tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/gothic-fiction-51118/articlesGothic fiction – The Conversation2024-03-25T00:46:33Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2253572024-03-25T00:46:33Z2024-03-25T00:46:33ZCatherine Chidgey’s revealing, uncomfortable novels bridge worlds. Is she New Zealand’s latest global literary star?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583639/original/file-20240322-18-xmjohd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=163%2C467%2C1903%2C1165&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Catherine Chidgey</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Chidgey#/media/File:Chidgey_Nov_2019.jpg">Helen Mayall</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Catherine Chidgey is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished and consistently surprising novelists. Since her debut in 1998, her works have also attracted international accolades and prizes, including the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for best first book (for <a href="https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/in-a-fishbone-church/">In a Fishbone Church</a>). </p>
<p>After a 13-year gap between her third novel in 2003 and her fourth in 2016, her career has seen a remarkable second act. The five novels Chidgey published between 2016 and 2023 have been met with critical acclaim both in New Zealand and abroad, and explore diverse subjects and styles. </p>
<p>Her most recent work, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catherine-Chidgey-Pet-9781787704732/">Pet</a> (2023), has attracted glowing reviews in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/02/pet-by-catherine-chidgey-review-sly-psychological-thriller">The Guardian</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/06/books/review/catherine-chidgey-pet.html">the New York Times</a> and was <a href="https://theconversation.com/best-books-of-2023-our-experts-share-the-books-that-have-stayed-with-them-214578">my favourite book</a> of last year. And her 2020 Holocaust novel, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catherine-Chidgey-Remote-Sympathy-9781787703711">Remote Sympathy</a>, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.</p>
<p>The novel published between, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catherine-Chidgey-Axeman's-Carnival-9781787704619">The Axeman’s Carnival</a> (2022), won New Zealand’s <a href="https://www.ockham.co.nz/stories/magpie-magnificence-wins-big-prize-at-2023/#:%7E:text=Celebrated%20New%20Zealand%20writer%20Catherine,menace%2C%20narrated%20by%20a%20precocious">most prestigious prize for fiction</a>, The Ockham Prize, and is now being published in Australia for the first time. </p>
<p>It explores the disintegrating relationship of a rural New Zealand couple from the perspective of their pet magpie, Tama. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A magpie in a grass field" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/583641/original/file-20240322-18-4nwr5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Axeman’s Carnival is narrated by a pet magpie.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jack McCracken/Unsplash</span></span>
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<h2>Strange associations</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>People tell bad stories about magpies. That we hold the souls of gossips, That we carry a drop of the devil’s blood in our mouths. That to meet a single magpie brings bad luck, sorrow, or death. We refused to take shelter in the Ark, people say; instead we sat on its roof and laughed at the drowned world. We were the only bird not to sing at the crucifixion. Magpies bore into sheep and cattle and eat them from the inside out. Magpies steal anything that shines. Witches ride to their seething Sabbaths on magpie’s tails. To make a magpie talk, cut its tongue with a crooked sixpence.</p>
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<p>This passage comes early in The Axeman’s Carnival and speaks to the strange associations sometimes attached to these birds. They are frequently perceived as an aggressive and invasive species. But they are also often attributed human qualities: greed, mischievousness, malice, humour. </p>
<p>Because of their intelligence and their capacity to mimic human voices and language, it becomes easy to anthropomorphise magpies. We project our own qualities onto them, reading their behaviour as a mirror of our own. </p>
<p>Tama (short for Tamagochi) is frequently subject to this kind of projection. Thanks to his owner, Marnie, he has become a rising internet star. Marnie films him dressed in a range of outfits, performing tricks and tasks, and spouting shareable one-liners. </p>
<p>They live with Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, deep in Central Otago in the South Island of New Zealand, on the aptly named “Wilderness Road”. In contrast to Tama’s growing international fame, Rob is a local celebrity. </p>
<p>He is a regular competitor in an annual competitive wood-chopping event: the “Axeman’s Carnival”, which gives the novel its title. Having previously won nine “golden axes”, he is hoping to bring home a tenth in this year’s contest. </p>
<p>While Rob and Marnie’s relationship seems idyllic to outsiders, Tama is witness to its unravelling. As the farm struggles and competition for the tenth golden axe stiffens, Rob becomes increasingly volatile and possessive towards Marnie. He also grows resentful of Tama’s presence in their house. </p>
<p>Rob is threatened by the attention his wife pays to the bird, whom he only grudgingly accepts because of the revenue generated from his social media presence. </p>
<p>Tama’s videos are a hit because of his seemingly “human like” attributes: his voice, intelligence and affection for Marnie. However, as the narrator, Tama also reinterprets human spaces from a bird’s perspective. He is acutely aware of Rob’s mounting frustrations, understanding them as the dangerous need to assert control and dominance over a diminishing and contested territory. </p>
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<p>Tama’s translation of the magpie’s call – “We are here and this is our tree and we’re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now” – is repeated throughout the novel. As the tension in Marnie and Rob’s relationship gradually builds, this refrain seems to express the sentiments of the human characters as well. Sooner or later, someone – whether Rob, Marnie or Tama himself – will be forced to “leave” by whatever means necessary.</p>
<p>As the narrator and protagonist of the Axeman’s Carnival, Tama straddles the divide between domestic and natural spaces. He was rescued by Marnie as a fledgling, after falling from his nest and then released as a young adult. After a brief period where he attempts to reintegrate with his magpie family, he abandons them to return to the farmhouse. He is drawn back by his love for Marnie and by the ease and safety of life as a pet. Within the house, he is treated as a surrogate child by Marnie and as a pest and interloper by Rob. </p>
<p>Outside the property, his magpie sister views him as an amusing curiosity, questioning whether he is “bird or not”, and his human-hating father denounces him as a traitor, dismissing him as “not even a memory. Not even a ghost”. </p>
<p>Tama’s relationships with these characters are sometimes dangerous and constantly shifting. He is often rebuked, threatened and blamed, but also confided in and admired. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ambition-corruption-and-guerilla-gardening-eleanor-cattons-birnam-wood-is-a-horror-story-for-our-time-195207">Ambition, corruption and guerilla gardening: Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood is a horror story for our time</a>
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<h2>Kiwi Gothic?</h2>
<p>The Axeman’s Carnival has been received in <a href="https://womanmagazine.co.nz/birds-eye-view/">some reviews</a> as an example of the “Kiwi Gothic”, due to its secluded rural setting and its undercurrent of mounting dread. Narrated from Tama’s idiosyncratic perspective, the novel has the tone of a dark fairytale. The nine golden axes that hang above Marnie and Rob’s bed and the empty space left for the tenth seem to signal some inevitable disaster to come. </p>
<p>Rob’s increasingly brutal domestic outbursts are subtly mirrored in the quiet menace of his daily routines, as observed by Tama. His efficient skinning and butchery of dead lambs. The furious precision of his axe-work. The crime shows he watches, all “about dead naked beautiful women, strangled in secluded forests”. </p>
<p>Beyond the farm, Tama’s father lurks in the pines, repeating his warnings and calling for violence. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You must swoop. Go for the hair, the scalp, the face. Pierce their eyes, drink their blood, clean their bones … Things do not go well for birds who go to humans of their own free will.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>However, Tama’s growing online popularity works to puncture the grim isolation of Wilderness Road in surprising and hilarious ways. To Rob’s consternation, their previously remote farm becomes a locus for tourists and backpackers who come to see “the bird who thinks he’s a person”, as one German visitor puts it. </p>
<p>Tama becomes the focus of attention for media workers, marketeers, merchandisers and animal-rights activists. He picks up on this growing medley of voices, mimicking and adapting them as the novel progress. </p>
<p>Chidgey’s previous works have frequently focused on both the contractions and the new forms of meaning that emerge by drawing seemingly distant experiences, voices and perspectives together. </p>
<p>Her first two novels, the intergenerational family narrative <a href="https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/in-a-fishbone-church/">In a Fishbone Church</a> (1998) and the correspondence-driven mystery <a href="https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/golden-deeds/">Golden Deeds</a> (2000) both use their premises to explore unexpected connections between disparate locations and lives. </p>
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<p>Her foray into Gothic horror, <a href="https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/transformation-the/">The Transformation</a> (2003), presents 19th-century Tampa, Florida as an occasionally nightmarish meeting point between the old world and the new. </p>
<p>More recently, Chidgey’s 2017 “found” novel, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/09/beat-of-the-pendulum-catherine-chidgey-review">The Beat of the Pendulum</a>, records a year in the author’s own life through a collage of recorded and remembered conversations, email chains, social media posts, news articles and other media fragments. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catherine-Chidgey-Remote-Sympathy-9781787703711">Remote Sympathy</a> (2020), one of two novels where Chidgey explores Nazi Germany as its subject, is constructed from intersecting accounts from both former Nazis and Holocaust survivors. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-zone-of-interest-the-dark-psychological-insight-of-martin-amiss-holocaust-novel-is-lost-in-the-film-adaptation-221867">The Zone of Interest: the dark psychological insight of Martin Amis's Holocaust novel is lost in the film adaptation</a>
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<h2>Waiting for the axe</h2>
<p>In the Axeman’s Carnival, Tama’s hybrid nature also bridges previously discrete and separable worlds, in ways both revealing and uncomfortable. Human and animal. Online and physical. As a natural mimic, he copies and reenacts language and behaviour from all these spaces, to the delight and annoyance of his various audiences.</p>
<p>However, this mimicry is not empty or superficial. Rather, he uses it to connect different discourses. He steals, magpie-like, from the sources around him. The television, radio and social media feeds. His sister and his father. Marnie and Rob. This gradually affords him new ways of acting, and new forms of understanding. </p>
<p>In one sequence, he assembles a horde of objects stolen from Rob as “evidence”, attempting to form a deduction in the manner of the crime shows he has seen on TV. In others, he uses his learned snippets of language – particularly his increasingly ominous, viral catchphrase “don’t you dare!” – to rile and confound his rival. </p>
<p>Ironically, the attention generated by Tama’s increasingly shrewd and sophisticated performances traps Rob in a performance of his own. To maximise their revenue from Tama, he and Marnie open their house up to 24-hour online scrutiny. This temporarily arrests his violence, as he is forced to act as a good husband to Marnie and a loving “dad” to Tama. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most fascinating and suspenseful section of the novel comes in its final third, which sees Tama and Rob trapped in this curious détente. They are both performing for the cameras. Only the occasional lapse – an outburst, or a messily consumed mouse – might alert a viewer to what lies beneath the surface. </p>
<p>In this sequence, they almost reflect one another. Two uncanny creatures, not quite wild and not quite tame, circling one another in an increasingly claustrophobic house. Both waiting for the axe to drop.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225357/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Novitz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Catherine Chidgey’s disquieting, award-winning novel The Axeman’s Carnival explores the disintegrating relationship of a rural couple from the perspective of their pet magpie, Tama.Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2125632023-10-26T16:41:46Z2023-10-26T16:41:46ZFive works of Welsh gothic literature you should read this Halloween<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555845/original/file-20231025-21-tg409h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=60%2C0%2C6720%2C4446&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Celebrate Nos Galan Gaeaf with some Welsh gothic fiction. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/stack-old-books-vintage-book-on-1870101415">zef art/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Wales has sought to rediscover its identity and autonomy since the <a href="https://senedd.wales/how-we-work/history-of-devolution/">devolution</a> referendum of 1997. Authors and publishers have embraced the gothic genre as a means of exploring Welsh language, culture and heritage – reflecting on the anxieties Welsh society has experienced since becoming a devolved nation. </p>
<p>Halloween (or <em><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zbkdcqt">Nos Galan Gaeaf</a></em>, as we say in Wales) presents the perfect opportunity for us to explore these social tensions through the macabre.</p>
<p>Here are five eerie works of Welsh literature for you to catch up with this spooky season. </p>
<h2>Ghostbird by Carol Lovekin (2016)</h2>
<p>In a little Welsh village filled with magic, Cadi Hopkins is on a mission to find herself and learn the truth about what happened to her father and sister. But it’s not long before ghosts appear, and Cadi and her mother learn they have to confront their fears. </p>
<p>Inspired by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Mabinogion">Welsh mythology</a>, <a href="https://www.honno.co.uk/books/ghostbird">Ghostbird</a> by Carol Lovekin has the perfect balance of ghost story and magical realism. Lovekin explores themes of identity, mother-daughter relationships, female empowerment and Welsh culture. Think the fantasy film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120791/">Practical Magic</a> meets Wales.</p>
<h2>Dead Relatives and Other Stories by Lucie McKnight Hardy (2021)</h2>
<p>In the opening story of this <a href="https://deadinkbooks.com/product/dead-relatives/">collection</a> of short stories, Iris, a young girl, resides in a big country house with her mother and their servants. But when the Ladies arrive, Iris’ dead relatives begin to stir.</p>
<p>This latest work by Lucie McKnight Hardy deals with themes of motherhood, small town anxieties and weird traditions. It’s the perfect option for those who may not have time to read a whole novel. </p>
<h2>The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (1894)</h2>
<p>Hoping to unlock the secret of seeing the spiritual world, Clarke witnesses Dr Raymond’s experiment on a young girl’s mind, which leaves her insane. Years later, Clarke realises that similar strange events seem to be happening and a young woman, Helen Vaughan, appears to be at the centre of it. </p>
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<p>Originally published in 1894, Arthur Machen’s novella may be one that you’ve previously read. Nevertheless, its connection with Wales has historically been overlooked, possibly due to the author’s own internal conflict with his Welsh identity. </p>
<p>Edited and re-released in 2018, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Great_God_Pan_and_Other_Horror_Stori/CMBEDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+Great+God+Pan+by+Arthur+Machen&printsec=frontcover">The Great God Pan</a> explores themes of the occult, sexuality, insanity and experimentation. It’s an ideal read for people who like traditional 19th-century horror. </p>
<h2>The Library Suicides by Fflur Dafydd (2023)</h2>
<p>Lost and grieving their mother’s death, twins Ana and Nan plan their revenge against the man they believe is responsible: the literary critic Eben. Trapped within the National Library of Wales, Ana and Nan have Eben exactly where they want him, until the plan starts to go awry. </p>
<p>This novel is an English language re-visioning of Fflur Dafydd’s 2009 Welsh language novel, <a href="https://www.ylolfa.com/products/9781847711694/y-llyfrgell">Y Llyfrgell</a>, which was also made into an award-winning <a href="https://ffilmcymruwales.com/our-work/y-llyfrgell-library-suicides">film</a> in 2016. </p>
<p>The Library Suicides is part psychological thriller and dystopian gothic fiction, which deals with themes of literature, complex identities and bereavement. And all this is set against the backdrop of the grand library in Aberystwyth.</p>
<h2>Stranger Within The Gates: A Collection of Short Stories by Bertha Thomas (1912)</h2>
<p>This collection opens with a young Englishwoman arriving in Wales. Soon, she meets her new landlady, Mrs Trinaman, who recalls the extraordinary tale of her former life as the local madwoman, Winifred Owen.</p>
<p><a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Stranger_Within_the_Gates.html?id=hWgfAQAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">Stranger Within The Gates</a> was re-published in 2008 as part of a classics series by <a href="https://www.honno.co.uk">Honno Welsh Women’s Press</a> that aims to rediscover lost Welsh women writers. Bertha Thomas’ short stories examine social changes, women’s rights, hybridity and the significance of “the other”. This is a great read for those who love both satire and the gothic. </p>
<p>The collection also includes Thomas’ pro-suffrage article from 1874, Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus.</p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie Jessica Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>These five works of Welsh gothic literature will not only help you explore Wales through the macabre but are likely to give you a good scare too.Sophie Jessica Davies, PhD Candidate and Part-time Teacher, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2161862023-10-25T10:50:43Z2023-10-25T10:50:43ZThe scariest stories to listen to this Halloween, from a horror audio expert<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555283/original/file-20231023-23-x5mwh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C7%2C4809%2C2818&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/old-vintage-microphone-attic-1676415100">mariesacha/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The next time you watch a horror movie, try putting it on mute. More than likely, it will lose its edge and may even appear comic. As much as horror media is visual, sound plays an outsize role in its ability to terrify. This is partly an evolutionary adaptation: sound can trigger a startle response in humans <a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780544570160/Sonic-Boom-Sound-Transforms-Way-0544570162/plp">within ten milliseconds</a> – 30 times faster than the blink of an eye. </p>
<p>Preeminent ghost story scholar Julia Briggs <a href="https://docplayer.net/49493585-12-the-ghost-story-julia-briggs.html">argues</a> that the details of scary stories can reproduce the same effects in the reader – reading about a protagonist’s frenzied heartbeat, your heart is likely to race, too. The same is true of horror audio.</p>
<p>Indeed, unexpected or unidentifiable sounds may be even more unsettling. As sound researcher Isabella van Elferen puts it, sound without source <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203490013-36/sonic-gothic-isabella-van-elferen">suggests something ghostly</a>.</p>
<p>There are nearly 100 years’ worth of radio and audio dramas that tap into the sound of fear. Here are just a few to get your heart racing.</p>
<h2>Classic and contemporary horror audios</h2>
<p>The long and storied history of horror drama on BBC radio and BBC Sounds owes a large debt of gratitude to the “Man in Black” – the mysterious host of the long-running horror audio series <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointment_with_Fear_(radio)">Appointment with Fear</a>. The storyteller was originally played by Valentine Dyall in the 1940s, and more recently by Mark Gatiss. </p>
<p>For a taste of the series, I recommend a 1988 episode of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b009smwk/episodes/guide">Fear on 4</a>, a revival of Appointment with Fear. Here, Edward de Souza plays the Man in Black, introducing <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gbbuQXSqRo">The Snowman Killing</a>, a terrifying drama of Thatcherite suburbia in which Imelda Staunton gives an unforgettable performance as an increasingly unsettled mother of unnerving twin boys.</p>
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<p>More recently, <a href="https://the11thhour.podbean.com/e/to-the-moon-and-back-1604758342/">To the Moon and Back</a> (2018) is a satisfying twist on the werewolf story. This single-episode horror tale was written and directed by Faith McQuinn of <a href="https://www.observerpictures.com/index.html">Observer Pictures</a>, an American independent production company, and features a terrific score by Amy Balcomb. Amari and Mae are cousins on their way back to the family farm when they are kidnapped. The question of their escape, and a dark family secret, make for a haunting listen. </p>
<p>The Canadian government funded <a href="https://www.myclassicradio.net/nightfall.html">Nightfall</a>, a contemporary radio horror series, in the early 1980s. With stories set across the country, the drama was recorded in multiple Canadian cities. While American radio drama of the period was frequently nostalgic in outlook, Nightfall embraced a thematically adult, nihilistic vision of the present, complete with electronic score and stories featuring slashers, evil children, possessed dolls and cross-species sex. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WceuctQb4_k">The Porch Light</a> is the episode of Nightfall that scared me the most. The combination of haunted house, murders and terrible weather – a Canadian snowstorm – creates fertile ground for heart-stopping suspense and terror for protagonists Bob and Carol, who have just moved from Toronto to a remote farmhouse.</p>
<p>But for sheer audio terror, you could do much worse than listen to the most famous radio drama of all time, the Mercury Theater on the Air’s adaptation of HG Wells’ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWD9Q6klzco">War of the Worlds</a>. Broadcast on October 30, 1938, many listeners who tuned in partway through were <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003002185-32/transgressing-boundary-rituals-radio-leslie-mcmurtry?context=ubx&refId=ad846bbd-97c9-4acc-a357-8e3f782a5b2c">convinced that aliens</a> – or Germans – were invading New Jersey. This adaptation’s realistic framing of drama as radio news is still highly effective.</p>
<p>As a companion piece, Jack J. Ward’s modern story <a href="https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/electric-vicuna-productions-po-531863/episodes/one-by-one-18657756">One by One</a> reworks the familiar story of radio as humanity’s last bastion against invasion.</p>
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<h2>True horror</h2>
<p>There are hundreds of other, fabulous fictional horror audio terrors to listen to – but nothing is scarier than reality. I will finish my recommendations with two nonfiction aural frights.</p>
<p>Nikesh Murali has written, presented and produced fiction podcast Indian Noir, which alternates between dark fantasy, crime and horror, since 2018. Murali also presents Indian Noir X, a strand of the podcast featuring urban horror legends (also known as <a href="https://creepypasta.org/">creepypastas</a>) and listeners’ “real life” paranormal encounters. <a href="https://podtail.com/en/podcast/indian-noir/indian-noir-x-issue-no-9-the-bus-trip-horror-antho/">The Bus Trip</a> (2021) describes a terrifying bus journey between Bangalore and Cochin that purportedly really happened to one listener.</p>
