TEM, MELANIE (1949–2015)
The American author Melanie Tem was a renowned horror and dark fantasy writer known for her humane, insightful domestic horror, which was influenced by her career in social work. She received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards for her writing, which included nearly a hundred short stories, twelve novels, and numerous plays, poems, and storytelling performances.
Tem’s novels include Prodigal (1991), Wilding (1992), Revenant (1994), The Yellow Wood (2015), Blood Moon (1992), and Black River (1997). As a social worker and administrator, she worked with the elderly, the disabled, and adoptive children and parents, which provided her with unique insights into caring for damaged families. Her novels often locate the oppressive scenarios they explore in suburban houses, and she focuses on the domestic and on family interactions. The family’s relationships are a prime location for her horror, which is an exposé of hypocrisy and repressive binary oppositions, taboos, and rituals that prioritize some behaviors while excluding, demonizing, and punishing others. In Blood Moon she explores the violent outbursts of a serially abused, neglected child, and in the short story (with writer husband Steve Rasnic Tem) “Mama” (1995), she identifies the domineering mother, every teenage girl’s guilty secret, as a returned vampire eating flies in the kitchen, gnawing on her dominated husband. The disgusted teenage daughter nevertheless soon succumbs to her own vampire nature. In the lesbian Gothic Wilding, werewolves express hidden, socially unacknowledged passions. Tem deals sensitively with matriarchal power and problems of Othering, inclusivity, and exclusivity central to queer theory. In The Yellow Wood five father-dominated siblings struggle to cope with the traumatizing talents imposed on them, which Alexandra, who leaves, then returns, suspects is more than extreme parenting.
Tem’s horror is based on her insights into families, social practices, and everyday relationships. She excavates the ways in which families and social groups Otherize those who are different, as seen in, for example, their responses of rejection, disgust, abjection, and destruction based on fears of difference, the body, the Other, the abject, the “not I.” She also refuses to end her stories and novels on the kind of horror closure that restores a former state of order that is actually deeply flawed. In all this she undercuts neat reinforcement of the status quo, which some conventional horror embraces in its closure. Tem’s work is caring, thoughtful, and concerned with human values, exposing the lack of all of these qualities in so many family and social settings. She refuses and exposes the demonizing of humanity’s animal nature, other selves, and any easy maintenance of taboos, neat sets of behaviors, and beliefs. Melanie Tem died of metastatic breast cancer on February 9, 2015.
Gina Wisker
See also: Bram Stoker Award; International Horror Guild Award; Vampires; Werewolves; World Fantasy Award.
Further Reading
Simmons, William P. 2005. “A Conversation with Melanie Tem.” Cemetery Dance 53: 70–75.
Wisker, Gina. 2009. “Devouring Desires: Lesbian Gothic Horror.” In Queering the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and A. Smith, 123–141. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
TERROR VERSUS HORROR
Both “terror” and “horror” have been used to name the affect that characterizes horror fiction. Critics trying to understand the genre better have had to reckon with the different ways in which people can be afraid.
Much of the critical discussion of horror and terror focuses on them as emotional reactions deliberately elicited by the writer. In an influential 1826 essay, Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe wrote that terror was a kind of dread with no clear cause, while horror was a paralyzing or contracting emotion with a clear cause. Terror, according to Radcliffe, was a stimulating, expansive feeling, while horror deadened the mind. Stephen King, writing in his nonfiction survey of horror, Danse Macabre, likewise sees terror as a form of excitement associated with danger, while horror is an experience of helplessness or despair. However, it is not at all unlikely that any given writer might use these terms interchangeably, or reverse their senses.
