In its themes and methods Gothic fiction exploits the fear of forces beyond human understanding. Compare the ways in which at least two Gothic texts express and explore this fear.
A. D. Bradley
An element of the supernatural, or forces beyond human understanding, pervades most Gothic texts to a greater or lesser extent. Indeed it is from the mysterious and
the unknown that Gothic authors derive much of the fear that is experienced by the reader. One of ways in which this fear has been expressed and exploited throughout the Gothic tradition draws on superstition – the world of witches and haunted ruins – to elicit fear, and plays on the horror of external villains like blood-sucking vampires as a very real and physical threat. While Dracula by Bram Stoker provides an excellent example of this method, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein can be seen as the precursor to a different approach to the fear of the unknown.
The ‘classic’ Gothic texts written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century are united in their sinister and strange atmosphere, which is largely achieved by an unfamiliar setting. The castle, coupled with a fascination for the past, was to become a defining feature of the Gothic novel, shortly after the genre came into being in 1765 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. A malevolent mood is certainly set in Dracula’s castle, a ‘massive’ and ‘dark’ dwelling, inhospitable to men – both inside and out. Although Shelly sets out to ‘curdle the blood, and quicken the heart’ of her reader, she does not opt to set her tale in the archetypal gothic castle or dungeon. Instead Victor Frankenstein’s world is a seemingly material and empirical one.
Yet an element of the unexplained (and therefore the gothic) is provided through the young Frankenstein’s interests and choice of reading; by having him read the works of famous alchemists such as the German Cornelius Agrippa, who is widely associated with the occult, the author distances Frankenstein from the traditional, more orthodox aspects of science. Just as the alchemists strove to find an elixir of life that would cure all diseases, Frankenstein’s intention in creating a superhuman is “to renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption”. This preoccupation with death and “corruption” is more familiar Gothic territory and, in a return the macabre setting of Dracula and other works, Frankenstein frequents a graveyard to collect parts of dead bodies for his experiments.
In this way both Shelly and Stoker confront the ultimate unknown: death. Of course there are religious overtones here. While authors often exploit the potential fear of anything that disturbs the natural run of the world, the creation of life and what comes after death are particular taboos.
The image of the “Bloofer Lady” performing evil acts under Dracula’s influence echoes the power struggle between God and Satan in John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, in which man is the pawn. Similarly, in peppering her text with allusions to Paradise Lost, Shelly invites for biblical comparison. It is easy to see how Frankenstein adopts the traditional role of God, namely that of creator of life, leaving the monster to play the part of Adam, inevitably falling from grace.
Yet the monster weakens this comparison when he likens himself to the devil:
“I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel”.
In addition, the interpretation of Frankenstein as a godlike figure is inconsistent with the link to the myth of Prometheus, who rebels against the gods to steal fire, established by Shelly in the subtitle: “The Modern Prometheus”. Dracula, who has been labelled by critics as an “anti-Christ”, also usurps God in his own way.
It is deeply ironic, for example, that Dr. Seward should erroneously think that Renfield is sending up a prayer to heaven when he hears him cry out to his “Master” (by which he means Count Dracula). Stoker further juxtaposes the idea of the good God with an evil imitation through the image of blood; whereas Christ gave his blood for the people through his crucifixion, Dracula takes blood from the people to prolong his own life. Thus Stoker depicts a very clearly-defined good pitted against an equally distinct but fearsomely dissimilar evil, while Shelly’s portray of the religious side to the unknown is steeped in ambiguity.
Shelly’s innovation in inspiring fear in her reader lies in her realisation that a more chilling terror is created by the darker side of the human psyche than by passages of apparitions and haunted castles. In this way Frankenstein can be viewed as an antecedent to later Victorian Gothic fiction, such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and, to a lesser extent, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with their internal portrayal of the darkness of the mind. Drawing on science rather than superstition, the fear of forces beyond human understanding is thus developed with a psychological emphasis.
It might be difficult for the modern reader to imagine a world without the myth of Frankenstein and his monster. Indeed with the publication of her book in 1818 Shelly created what was to become a ubiquitous icon of horror, rivalled in terms of reproduction and fame perhaps only by Stoker’s vampire.
So while the majority of modern readers will come to Frankenstein with many preconceptions, it was the very daring and inventive avant-garde quality of the plot that would have captured and shocked the audience of the day. As Stevenson also realised, including one aspect of the supernatural amidst a comparatively realistic background can form a potent Gothic novel that is neither outlandish as regards plot nor clichéd in characterisation.
Stoker describes his villains with an emphasis on the inhumane which augments the fear of these “creatures” by intensifying the “peculiarity” pervading them. With his ‘peculiarly sharp white teeth’ and ‘hairs in the centre of the palm”, much is made of the Count’s repellent “marked physiognomy”. The lady-vampires, though manifestly more attractive than their master are also depicted mysteriously and the unusual is once again stressed by the fact that “they threw no shadow on the floor”. Renfield is also effectively de-humanised by the simile of grovelling “like a dog” which equates him to an animal.
Conversely, Shelly depicts Frankenstein and the monster as fallible and, arguably, all the more human for it. That critics dispute which of the two figures is the protagonist and which the antagonist is indicative of a more subtle approach to characterisation. Indeed one interpretation of the novel centres on the idea of the double, as was exemplified by Stevenson’s use of a doppelganger in creating Dr Henry Jekyll, an ostensibly respectable man of great scientific merit and the wanton and brutal Edward Hyde.
Other critics point to Frankenstein’s reference to the monster as “my own spirit” as evidence of the idea that they might be doubles. This is somewhat tenuous a connection as, unlike Jekyll and Hyde, they are separate beings. However, more interesting perhaps, Frankenstein may have created some sort of alter ego in the monster, whether intentionally or not, whose actions could be viewed as the fulfilment of his master’s desires.
I think both Frankenstein in its theme of the ruthless pursuit of knowledge and Dracula, in terms of the struggle between the civilised West and the superstition and folklore of the peasants of Transylvania, must be examined in the context of the Industrial Revolution. In Britain the hitherto unquestioned thoughts and beliefs of orthodox society were being challenged by the onslaught of bizarre-looking technology and increasingly poor living conditions in polluted cities, all in the name of progress. Mary Shelly embraces this brave new world and exploits its potential fear, posing the question of what might be possible if such powerful inventions were to fall into the wrong hands.
At a time when so much was being invented and reformed, it follows that much lay beyond human understating of the status quo. Stoker approaches this theme in a slightly different way, taking his novel along a path more closely resembling the heyday of Gothic fiction than Shelly’s comparatively modern approach; Van Helsing establishes the limitation of science when he shrewdly observes “that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain”. This establishes the empirically inexplicable as a strong force in Dracula.
To conclude, Gothic writers break down barriers and, to this end, much of the horror and suspense of the genre is derived from the reader’s uncertainty and fear of what lies behind the conventional and the familiar. Bram Stoker continues the Gothic tradition of ghoulish creatures and threatening landscapes as he plays on the fear of his reader in Dracula. Mary Shelly, though writing before Stoker, appears to develop the fear of forces beyond human understanding in a novel way, locating it in the mind as she terrifies her reader with idea of the monster within.
Wednesday, 16 November 2005