<p>The scariest thing I’ve ever heard, though, is <a href="http://www.radioatlas.org/the-night-watchman/">The Night Watchman</a>, made for DR (a division of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation) by Stephen Schwartz and Knud Ebbesen in 1971. A factual interview with a nightwatchman in an anatomy museum, it’s a beautifully recorded piece. The interviewee sounds young, preoccupied with his new baby, and very ordinary – yet the things he reveals about his rounds patrolling the museum at night are increasingly bizarre. This is chilling sound at its very best.</p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leslie McMurtry does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A Gothic audio expert gives her recommendations of unsettlling podcasts and radio dramas.Leslie McMurtry, Senior Lecturer in Radio Studies, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2132762023-09-18T14:54:12Z2023-09-18T14:54:12ZHow reading ‘dark academia’ novels can help new students feel more at home at university<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547492/original/file-20230911-15667-vlazi6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=53%2C44%2C5890%2C3912&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/zeH-ljawHtg">Giammarco Boscaro/Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Over the next few weeks, <a href="https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/19-01-2023/higher-education-student-statistics-uk-202122-released#:%7E:text=The%20data%20shows%20a%20total,first%20year%20of%20their%20course.">over a million</a> new university students will be heading to campus. Many of them may be <a href="https://www.youngminds.org.uk/young-person/coping-with-life/looking-after-yourself-at-uni/#:%7E:text=It%27s%20natural%20to%20feel%20worried,some%20even%20offer%20counselling%20services">nervous</a> about what lies ahead, which is understandable given that most of them will be in a new place, living away from home for the first time, and faced with the prospect of building an entirely new friendship group.</p>
<p>One of their main worries will be about establishing a <a href="https://unibuddy.com/blog/the-science-behind-belonging/">sense of belonging</a>. Anxiety around this is completely normal, but I believe that reading literature from the “dark academia” genre could help put such fears to rest. </p>
<p>Dark academia began as a <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/iph-2022-2047/html">social media aesthetic</a> around 2015. It romanticises university life through images of leather-bound books with yellowed pages, wet cobblestones, gothic architecture shrouded in mist, and students in leather brogues, vintage sweaters and tweed jackets.</p>
<p>It became popular during <a href="https://ucr.sljol.info/articles/10.4038/ucr.v3i2.74">lockdown</a>, when university students were isolated in dorm rooms and secondary students envisioned freer future lives. Dark academia is heavily inspired by <a href="https://crimereads.com/dark-academia-your-guide-to-the-new-wave-of-post-secret-history-campus-thrillers/">gothic literature</a> and includes <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/133251/the-secret-history-by-tartt-donna/9780241621905">The Secret History</a> by Donna Tartt (1992), <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250095299/ifwewerevillains#:%7E:text=If%20We%20Were%20Villains%20was,%2C%20friendship%2C%20and%20truth.%22">If We Were Villains</a> by M.L.Rio (2018), and <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/babel-r-f-kuang">Babel</a> by R.F.Kuang (2022).</p>
<p>It draws upon the <a href="https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/history-of-the-gothic-gothic-literature-1825-1914/">elements</a> that make <a href="https://www.gale.com/ebooks/9781438149738/encyclopedia-of-gothic-literature">gothic literature</a> so popular – mysteries set in beautiful yet often remote and potentially dangerous locations, with <a href="https://kingswordplay.ca/documents/Feminism-Gothic-YWP.pdf">outsider protagonists who question the status quo</a> – and places them on university campuses.</p>
<h2>Relatable themes</h2>
<p>Like many real students, the main character typically feels out of place, awkward and alone. They question whether they belong at their university and if they will ever fit in. </p>
<p>Richard in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/133251/the-secret-history-by-tartt-donna/9780241621905">The Secret History</a>, Ann in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/452659/the-cloisters-by-hays-katy/9781787636392">The Cloisters</a> by Katy Hays (2023), and Mac in <a href="https://www.hmhco.com/shop/books/Bad-Habits/9780358440871">Bad Habits</a> by Amy Gentry (2019) all come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. They want to belong in the elite universities they find themselves in, but are unsure of ever fitting in.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/babel-or-the-necessity-of-violence-an-arcane-history-of-the-oxford-translators-revolution-rf-kuang#:%7E:text=Orphaned%20in%20Canton%20and%20brought,like%20paradise%20to%20Robin%20Swift.&text=But%20can%20a%20student%20stand,and%20the%20sacrifices%20of%20resistance.">Babel</a>, Robin, Ramy and Victoire are all students from minority backgrounds, whose worry about belonging is validated by their experience of prejudice and bias. </p>
<p>Many students – particularly those from non-white, non-traditional backgrounds – face a variety of “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13596748.2021.1909921">hidden curriculums</a>” at university. These are unspoken norms and expectations that are taken for granted as information all students have access to. When a student does not, it makes them feel like they don’t belong – and, in turn, makes them <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0309877X.2021.1915967?casa_token=oCf1_QLf0P0AAAAA:moY24UtF7BwWBmBV925t5XsPUB2NEU6MzAurIDWG20ZxBb1w2nBX5uVtQm3_A3p1Ie9rV0w_uyFi">less likely to achieve as well</a> as their more informed counterparts.</p>
<p>Other characters (and real-life students too) worry that they are not intelligent enough. In <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250095299/ifwewerevillains#:%7E:text=If%20We%20Were%20Villains%20was,%2C%20friendship%2C%20and%20truth.%22">If We Were Villains</a>, drama student Joe’s unease revolves around being second best. He describes feeling “doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else’s story”, and benefiting from the “overflow” of his roommate’s “popularity”.</p>
<p>These themes in dark academia books can help to bring to life the <a href="https://crimereads.com/dark-academia-your-guide-to-the-new-wave-of-post-secret-history-campus-thrillers/">various structures</a> and <a href="https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1096977">biases that do harm</a> at universities. </p>
<h2>How reading dark academia can be helpful</h2>
<p>The appeal of dark academia lies – in part – in the vulnerability of its characters. Often, they overcome this vulnerability by becoming part of a <a href="https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1096977">close-knit friendship group</a> of fellow students.</p>
<p>The genre helps students to realise how important relationships are. All of us, at some point in our lives, have felt like we do not belong. For students, the negativity and discomfort of not belonging explored in these novels can act as reassurance – that others feel the same way they do.</p>
<p>The characters move from feelings of insecurity to the joyous intensity of finding friendships that are deep and meaningful. Together, these friendship groups face down whatever dark mystery is at the heart of the plot and emerge battered and bruised, but survivors nonetheless.</p>
<p>While it is highly unlikely that most students will ever face the dark and twisted challenges set out in these novels (which often involve death, if not murder), the university environment is filled with challenges. Dark academia helps to show students how to manage these challenges and – through forming close friendships and support networks – how to come out the other side.</p>
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amy Gentry, author of Bad Habits, is my cousin, but this work has developed outside of that relationship.</span></em></p>Dark academia novels romanticise student life, but their stories of friendship are inspiring.Caron Gentry, Professor Vice-Chancellor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences, Northumbria University, NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2077092023-06-16T17:42:27Z2023-06-16T17:42:27ZCormac McCarthy’s fearless approach to writing<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532288/original/file-20230615-27-es4rpl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C17%2C1930%2C1298&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">McCarthy attends the 2009 premiere of the film adaptation of his novel 'The Road.'</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/ObitCormacMcCarthy/e76e31de4fce44e5becba9a64b06a2f7/photo?Query=Cormac%20McCarthy&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=19&currentItemNo=0">Evan Agostini/AP Photo</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Cormac McCarthy, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/books/cormac-mccarthy-dead.html">who died on June 13, 2023</a>, at the age of 89, is often characterized rather narrowly <a href="https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/texas/articles/cormac-mccarthy-reinventing-the-southern-gothic/">as a Southern writer</a>, or perhaps <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/the-read-down/want-read-southern-gothic-heres-start/">a Southern Gothic writer</a>.</p>
<p>McCarthy did lean heavily on <a href="https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/local/2023/06/15/remembering-cormac-mccarthys-legacy-and-early-life-in-east-tennessee/70320788007/">his Tennessee upbringing</a> in his first four novels, and he set many others in the deserts of the Southwest U.S. However, as a writer, he saw himself as a part of an expansive literary community, one that stretched back to the classical and Elizabethan periods, and one that drew on a variety of genres, cultures and influences.</p>
<p>His unique and varying writing style has been compared with that of many of the greatest authors of American letters, with scholars highlighting connections to the writings of <a href="https://readingmccarthy.buzzsprout.com/1616140/8480163-episode-9-melville-and-mccarthy-with-steven-frye">Herman Melville</a>, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cormac-mccarthy-in-context/ernest-hemingway/D3D8FDEB9548A1D4786480EAA3B39714">Ernest Hemingway</a>, <a href="https://www.openculture.com/2023/06/the-three-punctuation-rules-of-cormac-mccarthy-rip.html">James Joyce</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Hypermasculinities_in_the_Contemporary_N.html?id=WmnBoAEACAAJ">Toni Morrison</a>, <a href="https://lithub.com/harold-bloom-on-cormac-mccarthy-true-heir-to-melville-and-faulkner/">Thomas Pynchon</a>, <a href="https://unherd.com/2023/06/cormac-mccarthys-irrational-apocalypse/">Fyodor Dostoevsky</a>, <a href="https://themarginaliareview.com/how-flannery-oconnor-and-cormac-mccarthy-helped-to-invent-the-south/">Flannery O’Connor</a> and <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-orchard.html?scp=7&sq=The%2520Orchard&st=cse">William Faulkner</a>. </p>
<p>As such an unwieldy list of compatriots suggests, McCarthy is an author who experimented with language and literary technique. Each of his books typically departs radically in tone, structure and prose from the previous one.</p>
<p>I’m currently working on a book that’s tentatively titled “How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style.” In it, I trace McCarthy’s career-long commitment to playing with style, particularly his approach to narration and his techniques for conveying a mood.</p>
<h2>Two radically different reading experiences</h2>
<p>Depending on the book – and even passages within certain books – McCarthy’s writing can be characterized as minimalistic, meandering, esoteric, humorous, terrifying, pretentious, sentimental or folksy. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Title page of book reading 'Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West,' followed by author's name." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=710&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532287/original/file-20230615-15088-m4cp5x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The title page for the first edition of McCarthy’s 1985 novel ‘Blood Meridian.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Blood_Meridian_%281985_1st_ed_half_title_page%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some novels depend heavily on dense passages of narrative exposition and philosophizing, while others lean heavily on everyday dialogue. Some books celebrate regional voices and vernacular, and others adopt a neutral, removed and clinical tone.</p>
<p>It is possible to see McCarthy’s literary range and stylistic experimentation in two of his most famous novels, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110472/blood-meridian-by-cormac-mccarthy/">Blood Meridian</a>,” which came out in 1985, and “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110490/the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Road</a>,” which was published over two decades later, in 2006, and was turned <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0898367/">into a movie</a> in 2009.</p>
<p>In “Blood Meridian,” set in the desert of the Southwest U.S. and Mexico, McCarthy’s prose is dense, with details piling up one after another. </p>
<p>Take the famous scene in which a mercenary gang of American scalp hunters encounters a band of Comanche warriors:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador. … ”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The entire sentence is much too long to quote here. But you get the picture: There is very little punctuation and there are few places to even take a breath. </p>
<p>The narration in other moments of the novel catalogs the desert landscape of the U.S. West in similarly painstaking and tedious – if also beautiful – detail. The prose feels drawn out, slow and repetitive, like the subject of the novel: the United States’ western expansion in the 19th century, a campaign of escalating destruction that McCarthy characterizes in the novel as “some heliotropic plague.”</p>
<p>“The Road,” a later novel similarly committed to the idea of incessant movement, could not be more different in its style, pacing and rhythm. The prose in that novel, which won <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/cormac-mccarthy">the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction</a>, is concise and is marked by a linguistic restraint that’s entirely absent in “Blood Meridian.” </p>
<p>Rather than dense and overwhelming passages, this novel is constructed of short and distinct paragraphs that are separated by white space and often unrelated to what comes directly before or after:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was colder. Nothing moved in that night world. A rich smell of woodsmoke hung over the road. He pushed the cart on through the snow. … </p>
<p>In his dream she was sick and he cared for her. The dream bore the look of sacrifice but he thought differently. … </p>
<p>On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? </p>
<p>Dark of invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. … </p>
<p>People sitting on the sidewalk in the dawn half immolate and smoking in their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Each paragraph in this passage is different in tone, subject matter, place, and time from what comes before and appears after. </p>
<h2>A lasting legacy</h2>
<p>It might be tempting to see such difference as an evolution, as McCarthy honing and taming his narrative voice from his earlier work. But his final long novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110481/the-passenger-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Passenger</a>,” which was published in 2022, returns again to the rambling prose reminiscent of McCarthy’s big novels in the middle of his career, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110485/suttree-by-cormac-mccarthy/">Suttree</a>” and “Blood Meridian.”</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Black and white photo of man with mustache folding his arms." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/532286/original/file-20230615-29-z1oq2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of McCarthy used for the first edition of his 1973 novel ‘Child of God.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Cormac_McCarthy_%28Child_of_God_author_portrait_-_high-res%29.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some readers find McCarthy’s stylistic flourishes and experimentation excessive – or, even worse, pretentious. But they always struck me as reflecting his love of words and the endless possibilities of language. </p>
<p>In a blurb that was originally written for McCarthy’s first novel, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/110489/the-orchard-keeper-by-cormac-mccarthy/">The Orchard Keeper</a>,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/17/obituaries/ralph-ellison-author-of-invisible-man-is-dead-at-80.html">Ralph Ellison</a> <a href="https://www.fedpo.com/images/TheOrchardKeeper/04TheOrchardKeeper.jpg">wrote</a>, “McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly – envied.” </p>
<p>As I learned of McCarthy’s death, I couldn’t help but think of this quote that marked the beginning of his career, and to think how right Ellison was to champion McCarthy’s craft – the careful use of language that sustained his work for six decades across 12 novels.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207709/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Hardwig does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Pulitzer Prize-winning author was always willing to experiment with his prose, pacing and narration, crafting an oeuvre that varied wildly in style and structure.Bill Hardwig, Associate Professor of English, University of TennesseeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2014452023-03-16T12:33:00Z2023-03-16T12:33:00ZThe luck of the Irish might surface on St. Patrick’s Day, but it evades the Kennedy family, America’s best-known Irish dynasty<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515585/original/file-20230315-1846-c915gj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=177%2C149%2C3527%2C2272&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A portrait of the Kennedy family taken in Hyannis, Mass., in the 1930s. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.gettyimages.com/id/82759243/photo/portrait-of-the-kennedy-family.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=9nlchtG6g6vHgQYHhgOoFaNIk2OepV6uOumTzI2uZ14=">Bachrach/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>John F. Kennedy, whose ancestors left Ireland <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/john-f-kennedy-and-ireland">during the potato famine of the mid-19th century</a>, was famously the first United States president of Catholic Irish descent. </p>
<p>When Americans narrowly elected Kennedy in 1960, <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/john-f-kennedy-and-religion">anti-Catholic bias</a> was still part of the mainstream culture. </p>
<p>I <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zxEAZRkAAAAJ&hl=en">am a scholar</a> of Irish literature and the author of “<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/race-politics-and-irish-america-9780192859730?cc=us&lang=en&">Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History</a>,” a new book that describes how the Irish were <a href="https://www.routledge.com/How-the-Irish-Became-White/Ignatiev/p/book/9780415963091">long excluded</a> in America. </p>
<p>So when Kennedy accepted shamrocks from the Irish ambassador to the U.S. on his <a href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHP/1961/Month%2003/Day%2017/JFKWHP-1961-03-17-C?image_identifier=JFKWHP-ST-C57-1-61">first St. Patrick’s Day</a> in the White House in 1961, it signaled the social and <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781493024704/Real-Lace-America%E2%80%99s-Irish-Rich">political arrival of the Irish American elite</a>. It also was a pivotal moment, marking Irish Americans’ fulfilled dream of full assimilation into the U.S. </p>
<p>The dream soured when Kennedy was <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/assassination-of-John-F-Kennedy">assassinated in Dallas</a> in November 1963. That tragedy – and the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/02/us/kennedy-family-tragedies/index.html">many others that followed</a> for the Kennedy family – began to be told by others in the Gothic story tradition, which hinges on nightmarish scenarios and <a href="https://red.library.usd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&context=diss-thesis">the abuse of power</a>. </p>
<p>This kind of storytelling has shown to be a suitable match for the different narratives of the Kennedys as both innocent victims and wicked schemers.</p>
<p>The phrase “<a href="https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/phrase-luck-of-the-irish">the luck of the Irish</a>” is often used of Irish America, especially on St. Patrick’s Day, observed on March 17. Since it typically refers to good luck, however, it cannot be used of Irish America’s best-known dynasty.</p>
<p>This phrase has various proposed origins, including the success Irish gold miners had in the U.S. in the 1800s. </p>
<p>Irish America’s best-known dynasty might not be described as lucky, but rather as Gothic.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Two men wearing blue suits hold a green garland and look down at it." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515583/original/file-20230315-16-c6vzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515583/original/file-20230315-16-c6vzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515583/original/file-20230315-16-c6vzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515583/original/file-20230315-16-c6vzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=593&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515583/original/file-20230315-16-c6vzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515583/original/file-20230315-16-c6vzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515583/original/file-20230315-16-c6vzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President John F. Kennedy accepts shamrocks from the Ambassador of Ireland, Thomas J. Kiernan, in 1961.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The Kennedys and Gothic</h2>
<p>Since its <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/gothic-novel-the-castle-of-otranto-by-horace-walpole">18th-century beginnings in literature</a>, Gothic storytelling uses a sinister atmosphere of conspiracy and the supernatural. It also generally features an all-powerful Catholic patriarch. </p>
<p>Many <a href="https://www.invaluable.com/blog/elements-of-gothic-literature/">other elements</a> repeat over centuries in different classic Gothic works, <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393679205">like “Dracula</a>,” for example. This can include a secret or curse linked to a corrupt bloodline, endangered beautiful women and disrupted inheritance or murdered heirs.</p>
<p>For both sides of America’s <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/22/both-republicans-and-democrats-prioritize-family-but-they-differ-over-other-sources-of-meaning-in-life/">political divide</a>, the Kennedys fit the ready-made mold of Gothic, though in different ways. </p>
<p>After JFK’s assassination, liberals and Democrats who had approved of his administration’s <a href="https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights.htm">progressive policies</a> believed that the <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/kennedy-the-classic-biography-ted-sorensen?variant=32154167312418">idealistic Kennedys</a> were the blameless targets of <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/who-killed-jfk-president-kennedy-evidence-lee-harvey-oswald-what-conspiracy-theories/">dark conspiracies</a>. </p>
<p>These conspiracies included persistent questions about who or what was behind JFK’s assassination, even though a former Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, was <a href="https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth191000/">arrested in 1963</a> and charged in the president’s death. Oswald himself <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jack-ruby-kills-lee-harvey-oswald">was killed</a> before he could stand trial, feeding the conspiracy theories. </p>
<p>However, for conservatives and Catholic Irish Americans leaving <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/Machine-Made/">traditional</a> Democratic Party loyalty behind, the family known as “<a href="https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/thomas-maier/the-kennedys-americas-emerald-kings/9780786740161/">America’s royals</a>” represented <a href="https://openroadmedia.com/ebook/the-kennedy-imprisonment/9781504045391">the corruption of the elite</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515607/original/file-20230315-2975-bivuio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman wears a long white dress in a sepia colored painting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515607/original/file-20230315-2975-bivuio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515607/original/file-20230315-2975-bivuio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515607/original/file-20230315-2975-bivuio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515607/original/file-20230315-2975-bivuio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515607/original/file-20230315-2975-bivuio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515607/original/file-20230315-2975-bivuio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515607/original/file-20230315-2975-bivuio.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1144&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s official portrait, painted in 1970, is similar to some classic portrayals of women in Gothic literature.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/jacqueline-kennedy">White House Collection/White House Historical Association</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The Gothic patriarch, Joe Kennedy Sr.</h2>
