Horror in the Age of Steam

Tales of Terror in the Victorian Age of Transitions

Carroll Clayton Savant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000349726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Change is terrifying, and rapid change, within a small amount of time, is destabilizing to any culture. England, under the tutelage of Queen Victoria, witnessed precipitous change the likes of which it had not encountered in generations. Wholesale swaths of the economy and the social structure underwent complete recalibration, through the hands of economic progress, industrial innovation, scientific discovery, and social cohesiveness. Faced with such change, Britons had to redefine the concept of work, belief, and even what it meant to be English. Victorians relied on many methods to attempt to release the steam from the anxieties incurred through change, and one of those methods was the horror story of everyday existence during an age of transition. This book is a study of how authors Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë turned to horrifying representations of everyday reality to illustrate the psychological-traumatic terrors of an age of transition

1 “If Ever I Saw Horror in the Human Face, It Was Then”

Victorian Horror and the Terrifying Aesthetic of the Taboo in an Unstable World

Introduction

In Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novella The Haunted and the Haunters, or, The House and the Brain (1857), the narrator investigates the supernatural phenomena that occur in an abandoned and seemingly cursed London manor. In his overnight stay in the mansion, the narrator searches for a logical explanation for the reported hauntings that plague the estate and have left it a desolate ruin. The narrator takes his manservant, F—, with him and demands that his helper remain resolute in his demeanor, regardless of their experiences; however, as night sets in, F— is terrorized by the apparition of an individual who warns him to run, and flee he does.

I had witnessed many very extraordinary phenomena in various parts of the world,—phenomena that would be either totally disbelieved if I stated them, or ascribed to supernatural agencies. Now, my theory is that the supernatural is the impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of Nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant. Therefore, if a ghost rise before me, I have not the right to say, “So, then, the supernatural is possible;” but rather, “So, then, the apparition of a ghost, is, contrary to received opinion, within the laws of Nature,—that is, not supernatural.”

(12)

As the narrator notes, extraordinary, in this case, supernatural, events are inherently naturally occurring events, as moments that are wholly experiential cannot be considered supernatural but can be explained and experienced, physically. In the narrator’s interest in observable facts and reality, and in his willingness to seek a natural cause for all events, Lytton’s character is a product of the Victorian anxieties regarding Nature, belief, faith, and science. Through depicting these concerns plaguing the Victorians, Lytton attempts to create a narrative warning that at once forecasts the high and late Victorian debates over progress while illustrating the paradoxical struggles between upholding tradition and adopting the new theories of the modern and the progressive world. Horrifying tales were not new to the Victorians, with the revival of the Gothic and the creation of the sensation novel, but in narratives depicting horror, nineteenth-century authors expanded on gothic tales and infused them with forms of psychological monstrosity, terrifyingly brutal naturalism, and the mysterious unexplained to comment on the insecurities Britons faced in an age of transitions.

The study of literary horror is a relatively recent discipline that has emerged throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as a subset of the academic investigation of the gothic tale.¹ From its inception, the gothic novel was a reactionary genre, railing against the confines of Enlightenment thought or expressing the fears and extravagances of the French Revolution.² Historically, though, studies that investigate the Gothic have focused primarily on identifying and cataloging the elements considered Gothic, all in an effort to apply such criteria to other works as a means of building a coherent genre and rescuing the form from the dustbin of early critical dismissal.³ In an introductory survey of the genre, The Literature of Terror (1996), David Punter writes that the gothic novel that emerged throughout the eighteenth century and reemerged at the dawn of the nineteenth century was a manifestation of gothic sentimentality, which was a combination of an extension of the realist novel, the expression of sentimental literature, the emotional exploitation of the nineteenth-century graveyard poets, and, perhaps most importantly, a narrative that differentiated the barbaric past from the current historical moment (20). Encyclopedic in approach, Punter’s survey functions just as that: a survey of the history of gothic literature, identifying the tropes that define literary gothicism and tracing them throughout the history of British and American literature. Others who have followed in Punter’s footsteps, such as Clive Bloom, in Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (2010), have attempted to illustrate the development of the gothic novel throughout history, cataloging and noting its characteristic tropes and applying those devices throughout literary history. In this chapter, I wish to build on Punter and Bloom’s approaches by exploring the aesthetic and philosophical tenets of the genre as a means of studying the evolution from literary gothicism to literary horror. In my analysis of gothic tropes, I will study how the characteristics of a work of gothic fiction (i.e., remote settings, wild landscapes, demonic older villains, imprisonment, mistaken identities, supernatural events, etc.) expressed the fears and anxieties of the society that produced them and that in expanding upon such conventions, horror novelists were not only exploiting an already-popular genre to make social and political commentaries but were likewise creating a new genre of their own, the horror story. The gothic tale, as Eve Sedgwick notes, is a narrative of the taboo and “[a]‌t its simplest the unspeakable appears on almost every page: ‘unutterable horror’: ‘unspeakable’ or ‘unutterable’ are the intensifying adjectives of choice in these novels. At a broader level, the novels deal with things that are naturalistically difficult to talk about” (14). As Sedgwick’s comments suggest, the gothic novel illustrates narratives that are either forbidden to talk about or that simply cannot be told, since their topics breach social or political barriers. Essentially, if we are to take Sedgwick’s assertions as a wholesale attempt to not only define and categorize the genre but to define the parameters of its social work, then we see, as Fred Botting states, that the Gothic is implicitly a culturally historical text. He writes that “[t]he past with which gothic writing engages and which it constructs is shaped by the changing times in which it is composed: the definition of Enlightenment and reason … requires carefully constructed antitheses, the obscurity of figures of feudal darkness and barbarism providing the negative against which it can assume positive value” (3). From its very construction, the gothic narrative attempted to interact with the large social debates of its day, pointing out the fears and terrors associated with cultural and historical change. Throughout this chapter, and throughout the course of this book, I wish to argue that the transformation of the Gothic into a novel of horrors, particularly throughout the Victorian period, served as a means of confronting and explaining the drastic transformation that nineteenth-century Britons witnessed through the hands of technological innovation, through the rise of scientific thought, and through the tsunami of social recalibration, as gender roles, duties, and expectations evolved to meet the demands of a new age.

