“THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER”
Originally published in 1839, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous stories. It is a quintessential Gothic story, written at a time when the traditional Gothic novel had run its course, so that Poe’s use of stock Gothic materials is turning in a new direction. Rather than merely tell of crypts and haunted castles, Poe made such elements symbolic of his characters’ mental states, so that inner madness becomes physically manifest.
An unnamed narrator arrives at the crumbling mansion of his old school friend, Roderick Usher, whom he has not seen in years. He remarks at some length on how the mere sight of the place fills his soul with depressive gloom, and he observes a crack in the overall structure of the house. Roderick Usher had asked him to come, hoping that the presence of a friend would help dispel his own depression. Usher is the last of his line, suffering from a mysterious malady that has heightened all his senses. He cannot bear strong light, or any but the blandest foods, or any but certain musical notes. Meanwhile, Roderick’s sister Madeleine, with whom he has a strange, possibly incestuous relationship, is dying of a wasting illness of her own. She apparently dies, and the narrator and Roderick carry her coffin down into a crypt to leave it there for a fortnight before final burial. If this is a precaution against premature burial, it is an odd one, because they screw the coffin lid shut and close the heavy metal door to the vault. In the next few days, Roderick begins to behave strangely, and even the narrator is certain he is hearing noises from below. He tries to calm his friend by reading aloud from a chivalric romance, but even as the knight in the story strikes a gate with his mace, the two men hear a crash. As a dragon shrieks, they hear a cry. Roderick, with his heightened senses, has been aware for days that Madeleine is alive within her coffin. Now she has broken out and stands outside his chamber. When he opens it, she falls dying into his arms, and he dies too. The narrator escapes just in time, as a whirlwind crashes the entire structure into the surrounding tarn (lake).
Critics have made much of all this, citing numerous symbolic aspects, notably parallels between the disintegrating house and Roderick Usher’s disintegrating mind. This is brought out even more explicitly in the poem “The Haunted Palace,” which is given in the story as the composition of Roderick Usher. Poe scholar Thomas Olive Mabbott credited H. P. Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” for a solution to the central mystery: that Roderick, Madeleine, and the house share the same soul, and so all perish at the same instant. The story has been filmed many times, most memorably by Roger Corman in 1960.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: “The Masque of the Red Death”; Poe, Edgar Allan; Psychological Horror; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Bailey, James O. 1964. “What Happens in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’?” American Literature 35, no. 4 (January): 445–466.
Cook, Jonathan A. 2012. “Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ Papers on Language & Literature 48, no. 2: 3–44.
Gargano, James W. 1982. “‘The Fall of the House of Usher’: An Apocalyptic Vision.” University of Mississippi Studies in English 3: 53–63.
Kendall, Lyle H., Jr. 1963. “The Vampire Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ College English 24, no. 4 (March): 450–453.
Mabbott, Thomas Ollive. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1978. In The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches 1843–1849, 392–422. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Moss, William. 2014. “The Fall of the House, from Poe to Percy: The Evolution of an Enduring Gothic Convention.” In A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crowe, 177–188. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
Timmerman, John H. 2003. “House of Mirrors: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’“ Papers on Language & Literature 39, no. 3 (Summer): 227–244.
John Lee Farris, born in Jefferson City, Missouri, is an American writer best known for his psychic horror novel The Fury (1976), which was made into a successful film directed by Brian De Palma in 1978. A true artistic polymath, Farris has written screenplays—most notably, the script for The Fury—plays, and poetry, and he even directed a film, Dear Dead Delilah (1973). He is, however, best known for his work in horror prose. Although substantially less popular than some of his contemporaries, especially Stephen King, alongside whom he would appear in the second volume of Transgressions in 2006 as one of two New York Times best sellers, Farris’s oeuvre is vast and thematically varied.