<p>In traditional Gothic fiction, the usual source of such immorality is the all-powerful Catholic elder. </p>
<p>In the Kennedy narrative, that role of Catholic elder is played by the president’s father, Joe Kennedy Sr. He was a wealthy investor and politician. Kennedy family biographers <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/298604/the-patriarch-by-david-nasaw/">have recorded rumors</a> of shady dealings in his numerous business interests. </p>
<p>In addition, the Kennedy <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/298604/the-patriarch-by-david-nasaw/">patriarch’s very Gothic</a> ambitions to hereditary rule were repeatedly disrupted. </p>
<p>Joe Sr. <a href="https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Founding-Father-Audiobook/B002V9ZBTS?source_code=GPAGBSH0508140001&ipRedirectOverride=true">strategized to help launch</a> JFK’s political rise only after the first-born he had planned to make president, Joseph Jr., was <a href="https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/museums/nnam/explore/exhibits/online-exhibits---collections/presidents-and-naval-aviation/artifacts/joseph-p--kennedy--jr----older-brother-of-jfk.html">shot down</a> and killed in action during World War II. </p>
<h2>Jackie Kennedy</h2>
<p>The Kennedy Gothic narrative also enfolds people who marry into the family.</p>
<p>Joe Sr.’s daughter-in-law, Jacqueline Kennedy, was filmed clambering over the back of the presidential open-top limousine in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/fashion/jacqueline-kennedys-smart-pink-suit-preserved-in-memory-and-kept-out-of-view.html">bloodied suit</a> immediately after her husband was shot while being driven in a motorcade. In that moment, she became Gothic’s classic endangered, beautiful woman. </p>
<p>Strikingly, Jackie Kennedy’s eerie <a href="https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/jacqueline-kennedy">official portrait</a> resembles the fleeing woman in a flowing white gown of Gothic paperback <a href="https://flashbak.com/loads-of-women-running-from-houses-the-gothic-romance-paperback-150/">cover tradition</a>.</p>
<p>Right after her husband’s assassination, Jackie Kennedy talked about how the <a href="https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/345678306383007-john-f-kennedy-assassination-rosebud-from-jackie-39-s-bouquet-and-jay-watson-39-s-press-pass/?cat=0">Dallas mayor’s wife</a> had given her <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3y5Qwk2e8A">blood-red roses</a> earlier that day – which she implied was a <a href="https://www.life.com/history/jackie-movie-life-magazine/">bad omen</a> of the forthcoming assassination, given the flowers’ color. </p>
<p>In the same interview, Jacqueline used the phrase “<a href="https://www.life.com/history/jackie-movie-life-magazine/">Camelot</a>” to refer to the idealism of her husband’s administration. </p>
<p>However, <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/new-jfk-biography-aims-to-chronicle-a-complex-life/">many biographies</a> and media stories in the years that followed painted the picture of a <a href="https://millercenter.org/president/kennedy/impact-and-legacy">morally complex</a> Kennedy family. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515584/original/file-20230315-2405-ld71lk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman in a pink dress suit and hat holds red roses, next to a man in a gray suit, while other people look on." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515584/original/file-20230315-2405-ld71lk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/515584/original/file-20230315-2405-ld71lk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515584/original/file-20230315-2405-ld71lk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515584/original/file-20230315-2405-ld71lk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515584/original/file-20230315-2405-ld71lk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515584/original/file-20230315-2405-ld71lk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/515584/original/file-20230315-2405-ld71lk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=762&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former First Lady Jackie Kennedy receives red roses shortly before JFK’s assassination in Dallas, Texas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHP/1963/Month%2011/Day%2022/JFKWHP-1963-11-22-B?image_identifier=JFKWHP-ST-C420-13-63">Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The Kennedy curse</h2>
<p>Some Kennedy men’s <a href="https://archive.org/details/kennedymenthreeg0000blyn">sexually promiscuous or otherwise “liberal” behavior with women</a>, for example, got as much press as their liberal politics. </p>
<p>In 1969, a year after Robert Kennedy was <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bobby-kennedy-is-assassinated">assassinated during his presidential run</a>, his brother Ted drove off a bridge in Massachusetts. Ted Kennedy was yet another son of Joe Sr. with <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40464379">ambitions to one day become president</a>.</p>
<p>His 29-year-old passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1974/07/14/archives/chappaquiddick-5-a-tragedy-an-enigma-a-political-achilles-heel.html">drowned after Kennedy left her</a> in the water. He did not report the accident for 10 hours. Ted <a href="https://vineyardgazette.com/news/1969/07/25/senator-kennedy-pleads-guilty-leaving-accident">pleaded guilty</a> in 1969 to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident and later received a <a href="https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/incident-on-chappaquiddick-island">two-month suspended jail sentence</a>.</p>
<p>Ted later spoke about “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/06/ted-kennedy-spoke-of-a-family-curse-after-chappaquiddick-he-had-good-reason/">some awful curse</a>” playing a role in Kopechne’s death. Ted’s naming of the very Gothic idea of a family curse caught on and became popular lore. </p>
<p>Many observers have subsequently described the family’s <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/search?searchType=products&q=The+Kennedy+Curse%3A+Why+Tragedy+Has+Haunted+America%27s+First+Family+for+150+Years">tragedies as the result of a curse</a>, especially the 1999 death in an airplane crash of John Jr., JFK’s son and possible <a href="https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a28397221/jfk-jr-death-political-office-governor-run/">political heir</a>.</p>
<p>When <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/jfkjr/timeline.htm">the numerous premature deaths of Kennedy</a> family members are tallied, they do appear to be statistically unlikely. But whether the family’s tragedies are the result of mere bad luck or a Gothic family curse remains a matter of open interpretation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201445/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mary Burke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gothic storytelling, with its sinister atmosphere of conspiracy and other hallmarks, offers a way to reframe the Kennedy family lore.Mary Burke, Professor of English and Irish Literature concentration coordinator, University of ConnecticutLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1886562023-02-05T23:57:35Z2023-02-05T23:57:35ZNorthanger Abbey has attracted a trigger warning for ‘toxic relationships’ but I love its gentle romance. Bookworm Mr Tilney is my favourite Austen hero<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507751/original/file-20230202-15-4p4sbs.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=19%2C3%2C1164%2C625&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Henry Tilney (J.J. Feild) and Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) in the 2007 film.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Granada Television/ITV</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.</em></p>
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<p>“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” </p>
<p>So says Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland, the hero and heroine respectively of Jane Austen’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/northanger-abbey-9780141439792">Northanger Abbey</a> (completed 1803, published posthumously in 1817). It is a neat summation of the entire attitude of the book. </p>
<p>A biting satire of popular 19th-century Gothic romances, Northanger Abbey is also a passionate defence of the novel and of novel-reading. </p>
<p>“[T]here seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them,” Austen writes in chapter five, directly addressing the reader – and assuring them that she has no interest in doing the same. </p>
<p>Here, Austen is speaking about the context in which she was writing. Northanger Abbey is a pointed response to moralising texts like James Fordyce’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/sermons-to-young-women">Sermons to Young Women</a> (1766) – yes, the one that Mr Collins is so fond of in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/pride-and-prejudice-9780241374887">Pride and Prejudice</a> – as well as to a broader literary culture that devalued novels and worried about their effects on their (young women) readers. </p>
<p>However, her defence of the novel and its pleasures continues to resonate today for many readers of <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-romance-fiction-rewrites-the-rulebook-183136">popular romance fiction</a>: a literary form often imagined as “trashy”, and about whose readers (again, frequently young women) concern is often expressed. </p>
<p>Emphasis is often placed on the harm books can do to their readers (interestingly, one university has chosen <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/05/whos-going-to-be-triggered-by-northanger-abbey-its-hardly-game-of-thrones">to place trigger warnings</a> on Northanger Abbey for “gender stereotypes” and “toxic relationships and friendships”); however, here, Austen focuses on the pleasure and delight books can provoke and takes it seriously. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-romance-fiction-rewrites-the-rulebook-183136">Friday essay: romance fiction rewrites the rulebook</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Training to be a heroine, by reading</h2>
<p>Northanger Abbey is self-aware from its very first line: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.” </p>
<p>Indeed, the first two chapters are almost entirely about Catherine’s qualifications – or lack thereof – to be a heroine. She has “by nature nothing heroic about her”: she is average in most aspects of her life, from appearance to intelligence to temper to family situation. However, “from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine” – that is, she begins reading voraciously, which allows her to grasp narrative structure and a heroine’s place within it.</p>
<p>At home, Catherine is missing one important thing: a potential hero. There are no likely candidates to be found in her vicinity. This provides us with our inciting incident, for </p>
<blockquote>
<p>when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>When Mr and Mrs Allen, neighbours of the Morlands, go on a trip to Bath, they take Catherine with them, opening up a whole new world and a variety of new people to her.</p>
<p>Some of these people ultimately turn out to be villains. Isabella Thorpe, for instance, is the first friend Catherine makes in Bath; they bond over their mutual love of Gothic novels. </p>
<p>However, Isabella has an ulterior motive: she wants to marry Catherine’s brother James (whom she believes possesses a much larger fortune than he actually does). Isabella also pushes Catherine towards her unbearable brother John, who is by turns a comical and frightening figure. These are, one can assume, the “toxic relationships and friendships” that prompted <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/05/whos-going-to-be-triggered-by-northanger-abbey-its-hardly-game-of-thrones">the trigger warning</a>.</p>
<p>But as Austen promises us in the deeply metatextual first two chapters, Catherine also meets her romantic hero: Mr Henry Tilney.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507786/original/file-20230202-12-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="young woman sitting at a writing desk, looking out the window" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507786/original/file-20230202-12-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507786/original/file-20230202-12-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507786/original/file-20230202-12-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507786/original/file-20230202-12-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507786/original/file-20230202-12-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507786/original/file-20230202-12-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507786/original/file-20230202-12-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Catherine is missing one important thing: a potential hero.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">ITV/PBS</span></span>
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</figure>
<h2>Low-conflict liking</h2>
<p>In many ways, their first meeting is fairly unremarkable. Like Elizabeth and Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, they’re at a dance; but unlike the contentious first encounter between the former, Catherine and Mr Tilney become acquainted with very little conflict at all. </p>
<p>He is an inherently gentle, kind and down-to-earth clergyman (which arguably makes him, like Catherine, ill-suited to be a romantic lead). They are introduced, dance together, and engage in free-flowing small talk, where he good-naturedly teases her about how she will write about him in her journal the next day.</p>
<p>This lack of major interpersonal conflict characterises their whole romance. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Mr Darcy must overcome a great number of obstacles to be together: external (in the form of their differing social stations), but especially internal (his pride, her prejudice). Between Catherine and Mr Tilney, however, there are no internal obstacles. They meet, they like each other, and as the novel progresses, they only like each other more – a like that turns into love.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507790/original/file-20230202-26-ry9pr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507790/original/file-20230202-26-ry9pr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507790/original/file-20230202-26-ry9pr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507790/original/file-20230202-26-ry9pr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507790/original/file-20230202-26-ry9pr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=333&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507790/original/file-20230202-26-ry9pr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507790/original/file-20230202-26-ry9pr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507790/original/file-20230202-26-ry9pr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Catherine and Mr Tilney, like Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (pictured), meet at a dance. But unlike the latter couple, Catherine and Mr Tilney encounter no internal obstacles.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Working Title</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>The obstacles between are almost entirely external. The Thorpes seek to throw wrenches into their burgeoning romance – especially John, who wants Catherine for himself. When Catherine goes to stay with Mr Tilney and his sister Eleanor at their family home, the titular Northanger Abbey, Mr Tilney’s father, General Tilney, allows it because he believes Catherine to be the heiress to the Allens’ considerable fortune. When he runs into a disaffected John Thorpe in London, who spitefully tells him Catherine is almost destitute, General Tilney hurries home and swiftly evicts her. </p>
<p>Perhaps the greatest moment of internal conflict belongs to Mr Tilney, who defies his father by following Catherine home, where he proposes to her. However, even this is quickly overcome, once General Tilney realises that Catherine, while not an heiress to a huge fortune, is not penniless either. </p>
<p>Just as there was little drama to their romance, so is there little drama to their happy ending. Mr Tilney is a younger son and thus not particularly wealthy, so there is no Pemberley in his and Catherine’s future – but this does not distract from their happiness. As Austen writes in the book’s last paragraph, “Henry and Catherine were married, the bells rang, and everybody smiled.”</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/exes-alcohol-and-loose-historical-licence-why-netflixs-persuasion-is-jane-austen-via-fleabag-185383">Exes, alcohol and loose historical licence: why Netflix's Persuasion is Jane Austen via Fleabag</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<h2>Gothic romance</h2>
<p>The peculiarly conflict-free romance of Catherine and Mr Tilney stands in contrast not just to works like Pride and Prejudice, but also to the form Austen explicitly parodies in Northanger Abbey: the Gothic romance.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507791/original/file-20230202-256-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507791/original/file-20230202-256-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/507791/original/file-20230202-256-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507791/original/file-20230202-256-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507791/original/file-20230202-256-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507791/original/file-20230202-256-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507791/original/file-20230202-256-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/507791/original/file-20230202-256-3d58yn.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1130&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>These novels, very popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, focus on young women who find themselves in dangerous and sometimes supernatural situations, often trapped in old houses filled with secrets. One famous example, which Catherine and Isabella read, is Ann Radcliffe’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93134.The_Mysteries_of_Udolpho">The Mysteries of Udolpho</a> (1794), in which heroine Emily St Aubert is imprisoned in Castle Udolpho by her aunt’s mysterious new husband, Montoni. </p>
<p>When Catherine visits Northanger Abbey and discovers there is a wing no one ever enters, she immediately starts imagining the Abbey as Castle Udolpho-esque. Because the wing contains rooms that belonged to Mr Tilney’s late mother, she envisions his father General Tilney in place of Montoni, concocting a story in which he has either killed the mother or imprisoned her. </p>
<p>She is, of course, incorrect – as a rather humiliating encounter with Mr Tilney, when she is snooping around looking for evidence, reveals. On the surface, this would seem to endorse the view that reading novels has a deleterious effect on young women. </p>
<p>However, while she has parsed it through the wrong narrative lens, Catherine is not entirely wrong about Mr Tilney’s father, as shown when he unceremoniously throws her out of Northanger Abbey and leaves her to travel 70 miles home alone – something potentially quite unsafe for an unchaperoned young woman. </p>
<p>In other words, Catherine might have read the circumstances incorrectly, but her reading of novels allowed her to read General Tilney. Northanger Abbey thus pushes back at the most common criticisms levelled at novels: that either they were not educational, or were teaching their readers the wrong things. </p>
<p>Instead, according to Austen, in novels, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-rebecca-by-daphne-du-maurier-gender-gothic-haunting-and-gaslighting-146573">Guide to the classics: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — gender, gothic haunting and gaslighting</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A ‘romantic’ shared love of novel-reading</h2>
<p>English Studies professor Katie Halsey <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=bbQ1DgAAQBAJ&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false">argues</a> that Austen (in Northanger Abbey) and Fordyce (in his sermons) – along with much contemporaneous writing about writing – are informed by the principle “that works of literature should both delight and instruct”. The instructional is of most interest to moralisers like Fordyce; however, here, Austen takes the delight found in novels just as seriously. </p>
<p>Catherine has two potential love interests: Mr Tilney and Mr Thorpe. The latter decries novel-reading (“I never read novels; I have something else to do,” Mr Thorpe declares). The former, however, voraciously and unabashedly consumes novels; he enjoyed The Mysteries of Udolpho as much as Catherine did. </p>
<p>This shared delight is a major point of connection between Catherine and Mr Tilney. Not only does he take what she likes seriously, but he also likes – and values – what she likes. </p>
<p>As a writer, <a href="https://theconversation.com/love-and-a-happy-ending-romance-fiction-to-help-you-through-a-coronavirus-lockdown-133784">reader</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/i-believe-in-romance-remembering-valerie-parv-the-australian-author-who-sold-34-million-books-160084">scholar</a> of popular romance fiction, Mr Tilney is my favourite of Austen’s heroes. While conflict is the typical driver of a romance narrative, and Catherine and Mr Tilney’s relationship contains remarkably little, this shared love of novel-reading is, for me, one of the most romantic things in all of Austen’s work. </p>
<p>Anyone who has ever had their favourite form of media rubbished by a potential friend or partner and felt they had to hide their consumption of it will know how terrible that can feel. </p>
<p>Catherine and Mr Tilney might be two average people whose romance has one of Austen’s most prosaic happy endings. However, their mutual delight in novels means they will never run out of things to talk about.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/188656/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jodi McAlister does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A UK university has attached a trigger warning to Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen’s biting satire, for ‘toxic relationships’. Ironically, Jodi McAlister loves it for the gentle romance at its centre.Jodi McAlister, Senior Lecturer in Writing, Literature and Culture, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1871732022-08-16T20:04:22Z2022-08-16T20:04:22ZJekyll and Hyde: a tale of doubles, disguises, and our warring desires<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479099/original/file-20220815-13-uvsojl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">CROP Barrymore JH movie poster</span> </figcaption></figure><p><em>In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature.</em></p>
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<p>Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novella, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde">Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde</a>, was published in 1886. The Scottish author was already known for his travel writing and children’s literature – including <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/295.Treasure_Island">Treasure Island</a> – when Jekyll and Hyde appeared. However, this insightful and fantastic tale is perhaps his most unique and enduring.</p>
<p>As its title suggests, the story is indeed strange. It’s bound up in notions of self-estrangement, and the uncanny, which <a href="https://scalar.usc.edu/works/index-2/freuds-uncanny-theory">Freud describes</a> as the familiar made strange. Inspired by a feverish nightmare, the story is about competing desires, and what might happen if we could split the good and evil parts of the self into separate identities. </p>
