by Matt Cardin
Hannah Priest
See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; The Grotesque; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; Kafka, Franz; “The Last Feast of Harlequin”; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Buzwell, Greg. “Gothic Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Mutating Bodies and Disturbed Minds.” The British Library. Accessed July 8, 2016. http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-fiction-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siecle.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2001. Metamorphosis and Identity. New York: Zone Books.
Cruz, Ronald Allan Lopez. 2012. “Mutations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror Is Biological Horror.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 40, no. 4: 160–168.
Haddawy, Husain, trans. 1990. The Arabian Nights. New York and London: Norton.
Ovid. 1986. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paul-Choudhury, Sumit. 2013. “Ice-Age Art Hints at Birth of Modern Mind.” New Scientist, February 13. Accessed March 12, 2016. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729042-300-ice-age-art-hints-at-birth-of-modern-mind/.
TRILBY
Trilby is an illustrated melodramatic novel by George du Maurier, a well-known cartoonist for Punch and other British periodicals. Published as a serial in 1894 and in volume form in 1895, it is largely set in Bohemian Paris.
Trilby O’Ferrall, the daughter of an Irish father and a French mother, models for a group of artistic British gentlemen who literally or nominally represent the remaining three nations of the United Kingdom. The most innocent of these, Little Billee, becomes enamored of the hybrid bilingual heroine, even in the knowledge that, to his respectable family at least, her occupations as a laundry maid and nude model render her little better than a prostitute. The mutual romance, though, is disrupted not by this consciousness but through the intervention of an Eastern European and polylingual Jew, Svengali, who hypnotizes Trilby under the pretense of curing her recurrent ocular neuralgia. While her pain is relieved, Svengali has gained control over her mind and is able to eclipse her everyday character with a “second” Trilby who is compliant with his commands and who remembers nothing of her other life. Under Svengali’s tutelage Trilby, who is normally tone deaf, becomes a celebrated concert vocalist—her stage name of Madame Svengali intimating that the Jew’s control may well extend to a possession of more than just her voice. Svengali humiliates Trilby’s former admirers, Little Billee in particular, by having her ignore them while she is entranced, though when he dies during a concert his command over her is apparently negated. Reconciled with the British artists and Little Billee’s family, Trilby is, however, a broken and confused personality, recalling her distant past as a laundress but not her recent stage career. Though she endures a long physical as well as mental decline, her end comes suddenly when a portrait of Svengali is delivered to her and its eyes command her to a final, fatal crescendo.
Trilby is a significant work for a number of reasons. Immediately, its interest in hypnotism draws upon the revived popularity of that technique in Parisian medical circles at the Victorian fin de siècle. The clinical work of J. M. Charcot, notably, was well publicized in Britain, though folk memories of stage mesmerism and rumors of sexual interference conducted under the guise of hypnotic séance remained as an implicit counterpart to any suggestion that hypnotism might ever be deployed as an analgesic or therapeutic tool. The double personality of Trilby, moreover, is suggestive of the doppelgänger, and du Maurier’s novel ought to be regarded as an influence upon Stoker’s Dracula (1897), given the facial resemblance that unites Svengali and Count Dracula, and their specific interest in gaining hypnotic ascendancy over (nominally) British women. Du Maurier’s anti-Semitism reflects the rhetoric of his work’s heyday, a period of pogroms and Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to the crowded streets of London.
Trilby was dramatized in the United States by Paul Potter in 1895 and first staged in London in the same year. It has also been adapted for film, perhaps most memorably in the 1931 American film Svengali, starring John Barrymore as the eponymous villain.
William Hughes
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dracula.
Further Reading
Berman, Avis. 1993. “George du Maurier’s Trilby Whipped up a Worldwide Storm.” Smithsonian 24, no. 9: 110.
Grossman, Jonathan H. 1996. “An Essay on Du Maurier’s Trilby.” Studies in the Novel 28.4 (Winter): 525–542. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. 2016. Detroit, MI: Gale.
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
The Turn of the Screw is a novella by American writer Henry James, first published in 1898. It is now considered by many to be one of the finest examples of the ghost story ever written.
The main story is surrounded by a frame narrative in the style of the classic Gothic tale. Ghost stories are being told by the fireside at a house party; one guest tells a tale about a child being frightened by a ghost, then another guest offers a ghost story that, since it involves two children instead of one, amplifies the horror of the first guest’s tale. In other words, he will give that horror an additional “turn of the screw.”