After a first period in which he concentrated on thrillers and noirs, sometimes publishing under the pen name Steve Brackeen, Farris started to combine the successful Harrison High School series (1959–1974) with a string of horror novels. Following the television adaptation of When Michael Calls (1967) in 1972, Farris began working in the horror genre in earnest, which he sometimes combined with the psychological thriller and serial killer genres in novels such as Sharp Practice (1974), Shatter (1980), and Nightfall (1987).
The success of the telekinetic terrors of The Fury would lead Farris to mine more obviously occult and supernatural areas in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, and to become a full-time horror writer. His work during this, his “peak” period shows an understanding of the publishing market; the demonic Son of the Endless Night (1984), for instance, draws on the success of The Exorcist (1971) and The Omen (1976). But his very personal literary vision—which resorts to anything from Aztec rites in Sacrifice (1994) to Nordic folklore in Fiends (1990), voodoo cults in All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (1977), or vanished magical civilizations in Catacombs (1981)—prevails.
His last horror writing period, after a brief slew of thrillers published from 1995 to 1999, began in the new millennium. Apart from the collection Elvisland (2004) and the novels Phantom Nights (2004), You Don’t Scare Me (2007), and his first werewolf novel, High Bloods (2009), also his last work to date, the rest of Farris’s postmillennial books have been dedicated to reviving The Fury.
Although Farris’s books are now largely out of print, a number of his “classics” have recently become available in eBook format, a venture that has rescued some of his best novels from oblivion. In the 2010s, specialist publisher Centipede Press also paid homage to Farris by publishing five of his novels in deluxe limited editions.
Xavier Aldana Reyes
See also: The Exorcist; King, Stephen; Psychological Horror; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “John Farris.” In Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic: Essays on Fifty-Four Neglected Authors, Actors and Others, edited by Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy, 80–82. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Errickson, Will. 2015. “Evil Eighties: The Paperback Horrors of John Farris.” Tor.com, February 13. http://www.tor.com/2015/02/13/evil-eighties-the-paperback-horrors-of-john-farris.
FAULKNER, WILLIAM (1897–1962)
William Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel laureate who is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which illustrate the intricate links between race, class, and gender in the U.S. South at the turn of the twentieth century. His fiction is characterized both by distinctive writing techniques—including deconstructed timelines, shifting points of view, stream of consciousness, and unreliable narrators—and recurrent motifs such as moral and social decay in the American South, rape, lynching, incest, miscegenation, psychological distress, physical and mental disability, and pathological bonds between individuals, families, and the community.
Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner spent most of his life at his estate of Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, from which he also derived the inspiration for much of his writing. The innovative quality of his prose and his attachment to his Southern background have often led him to be categorized as an author of both the modernist movement and the Southern Renaissance. However, Faulkner’s taste for disturbing, often macabre storylines, as well as uncanny atmospheres, also made him responsible, alongside authors such as Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe, for the emergence of Southern Gothic fiction in the early 1930s. Major figures of the genre have acknowledged their debt to Faulkner, such as Flannery O’Connor, who wrote that “the presence of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do” (O’Connor 1969, 45).
Although Faulkner’s reputation as a writer is currently well established, his fame came relatively late. Prior to achieving success, he spent several years in California and New Orleans publishing screenplays for Hollywood, essays and sketches, and poetry. While in New Orleans, he became acquainted with Sherwood Anderson, who recommended he should write about his native region and the idiosyncrasies of the “southern character.” Following this advice, Faulkner proceeded to write the first book of the Yoknapatawpha saga, which would be published under the name Sartoris (1929). While waiting for it to be published, Faulkner embarked on a second novel that would be his ticket to fame: The Sound and the Fury.