On the other hand, terror and horror can also be understood in terms of the structure of a story. Terror is often the emotion a reader is meant to feel gathering strength as the story unfolds, while horror is the emotion that comes over the reader when the mystery is finally solved, and/or the evil exposed. In horror fiction, the reader is given a series of signs, which may be clues in a mystery, or moments of emotional revelation, or exploration of a place or relationship, and these signs all point toward the horror without naming it or making it too clear. Terror is the name one may give to the mounting impression created by these signs as they accumulate. Many of H. P. Lovecraft’s stories have this structure, so that the final, horrifying revelation of the story comes as a surprise, but does not come out of nowhere. The astute reader, in gradually picking up the writer’s signs, will have come to a vague suspicion that the hidden truth is nightmarish, will anticipate its being revealed, and will be both curious and reluctant to learn what it is. As long as the discovery is feared and postponed, the reader is enjoying the “terrifying” aspect of the story; however, as this unfolds, the “horror” of the story also comes increasingly into view. On re-reading, then, the reader would presumably experience primarily horror, the terror having given way to dramatic irony.
In everyday language, however, the word “terror” is often used to describe intense fear of some concrete or immediate danger, while “horror” is a feeling of denial, triggered by a more general state of affairs. For example, facing imminent death in an airplane crash would be cause for terror, while horror might better describe the sort of feeling one has contemplating one’s own mortality. Seen in this way, horror is the word for a nightmarish situation or destiny that cannot be avoided, but is too painful to accept. Terror, then, would be some avoidable outcome, or a threat that can be faced and defeated. This means that certainty about outcomes is another way to tell these two emotions apart. If the outcome is certainly negative, then the feeling will be one of horror. If there is hope, then the feeling will be terror. Seen in this way, Dracula is primarily a novel of terror, because the vampire is finally defeated. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, however, is a horror story insofar as the reader identifies with the main character, because he ends up beyond help. Lovecraft cites Charles Lamb’s essay “Witches and Other Night-Fears” at the opening of his own classic story, “The Dunwich Horror.” In this extract, Lamb also points out that the terrors of fantasy, such as witches and demons, do not alarm us by threatening us with bodily harm, but in a more philosophical way, threatening our spirits, our sense of self.
Michael Cisco
See also: Dracula; “The Dunwich Horror”; King, Stephen; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Numinous; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The Sublime; The Uncanny.
Further Reading
King, Stephen. [1981] 2010. Danse Macabre. New York: Gallery Books.
Lamb, Charles. Witches and Other Night-Fears. In The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, vol. 2: Elia and the Last Essays of Elia, edited by E. V. Lucas, 65–69. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lamb/charles/elia/book1.13.html.
Radcliffe, Ann. [1826] 2004. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” In Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader, edited by David Sandner, 41–50. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger.
TESSIER, THOMAS (1947–)
Thomas Tessier is an American author of horror fiction in a psychological vein, as opposed to the bloody, gory type of horror produced by many of the genre’s other major figures. His books are concise and economical in their writing and plotting—he has never published a book with more than 400 pages—and his style of writing has drawn attention from critics for its lucidity and precision. He frequently leaves the reader suspended between supernatural and naturalistic understandings of the events in his novels, of which, to date, he has published ten. He has also published three volumes of poetry and numerous short stories. He is furthermore a playwright and has had several plays professionally staged, though they have never been published.
Tessier was born in Connecticut in 1947. For college he crossed the Atlantic to attend University College Dublin. He lived for several years in Dublin, and then in London (which later became the setting for several of his novels), before returning to the United States. He currently resides in his home state of Connecticut.
His first novel, The Fates (1978), explores the chilling impact that a strange force, possibly supernatural, has on a small town in America. It set the precedent for Tessier’s later work by offering no final explanation for its frightening events, and by refusing to offer a happy ending. His second novel, The Nightwalker, published in 1979, featured the original American werewolf in London. Its protagonist is a quiet Vietnam veteran named Bobby Ives who is the victim of strange nightmares and violent impulses. It is unclear if Bobby’s fears are due to his (probable) trauma from the war and mental illness, or if he really is turning into a werewolf.