Similar to the academic inquiry of the Gothic, the study of horror has traditionally been preoccupied with examining the tenets and characteristics through which to classify the form. Meanwhile, horror scholars have also been preoccupied in looking at audience reactions to depictions of the horrific and investigating the underlying paradoxical aesthetic appeal of the genre as a whole, all as a means to develop a working definition of horror and to create an authentically academic discipline that is distinctively separate from the Gothic. As the field emerges, however, horror scholars turn primarily to the study of film and its depiction of horror as a means to explore and create an academic discipline. Scholars past, however, have attempted to explore the aesthetic characteristics of horror, and it is the work of figures such as Noël Carroll, whose The Philosophy of Horror (1990), which functions as a philosophical and aesthetic guidepost by which to study the genre, that we have attempted to coalesce an academic field of inquiry. As Carroll notes, the genre has one goal: to elicit reactions of disgust and displeasure from viewers and readers alike. Horror is “designed to elicit a certain kind of affect … and that [m]‌embers of the horror genre will be identified as narratives and/or images … predicated on raising the affect of horror in audiences” (15). Collectively, those who have followed in Carroll’s enquiry have attempted to solidify a discipline that at once studies a unique artistic form while they explore the cultural ramifications for the genre. For the most part, however, such studies are limited to the domain of popular culture, privileging examinations that study the effects of horror films on mass audiences, relatively ignoring the interdisciplinary connection between depictions of the terrifying in film and illustrations of the horrific in literature. Overall, their goal is to shed light on the principal foundations of horror and to differentiate it from the Gothic. Daryl Jones states that “[h]orror brings us face to face with our own flesh, our corporeality, and with the mutability and malleability of that flesh, its softness, its porousness or leakiness, its vulnerability, its appalling potential for pain, its capacity for metamorphosis or decay, its stinkiness and putridity, its transience and mortality” (14). Horror, just like the Gothic, is an implicitly social genre, which reacts to and comments on the conditions of the culture that produced it; it functions as a mirror, showing us the fragility of our own bodies and the delicacy of our own cultural structures. In essence, horror reminds us of our own mortality, of our own potentially innate badness, and even the limits to which we can be pushed by cultural or historical events. Throughout this book, I wish to examine just that: how horror novels, specifically, how Victorian novels that have not been canonically relegated to the domain of the horrific or of the Gothic, can illustrate the horror of everyday life, particularly in moments of great historical and social transition. The goal of such an examination is to bridge the academic disciplines of Gothic studies and Victorian studies and fuse them with the rapidly emerging field of horror studies. What I wish to accomplish in such a study is to bring the field of horror studies into the domain of literary criticism by examining the transition from literary gothicism to literary horror. Throughout the course of this book, I will show that in illustrating the insecurities of the Victorian period regarding science, belief, and even the ambiguities of an increasingly fluid social structure, nineteenth-century authors give voice to the anxieties of an unstable age.

In a self-assessment of his collected literary works, in The Art of the Novel (1907), Henry James derides the nineteenth-century trend of long, complex narratives. Venomously, he asks “… what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary artistically mean? We have heard it maintained … that such things are ‘superior to art’; but we understand least of all what they may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us” (83). The Victorian novel was a messy hodge-podge of styles and genres that often overlapped and spoke specifically to the concerns and anxieties of the age. Formulaically devoted to the cult of realism, Victorian novelists sought to authentically portray the lived experience of the period. In an attempt to classify “What’s Victorian about the Victorian Novel,” George Levine argues that the nineteenth-century British novel sought to capture a representation of English society, portraying the dominant culture of Englishness while simultaneously illustrating the lives of the British subalterns and minority populations (14–15). As a generic form, the Victorian novel at once defines the characteristics of narrative fiction while paradoxically transgressing those tropes and genres. Much has been said about the various subgenres of Victorian fiction that altered and changed the construction of the form (i.e., the industrial narrative, the sensation novel, the satirical farce, or the fin de siècle decadent narrative), and each scholar who attempts to study the various iterations of the nineteenth-century novel explores the genre’s formal qualities within the context of its social work.⁴