<p>The novella’s mystery plot centres on the puzzle of an unlikely connection between two opposing characters – the benevolent and respectable doctor, Jekyll, and the murderous, animalistic Hyde. The criminal Hyde uses a cheque signed by Jekyll, and Jekyll’s will is changed to make Hyde the sole beneficiary. But why? The connection, we eventually learn, is that Hyde <em>is</em> Jekyll. Or, more specifically, he is the embodiment of Jekyll’s evil aspects: a demonic double brought to life by a transformative potion, conjured to allow Jekyll to act out his vices in disguise. Based on his belief that “man is not truly one, but truly two”, Jekyll seeks to cordon off his dark side and let it run amok. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479096/original/file-20220815-19-uvsojl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479096/original/file-20220815-19-uvsojl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479096/original/file-20220815-19-uvsojl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479096/original/file-20220815-19-uvsojl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479096/original/file-20220815-19-uvsojl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479096/original/file-20220815-19-uvsojl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479096/original/file-20220815-19-uvsojl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479096/original/file-20220815-19-uvsojl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hyde is Jekyll’s demonic double, brought to life by a transformative potion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daniel Boud/STC</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Written in ‘a matter of days’</h2>
<p>According to biographical accounts, Stevenson penned his tale in a matter of days. He then threw the original draft into the fire <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/oct/25/books.booksnews">because</a> his wife suggested the story needed work. Various reports suggest she either didn’t think the sensational story worthy of him, or felt that the allegory needed to be refined. He wrote a revised version in another few days. Stevenson said that the work “was conceived, written, rewritten, re-rewritten, and printed inside ten weeks”. </p>
<p>Despite its astoundingly short production, Jekyll and Hyde was an incredible success: it has never been out of print, has been reimagined in countless film and stage adaptations, and is often referenced in popular culture. In The Simpsons, for instance, Bart exhibits “some monster-ism” after drinking an experimental diet cola.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kJwZ7dMwmQ0?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">In The Simpsons, Bart exhibits ‘some monsterism’ after drinking an experimental cola – a reference to Jekyll and Hyde.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The names Jekyll and Hyde have been integrated into our everyday language. Even those unfamiliar with the book (and its many adaptations and riffs) know that “Jekyll-Hyde” means twinned good and evil, or the split personality. According to <a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jekyll-hyde">Urban Dictionary</a>, “Jekyll-Hyde” is a colloquialism for someone whose erratic behaviour makes them seem like two different people. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-production-to-satisfy-sydneys-darkest-imaginings-sydney-theatre-companys-strange-case-of-dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-185596">A production to satisfy Sydney's darkest imaginings: Sydney Theatre Company's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Sensationalism and radical science</h2>
<p>Sensationalism was a popular genre that emerged in Britain in the 1860s. These sensational novels – often called railway novels, because cheap editions were sold at stations to be read on long train journeys – typically took place in recognisable, contemporary settings, with plots often revolving around shocking crimes, doubles, and mistaken identities. Jekyll and Hyde adheres to many conventions of the genre. Set in 19th-century London (in real-life locations such as Cavendish Square, Soho, and Regents Park), it represents violence, murder, and mirrored, fluid protagonists.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479103/original/file-20220815-20-s7tnqx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479103/original/file-20220815-20-s7tnqx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479103/original/file-20220815-20-s7tnqx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479103/original/file-20220815-20-s7tnqx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479103/original/file-20220815-20-s7tnqx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479103/original/file-20220815-20-s7tnqx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479103/original/file-20220815-20-s7tnqx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479103/original/file-20220815-20-s7tnqx.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The story of Jekyll and Hyde has been reimagined in countless adaptations, including the 1941 film, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with Spencer Tracy, Lana Turner and Ingrid Bergman.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The text is also distinctly gothic in its engagement with supernatural themes such as metamorphosis, and its delving into the dark side of human psychology and desire. There are some interesting crossovers between Jekyll and Hyde and Mary Shelley’s seminal horror story, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35031085-frankenstein">Frankenstein</a> (1818). In both cases, a radical scientist brings a monstrous, violent creature to life, and is then horrified and plagued by his own creation. </p>
<p>While Hyde is not as complex as <a href="https://theconversation.com/frankenstein-how-mary-shelleys-sci-fi-classic-offers-lessons-for-us-today-about-the-dangers-of-playing-god-175520">Frankenstein’s monster</a> – a character driven mad by isolation and the prejudice of others, but capable of love and empathy – both texts force us to question whether the monsters are really to blame for their crimes, or whether we should be pointing the finger at their irresponsible creators? More broadly, they force us to question whether society’s monsters (murderers and other villains) are born “evil”, or if their antisocial behaviour is created by outside forces.</p>
<p>Stevenson had been friends with a doctor, Eugene Cantrelle, who was later convicted (in 1878) of <a href="https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/real-life-jekyll-hyde-who-inspired-stevensons-classic-612461">murdering his wife</a> for a life insurance payout. Stevenson, who was present throughout <a href="https://archive.org/stream/trialofeugnema00chanuoft/trialofeugnema00chanuoft_djvu.txt">the trial</a>, was reportedly traumatised by discovering the dark side of his seemingly normal friend (who was also believed to have committed other murders). This may have influenced Stevenson’s novella, which was published eight years later.</p>
<p>Blending elements of sensation and gothic fiction, while also imparting moral lessons and reflecting on the intricacies of human nature, the story is both thrilling and thought-provoking. In a contemporary review, novelist Henry James refers to the tensions between moralism and excitement in the text, asking, “Is ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ a work of high philosophic intention, or simply the most ingenious and irresponsible of fictions?”. </p>
<p>Careful examination tells us that it is, in fact, both – a mesmerising horror story and a stylistically complex work that meditates on social issues as diverse as moral philosophy, the dangers of drug use, and the repressive codes of Victorian society, to name a few. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/frankenstein-how-mary-shelleys-sci-fi-classic-offers-lessons-for-us-today-about-the-dangers-of-playing-god-175520">Frankenstein: how Mary Shelley's sci-fi classic offers lessons for us today about the dangers of playing God</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The moral of man’s doubleness</h2>
<p>Stevenson explains he based the story on “that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature”. Although the book is only ten chapters long, it engages with complex questions about moral conflict, or the internal battle between our carnal – not always honourable – desires and our ethical responsibilities.</p>
<p>It also taps into contemporary concerns about the ethics of scientific and medical advancements. Jekyll is a pioneer of “transcendental medicine”; his experimental cocktail allows him to take on an unrecognisable form and commit atrocities without sacrificing his own good name. This raises a question that still resonates today: what is at stake when technology and power are used for personal gain? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479113/original/file-20220815-20-bygjvp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479113/original/file-20220815-20-bygjvp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479113/original/file-20220815-20-bygjvp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479113/original/file-20220815-20-bygjvp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479113/original/file-20220815-20-bygjvp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479113/original/file-20220815-20-bygjvp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479113/original/file-20220815-20-bygjvp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479113/original/file-20220815-20-bygjvp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stevenson based his story on a ‘strong sense of man’s double being’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daniel Boud/STC</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jekyll’s first transformation is intoxicating and liberating: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This “new life” lived through Hyde, who nonchalantly knocks down a small child in the street and frenziedly bludgeons a kindly old man to death, becomes a secondary outlet through which Jekyll’s base cravings can be channelled. Yet, expressive freedom turns to stifling bondage when Jekyll’s mutations into his evil twin become involuntary, and progressively more difficult to reverse. </p>
<p>Having flexed and strengthened his dark side, it takes him in a chokehold and refuses to let go. Hyde cannot be suppressed or flung aside, because he is an integral part of the whole self. Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, which is independent of its maker, Jekyll’s creation is an essential, inseparable part of himself – a different dimension of the same identity.</p>
<h2>The mythical and the beastly</h2>
<p>The narrative moves between past and present, building suspense by setting up the mystery of Hyde’s identity before finally taking readers into its confidence. Its fictional world is drawn through various perspectives, including two first-person accounts. No matter whose eyes the world is filtered through, it is a place of confusion and uncertainty, where characters try to figure each other (and themselves) out.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479110/original/file-20220815-19-gjozx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479110/original/file-20220815-19-gjozx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479110/original/file-20220815-19-gjozx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479110/original/file-20220815-19-gjozx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479110/original/file-20220815-19-gjozx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=391&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479110/original/file-20220815-19-gjozx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479110/original/file-20220815-19-gjozx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479110/original/file-20220815-19-gjozx6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=491&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fredric March in Hyde guise, in the 1931 film, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">TCM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We are rarely aligned with Hyde’s gaze. He remains an inaccessible, somewhat distant figure – more of a boorish caricature than a complex human. Characters who encounter Hyde form only a distorted, vague sense of him – thus hinting that he is a spectral, intangible figure. One recalls, “He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point”.</p>
<p>It’s as if we can’t get Hyde in full view, or see him in a broad light, seeming to signal a lack of substance. As a figure of “pure evil”, with any semblance of good cellared in his other self, Hyde emerges as an incomplete half-creature. To take an idiom that typically relates to mental incapacity, the extremely diabolical Hyde is (morally) “not all there”.</p>
<p>Physically furry and energised by primal impulses, he’s represented as more animal than human. His hands are covered in “swart” hair; he bares and gnashes his teeth when enraged, and physically treads over his victims like a stampeding beast.</p>
<p>Hyde’s vicious, almost feral side is most pronounced in the scene where he beats an old man who stops him in the street and politely asks for directions: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mr. Hyde broke out of all bounds and clubbed him to the earth. And, next moment, with ape-like fury, he was trampling his victim under foot, and hailing down a storm of blows, under which the bones were audibly shattered and the body jumped upon the roadway.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mood-and-personality-disorders-are-often-misconceived-heres-what-you-need-to-know-94971">Mood and personality disorders are often misconceived: here's what you need to know</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Adaptations: prosthetics, parody, and an Oscar</h2>
<p>With its thrilling plot and universal themes, Jekyll and Hyde lends itself to dramatic adaptations and reimaginings. There have been countless film versions; there’s even <a href="https://www.imdb.com/list/ls058844487/">an IMDB list</a> of the best and worst. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478700/original/file-20220811-2936-1gdvbk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/478700/original/file-20220811-2936-1gdvbk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478700/original/file-20220811-2936-1gdvbk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478700/original/file-20220811-2936-1gdvbk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=773&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478700/original/file-20220811-2936-1gdvbk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=971&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478700/original/file-20220811-2936-1gdvbk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=971&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/478700/original/file-20220811-2936-1gdvbk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=971&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fredric March in his Oscar-winning role imdb.com.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Adaptations range from horror-comedies to psychological dramas. In the 1931 film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022835/">Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</a>, for which Fredric March won the Academy Award for Best Actor, the animal dimensions of Hyde are borne out visually. March dons a set of false teeth resembling canine fangs and a wig of shaggy hair that sits so low on his forehead, it almost meets his eyebrows. </p>
<p>In his 1990 portrayal of the title character, in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099875/">Jekyll and Hyde</a>, Michael Caine plays up the bodily grotesqueness of the character, making him more ogre than human. It’s a departure from Stevenson’s notion that Hyde’s deformity is sensed, but not quite visible.</p>
<p>The 1996 film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117002/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Mary Reilly</a>, offers a subtler rendition of Stevenson’s story, and also introduces a new character – Jekyll/Hyde’s housemaid, Mary (played by Julia Roberts), who sees and loves both men. (Notably, there are no central female characters in the book.) John Malkovich takes on the paired roles of Jekyll and Hyde, infusing both with a charismatic intensity. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0jb87JTGoMg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The 1996 film Mary Reilly introduces a central woman character, played by Julia Roberts, to Stevenson’s story.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In this retelling, there are no prosthetics or special effects to distinguish the villain, and Hyde is recognisable only by his long, black hair and clean-shaven face, in contrast to the grey, goateed Jekyll. Although the film retains the gory violence of the original text – at one point, the villain is shown holding the severed head of a brothel madam – it gives Hyde a psychological depth, and a capacity for romantic attachment, which Stevenson does not afford him. </p>
<p>In a parodic sketch for Saturday Night Live in 2009, Bill Hader plays the part of Dr Jekyll, with Hyde as a made-up alter-ego through which he acts out his homosexual urges. He tells a group of colleagues, “I’m attracted to women, like my wife. It’s Mr Hyde who does stuff with guys.” This comical reworking mocks the absurdity of the transformative potion, a plotline that also drew complaints from many contemporary critics. But it stays true to the themes of split desires and their expression through a second, secret self. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XWVYM_A1uXo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">A comic spin on the ‘other’ self.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A human problem</h2>
<p>Despite its fanciful premise of the distillation of evil through shape-shifting, the anchoring concerns of Jekyll and Hyde are profoundly and universally human. This classic text forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about morality and responsibility: do the best of us have a bad side that is suppressed, waiting to get out? How would we act if we had a duplicate identity that couldn’t be traced back to us – an invisibility cloak, of sorts? </p>
<p>Stevenson’s fever-nightmare comes to life in this vivid, haunting tale, immersing readers in a dystopian world where sympathy and self-control give way to reckless self-indulgence. It is a world from which we must all recoil. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is on at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until September 3.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/187173/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie Last does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about morality and responsibility. Do the best of us have a repressed bad side, just waiting to get out?Stephanie Last, PhD candidate, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1698552021-10-18T13:11:13Z2021-10-18T13:11:13ZI translated the Marquis de Sade’s only gothic novel into English<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426685/original/file-20211015-26-1gdbbjc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C21%2C1457%2C969&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_de_Joannis_de_Chateaublanc#/media/Fichier:TR02_Image_03.png">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1813, a year before he died, the Marquis de Sade wrote his last published book, The Marquise de Ganges. The novel is based on a 17th-century true crime that Sade – notorious aristocrat, libertine and pornographer – probably first heard of as a young boy, and later read about while locked up in the Bastille. According to the accounts of the time, this is what happened. </p>
<p>On the afternoon of May 17 1667, Diane de Joannis, Marquise de Ganges, better known in her time in Louis XIV’s court as <em>la Belle Provençale</em>, is faced with a terrible choice. Standing before her are her two brothers-in-law – the Abbé (the abbott) and Chevalier de Ganges. The Abbé is holding a pistol in one hand and a glass filled with poison in the other. The Chevalier’s sword is drawn. “Madame,” the Abbé tells her, “you must die: you may choose fire, steel, or poison”.</p>
<p>The next few hours pass in a blur. Poison swallowed, then furtively disgorged; escape through a first-floor window; brief sanctuary amongst the women of the village; frenzied blows from the Chevalier’s sword, its blade snapping in her shoulder; and finally, the Abbé’s pistol, pressed against her chest … misfiring.</p>
<p>This is not the end of the Marquise’s ordeal, but there is some respite at least. The women of the village come to her aid once more, driving back the Abbé and the Chevalier, who take flight, never to return – and never to face justice. </p>
<p>Her wounds are dressed, and she is taken back to the Château de Ganges. Despite her extraordinary courage and resilience, however, the damage has already been done. She dies 19 days later – the autopsy confirming poisoning as the cause of death.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Book cover for The Marquise de Gange featuring woman in period dress and powdered white wig." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=912&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426686/original/file-20211015-25-1lrk8hc.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1146&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Oxford University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was one of the crimes of the century, and immediately became a <em>récit sanglant</em> or bloody tale, one to be told and retold by one generation to the next.</p>
<p>Now Sade’s version of this tragic episode is now available in English for the first time, in <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-marquise-de-gange-9780198848288?cc=us&lang=en&">my new translation</a> for Oxford World’s Classics. Sade scholars have always labelled it a “historical novel” but when I was translating it, I realised that’s not the right genre. It is, instead, Sade’s first and only truly gothic novel – inspired by English novelists like Ann Radcliffe, who wrote <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-mysteries-of-udolpho">The Mysteries of Udolpho</a>, and Mathew Lewis, who wrote <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-monk-by-matthew-lewis">The Monk</a>. </p>
<h2>Sade and the gothic</h2>
<p>Sade today is probably best known as the man who inspired the term “sadism”, and for his works of violent pornography – novels like Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom, which <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/07/marquis-de-sade-120-days-of-sodom-published-classic">he described</a> as “the most impure tale ever written since the world began”. Until now, he’s not really been considered a gothic novelist – although he is often quoted as an early commentator of this new genre, which he called “the necessary offspring of the revolutionary upheaval which affected the whole of Europe” in an <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2011.65.4.513">essay in 1800</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-motifs">Gothic novels</a> thrived in Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s and were highly popular across Europe. The writer <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=luFDEAAAQBAJ&pg=PR26&lpg=PR26&dq=madame+de+sta%C3%ABl+%22aim+was+to+inspire+terror+with+night-time,+old+castles,+long+corridors+and+gusts+of+wind&source=bl&ots=f9W5ca9v5U&sig=ACfU3U2M6avzEUfaNFjtgabyjrYSXveCvg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi2163hy9PzAhXThP0HHUwyAbcQ6AF6BAgCEAM#v=onepage&q=madame%20de%20sta%C3%ABl%20%22aim%20was%20to%20inspire%20terror%20with%20night-time%2C%20old%20castles%2C%20long%20corridors%20and%20gusts%20of%20wind&f=false">Madame de Staël</a> described these as stories whose “aim was to inspire terror with night-time, old castles, long corridors and gusts of wind.” They were stories of horror and suspense, of lust and love, with darkly violent and erotic undertones. </p>
<p>In the early 1790s, Radcliffe was the most influential and successful writer of this popular genre. Lewis’s The Monk, a supernatural tale of murder, incest and religion, saw the gothic take a turn from polite terror to the more shocking – think bleeding nuns and lecherous monks making pacts with demons.</p>
<p>Sade’s pornographic novels do share some features with the English gothic in terms of characters (virtuous heroines, debauched aristocrats and monks) and locations (isolated castles, dark forests, and even darker dungeons). Until now this has seemed a matter of coincidence rather than influence. When he wrote them, Sade hadn’t read Radcliffe or Lewis, and there’s no evidence that they ever read Sade either. And although The Monk was considered scandalous at the time, English gothic novels never come close to the graphic and often crude depictions of sex we find in Sade.</p>
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<img alt="Portrait of the Maquise de Ganges" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=738&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/426434/original/file-20211014-16-76vopr.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Diane de Joannis de Chateaublanc, the Marquise de Ganges.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
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<p>But <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-marquise-de-gange-9780198848288?cc=gb&lang=en&">The Marquise de Gange</a> is a very different work to Sade’s famous – or infamous – pornographic fiction. Written years later, Sade’s retelling is clearly inspired by novelists like Radcliffe and Lewis. It is his first attempt at a gothic novel – complete with its forbidding castle in keeping with “that Gothic style of architecture”.</p>
<p>Like so many other gothic novels, The Marquise de Gange is at its heart a story about predatory men and innocent women. In Sade’s part-fictionalised account of this historical murder, that violence is sexually driven, as the Marquise’s brothers-in-law take revenge for her rejection of their advances. Throughout the novel, male desire is a constant danger, a constant threat.</p>