More dark and disturbing fiction followed. Of Tessier’s third novel, Shockwaves (1982), horror icon Ramsey Campbell called it “remarkably dark.” Perhaps for this reason, Tessier’s subsequent novel Phantom, published in the same year, features a child protagonist and actually ends on an optimistic note.
Nevertheless, it was back to familiar territory for Tessier’s next novel, Finishing Touches (1986), which explores themes similar to The Nightwalker, focusing on a young American doctor’s descent into a murderous madness. Rapture (1987) and Secret Strangers (1990) were less supernatural and more conventional thrillers, and Tessier has been far less prolific in the years since they were published. His later novels are Fogheart (1997), Father Panic’s Opera Macabre (2001), and Wicked Things (2007), though he has continued to publish short fiction since the turn of the millennium.
Tessier has received several award nominations and received an International Horror Guild Award for Fogheart in 1998. Though not the most prolific of horror writers, he continues to produce books, essays, and short stories, with his most recent production at the time of this writing being Remorseless (2013), a collection of his short fiction.
Carys Crossen
See also: Dreams and Nightmares; Psychological Horror; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Errickson, Will. 2014. “The Erotic Horrors of Thomas Tessier.” Tor.com, June 20. http://www.tor.com/2014/06/20/summer-of-sleaze-the-erotic-horrors-of-thomas-tessier.
“Thomas (Edward) Tessier.” 2002. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, MI: Gale.
“THERE’S A LONG, LONG TRAIL A-WINDING”
American writer, editor, and conservative political theorist Russell Kirk (1918–1994) had already produced one collection of ghost stories, The Surly Sullen Bell (1962), the Gothic novel Old House of Fear (1961), the picaresque black comedy A Creature of the Twilight: His Memorials (1966), and several seminal publications on social, political, and religious subjects before his story “There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding” appeared in Kirby McCauley’s anthology Frights: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Terror (1976). The story went on to win the World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction in 1977.
In the story, Frank Sarsfield is walking along a lonely stretch of highway when a blizzard forces him to seek shelter in an abandoned village beside the shell of a prison, where he finds a single dwelling unfelled by time. Sarsfield is a man of simple faith haunted by the belief that “there could be no grace for him” because of his failure to maintain contact with his parents and sister, his terms of imprisonment for raiding church poorboxes, and the degrading day-to-day existence of a vagabond. He has the stature of a Viking but shuns violence, and he loves children but mistrusts women too much to raise a family. Additionally, his untutored intelligence leans less towards making a life for himself or anyone else than toward poetry and the solipsistic daydreams in which his thoughts crowd out the outside world. Snowbound in a house where time and identity become dazzlingly fluid, he experiences an increasing sense of familiarity with his surroundings and its former denizens. He has always been prone to seeing things his fellows could not perceive, but he now notices that the odd movements seen out of the corner of his eye, certain distant sounds, and even the sense of having been touched when on the verge of a dream have taken on an added clarity before he is called upon to play a heroic role in events that coincide with the day of his birth, sixty years in the past.
Through this “signal act of contrition” Sarsfield remits the debt implied in the age-old Christian dilemma posed in the biblical Book of James whereby humanity is saved by faith, but justified by works. Kirk’s heroes rarely play the passive role in uncovering and reacting to spectral phenomena that characterize the protagonists in most ghost stories, choosing rather to take an active, even aggressive stance toward the malignant forces arrayed against them. If Kirk’s villains sometimes seem as transparent as an allegorical character out of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), his fallible heroes are more complex. Despite bearing the marks of the venal, violent world around them, they act decisively to protect the bodies and souls of the innocent, even when their fear is most acute. As John Webster stated in the seventeenth-century tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, “Man, like to cassia [that is, cinnamon], is proved best, being bruised” (Webster 1999, 52). As powerful as this tale is in isolation, it also fits into a larger body of work dramatizing concerns Kirk had voiced in his nonfiction. Working from a central Dantesque trilogy of which this story forms the Purgatorio, “Balgrummo’s Hell” (1967) the Inferno, and “Saviourgate” (1976) the Paradiso, Kirk develops a Christian mythos drawing upon elements of medieval theology, the writings of the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and others to produce a network of cross-references within his fiction, which reaches a focal and dramatic climax when Ralph Bain suddenly crashes into action in the supernatural thriller Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979) straight from his apparently fatal fall from a cliff-top at the end of 1952’s “Sorworth Place.” Frank Sarsfield’s redemption, entire unto itself, requires no such apotheosis, though he does reappear briefly in Kirk’s “Watchers at the Strait Gate” (1980).
