Abstract
As Victor Sage argues in Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition, Christian theology conditions Western culture, providing simultaneously a common frame of reference and a series of interpretative distinctions through which political as well as sectarian difference may be proclaimed.1 The horror novel, Sage suggests, is but one amongst many cultural forms shaped by the language, imagery and assumptions of a Christian consciousness. In British and Anglo-Irish Gothic, this consciousness is popularly constructed as being specifically Protestant, although recent criticism of the Anglo-Irish Gothic has convincingly argued that the political identities vested in sectarian difference are frequently problematic.2 This latter is an important critical distinction, though it may be further argued that Gothic fiction articulates simultaneously a subtle sense of ontological unease, the implications of which are mobilised at a more fundamental level than that of sectarian difference.
The rhetoric of the horror novel is demonstrably theological in character.
Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (1988)
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Notes
Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) p. xvi.
See, for example, Colin Graham’s reading of Julian Moynahan in ‘A Late Politics of Irish Gothic: Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud (1909)’, Bruce Stewart, ed., That Other World 2 vols (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1998), Vol. 2, pp. 30–9 at pp. 30–1.
See Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996) pp. 7, 8. Gothic tales, of course, are not invariably bound by such closures. Stoker’s short story ‘The Judge’s House’ (1891; reprinted in Dracula’s Guest) constitutes, as Antonio Ballasteros Gonzáles suggests, ‘a deterministic and negative victory of the forces of evil over those of good’. The Gothic, in such circumstances, arguably draws on the energy of the Godwinian novel of persecution rather than the comfortable fiction of the moral tale. See ‘Portraits, Rats and Other Dangerous Things’, in Stewart, ed., That Other World, Vol. 2, pp. 18–29 at p. 27.
For example, C.G. Raible, ‘Dracula: Christian Heretic’, Christian Century, 96 (1979) 103–4 at p. 103.
Such possibilities are acknowledged in Stoker’s 1908 essay ‘The Censorship of Fiction’, the rhetoric of which is primarily directed against authors who knowingly exploit the ‘sex impulses’ of a prurient readership. Stoker concedes, however, that ‘In all things of which suggestion is a part there is a possible element of evil.’ See Bram Stoker, ‘The Censorship of Fiction’, The Nineteenth Century and After, LXIV (1908) 479–87 at p. 482.
Consider, for example, Van Helsing’s despairing speech after the revelation that Mrs Westenra has removed the garlic wreath from her daughter’s neck: Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 134 (Hereafter D).
Bram Stoker, Under the Sunset (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1882) p. 7 (Hereafter UTS). The name Fid-Def has an obvious Protestant resonance, being an abbreviation of Henry VIII’s title ‘Defender of the Faith’, formalised in 1544 after his break with the Church of Rome. It is used on British coinage as a royal title to the present day.
Phyllis Roth, Bram Stoker (Boston: Twayne, 1982) p. 64.
Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996) p. 139.
The vigil was a popular subject in the genre painting of the period, particularly in its association with the purity of Sir Galahad. See D.N. Mancoff, The Return of King Arthur (London: Pavilion, 1995) pp. 123–4.
R. Newton, The Giants and How to Fight Them (London: S.W. Partridge, n.d.) P. 5.
Bram Stoker, ‘Crooken Sands’, reprinted in Dracula’s Guest (Dingle: Brandon, 1990) pp. 145–6.
Charlotte Stoker’s memoirs are quoted at length in Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula (London: Foulsham, 1962) pp. 25–32. Cf. Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne, The Un-Dead (London: Constable, 1997) pp. 44–5.
See, for example, Haining and Tremayne, The Un-Dead, p. 45; David Skal, Hollywood Gothic (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) pp. 20–1.
J.S. Burdon-Sanderson, ‘Cholera: Its Cause and Prevention’, Contemporary Review, 48 (1885) 183.
Dr John Snow’s investigation into the Soho cholera outbreak of 1854 linked the epidemic to a public pump, contaminated with the faeces of the earliest victims, from which most of those affected drew their drinking water. See Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The Ghost Disease (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) pp. 160–1. Thomas Willis observed similar conditions in the North Dublin water supply in 1845. See J.F. Fleetwood, The History of Medicine in Ireland (Dublin: Skellig, 1983) p. 137.
J. M’Gregor-Robertson, The Household Physician (London: Blackie, n.d.) pp. 188–9.
Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula, p. 29; Christopher Wills, Plagues (London: HarperCollins, 1996) pp. 116–17. Wills reproduces a mid-century cartoon in which the shrouded figure of ‘Cholera’ hovers over the New York skyline while a sentinel labelled ‘Science’ slumbers at his post. The attitude and dress of the giant strongly resembles the figure in Fitzgerald’s illustration.
R.W. Dale, Christian Doctrine [1894] (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1903) p. 198.
