The Late Victorian Gothic

Mental Science, the Uncanny, and Scenes of Writing

Hilary Grimes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317026259
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Examining the automatic writing of the spiritualist séances, discursive technologies like the telegraph and the photograph, various genres and late nineteenth-century mental science, this book shows the failure of writers' attempts to use technology as a way of translating the supernatural at the fin de siècle. Hilary Grimes shows that both new technology and explorations into the ghostly aspects of the mind made agency problematic. When notions of agency are suspended, Grimes argues, authorship itself becomes uncanny. Grimes's study is distinct in both recognizing and crossing strict boundaries to suggest that Gothic literature itself resists categorization, not only between literary periods, but also between genres. Treating a wide range of authors - Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Du Maurier, Vernon Lee, Mary Louisa Molesworth, Sarah Grand, and George Paston - Grimes shows how fin-de-siècle works negotiate themes associated with the Victorian and Modernist periods such as psychical research, mass marketing, and new technologies. With particular attention to texts that are not placed within the Gothic genre, but which nevertheless conceal Gothic themes, The Late Victorian Gothic demonstrates that the end of the nineteenth century produced a Gothicism specific to the period.

Chapter 1 (Ghost)Writing Henry James: Mental Science, Spiritualism, and Uncanny Technologies of Writing at the Fin de Siècle

DOI: 10.4324/9781315556314-1

Introduction

[T]he human mind […] was largely an abstraction. Its normal adult traits were recognized. A sort of sunlit terrace was exhibited on which it took exercise. But where that terrace stopped, the mind stopped. […] But of late years the terrace has been overrun by romantic improvers, and to pass to their work is like going from classic to Gothic architecture, where few outlines are pure and where uncouth forms lurk in the shadows. A mass of mental phenomena are now seen in the shrubbery beyond the parapet. Fantastic, ignoble, hardly human, or frankly non-human are some of the new candidates for psychological description. The menagerie and the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital, have been made to deliver up their material. The world of mind is shown as something infinitely more complex than was suspected; and whatever beauties it may still possess, it has lost at any rate the beauty of academic neatness. ¹

In his commemoration lecture on F.W.H. Myers, the distinguished researcher in mental science and founding member and past president of the SPR, William James maintains that the mind had long been studied in a factual way, as orderly and linear. James offers the metaphor of a well-groomed terrace and asserts that, with the formation of the SPR in 1882 and especially with the influence of Myers, studies in psychology at the end of the century turned not only to what is on the terrace, but to what lies beyond it: what exists beyond and beneath the charted depths of the mind?

William James, Henry James’s brother, was a philosopher, a psychologist, and president of the SPR from 1894 to 1895. The fact that William, one of the most widely read psychologists of the nineteenth century, writes about the transformation of the terrace from garden to jungle using literary language is suggestive of the ways in which the literature and science at the end of the Victorian period were feeding into one another. That the terrace is overrun by ‘romantic improvers’ implies that the field of mental science has been invaded by novelists whose imaginative ‘material’ seeps into psychological studies and blurs distinctions between scientific fact and fiction. His account of the classical studies into the mind implies that, as in the classical period, earlier researches emphasized established analysis and ‘academic neatness’. Researches by the fin de siècle, however, were, like the Gothic literature he evokes, revelling in the ‘menagerie and the madhouse’. ² Although the ‘beauty of academic neatness’ is lost, James suggests there is something delightful, if frightening, in an inchoate version of the mind.

Significantly, the emergence of James’s ‘Gothic architecture’ of mental science at the end of the century coincides with a revival of Gothic literature – Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–1891), and Dracula (1897) are just some of the more popular examples of this trend. The Gothic studies of the mind and Gothic literature were not just overlapping, however, but were also in negotiation with one another, informing and inspiring each other. Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, for example, had been influenced by F.W.H. Myers’s theories on subliminal consciousness. Upon reading the novel, Myers had written Stevenson a letter expressing his admiration, but also giving advice on how Stevenson could make ‘medical and psychological improvements’. ³ Mental scientists and writers of Gothic fiction were also negotiating their shared anxieties about the stability of identity. They, and as this chapter will show, in particular Henry James, were haunted by the possibility that selfhood was itself a collection of illusional material.