Published in October 1929, the novel is widely regarded as a revolutionary masterpiece. It recounts the gradual decay of a Southern bourgeois family through the successive points of view of four of its members: Benjy, the youngest son, whose mental disability prevents him from having any sense of time, place, and people, to the point that he does not recognize his own image in the mirror; Quentin, the eldest son, whose incapacity to deal with his ambiguous feelings for his sister leads him to flee the South and commit suicide in the Charles River; Jason, the last son of the lineage as well as a bachelor who abuses the women of his family and drunkenly drives around the town of Jefferson chasing after his young niece; and finally, Dilsey, the black maid who has lived through the family’s downfall and is the last one standing to take care of the disabled son and the estate. The Sound and Fury is a challenging book in both form and content. To learn the truth about the Compson family, the reader must piece together many different plot elements scattered through the broken timeline and the stream of consciousness narrations. The horror and the violence of the plot are made apparent in the process of reading, through careful innuendos, ellipsis, and understatements. This novel set the tone for the other novels and stories to come: through convoluted narrative techniques and baroque prose, Faulkner was to paint life in the South as a horror story made of violence, unruly bodies, and perverted morals and manners. Exploring the whole social, racial, and gender spectrum from the Civil War to the Great Depression, Faulkner spares his reader no gruesome details.
His next novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), is a macabre and ludicrous mock-epic in which a family of poor farmers embark on a disastrous journey to bury the body of the mother that has just died. The many obstacles they face see their task put to a gruesome test, especially when the corpse inside the coffin starts rotting and carrion birds start following them everywhere they go. The macabre humor of As I Lay Dying is also to be found in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), a short story now considered a foundational text of Southern Gothic literature. Told from the collective point of view of the townspeople of Jefferson, the story tells of Emily Grierson, an old maid from an aristocratic family of Jefferson who has probably gone mad. In a final plot twist, the town realizes on the day she dies that she murdered her lover some fifty years ago and has been sleeping next to his decaying body every night since.
With Sanctuary (1931), Faulkner’s sulfurous detective-story, he earned the nickname “the corncob man”: the story follows a young white girl named Temple Drake as she runs away from college. She falls into the hands of an impotent thug named Popeye who eventually rapes her with a corncob in an abandoned grange. Even though the rape itself is left out of the text, the suggested violence of the scene was such that the novel was almost banned, under claims that no one but a pathological reader could enjoy being sadistically aroused by it.
Light in August (1932) is a collection of intersected stories that all come together through the violent beheading of Joanna Burden by her lover Joe Christmas, who consequently gets lynched by a white supremacist bearing the ominous name of Percy Grimm. Though Joanna’s murder seems to be the peak of violence in the novel, the rest of the novel is seething with racial hate and sexual abuse that is only solved through explosions of violence such as murders or lynching.
Absalom, Absalom (1936) is Faulkner’s Gothic grand oeuvre. Very much in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” it depicts the downfall of a family, brought about through generations of incestuous desires, greed, envy, and racial divides, climaxing in the literal destruction of the family home. Haunted by the presence of a member of the family whom everybody thought long gone, the Sutpen mansion goes down in flames, leaving nothing of the patriarch’s dream of grandeur but a couple of ghost stories told by the elders of the community.
Faulkner’s artistic vision stood in complete contradiction to the predominant discourse of the time that portrayed the South as a lost Eden. His callous prose earned him the ire of the Southern literary scene, which, as early as 1935, labeled him and other writers of the time as “the real equerries of Raw-Head-and-Bloody-Bones,” “merchants of death, hell and the grave,” and “horror-mongers in chief” (Bassett 1997, 352). Fellow Southern writer Ellen Glasgow called Faulkner out for letting his literature “crawl too long in the mire” (Bassett 1997, 359). She found his style too macabre, labeling it “Southern Gothic” in a pejorative way; in an attempt to disparage Faulkner, Glasgow both coined the term and tied it forever to his name. The label stuck, and distinguished authors such as O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Toni Morrison, all of whom wrote in a Southern Gothic vein themselves (with the term eventually losing its negative connotation), held Faulkner as a major point of reference.
Elsa Charléty
See also: The Grotesque; Morrison, Toni; O’Connor, Flannery; The Uncanny; Welty, Eudora.
Further Reading
Bassett, John Earl, ed. 1997. Defining Southern Literature: Perspectives and Assessments, 1831–1952. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Faulkner, William. 2003. The Portable Faulkner. New York: Penguin.