Jim Rockhill
See also: Kirk, Russell.
Further Reading
Guroian, Vigen. 2004. “Introduction.” In Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales by Russell Kirk, vii–xvii. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
Herron, Don. 1985. “Russell Kirk: Ghost Master of Mecosta.” In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction I, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, 21–47. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House.
Kirk, Russell. 1984. “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale.” In Watchers at the Strait Gate, ix-xiv. Sauk City, WI.
Pelan, John. 2002. “The Ghosts of Piety Hill.” In Off the Sand Road: Ghost Stories, Volume One by Russell Kirk, ix–xvii. Ashcroft, British Columbia: Ash-Tree Press.
Webster, John. [1623] 1999. The Duchess of Malfi. Mineola, NY: Dover.
“They” is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1904 and later collected in Traffics and Discoveries in 1904. It was influenced both by a personal bereavement of Kipling’s and by his keen awareness of the thriving world of Spiritualism—centered on the practice of spirit mediums contacting and speaking for the spirits of the dead—in turn-of-the-century England and America.
The actual story of “They” is quite simple: the nameless narrator, driving in Sussex, makes a wrong turn, finds a beautiful old country house, and barely glimpses a number of children. The owner is a woman, Miss Florence, blind almost since birth; they speak of the children, and she reveals she loves but cannot see them. The narrator speaks of his children, one of whom (it is inferred) is dead, though he never sees faces in his dreams. Miss Florence’s butler Madden, who helps him on his way, has also lost a child to the croup and will not accept a tip. The narrator returns again some months later, becoming emotionally closer with Miss Florence; when a distraught villager appears, the narrator assists by finding and fetching a doctor, then bringing in a nun to assist the dying child. A third visit, in autumn, permits him to see Miss Florence deal with a dishonest tenant; he and Miss Florence take tea, the children audible but not visible, and as he watches her and the farmer, his hand is kissed in a way known only to his dead daughter. He now knows who They are: the ghosts of dead children, visible only to those who have lost children, and Miss Florence tells him that he can never return.
Inspired by Kipling’s loss of his daughter Josephine (1892–1899) to pneumonia, “They” is an elliptical work: the word “ghosts” is never used, and it is unclear until the conclusion if the story has a point or if it is simply a series of anecdotes involving life, death, and nature. Only at the conclusion is it revealed that “They” offers a glimpse into a world in which innocent love and its memories can keep alive the dead, and that those who care the most often cannot see what they care for. It is a poignant and moving story that Somerset Maugham described as “a fine and deeply moving effort of the imagination” (Maugham 1952, xxi). Kipling scholar William B. Dillingham characterizes “They” as “perhaps the most personally revealing of [Kipling’s] stories” (Dillingham 2005, 140).
Richard Bleiler
See also: Kipling, Rudyard; “The Phantom ’Rickshaw”; “The Recrudescence of Imray”/“The Return of Imray”; Spiritualism.
Further Reading
Dillingham, William B. 2002. “Kipling: Spiritualism, Bereavement, Self-Revelation, and ‘They.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 45, no. 4: 402–425.
Dillingham, William B. 2005. “The Immortal Woe of Life: Bereavement.” In Kipling: Hell and Heroism, 101–157. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maugham, Somerset. 1952. Introduction to A Choice of Kipling’s Prose, vii–xxviii. New York: Macmillan.