While William James suggests that the ‘Gothic architecture’ of mental science can no longer be contained within the conventional rubrics of psychological research, his brother Henry is anxious about the potential loss of ‘academic neatness’ in his writing. Henry employs an architectural metaphor in his discussion of the ‘house of fiction’:

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million […] every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable […] by the need of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may not open […]. The spreading field, the human scene, is the ‘choice of subject’; the pierced aperture … is the ‘literary form’; but they are […] as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher – without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you he has been conscious. ⁴

Henry James’s ‘house of fiction’ is a haunted house, with ghostly guests lurking at every window. The structure also evokes William’s overrun terrace, a Gothic mansion that is architecturally incoherent, unwieldy, and rambling, filled with shadows, spectral presences, and incongruous parts, straining away from the ‘academic neatness’ of a conventional house. The metaphor of the ‘house of fiction’ suggests that fiction itself cannot be regulated and has little unity, but rather a million vantage points, and that even the act of writing is a vexed, haunted endeavour. Indeed, the house of fiction seems to be haunted by James himself, whose consciousness is the watcher in the windows.

James’s haunted ‘house of fiction’ and his brother’s ‘Gothic architecture’ are apt symbols for anxieties about identity and writing at the fin de siècle. ⁵ Writers like Henry James and Vernon Lee (whom I will discuss in depth in Chapter 5) and mental scientists like Myers wanted to confine their work to tidy blueprints, but were instead operating within an unchartable Gothic landscape, overrun with ghosts. The connection at the end of the century between writing and ghostliness, and the close ties between science and supernaturalism, rise out of the contemporary discourse on mental science, spiritualism, and discursive technologies. Automatic writers at a spiritualist séance, for example, would transcribe the words of the dead, succumbing to a trance-like state and writing whatever the spirits relayed. ⁶ But they also raised questions about the nature of agency in scenes of writing: Should ghosts be given credit for published works, or the mediums who transcribed them? ⁷ How did automatic writing change the notion of influence and control for authors like James and Lee?

Studies by the SPR on the activities of mediums, and particularly automatic writing, implied that it was the subconscious mind, rather than external entities, which was responsible for the spiritualistic phenomena. ⁸ Myers wrote about the subject in ‘Automatic Writing or the Rationale of the Planchette’ (1885), arguing that automatic writing is the result of unconscious cerebration: writing could be physical evidence for activity in the brain of which a person is completely unaware. ⁹ In the field of mental science, studies on a ‘secondary self’ within indicated that it was not only the séance that was haunted but also, disturbingly, the mind.

Automatic writing in the Victorian period referred not only to spiritualism and the emerging science of mind, but also to discursive technologies like the phonograph (1877), the typewriter (c. 1868), and the telegraph machine (1838). Significantly, manifestations during spiritualist séances would follow new innovations in technology, suggesting that contrivances designed for clear and easy communication had been appropriated for the mediated form of communication between this world and the next. For example, when the Morse code was introduced in the mid- to late 1830s, spirits rapped in Morse, and with the invention of the telephone, disembodied voices at séances became the vogue. ¹⁰ While Lisa Gitelman’s Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines discusses the ways in which writing machines radically refashion writing itself, I want to examine how technologies of writing, in particular the typewriter and the telegraph, alter the content of what is written or the mindset of the writer. ¹¹ Friedrich Kittler’s argument that identity fragments because of writing technologies is useful here – what happens to James, for example, when he begins to use the typewriter to create his work (and furthermore, when he employs an amanuensis to do the typing)? ¹²

In an examination of Henry James’s ‘The Private Life’, this chapter addresses the faltering attempts of writers and mental science alike to police the boundaries of identity and map the mind. Close readings of James’s ‘In the Cage’ and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Wireless’ suggest that the technological innovations that were themselves writing machines contributed to the development of an uncannily multiplied selfhood. This chapter also examines Henry James’s desire and inability to find ‘academic neatness’ within his ‘house of fiction’, looking in particular at James’s anxieties about his writing when it reaches the reading public. Who owns the ‘house of fiction’? How does celebrity become a haunting figure in James’s short stories? For James, in spite of himself, all scenes of writing are haunted ones.