Fiedler, Leslie A. [1960] 1997. Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.
O’Connor, Flannery. 1969. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, 36–50. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Sundquist, Eric J. 1983. Faulkner: The House Divided. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
FEAR
Fear is a novel of psychological horror by L. Ron Hubbard that was first published in the July 1940 issue of the pulp fantasy magazine Unknown. Editor John W. Campbell touted it as the type of horror story that he hoped other authors would contribute to his magazine of modern fantastic fiction.
The protagonist of Fear is James Lowry, a professor of anthropology and ethnology at Atworthy College. A scientific rationalist, Lowry has just published an article in the Newspaper Weekly dismissing humanity’s belief in devils and demons as a type of mental illness promulgated in times past by witch doctors who hoped to control the masses through their fear of the supernatural. The head of Lowry’s department interprets the article as an attack not just against superstition but against religion, and he fires Lowry for besmirching the university’s reputation with what he considers an exploitative attempt at self-aggrandizement. Reeling from this unexpected twist of fate, James visits the home of his friend and colleague, Tommy Williams, who disagrees with James’s rationalism and warns him that “that man is the safest who knows that all is really evil and that the air and earth and water are peopled by fantastic demons and devils who lurk to grin at and increase the sad state of man” (Hubbard 2000, 14).
At the start of the novel’s second chapter, James comes to his senses, disoriented, and discovers that four hours have passed since he left Tommy’s house for which he cannot account. Furthermore, he has lost the hat that he was wearing, and his hand bears a cut and a bruise whose cause he can’t recall. At first James attributes his disorientation to a recent bout of malaria that he picked up during his overseas travels. But over the next few hours, he moves through landscapes of seemingly impossible topography—among them, a stairway that leads to impossible subterranean depths—and as he tries to conduct his life normally with Tommy, his wife Mary, and his students, he experiences a variety of increasingly eerie and enigmatic visions, among them the legendary hangman Jack Ketch, a young girl, an invisible thing that keeps nudging his leg at a table, and an elderly crone who warns him that “if you find your hat you’ll find your four hours, and if you find your four hours then you will die!” (29). These visions culminate in a final one in which James is told that he is the only real person in the surreal universe that he is navigating, at which point he acknowledges what happened during his lost four hours—he mistakenly assumed that Tommy and his Mary were having an affair, killed them, and tried to conceal their bodies—and accepts that all of his encounters and experiences following this have been completely illusory, the product of his psychotic break with reality.
The thunderclap revelation at the end of Fear is that the world James has moved through for most of the novel is a completely internal landscape shaped by his denial and feelings of personal guilt over his actions. In that landscape, demons—incarnated in a pair who hover on the periphery of the narrative, speaking in editorial asides, and who present themselves as enacting Lowry’s ordeal in order to teach him a lesson—do exist. As Brian Stableford observes in his critique of Hubbard’s novel, “there are demons and they do torment us, but they are one with ourselves and haunt us from within” (Stableford 1979, 764). Praising the rigorous internal logic that gives the story its narrative cohesion, Stableford notes the parallels between Hubbard’s novels and the tenets of Scientology, the psychoanalytic discipline he would later found: “There is surely a moral in the fact that Hubbard went on to invent a new school of psychoanalysis based on the thesis that all the ills of mankind stem from blotted out memories (‘engrams’), suppressed because of their inherent unpleasantness, which plague and torment us, and that this new psychoanalysis was ultimate reincarnated as a religion whose dramatic revelation is that we are all potentially godlike if only we can clear away our inner demons and ‘audit’ ourselves back to our inherent superpowers” (764–765).
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Devils and Demons; Hubbard, L. Ron; Psychological Horror; Pulp Horror.
Further Reading
Budrys, Algis. 1991. “Books.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 80, no. 4: 28–29.
Hubbard, L. Ron. [1940] 2000. Fear. Los Angeles, CA: Galaxy Press.