In a commentary on the ‘Thirty-Nine Articles’ by which the doctrine of the Anglican Church (including the Church of Ireland) is popularly defined, G.F. Maclear and W.W. Williams argue that the Reformed Churches regard Adam’s disobedience as the origin of ‘a corruption, more or less entire, of human nature in its spiritual aspect, inclining man to evil and disinclining him to good’. See G.F. Maclear and W.W. Williams, An Introduction to the Articles of the Church of England (London: Macmillan, 1896) p. 145.
M.G. Easton, The Illustrated Bible Dictionary (London: Nelson, 1893) p. 632. Cf. Dale, Christian Doctrine, p. 215.
See William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961) p. 42.
The Academy, XX (1881) 431–2; Richard Dalby, Bram Stoker: A Bibliography of First Editions (London: Dracula Press, 1983) p. 10.
See, for example, David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) pp. 81–8; Robert Edwards, ‘The Alien and the Familiar in The Jewel of Seven Stars and Dracula’, William Hughes and Andrew Smith, eds, Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998) pp. 96–115 at pp. 98–112.
Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 145, 158 (Hereafter JSS).
Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula, p. 128. Ludlam’s lead has been followed by many subsequent critics. See David Glover’s ‘Introduction’ to the Oxford University Press edition of the novel (JSS ix); Carol A. Senf, ‘Dracula, The Jewel of Seven Stars and Stoker’s “Burden of the Past”’, Carol Davison, ed., Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997) pp. 77–94 at p. 78.
Bram Stoker, The Watter’s Mou’, reprinted in Charles Osborne, ed., The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973) pp. 166–224 at p. 224.
Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals, p. 90. Senf acknowledges Petrie, but points also to Stoker’s personal acquaintance with Sir Richard Burton and Sir William Wilde as possible sources. See Senf, ‘Dracula, The Jewel of Seven Stars and Stoker’s “Burden of the Past”’, pp. 87, 88.
Stoker’s private library, sold at Sotheby’s on 7 July 1913 included Budge’s Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life (1900); Egyptian Magic (1899); Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics (1899–1902); The Mummy (1893); The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum (1895); A History ofEgypt … (9 vols, 1902) as well as Flinders Petrie’s 1895 Egyptian Tales Translated from the Papyri (British Library: SC SOTHEBY 7/7/1913). Trelawny’s explanation of the ‘Ka’ (JSS 150) is lifted almost verbatim from Budge’s Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co., 1900) pp. 163–4.
E.A. Wallis Budge, The Mummy (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1893) p. 173.
Budge, The Mummy, p. 170–2. A device similar to that imagined by Stoker is described in R.A. Proctor, ‘The Mystery of the Pyramids’, Belgravia, XXXII (1877), 434–52 at p. 451.
Wilkie Collins, Heart and Science [1882–3] (Peterborough: Broadview, 1996) p. 188.
See J. Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed, ed. Bradley (London: Valpy, 1870), p. 344, p. 529. Cf. also John 11:25.
John Ritchie, Contested Truths of the Word (Kilmarnock: Ritchie, 1917) p. 3.
This Creed was recited daily in the Anglican office of ‘Morning Prayer’ in Iretand up to the revision of the Irish Book of Common Prayer in 1877. See G.J. Cuming, A History of Anglican Liturgy (London: Macmillan, 1969) p. 207.
Bram Stoker, The Jewel of Seven Stars (London: William Rider, 1912) p. 229. The Oxford Popular Fiction edition of The Jewel of Seven Stars reproduces only the final four pages of the 1912 ending as an appendix, and does not detail the many other differences between the two editions. Further references to the Second (or Rider) Edition are given in the text as JSS 1912.
Compare Sherlock Holmes’s analysis of the behaviour of the dog in ‘Silver Blaze’, in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes [1894] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952) p. 28.
See also: D 10. The occultist John Silence makes similar use of a cat in Algernon Blackwood’s 1908 short story ‘A Psychical Invasion’. See Blackwood, John Silence (London: Richards, 1962) pp. 36–7.
J.W. Brodie Innes to Bram Stoker, 29 November 1903 (Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library). Letters held in the Brotherton Collection also reveal that Stoker presented Brodie Innes with copies of The Mystery of the Sea (20 July 1902), Lady Athlyne (26 February 1909) and The Lady of the Shroud (14 July 1909).
Ludlam, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 207; Alain Pozzuoli, Bram Stoker: Prince des Tenenebres (Paris: Librairie Seguier, 1989) pp. 49–53. The association between Stoker and the Golden Dawn appears to stem from a highly questionable list of literary and celebrity members of the Order first published in Louis Pauwels and Jaques Bergier, Le Matin des Magiciens (Paris: Gallimard, 1960) p. 270.
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Hughes, W. (2000). Pity and Terror: Theology, Morality and Popular Fiction. In: Beyond Dracula. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598874_2
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