Authorship and the Uncanny: James's ‘The Private Life’

Henry James’s ‘The Private Life’ disturbingly indicates that authorship demands that the writer must suffer a separation into two distinct but dependent identities, the public self and the private self. ¹³ Perhaps James wants to imply that a public life is perversely necessary in order to preserve the private one: does the public self ironically make the private self more significant? In ‘The Private Life’ writing has an uncanny effect on selfhood. In ‘The Uncanny’, Freud suggests that the uncanny is the fear we feel when something ‘is familiar and agreeable [and] concealed and kept out of sight’ (pp. 224–5). It is within this conception of the uncanny that we find James’s Clare Vawdrey, the writer who is almost shockingly consistent, who ‘never talked about himself, and liked one subject […] precisely as much as another’ (p. 191), and whose ‘opinions were sound and second-rate’ (p. 192); he is, in effect, boring. ¹⁴ And yet Vawdrey’s creative outpourings are stunningly beautiful and exciting: he is ‘the greatest […] of our literary glories’ (p. 189). That he is dull in public and a brilliant writer in private is not, however, what makes him so singular; what makes him so singular is that Vawdrey is, in fact, double. He has a bland, reliable, public self and a private genius self. The division between the writer and the public self seems an unequal one, however, since the writer seems to have consumed the personality of the public self.

‘The Private Life’ reveals that the writer is haunted by a ghostly other self who is both himself and someone else, making authorship within the text slippery: Who is holding the pen and controlling the words that flow from it? Who owns the work when it becomes part of the literary marketplace? In asking these questions, James’s story is negotiating with contemporary concerns about authorship, particularly in relation to automatic writing – if writers acted as mediums for ghosts, how did that alter writing itself and the makeup of identity? The scene in which the narrator finds Vawdrey writing alone in the dark evokes the spiritualist séances in which the medium would sit transcribing while spirits manifested themselves outside. Like a medium taking down the words of ghosts, Vawdrey is in a ‘fit’ of ‘abstraction’, so possessed by the act of writing that he devotes all of himself to it: in turn, his public self becomes a materialized spirit, only the ghost of a personality (p. 206). While in the field of mental science automatic writing highlighted that the mind could no longer be contained within the tidy boundaries of ‘academic neatness’, in ‘The Private Life’ creative writing also denies writers this precision and clarity. Instead, the act of writing transforms the writer into an unfathomable, ghostly, and multiplied presence.

In ‘The Private Life’ writing destabilizes boundaries of identity to such an extent that selfhood itself is negotiated by literary language, particularly in the case of Lord Mellifont’s public identity. His dress, manners, and all his actions are the ‘topic’ of discussion, the ‘subject’ (p. 196) gracing everyone’s lips, and they set the ‘tone’ (p. 197) for every occasion. In fact, he seems to write popular society, for without his presence ‘it [society] would scarcely have had a vocabulary’ (p. 133). Just as Vawdrey writes himself in two, Mellifont’s ‘writing’ has transformative power so that social trends are reinvented. Mellifont not only rewrites social identity, shaping moods and styles in the fashionable world, he is also written himself. He is constantly compared to an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 (Ghost)Writing Henry James: Mental Science, Spiritualism, and Uncanny Technologies of Writing at the Fin de Siècle
• 2 Sensitive to the Invisible: Photography and the Supernatural in the Holmes Stories, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Spiritualism, and Francis Galton’s Composite Portraits
• 3 Identities and Powers in Flux:Mesmerism, Hypnotism, and George Du Maurier’s Trilby
• 4 Ghostwomen, Ghostwriting
• 5 Case Study: Vernon Lee, Aesthetics, and the Supernatural
• 6 Balancing on Supernatural Wires: The Figure of the New Woman Writer in Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book and George Paston’s A Writer of Books
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index