Stableford, Brian. 1979. “Fear and Typewriter in the Sky.” In Survey of Science Fiction Literature, edited by Frank N. Magill, 761–765. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.
Paul-Henri-Corentin Féval was born in Rennes in Brittany, France, and his interest in the history, legends, and folklore of Brittany was a strong element in his literary work, providing the basis for his early collections Contes de Bretagne (1844) and Les Contes de nos pères (1845), and a frequent stimulus to the newspaper serials he produced in great abundance, especially during the Second Empire (1851–1870), when he became famous as the chief proponent of swashbuckling “cape-et-épée fiction.” Such serial fiction traded very heavily in suspenseful melodrama and employed horrific motifs as a staple element of the threats prolifically addressed to their heroes and (more particularly) heroines.
Convention favored the rationalization of seemingly supernatural materials, and Féval constantly found his far-reaching imagination forced to operate within an editorially imposed straitjacket that required tokenistic explanation of supernatural manifestation in naturalistic terms, which resulted in extravagant novels like Le Livre des mystères (1852; also known as La soeur de fantômes and Les Revenants; tr. as Revenants) and La Vampire (1856; tr. as The Vampire Countess) becoming strangely awkward hybrids. More license was granted to writers when employing shorter formats, so Féval was allowed to let his love of the supernatural run riot in such exuberant novellas as La Fille de Juif-Errant (1864; tr. as The Wandering Jew’s Daughter), Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1867; tr. as Knightshade), and Le Ville-Vampire (1875; tr. as Vampire City), which juxtapose their horrific elements with humor in a fashion that was not to become commonplace until the late twentieth century. Le Chevalier Ténèbre introduces a “double act” of two brothers who are ingenious in all kinds of evil, who also excel in telling creepy stories to divert their intended victims, while the classic Le Ville-Vampire features the English Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe as a heroine, visiting the other-dimensional vampire city of Selene as an eccentric literary ancestor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Féval made considerable use of naturalistic horrific motifs in his pioneering crime fiction, especially Jean Diable (1862; tr. as John Devil) and the classic series launched by Les Habits Noirs (1863; tr. as The Parisian Jungle), featuring a criminal gang with elaborate connections in all strata of society, whose nefarious exploits are masterminded by the sinister Corsican Colonel Bozzo-Corona and his brutal right-hand man Monsieur Lecoq.
After making and losing a fortune, Féval underwent an ostentatious reconversion to devout Catholicism in 1876, after which he rewrote many of his novels to reduce their horrific elements and bring them into line with pious virtue, but those he considered morally unsalvageable—including La Vampire, which includes some fine phantasmagorical vignettes—continued to be reprinted regardless. His son, Paul Féval fils, also became a prolific writer in various genres, similarly intruding elements of horror into much of his melodramatic fiction.
Brian Stableford
See also: The Grotesque; Hugo, Victor; Penny Dreadful; Vampires.
Rohan, Jean, and Jacques Dugast, eds. 1992. Paul Féval: romancier populaire. Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
Stableford, Brian. 2003. “Introduction” and “Afterword” in Paul Féval, The Vampire Countess. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press.
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE OR POWER
The theme of forbidden knowledge has its roots in ancient Greek literature. Early examples revolve around a set of ideas, the comprehension of which has been prohibited by a figure of (often divine) authority. Access to this knowledge can confer superhuman or supernatural power on the individual, though this is often presented in negative terms. Contemporary fiction frequently replaces the idea of a singular authoritative figure with moral, ethical, and social proscriptions, though narratives commonly focus on the consequences of transgressing. There are two narrative traditions of forbidden knowledge, which are traditionally (though not necessarily) gendered.