<p>So far so gothic. But reading this novel is not quite like reading any other gothic novel, because it is impossible to forget who wrote it. Sade’s life, like his fiction, is a tale of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zyiEW5XZ_poC&pg=PA89&lpg=PA89&dq=Jeanne+Testard+and+Rose+Keller+sade&source=bl&ots=zqmTf2XjzK&sig=ACfU3U3DGOx3sMz3Z7AkfPAU1QwvO7Wixw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiZwvXO18nzAhUFsaQKHVEvBgMQ6AF6BAgSEAM#v=onepage&q=Jeanne%20Testard%20and%20Rose%20Keller%20sade&f=false">repeated acts of sexual violence</a> against women, from Jeanne Testard and Rose Keller, to the teenage girls he hired as servants in his castle in Lacoste one winter. As American radical feminist writer <a href="https://www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Pornography-Men-Possessing-Women-1981.pdf">Andrea Dworkin</a> put it, Sade’s “life and writing were of a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imagined and real”.</p>
<p>Beneath the novel’s respectable surface, and behind its moralising narrator, the reader can’t help but look for glimpses of an amoral author. One wants to look for the mask to slip, as it seems to when the narrator lingers over the heroine’s “bosom of alabaster, covered only with her beautiful, dishevelled locks” in the climactic scene, or when the narrator forgets whether he should be impressed or outraged by the evil Abbé’s plotting: “Everything had been judiciously, or rather, maliciously calculated in the Abbé’s plans,” he corrects himself. Sade teases the reader, playing cat and mouse throughout this highly self-conscious and subversive version of a gothic novel.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169855/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Will McMorran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A story about male violence and a damsel in distress, it is based on a true crimeWill McMorran, Reader in French & Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1291242019-12-30T08:49:08Z2019-12-30T08:49:08ZDracula: free movement of vampires a fitting horror story for the Brexit era<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307872/original/file-20191219-11939-3p89lp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C0%2C3976%2C2994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bloody and unbowed: Claes Bang as Dracula.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/David Ellis</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fictional vampires tend to reflect the politics of the times that produce them: “Because they are always changing, their appeal is dramatically generational,” says the late American scholar Nina Auerbach in her classic work of criticism <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ILOzzQFU8ooC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Our Vampires, Ourselves</a>. The figure of the vampire, she suggests, always tells us as much about ourselves as it does about vampires <em>per se</em>.</p>
<p>With this in mind, the first episode of the new adaptation of Dracula for the BBC and Netflix by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss is at first perplexing. Unlike Moffat’s previous, modernising adaptations of 19th-century fiction – Jekyll (2007) and Sherlock (2010-17) – the series returns to 1897, the year in which Bram Stoker published his novel. </p>
<p>The setting is high Gothic, featuring a crumbling, eastern European castle (Orava Castle in Slovakia) and a convent full of crucifix-toting nuns. Eschewing the sentimental romance of <a href="https://www.headstuff.org/culture/literature/literature-on-film-part-1-francis-ford-coppolas-adaptation-of-bram-stokers-dracula/">Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation</a> or the wildly successful <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/02/ten-years-of-twilight-the-extraordinary-feminist-legacy-of-the-panned-vampire-saga">Twilight franchise</a>, Moffat and Gatiss appear – initially at least – to take us back to the horror of the original text.</p>
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<p>But as the episode progresses the European setting becomes more than just spooky window dressing. One of the most famous arguments about the novel, first made by <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents">Stephen D. Arata</a>, is that Dracula enacts “reverse colonisation” – Stoker’s vampire expresses the threat that imperialism might not be a one-way operation. From his home in eastern Europe, the count travels to Britain to buy up its real estate and add its women to his harem, bypassing the need for a passport or immigration documents and threatening British manhood in the process.</p>
<h2>‘Brexit Gothic’</h2>
<p>Seen in this light, Dracula offers a clear application to our times. In an article for The Guardian on “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/feb/11/project-fear-what-will-brexit-gothic-fiction-look-like">Brexit Gothic</a>”, Neil McRobert points out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When Nigel Farage expresses concern about <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27459923">Romanian men moving in next door</a>, it makes one wonder if he has read Dracula – the story of a Romanian man who literally moves in beside some stuffy British people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Moffat and Gatiss are too canny to give us a straightforward metaphor for Brexit – and yet there are clear nods to contemporary anxieties in the first episode. Dracula quizzes Jonathan Harker on English language and culture out of a desire to “pass among your countrymen as one of their own”. He will be the good immigrant who assimilates, who blends invisibly with the host culture. There is a moment of discomfort, however, as he promises to “absorb” Harker – this immigrant is a parasite who feeds off its host.</p>
<p>There is no direct correlation with itinerant agricultural workers, however, as Dracula seeks to infiltrate the highest echelons of society. In a warped version of late 19th-century eugenics, we discover that Dracula’s choosiness about his victims is the secret to his vampiric success – consuming only the blood of the best enables him to retain his human qualities. Hence his appetite for the British Empire. “Vampires go where power is,” says Auerbach. “You are what you eat,” quips Claes Bang’s Dracula.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Dolly Wells as Sister Agatha with Joanna Scanlan as Mother Superior.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/Robert Viglasky</span></span>
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<p>Moreover, this is a tale of two Europeans. Sister Agatha, the Dutch nun who questions Harker after his escape from Dracula’s castle (a significantly expanded role from the book, played with exquisite exasperation by Dolly Wells), scoffs at Jonathan’s English masculinity when he fails to realise the incongruity of a secret message written to him in English in a Transylvanian castle: “Of course not! You are an English man! A combination of presumptions beyond compare.” British exceptionalism looks set to take a tumble as Dracula reaches England in the second instalment.</p>
<h2>Dark humour</h2>
<p>The episode displays the acute self-aware characteristic of vampire films, which are what <a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/book-reviews/new-vampire-cinema-by-ken-gelder/">Ken Gelder calls “citational”</a>, constantly referring to previous examples of the genre. There are multiple moments when viewers anticipating romance have their expectations rudely shattered. Twilight in particular comes in for some sharp debunking, with Mina playing the role of Twilight’s heroine Bella, appealing to her lover’s higher moral fibre and coming in for a shock as she discovers that true love does not trump bloodlust after all. Instead of Twilight’s lingering shots of gleaming male torsos we get intimate body horror in excruciating close up – a fly crawling across an eyeball, a blackened nail flaking off a finger.</p>
<p>One of the most striking features of Moffat and Gatiss’s adaptation is its humour. Comedy has always been a crucial element of Gothic literature, which continually teeters between terror and laughter. “King Laugh,” a metaphorical figure invented by Professor Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s novel to explain his own hysterics, is a version of death, leading the characters in a kind of <em>danse macabre</em>. The novel exhibits black humour in the character of the lunatic Renfield, in particular, who calculates how many lives he can consume, starting by eating flies and trading up the food chain.</p>
<p>As I argued in my recent book, <a href="https://irishgothichorror.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/catherine-spooner.pdf">Post-Millennial Gothic</a>, a distinguishing characteristic of contemporary vampires is their increasing comic agency. The first self-conscious vampire joke is the iconic one-liner first spoken by Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s classic 1931 film: “I never drink … wine.” Moffat and Gatiss get this out of the way in the first few minutes – and even add a callback later in the episode.</p>
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<p>There are more zingers to come as Bang quips his way across Europe like an infernal James Bond. When Harker spots him with a glass and queries that he never drinks, I almost expected him to clarify: “Shaken, not stirred.”</p>
<p>The comparison between Dracula and Bond is not a casual one. Bond props up a crumbling British Empire – Dracula aims to infiltrate it and use it to his own ends. They emerge from the same social and historical concerns, two sides of the same coin. Both reflect us back in multiple ways, and neither offers a flattering picture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129124/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spooner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The latest version of the Gothic vampire chiller is brought to you with the trademark humour of writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1259822019-10-30T16:06:19Z2019-10-30T16:06:19ZBBC and Netflix have resurrected Dracula: a short history of world’s favourite vampire<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299423/original/file-20191030-17878-1itv2x0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1997%2C1332&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Heffernan as Jonathan Harker in Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat's Dracula.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/Robert Viglasky</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>British screenwriters Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are dipping their toes in the waters of late-Victorian fiction again. Following the success of their take on the most famous of all detectives, Sherlock Holmes, the pair have turned their sights on the most famous of vampires: <a href="https://youtu.be/IC9TjMNqPEo">Dracula</a>. A new series based on the novel and co-produced by the BBC and Netflix will reportedly <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/28/dracula-start-bbc-one-cast-10995995/">hit screens early in 2020</a>.</p>
<p>Like those of Holmes, this will hardly be the first adaptation of Dracula (1897). Bram Stoker’s novel is 122 years old, and the character has appeared on screen nearly <a href="https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=dracula&ref_=fn_al_kw_1">350 times</a>. This might leave us to wonder: what new ground could they possibly cover?</p>
<p>Yet, each incarnation of Dracula offers a new story and a new vampire, no matter how closely the script follows the novel. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Moffat and Gatiss won’t be using a <a href="https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2019-04-30/dracula-will-be-the-hero-of-his-own-story-in-radical-reinterpretation-by-sherlock-creators/">modern setting for Dracula</a>, but there is no doubt that his story will be modernised. He will be transformed to suit the interests and needs of a 21st-century audience.</p>
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<p>Gothic fiction has always had the power to both respond to and transcend its own historical moment. Dracula can be said to be “about” a number of very specific social contexts of the mid-1890s – such as the <a href="http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2409/">political turmoil</a> in the Transylvania region which followed the 1877 Russo-Turkish war. Yet, year after year people read and enjoy Dracula who have never heard of these political events. </p>
<p>This is because displacement is at the heart of Gothic literature’s cathartic function. Gothic fiction projects contemporary anxieties (the church, new science, the crumbling empire) onto supernatural monsters, allowing for a safe exploration of social and political fears. They are given embodied form – a villain that can be confronted, fought, and killed. </p>
<p>This displacement also allows Gothic works longevity past their own historical moment. Because these monsters are distanced from the actual source of anxiety that may have inspired them, they can be reinterpreted by subsequent generations to represent any number of anxieties. </p>
<p>And Dracula is uniquely well suited to reinterpretation. Unlike other eponymous Gothic villains of the 19th century (Frankenstein’s Creature, Dr Jekyll, Dorian Gray), Dracula does not narrate any portion of his own story. The epistolary novel presents us with diary entries, newspaper clippings, and ship’s logs, which give us insight into the thoughts of everyone except for the titular vampire. We know his movements, but never his motives. It is this inscrutability that has allowed filmmakers to reshape and redefine Dracula since the first unlicensed adaptation of the novel in 1922 (Nosferatu).</p>
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<p>Bela Lugosi (Dracula, 1931) transformed the unattractive Count into a suave and handsome aristocrat, who all the women find “<a href="https://youtu.be/dTr8dXob7YI">fascinating</a>”. </p>
<p>Subsequent iterations of Dracula, including by directors Dan Curtis (1973), John Badham (1979) and Francis Ford Coppola (1992) followed suit, with Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula providing Gary Oldman with a tragic backstory (a dead wife), an all-consuming passion for Mina, and transforming the novel’s sexual assault into a <a href="https://youtu.be/_OFfuZY_Pvk">love scene</a>.</p>
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<h2>Hammer nails it</h2>
<p>By contrast, the years between Lugosi and Oldman were dominated by Hammer Horror’s Dracula, portrayed by Christopher Lee across six films. Violent, animalistic and practically non-verbal – the Count does not speak at all in Dracula Prince of Darkness (1966) – Lee’s Dracula is far from a hero. Instead he seems to represent the threat of Eastern powers during the <a href="https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/2000.htm">Cold War era</a>.</p>
<p>Each generation’s interpretation of Dracula reflects its own political climate. Second-wave feminists in the 1970s saw the novel as a misogynistic rape fantasy that punished women for their <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827492?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">sexual liberation</a> (an interpretation that quickly lead to sexploitation films like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066380/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1">Vampyros Lesbos</a>, 1971, and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080080/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1">Vampire Hookers</a>, 1978). Queer theorists responded to the climate of LGBT activism and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s by reading <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928560?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">suppressed homosexuality</a> into the novel (primarily between Jonathan Harker and Dracula, but sometimes also Mina and Lucy). </p>
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<p>Post-colonial scholars shifted their focus from sex <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">to race</a>, and suggested that the novel reflects similar concerns to those they saw in the wake of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jan/25/race.world">increased immigration</a> in the 1990s: fears of mass migration and anxieties about rapidly multiplying numbers of foreigners. This interpretation lingers into 2014’s Dracula Untold, which has been called “<a href="https://io9.gizmodo.com/dracula-gets-a-makeover-for-the-isis-age-in-dracula-unt-1644837610">Dracula for the ISIS age</a>”. </p>
<p>The dizzying pace of technological change at the millennium led scholars of this period to read the novel through its <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SFSqoX0gTygC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">technology</a>, as telegraphs, phonographs, and typewriters form the principal “weapons” mobilised against Dracula. These concerns are apparent in films such as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0367677/">Dracula 3000</a> (2004), which sends the vampire to space.</p>
<h2>Modern monster</h2>
<p>So what will Dracula mean to us (or at least to Moffat and Gatiss) in 2020? Maybe a combination of all the above – the anxieties that scholars have traced in the novel still remain at the fore of our political landscape. Attempts are still made to police women’s bodily autonomy, evidenced by a political campaign against the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/northern-ireland-abortion-stormont-protest-dup-arlene-foster-a9095351.html">decriminalisation of abortion</a> in Northern Ireland in 2019. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299425/original/file-20191030-17878-1899rj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299425/original/file-20191030-17878-1899rj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299425/original/file-20191030-17878-1899rj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299425/original/file-20191030-17878-1899rj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299425/original/file-20191030-17878-1899rj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299425/original/file-20191030-17878-1899rj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299425/original/file-20191030-17878-1899rj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Danish actor Claes Bang is the latest incarnation of the undead Count.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/Robert Viglasky</span></span>
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<p>Other familiar themes are resurfacing – “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/27/immigration-panic-how-the-west-fell-for-manufactured-rage">immigration panic</a>” in the West in the wake of Brexit and the rise of US president, Donald Trump – whose base obsesses over alt-right claims of “<a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/white-genocide-a-dangerous-myth-employed-by-racists-1.3981739">white genocide</a>”. We’re bothered by technology, too, which is increasingly seen as out of control, finding endless new ways to invade our <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/facebook-accused-of-conducting-mass-surveillance-through-its-apps">privacy</a>. A new Dracula has the potential to engage with all of these contemporary anxieties. </p>
<p>The teaser trailer from Gatiss and Moffat hasn’t told us much. Reminiscent of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, but less stylised and more gruesome, it seems we can expect a show that doesn’t flinch from violence. “It’s really hard” to drag a shadowy villain into the spotlight of the hero, Moffat and Gatiss admitted. It will be interesting to see if they succeed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125982/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jordan Kistler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Ever since Dracula was born in the late 19th century, every age gets the vampire it deserves.Jordan Kistler, Lecturer in Victorian literature, School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1117422019-07-03T19:59:50Z2019-07-03T19:59:50ZAustralian Gothic: from Hanging Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273441/original/file-20190509-183093-1f0dtf3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 'gothic' genre was once thought to be inapplicable to Australia. But there is a strong gothic tradition in Australian literature and film, seen in examples like Picnic at Hanging Rock. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">IMDB</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the popular imagination, the term “Gothic” evokes images of grim, crumbling castles, wild moors, jagged mountain peaks, and coffins creaking open in labyrinthine underground crypts.</p>
<p>Populating this Gothic terrain are bloodsucking (or, more recently, sparkling) vampires, howling werewolves, ghostly apparitions, black-browed villains, and virginal maidens (<a href="https://twitter.com/pulplibrarian/status/1046421804154261505?lang=en">usually with great hair</a>) fleeing persecution and imprisonment.</p>
<p>Gothic novels, films, and other texts explore the terrors of the unseen, or the half-seen – the repressed matter that threatens to return. Its plots turn on uncertainty and anxiety, sexual danger and desire, inheritance and usurpation, and boundaries and their transgression.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-female-werewolf-and-her-shaggy-suffragette-sisters-72082">Friday essay: the female werewolf and her shaggy suffragette sisters</a>
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<p>Early Gothic novels, arguably beginning with Horace Walpole’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12923.The_Castle_of_Otranto">The Castle of Otranto</a> in 1764, were the bestsellers of their day.</p>
<p>Ann Radcliffe’s literary hits, such as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93134.The_Mysteries_of_Udolpho?from_search=true">The Mysteries of Udolpho</a> (1794), were so popular, particularly among young female readers, that Jane Austen satirised the period’s Gothic craze in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50398.Northanger_Abbey?ac=1&from_search=true">Northanger Abbey</a> (1817). </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273438/original/file-20190509-183103-8jfley.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>The Gothic lives on today in a variety of forms, from books like Stephanie Meyer’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=twilight">Twilight</a> to binge-worthy television shows like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6763664/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Haunting of Hill House</a>.</p>
<h2>An Australian tradition</h2>
<p>For some early commentators, the idea of an Australian Gothic aesthetic was laughable. Australia, given its lack of European history or ivy-covered ruins, couldn’t hope to lay “the foundations of a second ‘Castle of Otranto’”, wrote <a href="http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/setis/id/p00058">journalist Frederick Sinnett in 1856</a>.</p>
<p>But consider these examples: Albert Tucker’s 1956 painting <a href="https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/286.1982/">Apocalyptic Horse</a>; Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1533656.Wake_in_Fright?from_search=true">Wake in Fright</a>; Joan Lindsay’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/791345.Picnic_at_Hanging_Rock?ac=1&from_search=true">Picnic at Hanging Rock</a> and its adaptations; and George Miller’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392190/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1">Mad Max</a> films.</p>
<p>Or what about Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chF244LWWqg&amp=&start_radio=1&amp=&list=RDchF244LWWqg&amp=&t=8+%22%22">Where the Wild Roses Grow</a>?</p>
<p>These works all belong to an Australian Gothic tradition that took root alongside colonisation.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/chF244LWWqg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue - Where the Wild Roses Grow.</span></figcaption>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-gothic-buildings-became-associated-with-halloween-and-the-supernatural-67820">How Gothic buildings became associated with Halloween and the supernatural</a>
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<p>The Gothic genre gave early Australian writers and artists a way to explore the dark side of the Australian experience. This included the perceived hostility of the natural environment, the violence of colonisation, convicts’ experiences of exile and entrapment, settlers’ feelings of alienation, and European fears of the racial Other.</p>
<p>In Marcus Clarke’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/397046.For_the_Term_of_His_Natural_Life?from_search=true">For the Term of His Natural Life</a> (1874), Henry Lawson’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1855137.The_Bush_Undertaker_And_Other_Stories">The Bush Undertaker</a> (1892), and Barbara Baynton’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1961204.Bush_Studies?from_search=true">Bush Studies</a> (1902), Australia is not a country of promise and plenty, but rather a menacing and claustrophobic hell. The iconic swagman becomes a monstrous figure, the bush is haunted by a “weird melancholy”, and the landscape imprisons and threatens.</p>
