontë Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. New York: Clarion Books.

  Shulevitz, Judith. 2016. “The Brontës’ Secret.” The Atlantic (June): http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/the-brontes-secret/480726.

  BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN (1771–1810)

  Charles Brockden Brown was an American novelist and historian whose accomplishments made him one of America’s most important literary figures. As a novelist he wrote mainly in the Gothic tradition, and his work influenced other major writers in the same genre, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

  Late in Brown’s Gothic novel Wieland, the narrator, Clara, reflects on the uncanny occurrences that have unfolded, especially the hearing of disembodied voices, which have led her brother, Wieland, to murder his family in the belief that it is God’s will. Clara, who is intensely intellectual, finds her thoughts leading her in dark directions:

  Ideas thronged into my mind which I was unable to disjoin or to regulate. I reflected that this madness, if madness it were, had affected Pleyel and myself as well as Wieland. Pleyel had heard a mysterious voice. I had seen and heard. A form had showed itself to me as well as to Wieland. . . . What was my security against influences equally terrific and equally irresistable?

  It would be vain to attempt to describe the state of mind which this idea produced. I wondered at the change which a moment had affected in my brother’s condition. Now was I stupified with ten-fold wonder in contemplating myself. Was I not likewise transformed from rational and human into a creature of nameless and fearful attributes? Was I not transported to the brink of the same abyss? Ere a new day should come, my hands might be embrued in blood, and my remaining life be consigned to a dungeon and chains.

  . . . Some times I conceived the apparition to be more than human. I had no grounds on which to build a disbelief. I could not deny faith to the evidence of my religion; the testimony of men was loud and unanimous: both these concurred to persuade me that evil spirits existed, and that their energy was frequently exerted in the system of the world. (218–220)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Brown, Charles Brockden. 1798. Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale. New York: Printed by T. & J. Swords, for H. Caritat.

  Brown was born into a Quaker family on January 17, 1771. His family intended their son to become a lawyer, and to accomplish this they sent him to a Quaker school from 1781 to 1787. After six years of reading law, though, he turned to other interests and published his first collection of essays, entitled The Rhapsodist, in a local magazine in 1789. Subsequently, he moved to New York to pursue other interests. There he became associated with the Friendly Club, a “study club,” which included such luminaries as Elihu Hubbard Smith and William Dunlap and a number of literary ladies. These intellectuals steered him into the world of imaginative literature. Brief sketches and introductory notes on Brown mention that he was the first professional writer in the colonies and the first American writer to garner an international reputation. At various times, some have designated him as either the “Father of American Romance” or the “Father of the American Gothic.” Between 1798 and 1801, Brown published his best-known novels: Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799), Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly (1799), Clara Howard (1801), and Jane Talbot (1801). Shortly thereafter, he entered into a partnership with his brothers in an export business, which failed in 1806. The demands of business notwithstanding, Brown continued his literary endeavors by editing The Monthly Magazine and American Review and The Literary Magazine and American Register. He died in 1810, apparently of tuberculosis.

  The general consensus is that Brown’s best novels are those allied with the Gothic. Although most scholars hold that the author was a slovenly stylist, they also assert that he was a “flawed genius,” and that Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly are worthy contributions to the Gothic genre. Undeniably, Wieland, or The Transformation stands as his best novel, horror or otherwise. Employing a female narrator, Brown relates the history of the Wieland family as it is plagued by religious freneticism and mental aberration. The family patriarch dies as a result of spontaneous combustion; his unbridled zeal may well have led to his fiery end. The younger Wieland manifests both of these tendencies, and they lead him to murder his wife and children. Arthur Mervyn explores the terrors of physical illness in the form of yellow fever, which scourged the environs of Philadelphia in 1793. Brown’s treatment of this epidemic looks ahead to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” In Edgar Huntly, Brown explores the mysterious world of somnambulism and the dangers of living on the fringes of the wilderness.

  In all of his horror fiction, Brown excels in his work with landscapes. On the one hand, he is fairly conventional in his Gothic settings. Brown, though, Americanizes it. In both Wieland and Edgar Huntly, he describes carefully and thoroughly the Pennsylvania region. The former novel employs the urban “wilderness” in Philadelphia, while the latter uses the Lehigh Valley.

  The Godwin Circle (the group of radical thinkers gathered around the English political philosopher and novelist William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley) and other international luminaries praised Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic fiction. In additi
on to Poe and Hawthorne, Brown also influenced Washington Irving and Margaret Fuller. In the later nineteenth century, interest in Brown’s work waned. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, scholars revived the almost forgotten novelist, and Brown has carved his niche in the world of the literature anthology and the academic conference.

  E. Kate Stewart

  See also: Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Irving, Washington; Poe, Edgar Allan.

  Further Reading

  Axelrod, Alan. 1983. Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale. Austin: University of Texas Press.

  Brown, Charles Brockden. 1926. Wieland, or the Transformation, ed. Fred Lewis Pattee. New York: Harcourt Brace.

  Grabo, Norman S. 1981. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

  Kafer, Peter. 2004. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2011. Charles Brockden Brown. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

  BULWER-LYTTON, EDWARD (1803–1873)

  Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, author of several influential works of occult fiction, was born May 25, 1803, in London. He added a hyphenated Lytton to his name after inheriting his mother’s estates in 1838 and became Lord Lytton in 1866. Although he is chiefly remembered today for his horror story “The Haunted and the Haunters,” his popularity as a novelist in his own day rivaled that of Charles Dickens, influencing everything from clothing styles to the development of Theosophy. He is remembered outside the genre for his historical novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834); for the phrases “the pen is mightier than the sword” and “the great unwashed,” and for the perhaps unjustifiably maligned opening line “It was a dark and stormy night,” which inspired a whimsical annual contest of bad opening lines. He died in 1873.