The guest first speaks about a governess he once knew. She then takes over the narration in her own voice, although her name is never given. The governess is hired by a wealthy man to look after his young niece and nephew, to whom he is indifferent. Their parents have died, and he is unmarried and unwilling to take care of the children personally. The governess goes to live with the children at Bly, her employer’s country estate. They live there together with the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Very quickly the governess comes to the conclusion that Bly is haunted by the ghosts of Peter Quint, the former groundskeeper, and of the previous governess, Miss Jessel. Quint and Jessel were apparently having an affair. Quint died by violence under mysterious circumstances, while it appears that Miss Jessel might have taken her own life, possibly to escape the shame of pregnancy outside marriage.
[I find The Turn of the Screw] to be the most powerful, the most nerve-shattering ghost story I have ever read. . . . When I told the author exactly how I felt while reading it, and thanked him for giving me sensations that I thought no author could give me at my age, he said that he was made happy by my testimony. “For,” said he, “I meant to scare the whole world with that story; and you had precisely the emotion that I hoped to arouse in everybody.”
—William Lyon Phelps. 1916. The Advance of the English Novel.
New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company. 323–324.
The Turn of the Screw is such a deliberate, powerful, and horribly successful study of the magic of evil, of the subtle influence over human hearts and minds of the sin with which this world is accursed, as our language has not produced since Stevenson wrote his Jekyll and Hyde tale. . . . Mr. James’s story is perhaps as allegorical as Stevenson’s, but the allegory is not so clear. . . . These children are accursed, or all but damned, and are shown to have daily, almost hourly, communication with lost souls, the souls that formerly inhabited the bodies of a vicious governess and her paramour, who, in the flesh, began the degradation of their victims. . . . The strongest and most affecting argument against sin we have lately encountered in literature (without forcing any didactic purpose upon the reader) it is nevertheless free from the slightest hint of grossness.
—From “Magic of Evil and Love” (an anonymous review of
The Turn of the Screw). 1898. The New York Times Saturday
Review of Books and Art, October 15: 681–682.
Matt Cardin
The governess believes that Peter Quint, in particular, is exerting a corrupting influence over the children. The boy, Miles, has recently been expelled from school for reasons that aren’t clear; all that emerges is that he was speaking to the other boys in an unacceptable way. As the story unfolds, the governess comes to suspect that the spirits of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are trying to po
ssess the children in order to renew their sexual relationship through them. The governess is determined to protect the children and reasons that, if she can compel them to admit that they are seeing Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, she can break the sinister influence of the ghosts. When the governess tries to compel the girl, Flora, to confess, she becomes distraught and seems to experience a hysterical episode that removes her from the story. Later, when the governess pressures Miles to a similar confession, he becomes so overwrought that he dies, possibly of heart failure. It may be that the ghost of Peter Quint has somehow claimed Miles as his victim, or it could be that the governess’s emotional coercion of Miles, and what might be his fear of her rather than Quint, causes his death.
The narrative throws considerable doubt on the governess’s interpretation of events. It is possible that Miles’s behavior at school was only an expression of innocent high spirits. He might be imitating Peter Quint based solely on his memory of the living man, and there is no indication of any sexual activity between the children. So, The Turn of the Screw could be the story of a heroic governess fighting off a supernatural menace, which is the way she sees things, or it could be the story of a delusional governess inventing a terrible crisis when nothing is really wrong, simply to establish her own importance and to impress her employer. James plants a few indications in the story of the governess that suggest she unconsciously wishes to marry her employer and become the lady of the house. Clearly, the governess tends to dominate Mrs. Grose as if she were not essentially a servant of the household herself. The governess also only sees Miss Jessel after learning about her from Mrs. Grose, suggesting that she is embroidering her initial story.
James does not exclude the possibility of a supernatural influence at Bly. The governess sees a strange man at Bly very shortly after she first arrives at the estate. She describes this man’s appearance in detail to Mrs. Grose, who recognizes him as Peter Quint, a man that the governess knew nothing about at the time. This is the one aspect of the story that cannot plausibly be accounted for, since Peter Quint is not an average-looking man, whose appearance might be hit upon by coincidence. The governess says “he’s like nobody” and goes on to give this description of the man she saw:
He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange—awfully; but I only know clearly that they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor. (James 2009, 47)
The persistent ambiguity about the events at Bly is never resolved. While it is possible the governess might have run across Peter Quint or his description somewhere, that information is not included in the text. Also, the governess is originally from a small village and is not likely to have spent any time in the vicinity of Bly.