<h2>Contemporary Australian Gothic</h2>
<p>Anxieties about Australia’s colonial past have also been explored more recently in Gothic literature and film. Kate Grenville’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/347698.The_Secret_River?from_search=true">The Secret River</a> (2005) returns to the Gothic bush to confront the guilty legacy of colonisation. The novel traces convict William Thornhill’s determination to possess a land plot along the Hawkesbury River, and the desire, fear, and greed that lead him to participate in the massacre of its Aboriginal owners. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273451/original/file-20190509-183089-x1avq1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>Indigenous writers such as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/341920.Alexis_Wright">Alexis Wright</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/805409.Kim_Scott?from_search=true">Kim Scott</a> have also appropriated the Gothic, overturning tropes that cast Indigenous people as the monstrous Other and instead positioning colonisers as terrifying figures.</p>
<p>The subgenre Tasmanian Gothic (see <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8864.Richard_Flanagan">Richard Flanagan</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4818153.Rohan_Wilson">Rohan Wilson</a>), meanwhile, often reveals anxieties about the colonial genocide of Aboriginal people, and present-day environmental degradation. For example, the extinct Tasmanian Tiger haunts Tasmania’s landscape in the 2011 Daniel Nettheim film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1703148/?ref_=nv_sr_5?ref_=nv_sr_5">The Hunter</a>, based on the 1999 novel by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1398605.The_Hunter?ac=1&from_search=true">Julia Leigh</a>.</p>
<p>Australian Gothic increasingly finds new sites to play out its terrors. In Jennifer Kent’s 2014 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2321549/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Babadook</a>, the Gothic moves into the urban, domestic space of an Adelaide terrace house where a mother and child are terrorised when the horrifying “Babadook” emerges from a child’s pop-up book. </p>
<p>The film has been read as an <a href="https://torontosun.com/2015/03/04/the-babadook-review-aussie-horror-near-perfect/wcm/58e5c499-e231-41b1-b979-a6a957b0b04d">exploration of grief</a> and the terrors of <a href="https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-babadook-2014">childhood and parenting</a>, demonstrating Australian Gothic’s ability to tackle diverse topics.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/273435/original/file-20190509-183086-1r30f9g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=606&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Essie Davis in The Babadook, a film which explores gothic themes in suburbia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screen Australia/IMDB</span></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-ya-gothic-fiction-is-booming-and-girl-monsters-are-on-the-rise-95921">Friday essay: why YA gothic fiction is booming - and girl monsters are on the rise</a>
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<p><a href="https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/article/view/3679">Tropical and subtropical Australia</a> have also been portrayed as “Gothic” in the novels of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/617561.Charades">Janette Turner Hospital</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1670400.It_s_Raining_in_Mango">Thea Astley</a>, and in the recent Netflix series <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6898970/?ref_=nv_sr_2?ref_=nv_sr_2">Tidelands</a>, in which supernatural sirens inhabit the waters off the Queensland coast.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1301146.The_Gothic">literary scholars David Punter and Glennis Byron </a> have pointed out, the Gothic genre flourishes at times of upheaval. It allows us to share fears, subvert norms, and point towards what might be overlooked in our history and culture. </p>
<p>Gothic will remain a popular mode for Australian writers, filmmakers, and other artists as long as anxieties about the colonial past, race, gender, and difference remain with us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111742/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emma Doolan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gothic texts are not all bloodsucking vampires and howling werewolves. An Australian Gothic tradition took root alongside colonisation, influencing writers from Marcus Clarke to Alexis Wright.Emma Doolan, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Southern Cross UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1143822019-03-29T12:27:05Z2019-03-29T12:27:05ZVampire’s rebirth: from monstrous undead creature to sexy and romantic Byronic seducer in one ghost story<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266523/original/file-20190329-71006-1y0070f.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C11%2C1597%2C1281&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Detroit Institute of Arts</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Victorian physician John Polidori took the vampire out of the forests of eastern Europe, gave him an aristocratic lineage and placed him into the drawing rooms of Romantic-era England. His tale <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-vampyre-by-john-polidori#">The Vampyre</a>, published 200 years ago – on April 1 1819, was the first sustained fictional treatment of the vampire and completely recast the folklore and mythology on which it drew. The vampire figure abandoned its peasant roots and left its calling card in polite society in London. </p>
<p>The story emerged out of the same storytelling contest at the Villa Diodati that gave birth to that other archetype of the Gothic heritage, Frankenstein’s monster. Present at this gathering were Polidori (then Byron’s physician) as well as Mary Godwin, the author of Frankenstein, Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, Mary’s soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley, and – crucially – Lord Byron. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fantasmagoriana-the-german-book-of-ghost-stories-that-inspired-frankenstein-105236">Fantasmagoriana: the German book of ghost stories that inspired Frankenstein</a>
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<p>Byron’s contribution to the contest was an inconclusive fragment about a mysterious man, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/fragment-of-a-novel-from-mazeppa-by-lord-george-byron">Augustus Darvell</a>, characterised by “a cureless disquiet”. Polidori took this fragment and turned it into the sensational tale of the vampire Lord Ruthven, preying on the vulnerable women of society.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266516/original/file-20190329-71003-1tasxui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">John William Polidori, by F.G. Gainsford.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Portrait Gallery</span></span>
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<p>After its magazine debut the story was published in book form and went through seven English printings in 1819 alone. It was adapted for the stage the following year by melodramatic playwright <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=flzKFymvfj0C&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=.+R.+Planch%C3%A9%E2%80%99s+The+Vampyre+(1820)&source=bl&ots=pOPwgl5oUd&sig=ACfU3U1j-_9XzxuIKmWjCXjPSWpnLoEM_g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi0_rXm4qXhAhU5SxUIHW#v=onepage&q=.%20R.%20Planch%C3%A9%E2%80%99s%20The%20Vampyre%20(1820)&f=false">James Robinson Planché</a>, one of a growing number of vampire theatricals inspired by Polidori, such as those by Charles Nodier and others. </p>
<p>It was then expanded into a two-volume French novel by Cyprien Bérard, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14533129-the-vampire-lord-ruthwen">Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires</a>. By 1830 it had been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish. </p>
<p>Despite all these imitations and adaptations, “Poor Polidori”, as Mary Shelley liked to call him, has all but been forgotten and his lively tale has often been dismissed as a crude narrative, written under the influence of a greater, more subtle talent, Byron. And yet it was Polidori not Byron who succeeded in founding the entire modern tradition of vampire fiction. </p>
<h2>Peasant to patrician</h2>
<p>The vampire prior to this had been a blood-gorged, animalistic monster of the Slavic peasantry. In his study of the origins of Vampire lore, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq6gm">Vampires, Burials and Death</a>, American scholar Paul Barber described the traditional image of the undead bloodsucker thus: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>with long fingernails and a stubbly beard […] his face ruddy and swollen. He would wear informal attire — a linen shroud – and would look for all the world like a dishevelled peasant.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Polidori transformed the East European peasant vampire of old into a pale-faced, dead-eyed, licentious English aristocrat. This deceiving, dashing and cursed creature was in possession of “irresistible powers of seduction”, haunting the drawing rooms of Western society undetected. In the hands of Polidori, under the influence of Byron, vampires transitioned from dishevelled peasants into alluring, seductive aristocrats in the 19th century.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266517/original/file-20190329-70993-yzgxzm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron by Richard Westall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Portrait Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This elevation in social status is not all. Polidori’s The Vampyre is responsible for a number of groundbreaking innovations. He established links to the aristocracy – where there had never before been an urban vampire, let alone one as educated and high in social rank. He also introduced the notion of the vampire as sexual predator, showing his readers, for the first time, the vampire as rake or libertine – a real “lady killer”. As he <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6087/6087-h/6087-h.htm">wrote in his novella</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The guardians hastened to protect Miss Aubrey; but when they arrived, it was too late. Lord Ruthven had disappeared and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Mad and bad</h2>
<p>Lord Ruthven is a satirical portrait of Byron as a seducer of women in polite society. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” – as the aristocratic writer Lady Caroline Lamb described the lover who had spurned her. This is the image we have of the vampire. Lamb cast Byron as the dark and duplicitous Gothic seducer, Lord Ruthven in her 1816 novel Glenarvon. In turn, Polidori took the name Lord Ruthven in order to create the first literary vampire.</p>
<p>Lord Ruthven spawned a series of saturnine or demonic lovers in turn, from the Brontës’ Mr Rochester to the more sexy incarnations of Dracula and the contemporary paranormal romances of mortal women seduced by brooding bad and dangerous vampires.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/266461/original/file-20190328-139352-akexc9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Edward Cullen, the vampire from the Twilight novels, as played by Robert Pattison.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goldcrest Pictures</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Polidori’s vampire, despite being something of a blank canvas, is sexualised and mesmeric, providing a template not only for Count Dracula but for the “Byronic hero” that features in Gothic romance from pre-Victorian times down to present-day paranormal romances such as Twilight. Edward Cullen – played by Robert Pattison, continuing the tradition of British actors playing vampires from Christopher Lee to Gary Oldman – is a reproduction of this earlier archetype. He’s something of a consumerist fantasy – as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Twilight.html?id=3WVTPwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">expensive as diamonds, marble or crystal</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>His skin white […] literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculptured incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare […] a perfect statue carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cullen’s aristocratic charm and anachronistic way of speaking (“I endeavoured to secure your hand” he tells Bella) indicate he is a relic of earlier models of vampiric masculinity, further evidence of the long-reaching legacy of Polidori’s vampire. </p>
<p>As Catherine Spooner, Professor of Gothic Literature at Lancaster University, has argued in a <a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781784993627/">collection of essays</a> about Vampires – Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead which I co-edited in 2012: “Over a period of about 200 years vampires have changed from the grotty living corpses of folklore to witty, sexy, super achievers.” </p>
<p>Polidori <a href="https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13248870">died in London in August 1821</a>, weighed down by depression and gambling debts. It is said that he committed suicide by means of cyanide but that, to protect his family’s name, the coroner gave a verdict of death by natural causes. Sadly he wasn’t to know the fame his creation would achieve as the star of hundreds of books, plays and films – and millions of nightmares.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114382/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam George has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is the convener of the Open Graves, Open Minds research group who have organised the Polidori Bi-Centenary Vampyre Symposium 2019, 6-7 April 2019, Keats House, Hampstead, UK <a href="http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/polidori-symposium-2019/">http://www.opengravesopenminds.com/polidori-symposium-2019/</a></span></em></p>Written in the same house party as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Polidori’s creature was based on the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron.Sam George, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of HertfordshireLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1020012018-08-30T08:58:21Z2018-08-30T08:58:21ZWhy the Spanish Civil War continues to haunt Gothic literature<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233913/original/file-20180828-86120-6p2df6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The ruins of a church in Belchite, Zaragoza, which was devastated during the Spanish Civil War. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/church-ruins-civil-war-spain-belchite-1040622382?src=XpEywY7GN6In5LmdYeaznw-1-43">Shutterstock/gonzalovidania</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The spectre of the Civil War continues to haunt Spain in many different ways. It manifests itself overtly in conflicts over Catalan independence but also more subtly through art, literature and film. Many will remember Guillermo del Toro’s haunting Mexican-Spanish co-productions The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). But it is especially prevalent in the works of writer <a href="https://www.carlosruizzafon.co.uk/">Carlos Ruiz Zafón</a>. His novel The Labyrinth of the Spirits, the last in the international best-selling quartet The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, is being published in English in September. </p>
<p>Those who can read Spanish had access to <a href="http://www.carlosruizzafon.com/en/novelas/el-laberinto-de-los-espiritus.php">El Laberinto de los Espíritus</a> as early as 2016. But as it is just shy of 1,000 pages, it is not surprising it has taken nearly two years for this mammoth conclusion to see the light of day in translation. Its epic proportions, as well as Ruiz Zafón’s usual concoction of suspense, melodrama and humour – all set against a heavily Gothic Barcelona – is sure to delight his readers.</p>
<p>The introduction of a new character, the detective Alicia Gris, also provides some much needed new blood to a series of books that has been steeped in an exploration of the horrors and silences of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/spanish-civil-war-29488">Spanish Civil War</a>. </p>
<h2>The Cemetery of Forgotten Books</h2>
<p>The other volumes in Ruiz Zafón’s quartet, namely The Shadow of the Wind (2001), The Angel’s Game (2008) and The Prisoner of Heaven (2011), are also variously set during the Civil War and its direct aftermath. They each interweave the classic formulae of Gothic literature with a revisionist social realism strongly imbued with the war and Spain’s recovery from it as traumatic event – the perception of which has been affected by <a href="https://www.europeaninterest.eu/article/time-end-francos-legacy-spain/">recent historical and social changes</a>.</p>
<p>As I have argued in <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137306005">my book on the Spanish Gothic</a>, the fear in these novels is not strictly spectral. It is derived from the war, the subsequent fascist regime and its followers. The Gothic anti-hero in The Shadow of the Wind, Julián Carax, turns out not to be the villain of the novel, but the man who saves the protagonist from the real monster: police officer Fumero. </p>
<p>The Civil War is imagined in all its cruelty and visceral brutality in Ruiz Zafón’s novels. The war is Gothicised as much as its setting, a fallen, rainy and depressed Barcelona which contrasts strongly with images of the city in the contemporary tourist industry. </p>
<p>Even the library that becomes the catalyst of all events – appropriately named the Cemetery of Forgotten Books – stands as a poetic image for those killed in the war. It is described in The Shadow of the Wind as an “endless necropolis” where volumes “remain unexplored, forgotten forever” until rescued by a daring reader who may become their protector. These daring readers are naturally modern day Spaniards, some of whom have been quite literally digging up the dead since the first <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-graves/spanish-archaeologists-dig-up-more-civil-war-dead-from-mass-graves-idUSKCN1BA19X">exhumation of a war mass grave in 2000</a>.</p>
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</figure>
<h2>‘One doesn’t talk about the war’</h2>
<p>This casual injunction, a phrase I heard often when growing up in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s, may be read as a distillation of the country’s attitude towards a conflict that took place 80 years ago, but which is still very much present in the lives of the Spanish. It is a bit like a ghost, but more like a cursed legacy. It is an echo of “the sins of fathers (being) visited on their children to the third and fourth generation” that Horace Walpole suggested was the main moral of his <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126941.html">The Castle of Otranto</a> (1764) – broadly seen as the first Gothic novel. </p>
<p><a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-abstract/28/1/89/20922/Memory-and-Modernity-in-Democratic-Spain-The">It has been suggested</a> that the repression of trauma (a typical Gothic trope) may not be appropriate for the case of the Spanish Civil War. The reason for the relative lateness of the “memory boom” (1990s and 2000s) could be due to a reluctance on the part of those who lived through the conflict to tell their stories. The decision to break with the past after Franco’s death, the argument continues, may have more to do with not wanting to let the past affect the future than with deliberately attempting to silence it.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233919/original/file-20180828-86153-1nuwklx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233919/original/file-20180828-86153-1nuwklx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233919/original/file-20180828-86153-1nuwklx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233919/original/file-20180828-86153-1nuwklx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233919/original/file-20180828-86153-1nuwklx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233919/original/file-20180828-86153-1nuwklx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233919/original/file-20180828-86153-1nuwklx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=977&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Lluís Companys, the president of Catalonia from 1934 and during the Spanish Civil War.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, the conflicts over <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/world/europe/spain-catalonia-referendum.html">the Catalan independence vote in 2017 demonstrate</a> that the very idea that the past may not affect the future is not only untenable, but reactionary. This position may inadvertently mask a desire to let the status quo go unchallenged. On this note, it is interesting that Ruiz Zafón’s books are set in Catalonia, a part of Spain with a <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/10/catalonia-independence-vote-spain-violent-response/">history of resistance to centralist policies</a> and whose president during the War, Lluís Companys, was eventually executed by the regime.</p>
<h2>Spain’s modern Gothic tale</h2>
<p>The Civil War remains Spain’s favourite modern Gothic tale. This is because Spain, as a country, is only beginning to deal with the war’s legacy openly, with its impact on the lives of those directly affected by it. It could not have begun to do so any sooner given that the crimes committed during Francoism <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/12/spain-to-establish-truth-commission-for-franco-era-crimes">have not even been legally recognised, let alone sanctioned</a>. </p>
<p>Whether the past can ever be truly laid to rest is a contentious issue, but it seems to me that only the recognition of its effects – and the way that current discourses around nationalism have been coloured by them – can lead to the end of the type of alienation, fear and anger that Ruiz Zafón and other artists have been working through in their work. We should continue to read and talk about the Civil War and to condemn the brutal acts of murder and repression that have affected Spain for at least three generations. As philosopher George Santayana once warned, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102001/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Xavier Aldana Reyes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Failure to deal with the wounds of the conflict has permeated society and culture in Spain.Xavier Aldana Reyes, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1007442018-07-30T13:18:20Z2018-07-30T13:18:20ZEmily Brontë’s fierce, flawed women: not your usual Gothic female characters<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229731/original/file-20180729-106521-1d0041s.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">BBC Cymru's To Walk Invisible, the story of the Brontë sisters.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Domestic violence, alcoholism, child abuse, neglect, sexual obsession and torture: <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emily-Bronte">Emily Brontë’s</a> 1847 novel <a href="https://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/wh/summary.php">Wuthering Heights</a> is nothing if not graphic in its depiction of the messy, frightening and chaotic lives of unhappy families. No wonder critics at the time were repelled by its “shocking pictures of the worst forms of humanity” and its “details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance”. But the women in the novel, trapped in these toxic, inter-generational cycles of abuse, are not passive but remain resolute and resistant.</p>
<p>“Whether it is right or advisable to create things like <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/who-is-heathcliff">Heathcliff</a>, I do not know,” wrote <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charlotte-Bronte">Charlotte Brontë</a> in her apologetic preface to the 1850 posthumous edition of her sister’s novel. But despite her misgivings, Heathcliff remains one of the most memorable and enduring characters in Victorian literature.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229726/original/file-20180729-106514-svjh4p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=642&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis the age of 30. Wuthering Heights was her only novel.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The boy adopted by the Earnshaws as a gypsy child grows up to hang his fiancée’s dog. He refuses a nurse or doctor to his dying son – crying: “Lock him up and leave him.” And he frequently assaults and threatens others – “I’ll crush his ribs in like a rotten hazel-nut” he says of Edgar Linton. Later he also threatens to rip out his wife Isabella fingernails and digs up his great love Catherine Earnshaw’s coffin with necrophiliac fervour.</p>