If the Victorian novel was wholly dedicated to realistically portraying authentic lived experience throughout nineteenth-century England, depictions of the supernatural or the fantastic were seemingly at odds with the cult of realism. An offshoot of examinations into the form of the Victorian novel are inquiries into the Victorian Gothic. Scholars who examine the horrific in the nineteenth-century British novel often trace the genre’s conventional characteristics to compare them to the eighteenth-century gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis, focusing on supernatural narratives or novels that illustrate the monstrosity in humanity. In her survey of the gothic elements that could be found in the sensation novels that emerged in England in the 1860s, Lyn Pykett argues that authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, and Wilkie Collins turned to gothic tropes to tell modern-day stories of horror and fear that focused on life in nineteenth-century England (rather than life in far-off country, set in a long-ago time) (see Pykett 192–211). What I wish to do throughout this chapter is to expand upon such conventional arguments to trace the evolution of gothic tenets into an aesthetic of the horrific to argue that depictions of the terrifying were a method for Victorian authors to confront the anxieties of a changing world. Previous studies that have taken such an approach, such as Aaron Worth’s “Arthur Machen and the Horrors of Deep History” (2012), have done so by only taking a slice of those anxieties and have attempted to show that tales of the supernatural are a means for Victorian authors to allay fears of the new and of the novel (215–227). Commonly, however, such examinations privilege the study of previously classified gothic narratives, e.g., The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Dracula (1897), Machen’s weird tales (1890s to 1920s), Bulwer-Lytton’s novels of mystery and supernaturalism (1820s to 1870s), and even some of H. G. Wells’ science-fiction narratives to focus only on their gothic elements. Such studies are reductive, since they focus either solely on comparing the novels’ gothic formulas or on examining the genre’s social references through a very narrow perspective, as in Gail Houston’s investigation of the Victorian Gothic as a means of looking at the nineteenth-century banking crises that destabilized the nineteenth-century British economy. If, as Levine argued, the Victorian novel was a panoramic view of life in nineteenth-century England, our scholarship of the Victorian novel should be just as all-encompassing; therefore, what I intend to examine throughout this book, is how, at the hands of the Victorians, the gothic narrative evolved into a horror genre that articulated a plurality of anxieties and the ennui of everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain.⁵ Though previous studies of Victorian literature often include examinations of the Victorian Gothic, there has yet to be an attempt at making a holistic foray into the exploration of nineteenth-century depictions of the horrific. Through a comparative analysis of my own, I wish to explore how the tropes of literary gothicism changed throughout the nineteenth century to include traits of the horror genre.

The methodology of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, it is a theoretical and philosophical analysis of the aesthetics of literary gothicism and the tenets of horror; on the other hand, it is an historical inquiry. Through examining the philosophical impetus for the gothic aesthetic, seen primarily through works by Hegel, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Ruskin, Pater, and Freud, I hope to show that literary gothicism was not just rooted in the philosophical and aesthetic theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but likewise was a consciously historical and cultural phenomenon. Similarly, in comparing the philosophy of literary gothicism to the psychological and philosophical tenets of horror, seen specifically in the works of Darwin, Swinburne, Lovecraft, Adorno, Kristeva, Carroll, and Cohen, I hope to show that while a school of traditional literary scholarship has emerged in the discipline of Gothic studies, we can likewise create an academic discipline for the study of literary horror. Secondarily, in this chapter, I will apply these theoretical principles to an historical investigation of Victorian England by examining the philosophical and psychological effects of the various transitions England underwent during the period, economically, technologically, socially, and scientifically, to show that the very definitive parameters and characteristics we have for discussing the period are often the very transitions and alterations that worried the Victorians themselves. In these methods, I hope to construct a new approach for examining Victorian literature, Victorian history, and, perhaps most importantly, create an academic method through which to discuss the aesthetics of the horrific.

Far, Far Away, In a Castle Darkly: Theories of the Gothic

The study of horror is often prefaced by historical examinations of gothicism, and in this study, I wish to follow suit; however, in this chapter, I wish to build on the explorations into the Gothic as a means to compare the elements of horror that have been implicitly in place within the gothic idiom since i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “If Ever I Saw Horror in the Human Face, It Was Then”: Victorian Horror and the Terrifying Aesthetic of the Taboo in an Unstable World
• 2 “The Monstrous Serpents of Smoke”: The Hellscape of the Industrial Factory in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton and North and South and Victorian Fears of an Industrializing Economy
• 3 Greeks, Freaks, and Raving Lunatics: The Monstrous World of Science in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
• 4 Hysterical Angels and Loud-Mouthed Hussies: Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the Transformation of Gendered Voices in Victorian England
• References
• Index