One of the earliest seekers of forbidden knowledge is Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BCE). In this story, Prometheus steals fire from Zeus and gives it to humanity. In Works and Days (ca. 700 BCE), Hesiod expands this, suggesting that the forbidden fire is related to the creation of life itself. Prometheus is punished for his crime with eternal torment. Prometheus’s willful challenge of Zeus’s authority is echoed in Christian narratives of Lucifer/Satan’s war against God. The story of Lucifer found in Isaiah 14:12 condemns the “morning star” for his pride; however, later stories (such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost) connect Lucifer’s rebellion specifically with the pursuit of prohibited power and knowledge. As the devil or Satan, this figure becomes a temptation to other men, from Adam (in biblical tradition) to Faust (in German folklore and literature). Prometheus and Lucifer’s desire to attain knowledge that would make them “like gods,” despite the horrendous consequences, is also reflected in stories of people who attempt to transgress natural and social “laws,” such as in Frankenstein (1818), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and Jurassic Park (1990).
A parallel tradition also begins with Hesiod’s Works and Days and the story of Pandora, the woman entrusted with a jar (or box) containing all the evils of the world. Although instructed not to open the jar, she cannot help but look inside, and thus evil enters the world. Elements of the Pandora story can be seen in various versions of Eve’s temptation by Satan, where the woman is compelled to take a bite of “forbidden fruit” despite knowing exactly what will happen if she does. Transgressive curiosity is also the theme of the Bluebeard story, as told, for example, by Charles Perrault. In this folkloric tale, a young woman marries a man who prohibits her from looking in one particular room in his castle. The woman eventually looks in the room and is confronted by the bodies of her husband’s former wives. Bluebeard’s wife is the direct ancestor of many Gothic heroines, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the unnamed narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), but she is also echoed in the many contemporary horror characters who are unable to resist trying something, despite receiving multiple warnings and prohibitions.
The “Prometheus” and “Pandora” traditions of seeking forbidden knowledge frequently intersect in horror fiction and, while the traditions remain gendered to some degree, it is possible to find a male Pandora or a female Prometheus. In some fiction, seekers of knowledge are depicted as rebellious and heroic; nevertheless, much contemporary horror relies on the older trope of knowledge that has been forbidden for the good of humanity.
Hannah Priest
See also: Conjure Wife; Frankenstein; The Historian; The House of the Seven Gables; Mad Scientist; “The Monkey’s Paw”; “The Music of Erich Zann”; Our Lady of Darkness.
Further Reading
Athanassakis, Apostolos N. (trans.) 2004. Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield. 2nd ed. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Colavito, Jason, ed. 2008. “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.
Shattuck, Roger. 1997. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace.
Tatar, Maria. 2004. Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives. Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
The “frame story” is a narrative device that, although now associated with horror and other genre writing, has been used by some of the foundational texts of world literature, including Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1380–1400), Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1349–1353), and One Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights (ca. ninth century). The frame story usually establishes a situation in which a represented narrator (a character in the frame story) is brought together with a represented audience (other characters in the frame story) to whom he or she then imparts a story or stories.
Typically, several of these “tales within a tale” will be linked together within the frame story. The origins of the form are perhaps to be found in its expediency in corralling oral folk traditions for the printed page, imposing a structure that allows the reader to more easily navigate otherwise disparate contents. Another facet, identified by genre critic John Clute, is that its use creates a critical distance between the reader and the composite tale, facilitating a suspension of disbelief in the face of accounts of often wondrous or supernatural events. In other words, Clute has argued, we are led to understand that “a tale is being told” rather than reality being directly represented. Before the story is related, an atmosphere of contemplative expectation is usually established, and the everyday concerns of the audience are suspended for the duration of the narrative. Through this setup, actual readers feel vicariously reassured that they are free to question the veracity of the story, rather than required to accept an often incredible anecdote at face value.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, several Gothic novels used the device, notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but also Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (ca. 1815) by Jan Potocki, both of which significantly complicate the conceit. The increase in print culture and the associated rise of the short story form in the nineteenth century created conditions for the proliferation of the use of the frame story, since the device was a convenient and commercially expedient way whereby short stories previously published in journals could be “fixed up” into a book-length text for republication. Examples include J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882), and Robert Louis and Fanny Vandergrift Stevensons’ More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1882). Arthur Machen similarly recycled existing material within the frame story of his weird horror classic The Three Impostors (1895).