Franco-Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov’s classic book-length study of supernatural fiction, entitled The Fantastic, derives its definition of “fantastic” fiction almost entirely from a study of The Turn of the Screw. Todorov finds very few examples of what he would call the “pure” fantastic stories, and, because of its carefully constructed uncertainty about the existence of the supernatural, The Turn of the Screw is, for him, the most perfect expression of the “pure” fantastic tale.
The Turn of the Screw has been the subject of numerous adaptations in a variety of media. Benjamin Britten, the famous English composer, transformed the story into an opera. It was dramatized for the stage under the title The Innocents, debuting in 1950, and the play was adapted for a film of the same name in 1961. In 1972, director Michael Winner released The Nightcomers, a film meant to tell the story of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel before their deaths, starring Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beacham.
Michael Cisco
See also: Frame Story; James, Henry; Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Heller, Terry. 1989. The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision. Boston: Twayne.
James, Henry. 2009. The Turn of the Screw. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Smith, Allan L. 1993. “A Word Kept Back in The Turn of the Screw.” In Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 47–63. London: Pluto Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Wilson, Edmund. 1976. “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” In The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, 88–132. New York: Noonday.
U
THE UNCANNY
The uncanny is a concept used to describe something—an object, a place, an atmosphere—that is both strange and familiar at the same time. The overlapping of the known with the unknown generates an unsettling feeling for the reader (or viewer) that can range from discomfort to fear. The sense of what is “real” and “normal” is slightly unsettled by the presence of jarring elements in the narration, and it is uncertain, for both the reader/viewer and the characters, whether these elements have mundane, supernatural, or imaginative causes: a degree of ambiguity has to be maintained for the uncanny to exist. Borrowed from psychoanalysis, the concept has been widely used by literary criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to analyze any type of fiction that plays on this ambiguous feeling of unease, with Gothic fiction, horror literature, and weird fiction being examples. Instances of the uncanny include déjà-vu, time-loops, repetitions, doubles, twins, doppelgängers, ghosts, moving paintings, never-ending staircases, and living dolls. The sense of the uncanny can be compared to the “odd,” the “weird,” and the “incongruous.”
One of the most well-known treatises on the uncanny is Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, of which the English “uncanny” is a loose translation. The term unheimliche is a combination in German of the adjective heimliche—derived from Heime, or “home” in English—and the prefix un. Heimliche is used to refer to the house, the family, and everyday life, but also to what is intimate as well as concealed. As Freud observes, the concept of Heimliche is twofold, with the home a space of both comfort and secrecy. The negative prefix un- makes unheimliche an imperfect opposite of Heimliche: it describes a feeling of estrangement rooted within the familiar that is both threatening and alluring for the subject that experiences it.
Freud’s essay was a response to previous theories of the uncanny, particularly that of the German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in his pioneering essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906). Freud draws extensively from Jentsch’s theory that the uncanny emerges from indecipherable circumstances and that fiction is the most efficient device to create such conditions. Most of Freud’s response is dedicated to the intricate links between psychoanalysis and literature, expanding on the reading Jentsch offers of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sand-man” (1817), which features childhood monsters, doppelgängers, and a living automata called Olympia. Freud agrees with Jentsch’s opinion that Hoffmann’s story is a landmark of uncanny fiction, but the conclusions he draws are slightly different: while Jentsch sees the living doll Olympia as the locus of the uncanny in the text, Freud believes that the character of the Sandman, a creature that steals children’s eyes at night to feed them to its own offspring, is the central figure. Freud reads the haunting effects that the monster has on the main character as fictionalized versions of the psychoanalytical concepts of repression, repetition compulsion, and anxiety neurosis: repressed childhood fears and conflicts, when brought back to the surface by unexpected elements, trigger a feeling of anxiety that Freud identifies as the experience of the uncanny.
Freud’s theory was highly influential both within and without the re
alm of psychoanalysis. It paved the way for Jacques Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage in human psychological development, and it inspired psychoanalytical feminist philosophers such as Helen Cixous and Julia Kristeva to question the relationship between the “self” and the “other” in the cognitive space. It was also used widely in literary criticism, especially in attempts to define the genres of Gothic and horror fiction. Scholars such as Leslie Fiedler and David Punter consider it a key concept of the Gothic genre, tracing occurrences of the uncanny in foundational Gothic texts such as Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798). Later instances include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories such as “William Wilson,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat,” Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” (1926), and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925).