“Thrawn Janet” is a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson first published in the October 1881 issue of The Cornhill Magazine. It is narrated almost entirely in a thick Scottish dialect, which gives it the character of an old folk legend.
The story is set in 1712 in the moorland parish of Balweary, where the Reverend Murdoch Soulis has newly arrived from college. When he hires Janet M’Clour to be his housekeeper, the locals are aghast because Janet is rumored to be “si to the de’il” (that is, a witch). Soulis saves her from being dunked in the waters of the Dule to prove that she’s a witch, and he has her swear before the townspeople that she renounces the devil. The next day, Janet appears with her head and neck twisted askew, as though she’s been hanged or “thrawn.” Soulis believes that she has suffered a palsy through the cruelty of the townspeople, but the townsfolk believe that something unholy has taken up residence in her body. One stormy evening, after Soulis has had a disturbing encounter with a strange Black Man in the churchyard, he enters Janet’s room and sees her corpse hanging from a thread on a nail in the wall. When Soulis leaves the room, the corpse pursues him, and when he invokes the power of God, the corpse dissolves into ash. The next day, when the Black Man is seen leaving town, the locals reason that it was the devil himself who had possessed Janet’s corpse the last few months. Thereafter, Soulis turns extremely dour and reclusive, and he frightens people with the intensity of his admonitions against the forces of evil.
In his introduction to The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, Barry Menikoff praises “Thrawn Janet” as “a masterpiece of linguistic realism” and one of Stevenson’s most complex considerations of the nature of evil. As he notes, neither the villagers’ superstitiousness nor the minister’s rationalism can explain the story’s macabre events. “In effect,” Menikoff writes, “the diabolic served Stevenson as a convenient frame for focusing attention on an aspect of life that appears to resist rational explanation” (Menikoff 2002, xliii). The story was one of Stevenson’s personal favorites, and it moved him to reflect in his personal letters on whether it was wholesome for him to brood upon “the evil in the world and man.”
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Devils and Demons; Possession and Exorcism; Stevenson, Robert Louis; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Arata, Stephen. 2010. “Stevenson and Fin-de-Siècle Gothic.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Penny Fielding, 53–69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Coleman, O. Parsons. 1946. “Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in ‘Thrawn Janet.’” Studies in Philology 43, no. 3 (July): 551–571.
Menikoff, Barry. 2002. “Introduction.” The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Barry Menikoff, xiii–liii. New York: Modern Library.
TRANSFORMATION AND METAMORPHOSIS
Transformation and metamorphosis are both words used to denote a change from one form or shape to another. The difference between the two terms is largely etymological: the Latin elements of “trans-” and “form” broadly correspond to the Greek elements of “meta-” and “morphosis” (meaning “between” and “form” respectively). Both words are used in English to refer to the process of change in a variety of contexts; however, in artistic works, metamorphosis generally connotes a more complete change of state or substance, often effected through supernatural or divine means. In fiction and art, the most common type of metamorphosis is the transformation of the human into another organism or inanimate object (and vice versa). Ideas of transformation have particular significance for the tradition of horror literature, as the enduring fascination with metamorphosis is reflected in numerous texts and narratives throughout the history of horror fiction.