Clute (2011) has also identified the fin de siècle (late nineteenth century) and Edwardian periods as ones that saw the rise of what he calls the “club story.” The narrowest definition of the club story involves the represented narrator relating an allegedly autobiographical experience to his fellow club members (usually male). The telling of the tale can be precipitated by something raised in preceding general discussion, which triggers a specific memory; fulfilling an expectation of the auditors (who may regularly gather for that specific purpose); or offered by way of simple entertainment to ameliorate an otherwise dull evening. Numerous ghost stories use the technique of a represented narrator recounting an “unusual” experience. Notable examples in horror fiction of the period include William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki stories and F. Marion Crawford’s “The Upper Berth” (1894). However, the basic iteration of the club story motif had become so ubiquitous by 1924 that H. P. Lovecraft was critical of its overuse in Weird Tales magazine, describing “the club-room with well-groomed men around the fire” as “hackneyed stuff” (Lovecraft 1924, 3). Lovecraft’s own “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928) represents, by contrast, a far more sophisticated deployment of the device.
Versions of the frame story persisted in horror fiction throughout the twentieth century, including, for example, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), and Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (1984–1985). In the latter, much like his nineteenth-century antecedents, Barker uses the device to yoke together otherwise unrelated narratives. However, perhaps the most notable twentieth-century examples have been in horror cinema. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Anglo-American studio Amicus in particular produced a string of “portmanteau” horror films heavily influenced by the use of the conceit in the horror comics of the 1950s (specifically EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt), for example Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Torture Garden (1967), and Asylum (1972). The early twenty-first century has seen the frame story continue to be effectively applied in horror fiction, and interesting new formulations of the device are to be found in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) and Timothy J. Jarvis’s The Wanderer (2014).
James Machin
See also: Books of Blood; “The Call of Cthulhu”; House of Leaves; In a Glass Darkly; Interview with the Vampire; Machen, Arthur; Melmoth the Wanderer; Stevenson, Robert Louis; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Baldick, Chris. 2008. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clute, John. 2011. Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm. Essex: Beccon.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1924] 2015. Letter to J. C. Henneberger, February 2. In James Machin, “Fellows Find: H. P. Lovecraft Letter Sheds Light on Pivotal Moment in His Career.” Harry Ransom Center, January 27. http://blog.hrc.utexas.edu/2015/01/27/fellows-find-h-p-lovecraft-letter/.
FRANKENSTEIN
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is a Gothic novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It ranks among the most famous stories in modern human history and has had an immeasurable impact on the development of both horror and science fiction literature (and other media). Indeed, horror and science fiction most commonly meet in representations of scientific endeavor gone horribly awry. The origins of this cultural myth can be most clearly found in Shelley’s novel.
It was first published in 1818 by the London publishing house Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mayor and Jones. This first edition was published anonymously, though it included both a dedication to William Godwin, Mary’s father, and a preface written by Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. G. & W. B. Whittaker published a second edition of the novel in 1823. This edition contains few noteworthy changes from the 1818 text and is relatively ignored in critical histories of the novel. The major significance of the 1823 edition is in marking the first time that Mary Shelley attributed her name as author of the novel. Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley published a third “revised” edition of the novel as a single volume in 1831. Both the 1818 and 1831 versions of the text remain in print, though the latter edition is more commonly available.
Though there are substantive differences between the editions, they are subtle and thematic rather than narrative. Whereas the 1818 edition presents Victor Frankenstein as a man driven by pride and personal ambition, the 1831 version gives more scope for sympathy, presenting Victor as a victim of cruel fate. For scholars, the most significant addition to the 1831 text is Mary Shelley’s preface, in which she outlines the origins of the novel (an event that has itself become a famous story in literary history). The 1831 preface has also become famous for Shelley’s statement: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (Shelley 2012, 169). Such phrasing suggests an intended link between Shelley’s creation of the novel and Victor’s construction of the monster, and it has in turn had a major impact on critical and autobiographical interpretations of the novel over the last two centuries.