<p>In Brontë’s description of a fight between Heathcliff and Hindley, Catherine Earnshaw’s elder brother, who has just tried to shoot him, the choreography is cool and exact:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The knife, in springing back, closed into its owner’s wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away by main force, slitting up the flesh as it passed on… His adversary had fallen senseless with excessive pain and the flow of blood that gushed from an artery or a large vein. The ruffian kicked and trampled on him, and dashed his head repeatedly against the flags.“ </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Violence and abuse</h2>
<p>Charlotte Brontë’s preface famously excuses the book as the "rugged” outpouring of her sister’s untutored imagination as a “nursling of the moors” and suggests that Heathcliff is the focus of all the villainy in the book. But Heathcliff is not the only perpetrator of violence and abuse in a novel which bristles with attacks and injuries, both mental and physical.</p>
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<p>At one point Hindley orders the servant (and principal narrator) Nelly Dean to: “‘Open your mouth.’ He held the knife in his hand, and pushed its point between my teeth”. In an alcoholic rage Hindley grabs his own baby son and shouts, “‘I’ll break the brat’s neck.’ Poor Hareton was squalling and kicking in his father’s arms with all his might, and redoubled his yells when he carried him up-stairs and lifted him over the banister.” The father then drunkenly drops him, and baby Hareton’s life is only saved because Heathcliff manages to catch him.</p>
<p>Wuthering Heights is, in the words of the novel, “a string of abuse or complainings” – and worse. Brontë trains a singularly cool and unflinching gaze on the violent behaviour that can explode in the intimate spaces of the “home”.</p>
<p>Early critics saw this clearly, but more recent critics have noticed it less. Perhaps the attention given to Brontë as a woman writer by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s, hugely important as it was, pushed readings of the novel away from the representation of violence and towards ideas of female repression.</p>
<h2>Loathsome women</h2>
<p>In her <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/365579.Desire_and_Domestic_Fiction">famous 1987 analysis</a>, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, literary scholar <a href="https://english.duke.edu/people/nancy-armstrong">Nancy Armstrong</a> reads the double-generation plot as resolved by the middle-class female (Catherine’s daughter Cathy) who disrupts and transforms the old order with her domestic rule. Armstrong says: “Where there had always been brambles at Wuthering Heights, Catherine has Hareton put in her ‘choice of a flower bed in the midst of them’.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/229727/original/file-20180729-106521-8tuazu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The ruins of Top Withens on Haworth Moor, scene of the fictional Wuthering Heights.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/derelict-farmhouse-top-withens-associated-wuthering-1079376671?src=fBA3uhM7ti0oF7P9c43YCg-1-10">Shutterstock</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>But such readings perhaps underestimate the manipulative, violent and obsessive behaviour of the female characters and both their complicity and their agency in abuse. Balanced against the “painful appearance of mental tension” in Heathcliff, is what is described by Nelly Dean as the “mental illness” of Catherine.</p>
<p>Catherine pinches Nelly’s arm “spitefully” and slaps her face with “a stinging blow”. She forces Nelly to lie to her husband Edgar and say she is very ill in order to frighten him. Edgar’s sister Isabella scratches Catherine with her “talons” and draws blood. And Heathcliff describes Isabella – his fiancée – as “that pitiful, slavish, mean-minded… abject thing”, despising her for they way she is obsessed with him even though he treats her with appalling cruelty.</p>
<p>“Even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt,” remarked one reviewer at the time. That Brontë dared to make her women loathsome is important. The violence against women in Gothic fiction (as in the novels of genre pioneer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/30/ann-radcliffe-gothic-fiction-mother-in-law">Ann Radcliffe</a>) generally sees them depicted as beautiful victims. In other words the females characters suffer beautifully but passively, such as the terror endured by Emily St Aubert in Radcliffe’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-mysteries-of-udolpho">Mysteries of Udolpho</a> or the strangulation of the exquisite Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/1831-edition-of-frankenstein-or-the-modern-prometheus">Frankenstein</a>.</p>
<p>But Brontë’s female characters are not victims. They remain locked in a perpetual struggle both inside the home and with the forces of nature and fate beyond the home. From their girlhoods, when “half savage and hardy” they run free on the moors, neither of the Catherines in Wuthering Heights ever lose their hardiness or give in to any of the men around them. Even Isabella manages to escape her abusive marriage to Heathcliff, and moves away with her baby son. And narrator Nelly Dean is stoic and always protective of her charges, even in the face of simmering violence.</p>
<p>A different feminist argument can be made that Emily Brontë shows us how vital is the tenacious defence of self in a violent world. Catherine, Isabella, Nelly, Cathy: Brontë’s women are fierce and active in their own stories. These women are not passively resilient, but resolute, resistant and strong-willed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100744/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Pettitt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>By refusing to idealise or victimise the women in Wuthering Heights, Brontë reveals herself as an early feminist.Clare Pettitt, Professor of 19th Century Literature and Culture, King's College LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/959212018-07-19T18:50:40Z2018-07-19T18:50:40ZFriday essay: why YA gothic fiction is booming - and girl monsters are on the rise<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227747/original/file-20180716-44094-11ep7nw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Zoey Deutch in the film Vampire Academy (2014).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Angry Films, Kintop Pictures, Preger Entertainment</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>An 18-year-old girl prepares to die to enable the birth of her half-vampire baby. Her spine is broken in the process, and the fanged baby begins to gnaw its way through her stomach before the girl’s husband performs a vampiric Cesarean section. This is a crucial moment in Stephenie Meyer’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3090465-the-twilight-saga?from_search=true">Twilight</a> novel series, published from 2005 to 2008. </p>
<p>Meyer’s books heralded a new, and continuing, wave of Gothic fiction for Young Adult readers, which revisits familiar literary Gothic conventions: ancient, ruined buildings and monstrous supernatural figures like the vampire, werewolf, ghost and witch. </p>
<p>The Gothic romances of the 18th century, such as the novels of Ann Radcliffe, and the enduringly popular Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), sought to recreate feelings of terror and horror for an audience of adult readers. Today, however, most Gothic fiction is being published for, and read by, young people. Surprisingly, it has proved to be the ideal genre for exploring the grotesque and frightening aspects of coming of age, and metaphorically representing pressing social issues such as racism and gender inequality.</p>
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<p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-what-might-heaven-be-like-95939">Friday essay: what might heaven be like?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>The <a>phenomenally popular</a> YA genre, targeted at readers between 12 and 18 years old, evolved from realist novels of the 1960s. These books were preoccupied with the struggles of adolescence set against a backdrop of social issues. Now, though, the genre often looks to the supernatural. Beyond Twilight, some of the most popular YA Gothic series also focus on the “lives” of vampires who are protagonists rather than foes. </p>
<p>Richelle Mead’s six-book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/42114-vampire-academy">Vampire Academy</a> (2007-2010), now adapted into a TV series, is about a teenage girl who is a Dhampir (half-human, half-vampire). She becomes entangled in a forbidden romance with her instructor as St Vladimir’s Academy, while learning how to defeat evil vampires named Strigoi. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227757/original/file-20180716-44100-s9inmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227757/original/file-20180716-44100-s9inmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227757/original/file-20180716-44100-s9inmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227757/original/file-20180716-44100-s9inmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227757/original/file-20180716-44100-s9inmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227757/original/file-20180716-44100-s9inmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227757/original/file-20180716-44100-s9inmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227757/original/file-20180716-44100-s9inmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Ashley Lyn Blair in Vampire Academy: The Officially Unofficial Fan Series (2016).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">idmb</span></span>
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<p>The YA Gothic revival has also embraced a wide range of supernatural entities. Cassandra Clare’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37672947-2-books-set?from_search=true">Shadowhunter Chronicles</a>, a cross-media franchise that includes the Infernal Devices and Mortal Instruments novel series, charges angel-blooded humans with the task of protecting regular humans from a range of supernatural beings. </p>
<p>The Nephilim, or Shadowhunters, are busy controlling demons, warlocks, werewolves, faeries and vampires, but critically, it is their part-supernatural status that enables them to serve as protectors. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227754/original/file-20180716-44076-r6556j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227754/original/file-20180716-44076-r6556j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227754/original/file-20180716-44076-r6556j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227754/original/file-20180716-44076-r6556j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227754/original/file-20180716-44076-r6556j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227754/original/file-20180716-44076-r6556j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227754/original/file-20180716-44076-r6556j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Clare has said that <a href="http://www.cassandraclare.com/about/">she did not write her series</a> for young adults (and indeed <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/53937-new-study-55-of-ya-books-bought-by-adults.html">almost half of the readership</a> of YA fiction might be adults). Nevertheless, her teenage protagonists have resonated with readers of the same age. </p>
<p>The Gothic, and its newer sub-genres like <a href="//www.goodreads.com/genres/paranormal-romance">paranormal romance</a>, have a unique resonance with teenagers. They are poised in a transitional space between childhood and adulthood, neither quite embodying the stage they are leaving behind nor fully the thing that they are in the process of becoming. It is unsurprising, then, that they have eagerly embraced the Gothic’s themes of the liminal and the monstrous, as well as its fixation on romance and sex.</p>
<p>Another significant element of the current YA Gothic revival is the emergence of the girl monster. In earlier manifestions of the <a href="http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/moers.html">“female Gothic”</a>, first published in the 18th century by women writers, female protagonists were often courageous, but simultaneously passive and victimised. The plots of the female Gothic reflected the comparative powerlessness of women at the time and their fears about their vulnerability and entrapment within domestic roles and patriarchal society. </p>
<p>In contemporary YA Gothic, girl monsters, who can constitute a threat to others and themselves, disrupt the plotline of male monster and female victim. </p>
<h2>Why now?</h2>
<p>The most obvious catalyst for the embrace of Gothic conventions in literature for young people is J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Its popularity signalled a warm embrace of fantasy fiction that confronted the eternal dilemma of the battle between good and evil, charging a child - and later teenage protagonist - with the ability to save the world. While Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was not necessarily Gothic, the Potter phenomenon opened the way for the publication of numerous titles that embraced the possibilities of young protagonists with supernatural abilities.</p>
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<p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rethinking-harry-potter-twenty-years-on-86761">Rethinking Harry Potter twenty years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>Most significantly, Meyer’s Twilight series about human Bella Swan and “sparkling” vampire Edward Cullen, combined this staple figure of Gothic fiction with the teen romance novel. The Twilight novels were <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8457612.stm">bestsellers</a> internationally and the saga was voted into the number one position in Australian book chain Angus & Robertson’s <a href="https://www.giraffedays.com/?page_id=5138">Top 100 Books poll of 2010</a>. The Twilight universe expanded from books into a highly successful film series.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227745/original/file-20180716-44100-wmnryl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227745/original/file-20180716-44100-wmnryl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227745/original/file-20180716-44100-wmnryl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227745/original/file-20180716-44100-wmnryl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227745/original/file-20180716-44100-wmnryl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227745/original/file-20180716-44100-wmnryl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227745/original/file-20180716-44100-wmnryl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227745/original/file-20180716-44100-wmnryl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Robert Pattinson and Cam Gigandet in Twilight (2008)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Summit Entertainment, Temple Hill Entertainment, Maverick Films.</span></span>
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<p>The Gothic has had several major periods of popularity since its first appearance in 18th-century England, with Horace Walpole’s novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12923.The_Castle_of_Otranto">The Castle of Otranto</a> (1764). In each subsequent revival of Gothic fiction, the genre has been reworked and reinvented to address current cultural concerns. </p>
<p>In particular, the monsters that haunt the pages of Gothic novels are transformed with shifting fears and anxieties. In her influential book Our Vampires, Ourselves Nina Auerbach <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Our_Vampires_Ourselves.html?id=ILOzzQFU8ooC&redir_esc=y">explains</a> that “every age embraces the vampire it needs”, and this comment can be extend to Gothic monsters more generally. </p>
<p>Contemporary YA fiction blurs the line between good and evil. In Gothic novels of the 19th century, monsters were usually wholly “Othered”. A Victorian-era vampire such as Stoker’s Dracula, for instance was depicted as evil, foreign, and frighteningly different to the British human. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227755/original/file-20180716-44073-im7yl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227755/original/file-20180716-44073-im7yl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227755/original/file-20180716-44073-im7yl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227755/original/file-20180716-44073-im7yl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227755/original/file-20180716-44073-im7yl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227755/original/file-20180716-44073-im7yl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227755/original/file-20180716-44073-im7yl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227755/original/file-20180716-44073-im7yl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=472&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gary Oldman as Count Dracula in the 1992 film version of the Bram Stoker novel. Contemporary monsters are no longer set in opposition to the human.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">American Zoetrope, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Osiris Films</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But contemporary monsters are no longer necessarily imagined as racially different or set in opposition to the human. Moreover, they are often represented sympathetically, especially in stories told from their perspective.</p>
<p>These include the <a href="http://izombie.wikia.com/wiki/IZombie_(Comics)">iZombie</a> comic series, in which the protagonist must eat brains on a monthly basis to survive, and Claudia Gray’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2722413-evernight?from_search=true">Evernight</a> series, in which the reader is not even aware that the girl protagonist is a vampire for half of the first book. Indeed, as Anna Jackson explains in <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=oTeFDgAAQBAJ&pg=PT12&lpg=PT12&dq=%22the+monsters+have+become+the+heroes%22+jackson&source=bl&ots=u31LMOUtxk&sig=Rz44kD-qxc7f1v7oaRuL-9bC214&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiq-t-MzuPaAhUEf7wKHQsKC7IQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=%">New Directions in Children’s Gothic</a>, “the monsters have become the heroes” in contemporary children’s Gothic.</p>
<h2>The passive heroine</h2>
<p>Most Gothic novels for young people contain a romance plot. This is often because the protagonists’ age places them in the transitional zone for entering adulthood, which is demarcated by sexual experience.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-long-have-we-believed-in-vampires-85639">How long have we believed in vampires?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In a typical YA Gothic novel, such as Twilight, a plot in which a human or monstrous girl protagonist falls for a boy who is not her “type” can dissolve the boundaries between monster and human. These monstrous love interests range from traditional Gothic ones - vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghosts and witches - to newer figures such as fallen angels and faeries. The key challenge to be overcome in these novels is the barriers posed to love by supernatural monstrosity, including the physical dangers to humans, as well as social discrimination about “cross-species” love.</p>
<p>In one of few major studies of teen romance fiction, published almost 30 years ago, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Becoming_a_woman_through_romance.html?id=yNkmAQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">Linda Christian-Smith described</a> these novels as a “site of ideological struggles for young women’s hearts and minds”. In particular, she refers to teen romance fiction’s emphasis on heteronormative coupling and motherhood. Little has changed with respect to depictions of sexuality since, despite the YA Gothic’s embrace of diverse human-monster relationships.</p>
<p>Most romances in the genre are heterosexual. They do often emphasise the heroine’s agency through her supernatural abilities and ability to choose between men or move between relationships. However, the human heroines of the Twilight series and Lauren Kate’s Fallen series, in which the heroine becomes drawn to a boy who is a fallen angel, are comparatively indecisive and continue to need rescuing. </p>
<p>Tellingly, Joss Whedon, the creator of the TV series Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), <a href="http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/twilight/news/a509522/joss-whedon-criticises-twilight-saga-bella-swan-is-too-passive/">has described Twilight’s Bella as</a> lacking empowerment, overly fixated on her romantic options, and “completely passive”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227742/original/file-20180716-44070-njhjw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227742/original/file-20180716-44070-njhjw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227742/original/file-20180716-44070-njhjw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227742/original/file-20180716-44070-njhjw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227742/original/file-20180716-44070-njhjw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227742/original/file-20180716-44070-njhjw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227742/original/file-20180716-44070-njhjw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227742/original/file-20180716-44070-njhjw0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kristen Stewart (Bella) and Robert Pattinson (Edward) in Twilight (2008). Bella has been described as a completely passive heroine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Summit Entertainment, Temple Hill Entertainment, Maverick Films.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Novels with passive human heroines allow the reader to use the fantasy of romance as a temporary escape from real-world gender inequality. Yet they also reinforce its reality for female readers. </p>
<h2>The girl monster</h2>
<p>Supernatural heroines, however, are often able to breach the confines of traditional femininity and become extraordinary in ways that Twilight’s Bella and other human characters cannot. In a number of YA Gothic novels, such as Mead’s Vampire Academy, the protagonists disrupt expectations of feminine behaviour because of their unique, and often poorly understood, supernatural abilities. These special powers become the focus of anxieties about the girls’ coming of age, as they pursue romances that place their broader communities under threat.</p>
<p>The Vampire Academy series was sufficiently popular in 2010 for three of its six titles to sell between 300,000 and half a million copies in hardcover in the US alone, according to <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/46543-franchises-flying-high-children-s-books-facts-figures-2010.html">Publishers Weekly</a>. However, unlike the Twilight series, on which it likely attempted to capitalise, its protagonist, Rose, is half-vampire, half-human and a monster in her own right. Rose shares a close bond with vampire Lissa, and is driven to break the Academy’s rules in order to save her friend when she is kidnapped, highlighting that girls are also capable of protecting and rescuing people they love. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227749/original/file-20180716-44088-1ls5wu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227749/original/file-20180716-44088-1ls5wu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227749/original/file-20180716-44088-1ls5wu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227749/original/file-20180716-44088-1ls5wu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227749/original/file-20180716-44088-1ls5wu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227749/original/file-20180716-44088-1ls5wu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227749/original/file-20180716-44088-1ls5wu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227749/original/file-20180716-44088-1ls5wu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ashley Lyn Blair (Lissa) and Jennifer Studnicki (Rose) in Vampire Academy: The Officially Unofficial Fan Series (2016).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">idmb</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Vampire Academy positions Rose as a sexual object, particularly in the eyes of a privileged type of vampire (Moroi), who find Dhampir women especially attractive because of racial differences. Rose enjoys her sexuality and dresses to take advantage of it, but this sexuality operates within her definition as a strong young woman: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>First they saw my body and the dress. Testosterone took over as pure male lust shone out of their faces. Then they seemed to realize it was me and promptly turned terrified. Cool. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rose is able to reject unwelcome advances and possesses the physical strength and skills to stand up for herself, suggesting a fantasy of empowerment and equality. </p>
<p>Lissa, meanwhile, thwarts what amounts to an attempted gang rape of a drugged girl. A group of male Moroi students attempt to take advantage of a female feeder (person who permits their blood to be sucked) at a party, “doing a sort of group feeding, taking turns biting her and making gross suggestions. High and oblivious, she let them”.</p>
<p>The supernatural female protagonists in YA gothic novels are responsible for their own safety and protection, yet they also have a responsibility to keep others safe.