Transformation and metamorphosis are among the earliest concerns of human art. Sculptures and cave paintings dating back to the last Ice Age (ca. 38,000–8000 BCE) depict creatures that are part human and part animal, suggesting species fluidity (either hybridity or metamorphosis). From the earliest examples, literature also evinces this fascination. The ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 2100 BCE) contains, among other things, stories of scorpion-men, humans transformed into clay, and a shepherd turned into a wolf by an angry goddess. In the ancient Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers” (ca. 1200–1194 BCE), a man is transformed into a bull and then into a tree after his death. In this latter case, metamorphosis intersects with resurrection and the afterlife, which is a recurrent motif in both Western and Eastern cultures. Ideas of metamorphosis frequently appear in classical Greek and Latin writing as well, with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (ca. 760–710 BCE) containing numerous episodes of transformation. For Western fiction, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE) is one of the most influential texts on transformation, with its unifying theme extending to episodes of human-animal, human-object, animal-human, and plant-human change, as well as to episodes of gender inversion and physical alteration. The mechanisms of transformation depicted in Ovid’s work are also varied, with metamorphosis being effected by human, supernatural, and divine means, but also as a result of natural change. Ovid’s work draws on earlier literature, but also on mythological and folkloric conceptions of transformation. Almost all known mythologies and folklores include some element of metamorphosis; magical practice, esotericism, and superstition also reflect a perennial concern with effecting transformation, including using rituals and spells to alter shape, status, or circumstance. Many stories are the result of an intermingling of Western and Eastern traditions. For example, One Thousand and One Nights (also known as the Arabian Nights) contains numerous stories in which voluntary and involuntary transformation is achieved through the will (or control) of a supernatural being. While some of these stories (such as “The Fisherman and the Jinni”) appear in the oldest manuscripts of the text and probably draw on Persian and Indian folklore, others (such as “Aladdin’s Lamp”) were added by the eighteenth-century French translator, Antoine Galland. Galland was friends with Charles Perrault, one of the writers responsible for the popularity of the literary fairy tale, which has its roots in European folklore and fable. Physical transformation, supernatural alteration of circumstance, and species fluidity are key concerns in all these modes of storytelling.
As well as having folkloric and mythological roots, conceptions of metamorphosis have long been inflected by developments in religious and scientific thinking. In Western traditions, the centrality of an act of transformation to Christianity is significant. The doctrine of transubstantiation, while prescribed as a unique miracle in theological texts, is reflected in European narrative fiction from the twelfth century onward. Medieval romance texts (for example, Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec and Enide) reveal a recurrent interest in the redemptive transformation of the individual (usually a man) and the potential for one substance to be translated into another through supernatural or divine will. At the same time as these developments in theology and literature, studies in biology (informed by Greek and Arabic scholarship) increased focus on natural processes of transformation such as digestion, reproduction, and growth. These intersecting influences continue to be a significant influence on fictional tales of metamorphosis.
Horror fiction retains this fascination with transformation and metamorphosis, and the influences of older traditions are visible. In the nineteenth century, a number of Gothic texts addressed the concept of metamorphosis through engagement with both supernatural and scientific ideas. Transformative creatures such as the vampire and the werewolf, whose previous incarnations had been mainly folkloric or theological, became staple figures of horror literature, and new understandings of biology, chemistry, and physics were interpreted through the lens of fiction. One of the best-known examples of such a text is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which a seemingly demonic act of horrific physical and psychological transformation is actually effected through secretive scientific experiments. Contemporary horror also often reflects current scientific concerns, incorporating new ideas of evolution, robotics, and genetic modification into older traditions of species fluidity, supernatural transformation, and ritual. For example, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” combines ideas of artificial intelligence with depictions of physical and mental transformation to depict the grotesque metamorphosis of human beings by a vengeful supercomputer. Elsewhere, arcane rites and supernatural evil are responsible for the distortion of the human form, and horrific transformation is a key theme in the works of writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and Thomas Ligotti. While Ellison’s supercomputer represents the transformative potential of new technology, works such as Ligotti’s “The Last Feast of Harlequin” draw on fears of ancient or repressed monstrosity and of the possibility of degeneration. Nevertheless, the basic premise of all these narratives—the possibility that a human might become something nonhuman—dates back to some of the earliest examples of artistic creation.