Shelley’s implied comparison is important, as Frankenstein is indeed a novel about the processes and perils of creativity. Constructed as a frame narrative with multiple levels, it relates the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young nobleman who, early in life, develops a keen scientific interest. After he enrolls in the University of Ingolstadt, this interest mutates into a fixation on the origins and properties of life. In pursuit of answers he constructs a human figure from the disparate remains of corpses and successfully imbues it with life. Appalled at the monstrosity he has constructed, Victor rejects his creation. The nameless creature wanders the rural wilderness, where he discovers the nature of humanity, both in the reading of classical literature and through his own human encounters.
After a further rejection by the poor De Lacy family, the creature becomes embittered and vengeful. He returns to Victor to demand that his creator at least end his isolation by creating a mate. Victor initially agrees but, at the last moment, reflects that if these creatures were to breed, “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” (Shelley 2012, 119). He rends the constructed body into pieces, enraging the creature, who vows eternal vengeance. The creature systematically destroys Victor’s life and family, climaxing in his promise to Victor that “I will be with you on your wedding night” (136). The threat is borne out when the creature murders Victor’s beloved Elizabeth in their honeymoon bed. The promise has also served as a tool in numerous queer readings of Frankenstein and in those critical responses that focus on the doubling present throughout the novel. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, reads Frankenstein as part of a subgenre of “paranoid” Gothic novel in which a man finds himself “persecuted,” “transparent to,” and “under the compulsion” of another male (Sedgwick 1985, 91).
The novel ends with Victor pursuing the creature to the Arctic aboard a ship captained by Robert Walton, one of the novel’s many narrators. Victor eventually dies before he is able to destroy his nemesis, but not before he is able to warn Walton of the dangers inherent in ambition, hubris, and the unchecked pursuit of knowledge. Walton, who was previously willing to risk his crew’s life in pursuit of his own exploratory ideals, heeds the advice. The novel closes when the creature invades the cabin and bears his creator away into the freezing wastes.
Frankenstein is open to multiple, almost innumerable interpretations, further expanded by the changes between the 1818 and 1831 versions. It has been read as a biographical account, most notably revealing Mary Shelley’s guilt over the death of her mother and the loss of her infant daughter. Ellen Moers describes the novel as a birth myth that is particularly female in its “emphasis not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of the afterbirth” (Moers 1979, 93).
Frankenstein has also been interpreted as both pro- and anti-revolutionary. Readers’ stances on this depend largely on whether they consider the creature or the scientist to be the “real” monster of the novel. Originally the creature may have been seen to represent the threat of violent, uncivilized revolution that seemed poised to sweep across Europe in the years preceding the novel’s publication. To the modern reader, however, the creature seems a sympathetic figure: a victim of authority and inhumanity that is extremely relevant in the contemporary capitalist world. The contemporary trend for redeeming monsters—making them sympathetic, understandable, even attractive—owes a huge debt to Frankenstein. This may be the novel’s most important ongoing purpose: to force readers to rethink what is acceptable, what is moral, and what is human.
The novel has been the subject of a multitude of adaptations for stage, cinema, television, comic books, video games, and other media. The most famous adaptation is Universal Studios’ 1931 film Frankenstein, starring Boris Karloff, which gave the world the iconic image of the rectangular-headed, bolt-necked monster.
Neil McRobert
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Forbidden Knowledge or Power; Frame Story; Gothic Hero/Villain; Mad Scientist; Monsters; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Shelley, Mary.
Further Reading
Botting, Fred. 1991. Making Monstrous: Frankenstein, Criticism, Theory. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
Moers, Ellen. 1979. “Female Gothic.” In The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, edited by George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher, 90–98. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shelley, Mary. 2012. Frankenstein. Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton.
Tropp, Martin. 1976. Mary Shelley’s Monster: The Story of Frankenstein. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.