These heroines have some romantic and sexual agency in a way that can be considered progressive. However, their desire is also framed as disruptive and dangerous and there is an obsessive fixation on the pursuit of romance above the girl’s own development, education and safety.</p>
<p>In other words, the superficially radical potential of girl heroines with superhuman physical strength, mind-reading abilities, and the potential to kill can merely be a decorative smokescreen for the reinforcement of traditional feminine values.</p>
<h2>The good and monstrous within</h2>
<p>The recent proliferation of Gothic YA novels is skewed toward a female readership with a focus on girl protagonists, and significant emphasis on their quest for romance. Nevertheless, there are a number of series with boy heroes. For example, Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (the first book of which was recently filmed by director Tim Burton), focuses on a 16-year-old human boy, Jacob. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227752/original/file-20180716-44100-14bqrbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227752/original/file-20180716-44100-14bqrbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227752/original/file-20180716-44100-14bqrbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227752/original/file-20180716-44100-14bqrbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227752/original/file-20180716-44100-14bqrbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227752/original/file-20180716-44100-14bqrbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227752/original/file-20180716-44100-14bqrbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/227752/original/file-20180716-44100-14bqrbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eva Green, Asa Butterfield (Jacob) and Georgia Pemberton in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Twentieth Century Fox, Chernin Entertainment, TSG Entertainment.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jacob has inherited an ability that makes him uniquely able to help the supernatural peculiar children of the title, who are threatened by creatures named hollowgasts who are driven to murder peculiar children in order to feed upon their souls. For Jacob, his transition to adulthood is less about romance and more about self-discovery, connections with his ancestors, and finding a way to negotiate his new-found abilities and responsibilities. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18049260-the-gothic-child?from_search=true">The Gothic Child</a>, Maria Georgieva <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=AdjQAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=the+growth+and+transformation+of+the+child,+the+crisis+of+adolescence+and+the+sometimes+painful+transition+into+adulthood&source=bl&ots=nYYj7PzA67&sig=B354L2FMpHR3SCtAU4V6hKaZR7">suggests that</a> the traditional Gothic novel is preoccupied with “the growth and transformation of the child, the crisis of adolescence and the sometimes painful transition into adulthood”. She is referring to the child’s potential to grow into the hero, heroine or villain.</p>
<p>However, the recent surge in YA Gothic fiction takes this fascination with the darker aspects of childhood in a different direction. The girl heroine, in learning to manage the physical and emotional shifts of her development and more complex relationships in romance, can both be a threat and a saviour to others.</p>
<p>The fuzziness of her nature reflects both the liminal status of the teenager and new cultural understandings of the monster, who now more often resembles the typical American teen than an undead Romanian count.</p>
<p>Instead of contemplating a child’s potential to head towards either good or evil, recent Gothic YA acknowledges the possibility of both the good and the monstrous residing in one person.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95921/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle Smith has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Gothic fiction has become the ideal genre for exploring the grotesque, frightening aspects of coming of age. And disruptive girls with supernatural powers have replaced the passive heroines of old.Michelle Smith, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/981962018-06-14T09:25:28Z2018-06-14T09:25:28ZSeeing double: the origins of the ‘evil twin’ in Gothic horror and Hollywood<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222960/original/file-20180613-32342-1poolwl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Shining (1980)</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/mediaindex?page=2&ref_=ttmi_mi_sm">IMDB/Warner Bros</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Twins and doubles have been making unsettling appearances in Gothic novels and horror films for decades. They have an even longer history that goes back to, at least, <a href="https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-comedy-of-errors/">The Comedy of Errors</a>. There’s something about twins that gives them great horrific potential. Their extreme similarity, the fact they are virtually indistinguishable and purportedly have deep connections are the kinds of elements that get repeatedly exploited for dramatic purposes.</p>
<p>It is not a coincidence that evil twins in horror and the Gothic tend to be identical (with the odd exception, like 1970’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065790/">Goodbye Gemini</a>). The scariest thing about evil twins is, after all, that they embody repetition, and “repetition of the same thing” is one of the elements psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud identified as being connected to the effects of the “uncanny” in his <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/57004/the-uncanny/">influential 1919 essay of the same name</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p><em><strong>Xavier Aldana Reyes features in the June episode of The Anthill podcast, on twins. <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-26-twins-98271">Listen here</a>, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from.</strong></em> </p>
<hr>
<p>The “unheimlich”, or uncanny, involves the experience of something familiar being rendered unfamiliar or of something new being experienced as strangely familiar. This is the case with identical twins, who tend to populate film more than literary fiction, given the reliance on images in film.</p>
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</figure>
<h2>The Grady sisters</h2>
<p>The most memorable example of the visual use of identical twins in horror is that of the Grady sisters in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/">The Shining</a> (1980). Although the sisters were not identical twins in Stephen King’s source novel, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3298376/Grady-daughters-horror-classic-Shining-reveal-like-working-movie.html">Lisa and Louise Burns’s audition</a> made director Stanley Kubrick change his mind – identical twins were just spookier. </p>
<p>Accidental though this choice may have been, it plays with the idea of twins being reflections of one another – and at least one film critic has postulated that the careful alignment of the Grady sisters is an indication they may <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6enBqFjWbhs">actually be the same person</a>. Twins’ inherent uncanniness is often supplemented with additional supernatural powers. The Grady sisters are ghosts, but in other texts twins can also be telepathic. </p>
<h2>Good twin, bad twin</h2>
<p>More often, identical twins present subjective dichotomies for readers or viewers. They become allegorical representations of either moral or religious struggles. They externalise the division between the socialised and the repressed selves or else the battle between good and evil. In this sense, evil twins are extensions of the trope of the double (doppelgänger) or shadow self. This motif is particularly popular in Gothic texts, appearing in literary classics such as Edgar Allan Poe’s short story from 1839, <a href="https://poestories.com/read/williamwilson">William Wilson</a>, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51496.The_Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde">Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde</a> (1886). But it also appears in cinema in examples like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0003419/">The Student of Prague</a> (1913).</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222963/original/file-20180613-32307-1gknpp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222963/original/file-20180613-32307-1gknpp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222963/original/file-20180613-32307-1gknpp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222963/original/file-20180613-32307-1gknpp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222963/original/file-20180613-32307-1gknpp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222963/original/file-20180613-32307-1gknpp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222963/original/file-20180613-32307-1gknpp5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fredric March in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde from 1931.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022835/?ref_=ttmi_tt">IMDB/Paramount Pictures</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In films like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0026123/">The Black Room</a> (1935) or <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069427/">Twins of Evil</a> (1971) identical twins fall into the category of the double. They not only murder, but impersonate their good siblings, using their physical similarity for nefarious purposes. Admittedly, the use of evil twins in these films is driven by their respective narratives, but it is nevertheless possible to read them as examples of temptation where the evil self attempts to triumph over the good self – especially since the evil twin is ultimately defeated. Although some films, like Twins of Evil, cast real twin actors, it is quite common, as in The Black Room, for the same actor to play both twins – a decision that underscores the idea of the evil twin operating as the double.</p>
<p>Some films, such as <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069050/">The Other</a> (1972), based on the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219535.The_Other">Thomas Tryon novel</a>, and Brian De Palma’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070698/">Sisters</a> (1973), can subvert genre expectations by playing with viewers’ assumptions about twins and their traditional Gothic and horror roles. Both films initially portray their identical twins as polar opposites: one twin being angelic and obedient and the other one being evil and sociopathic. In both examples the evil twin either ends up haunting or overtaking the good twin. The narrative role of the evil twin as double is made evident as both collapse into one haunted individual.</p>
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</figure>
<h2>Synchronisation</h2>
<p>Sisters is also interesting because it draws on the last of the qualities that define evil twins: their deep connection to each other. Danielle and Dominique (both played by <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0452288/">Margot Kidder</a>) are conjoined twins separated by a doctor who falls in love with Danielle. His reckless operation kills Dominique and is the cause of Danielle’s subsequent schizophrenia. In Sisters the connection between the siblings is physical in nature due to them being conjoined. But other horror texts, like Algernon Blackwood’s <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stories-Algernon-Blackwood-Fiction-Classics/dp/1598188445">The Lost Valley</a> (1910), explore the interdependence of twins in similar psychic ways. The outcome is rarely positive.</p>
<p>In David Cronenberg’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094964/">Dead Ringers</a> (1988) – <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1975/07/21/archives/death-of-twin-doctors-linked-to-despondency.html">loosely based</a> on the lives of doctors Stewart and Cyril Marcus – twin interdependence comes dangerously close to co-dependence. The brothers Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons) share everything, including their lovers. Yet, it is precisely the love of a woman that comes between them and sends them on a destructive spiral. At one point, Elliot develops a drug addiction to match Beverly’s, as he believes their troubles are due to a lack of synchronicity. Dead Ringers histrionically points towards the horrors of intense brotherly love and when it comes to exploring the nature of “evil” twins, nothing can match its intensity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98196/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Xavier Aldana Reyes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Horror loves evil twins and doubles because of concepts like the uncanny and otherness. They also provide memorable images for movie makers.Xavier Aldana Reyes, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Film, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/938102018-03-29T10:25:11Z2018-03-29T10:25:11ZThe Victorians portrayed paedophiles as strangers – and the myth persists today<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212426/original/file-20180328-109179-qdgiqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/download/confirm/514093894?src=1ex8_Xx2QvZH5KV0li4wJQ-1-0&size=medium_jpg">Dm_Cherry/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Victorians portrayed paedophiles as scary strangers and social outsiders. By portraying them in this way, it was possible to avoid the unthinkable reality that children could be abused in respectable middle-class homes. </p>
<p>This myth of the stranger paedophile is still persistent today. And even though the evidence shows that most child sexual abuse is <a href="http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673604167718/abstract">perpetrated by close family members</a>, the stranger myth continues to distract our attention from the most common type of abuse.</p>
<p>The way we understand child sexual abuse today has its roots in social and medical theories developed in the late-19th century. The stranger myth originated partly in these theories and also in sensational journalism and popular fiction. Because it was a taboo subject, it was impossible to represent child sexual abuse directly in cultural works like novels. It was even difficult to discuss it in textbooks or newspaper articles, and the focus was kept firmly on stranger perpetrators. </p>
<p>An important event that helped make the discussion of child sexual abuse public was the publication of a series of newspaper exposés of child prostitution in 1885 by the investigative journalist, WT Stead. With the sensational title, <a href="https://attackingthedevil.co.uk/pmg/tribute/mt1.php">The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon</a>, the reports described a booming London trade in providing young girls for violent sexual exploitation. </p>
<p>Another event that opened up the discussion was the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4595948/">creation in 1896 of the medical concept of paedophilia</a>. It was publicised in a <a href="https://archive.org/details/psychopathiasexu00krafuoft">very successful textbook</a> on deviant sexuality, which focused on violent sexual crimes committed by strangers and almost entirely overlooked the act of incest. These treatments of the issue helped keep the focus off domestic problems. They allowed child sexual abuse to be <a href="https://www.crcpress.com/Child-Sexual-Abuse-in-Victorian-England/Jackson/p/book/9780415226509">portrayed as a lower-class problem of public morality</a>, associated with stereotypes of poverty, slums, substance abuse and poor hygiene.</p>
<h2>Gothic conventions</h2>
<p>In the realm of fiction, some writers got around the taboo by using the metaphors of gothic writing to sneak sexual content past the censor. In this way, child sexual abuse could be represented using the figure of the monster who preys on children. </p>
<p>For example, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), there is a bizarre incident where Mr Hyde cruelly tramples a little girl underfoot on a nighttime London street. This has been <a href="https://books.google.ie/books?id=sK3SeTvmm7QC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">interpreted</a> as a covert reference to the problem of child prostitution, coming just after the maiden tribute scandal the year before.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=417&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212624/original/file-20180329-189824-2wzlm6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=524&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The monstrous Mr Hyde, who ‘tramples’ a young girl.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10048960">National Printing & Engraving Company/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The vampirism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, probably the best-known Victorian gothic tale, has <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/2928560">long been interpreted as violently sexual</a>. But the fact that most of the vampires’ victims in the book are children, means it too can be read as covertly representing child sexual abuse. By showing highly sexualised monsters preying on children, Dracula and many similar popular tales may have helped to circulate the stranger myth to a wide audience. </p>
<p>Gothic writing also gave credence to the stranger myth in another important way. Because it was difficult to describe child sexual abuse directly, even the non-fiction accounts often used gothic conventions to hint at unmentionable acts. The child prostitution articles used the sensational metaphor of the “sacrifice” of girls to the “insatiable” “maw” of “the London minotaur”. And the medical textbook, which featured a number of cases that involved cannibalism, even referred to the perpetrators of sexual murder as “modern vampires”.</p>
<h2>Victorian attitudes die hard</h2>
<p>Although it is no longer taboo to discuss child sexual abuse or to describe it explicitly, it is still not an experience or issue that is easily raised, especially when it occurs in a domestic setting. The <a href="https://arrow.dit.ie/icr/vol10/iss1/1/">focus is still on extreme cases</a> committed by strangers and treated in a sensational way by the media, such as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Madeleine_McCann">disappearance of Madeleine McCann</a>. </p>
<p>And the modern horror genre still seems to be used often to engage with child sexual abuse, with a continuing tendency to distance the perpetrators by making them monstrous. For example, in the classic 1984 horror movie, Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger was <a href="http://www.overlookpress.com/categories/screams-and-nightmares-1.html">originally conceived of as a child molester</a>, and this is made <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/nightmare-film-casts-freddy-child-molester-70239">explicit in the 2010 remake</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212423/original/file-20180328-109196-mhjcr4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1002&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Freddy Krueger, originally conceived as a child molester.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23238422">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although we like to think we live in more enlightened times, we seem to be reproducing the unhelpful disavowal of domestic child sexual abuse that was so prevalent in Victorian times, and over-focusing on “stranger danger” and extreme cases. We are now willing to point the finger at institutional abuse, for example, but we are still unwilling to admit that child sexual abuse happens behind the closed doors of ordinary-seeming families. And this makes it even more difficult for the survivors of abuse to deal with their experiences.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93810/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ailise Bulfin receives funding from the Trinity College Dublin Wellcome Trust-SFI-HRB co-funded Institutional Strategic Support Fund. </span></em></p>Most child sex abuse happens within families, but we still cling on to the Victorian idea of paedophiles as outsiders.Ailise Bulfin, Research Fellow, ‘Catalysing Neurohumanities research into Child Sexual Abuse’, Trinity College DublinLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/930302018-03-14T15:12:17Z2018-03-14T15:12:17ZEight things you need to know about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210309/original/file-20180314-113458-oens6x.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://pixabay.com/en/frankenstein-monster-boris-karloff-394281/">Pixabay/Universal Pictures</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In his acceptance speech at the 2018 <a href="http://www.bafta.org/about">BAFTA</a> awards, Mexican director <a href="https://www.biography.com/people/guillermo-del-toro-92115">Guillermo del Toro</a> – a creator rather fond of monsters himself – praised the writer <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/mary-shelley">Mary Shelley</a> for giving a “voice to the voiceless”. <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/1831-edition-of-frankenstein-or-the-modern-prometheus">Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus</a> was Shelley’s first novel, written at the tender age of 18. Here are some things you might not know about her most famous creation, first published 200 years ago in 1818.</p>
<h2>1. Matters of life and death</h2>
<p>Young Mary Shelley (née Godwin) never got to know her mother, the pioneering feminist and philosopher <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/wollstonecraft_01.shtml">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>, author of the radical treatise <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/mary-wollstonecraft-a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman">A Vindication of the Rights of Woman</a>, which was published in 1792. Wollstonecraft died shortly after the birth of Mary, her second child. As a young woman, Mary Shelley herself suffered multiple infant mortalities. The miracle of birth was for her haunted by the brutality of death, which she dramatises so powerfully in Frankenstein.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1168&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1168&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210307/original/file-20180314-113455-p9di99.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1168&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Whale’s 1931 film starred Boris Karloff as the monster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Frankenstein-252859133-large.jpg">Universal Pictures</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>2. Thunder, lightning and scary stories</h2>
<p>During unseasonably stormy weather in the summer of 1816, Mary and her future husband, the poet and philosopher <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/percy-bysshe-shelley">Percy Bysshe Shelley</a>, playboy poet <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/lord-byron-19thcentury-bad-boy">Lord Byron</a> and other members of their party passed the time at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva by concocting ghost stories. After a feverish dream, Mary hit on the core premise of her first novel, which she hurriedly committed to paper. She recast this early work into the draft of a two-volume edition in 1816/17, using two notebooks <a href="http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/contents/frankenstein/">whose pages</a> survive in the <a href="https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/about/history">Bodleian Library</a> at the University of Oxford.</p>
<h2>3. The man who wrote Frankenstein?</h2>
<p>Gay rights activist <a href="http://www.paganpressbooks.com/jpl/BIO.HTM">John Lauritsen</a> continues to argue that Mary Shelley was not the true author of Frankenstein. Rather, he believes, her husband Percy wrote it in secrecy to air his latent homosexuality. <a href="https://www.biographyonline.net/writers/germaine-greer.html">Germaine Greer</a> wrote <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/apr/09/gender.books">a scathing riposte</a> in curiously dismissive terms – Frankenstein, she argues, was clearly written by a teenage Mary because it’s not a good book. Lauritsen’s <a href="http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/GUARDIAN.HTM">reply</a> in The Guardian derided Greer’s “old feminist misinterpretations of Frankenstein: motherhood, dead or aborted babies, and so on.” Instead, he argued, Frankenstein “is about male relationships: romantic friendship, companionship and, for the poor monster, ostracism.”</p>
<h2>4. Mary Shelley’s Scotland</h2>
<p>The origins of Frankenstein go back a little further than Shelley’s feverish dream in Switzerland. At the age of 14, she was sent to live with the Baxter family on the outskirts of Dundee. Much later, in the 1831 introduction to a revised edition of Frankenstein, she spoke fondly of her days by the Tay river: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Parts of Frankenstein are set in Fife, Edinburgh and Orkney. In a rundown hut on Orkney, most notably, Victor creates – and destroys – the Bride, fearing the hideous race of creatures Frankenstein’s monster and the Bride would produce.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=737&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210294/original/file-20180314-113475-193q9md.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mary Shelley’s first novel has influenced popular culture since it first appeared in 1818.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley#/media/File:RothwellMaryShelley.jpg">National Portrait Gallery</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>5. The monstrous birth of science fiction</h2>
<p>Frankenstein has many of the required ingredients associated with <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-the-gothic">Gothic fiction</a>: maddened ambition, gruesome death, a monster. But it doesn’t have supernatural elements. It doesn’t even have ghosts or vampires – though Victor does invoke Gothic tropes when referring to his creation figuratively as “my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave”. More accurately, Frankenstein is science fiction: if there is magic here it is the magic of science – AI, human and cross-species transplantation, animal testing, reanimation, and more.</p>
<h2>6. What’s in a name?</h2>
<p>As pedants like to remind us, Frankenstein is the name of the creator rather than his creation, whom we tend to refer to as Frankenstein’s “monster” or “The Creature”. <a href="http://www.okehampton-today.co.uk/article.cfm?id=422541&headline=Opening%20the%20lid%20on%20The%20%E2%80%98Prof%20of%20Goth%E2%80%99&sectionIs=news&searchyear=2017">Nick Groom</a>, “Prof of Goth” at the University of Exeter, has offered a far more humane term: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/04/frankenstein-monster-200th-anniversary-electricity-mary-shelley">Frankenstein’s Being</a>. </p>
<p>The Being is given many labels throughout the novel. Referencing the first humans, Adam and Eve, he calls himself “thy Adam”. Peggy Webling’s 1927 stage adaptation was perhaps the first to misname the Being as “Frankenstein”. <a href="http://members.aon.at/frankenstein/frankenstein-universal.htm">James Whale’s iconic 1931 film</a> billed Boris Karloff’s visually imposing character simply – and enigmatically – as “?”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1qNeGSJaQ9Q?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Universal Pictures/YouTube.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>7. Frankenstein at the movies</h2>
<p>From <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059199/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl">Frankenstein Meets the Spacemonster</a> (1965) to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1142977/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ql_stry_2">Frankenweenie</a> (1984), <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2014/01/22/frankenstein-movie-history/4458425/">many quirky adaptations</a> of Shelley’s material have made it to the big screen (IMDB currently lists <a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?q=frankenstein&s=tt&ttype=ft&ref_=fn_ft">173 separate titles</a>). Whale’s version remains the most famous, though Mel Brooks’ comic masterpiece <a href="https://inews.co.uk/culture/film/young-frankenstein-first-scene-gene-wilder-mel-brooks/">Young Frankenstein</a> (1974) also retains a prominent place in the popular imagination.</p>
<p>Various new films appear to be in development, including a 2019 <a href="http://deadline.com/2017/10/bride-of-frankenstein-postponed-bill-condon-javier-bardem-angelina-jolie-1202182510/">remake</a> of The Bride of Frankenstein starring Javier Bardem and Angelina Jolie as the monster and his mate. Mary Shelley herself has also appeared on screen many times, most recently brought back to life by Elle Fanning in <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/09/mary-shelley-review-elle-fanning-biopic-1201875795/">Mary Shelley</a> (2017). Now a further biopic is in development: <a href="http://variety.com/2014/film/news/sophie-turner-cast-in-mary-shelleys-monster-1201281941/">Mary Shelley’s Monster</a> will see the young author strike a Faustian bargain with her alter-ego as she works on her seminal novel.</p>
<h2>8. Frankenstein spin-offs</h2>
<p>Frankenstein has also been reworked by fellow novelists, most notably Peter Ackroyd, author of <a href="2008">The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein</a>, in which a scientist (Victor) and a poet (Percy Bysshe Shelley) form an unlikely but intellectually stimulating friendship. </p>
<p>The hugely enjoyable young adult novel, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313423/man-made-boy-by-jon-skovron/9780142427439/">Man Made Boy</a> (2013) by Jon Skovron, is a wildly imaginative tale about Boy, the teenage son of Frankenstein’s Being and the Bride. Wearied by his family’s secretive existence in a lair beneath Times Square, Boy embarks on a road trip across America with the granddaughters of Jekyll and Hyde, who introduce him to malls and diners, love and heartbreak.</p>
<p>Mary Shelley’s first and most famous novel has shaped our imaginations in diverse, profound and enduring ways. It would be fair to say that no teenager in history has influenced popular culture to such an extent. Frankenstein is very much alive! Alive!</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93030/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Written by a teenager, Frankenstein is an extraordinary novel that still endures 200 years after its first publication.Daniel Cook, Senior Lecturer in English, University of DundeeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.