Hannah Priest
See also: Barker, Clive; Body Horror; The Grotesque; “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”; Kafka, Franz; “The Last Feast of Harlequin”; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Vampires; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Buzwell, Greg. “Gothic Fiction in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Mutating Bodies and Disturbed Minds.” The British Library. Accessed July 8, 2016. http://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-fiction-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siecle.
Bynum, Caroline Walker. 2001. Metamorphosis and Identity. New York: Zone Books.
Cruz, Ronald Allan Lopez. 2012. “Mutations and Metamorphoses: Body Horror Is Biological Horror.” Journal of Popular Film & Television 40, no. 4: 160–168.
Haddawy, Husain, trans. 1990. The Arabian Nights. New York and London: Norton.
Ovid. 1986. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Paul-Choudhury, Sumit. 2013. “Ice-Age Art Hints at Birth of Modern Mind.” New Scientist, February 13. Accessed March 12, 2016. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729042-300-ice-age-art-hints-at-birth-of-modern-mind/.
TRILBY
Trilby is an illustrated melodramatic novel by George du Maurier, a well-known cartoonist for Punch and other British periodicals. Published as a serial in 1894 and in volume form in 1895, it is largely set in Bohemian Paris.
Trilby O’Ferrall, the daughter of an Irish father and a French mother, models for a group of artistic British gentlemen who literally or nominally represent the remaining three nations of the United Kingdom. The most innocent of these, Little Billee, becomes enamored of the hybrid bilingual heroine, even in the knowledge that, to his respectable family at least, her occupations as a laundry maid and nude model render her little better than a prostitute. The mutual romance, though, is disrupted not by this consciousness but through the intervention of an Eastern European and polylingual Jew, Svengali, who hypnotizes Trilby under the pretense of curing her recurrent ocular neuralgia. While her pain is relieved, Svengali has gained control over her mind and is able to eclipse her everyday character with a “second” Trilby who is compliant with his commands and who remembers nothing of her other life. Under Svengali’s tutelage Trilby, who is normally tone deaf, becomes a celebrated concert vocalist—her stage name of Madame Svengali intimating that the Jew’s control may well extend to a possession of more than just her voice. Svengali humiliates Trilby’s former admirers, Little Billee in particular, by having her ignore them while she is entranced, though when he dies during a concert his command over her is apparently negated. Reconciled with the British artists and Little Billee’s family, Trilby is, however, a broken and confused personality, recalling her distant past as a laundress but not her recent stage career. Though she endures a long physical as well as mental decline, her end comes suddenly when a portrait of Svengali is delivered to her and its eyes command her to a final, fatal crescendo.
Trilby is a significant work for a number of reasons. Immediately, its interest in hypnotism draws upon the revived popularity of that technique in Parisian medical circles at the Victorian fin de siècle. The clinical work of J. M. Charcot, notably, was well publicized in Britain, though folk memories of stage mesmerism and rumors of sexual interference conducted under the guise of hypnotic séance remained as an implicit counterpart to any suggestion that hypnotism might ever be deployed as an analgesic or therapeutic tool. The double personality of Trilby, moreover, is suggestive of the doppelgänger, and du Maurier’s novel ought to be regarded as an influence upon Stoker’s Dracula (1897), given the facial resemblance that unites Svengali and Count Dracula, and their specific interest in gaining hypnotic ascendancy over (nominally) British women. Du Maurier’s anti-Semitism reflects the rhetoric of his work’s heyday, a period of pogroms and Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to the crowded streets of London.
Trilby was dramatized in the United States by Paul Potter in 1895 and first staged in London in the same year. It has also been adapted for film, perhaps most memorably in the 1931 American film Svengali, starring John Barrymore as the eponymous villain.
William Hughes
See also: Doubles, Doppelgängers, and Split Selves; Dracula.
Further Reading
Berman, Avis. 1993. “George du Maurier’s Trilby Whipped up a Worldwide Storm.” Smithsonian 24, no. 9: 110.
Grossman, Jonathan H. 1996. “An Essay on Du Maurier’s Trilby.” Studies in the Novel 28.4 (Winter): 525–542. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. 2016. Detroit, MI: Gale.
THE TURN OF THE SCREW
The Turn of the Screw is a novella by American writer Henry James, first published in 1898. It is now considered by many to be one of the finest examples of the ghost story ever written.
The main story is surrounded by a frame narrative in the style of the classic Gothic tale. Ghost stories are being told by the fireside at a house party; one guest tells a tale about a child being frightened by a ghost, then another guest offers a ghost story that, since it involves two children instead of one, amplifies the horror of the first guest’s tale. In other words, he will give that horror an additional “turn of the screw.”
The guest first speaks about a governess he once knew. She then takes over the narration in her own voice, although her name is never given. The governess is hired by a wealthy man to look after his young niece and nephew, to whom he is indifferent. Their parents have died, and he is unmarried and unwilling to take care of the children personally. The governess goes to live with the children at Bly, her employer’s country estate. They live there together with the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Very quickly the governess comes to the conclusion that Bly is haunted by the ghosts of Peter Quint, the former groundskeeper, and of the previous governess, Miss Jessel. Quint and Jessel were apparently having an affair. Quint died by violence under mysterious circumstances, while it appears that Miss Jessel might have taken her own life, possibly to escape the shame of pregnancy outside marriage.
The governess believes that Peter Quint, in particular, is exerting a corrupting influence over the children. The boy, Miles, has recently been expelled from school for reasons that aren’t clear; all that emerges is that he was speaking to the other boys in an unacceptable way. As the story unfolds, the governess comes to suspect that the spirits of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are trying to possess the children in order to renew their sexual relationship through them. The governess is determined to protect the children and reasons that, if she can compel them to admit that they are seeing Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, she can break the sinister influence of the ghosts. When the governess tries to compel the girl, Flora, to confess, she becomes distraught and seems to experience a hysterical episode that removes her from the story. Later, when the governess pressures Miles to a similar confession, he becomes so overwrought that he dies, possibly of heart failure. It may be that the ghost of Peter Quint has somehow claimed Miles as his victim, or it could be that the governess’s emotional coercion of Miles, and what might be his fear of her rather than Quint, causes his death.
The narrative throws considerable doubt on the governess’s interpretation of events. It is possible that Miles’s behavior at school was only an expression of innocent high spirits. He might be imitating Peter Quint based solely on his memory of the living man, and there is no indication of any sexual activity between the children. So, The Turn of the Screw could be the story of a heroic governess fighting off a supernatural menace, which is the way she sees things, or it could be the story of a delusional governess inventing a terrible crisis when nothing is really wrong, simply to establish her own importance and to impress her employer. James plants a few indications in the story of the governess that suggest she unconsciously wishes to marry her employer and become the lady of the house. Clearly, the governess tends to dominate Mrs. Grose as if she were not essentially a servant of the household herself. The governess also only sees Miss Jessel after learning about her from Mrs. Grose, suggesting that she is embroidering her initial story.
James does not exclude the possibility of a supernatural influence at Bly. The governess sees a strange man at Bly very shortly after she first arrives at the estate. She describes this man’s appearance in detail to Mrs. Grose, who recognizes him as Peter Quint, a man that the governess knew nothing about at the time. This is the one aspect of the story that cannot plausibly be accounted for, since Peter Quint is not an average-looking man, whose appearance might be hit upon by coincidence. The governess says “he’s like nobody” and goes on to give this description of the man she saw:
He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are sharp, strange—awfully; but I only know clearly that they’re rather small and very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor. (James 2009, 47)
The persistent ambiguity about the events at Bly is never resolved. While it is possible the governess might have run across Peter Quint or his description somewhere, that information is not included in the text. Also, the governess is originally from a small village and is not likely to have spent any time in the vicinity of Bly.
Franco-Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov’s classic book-length study of supernatural fiction, entitled The Fantastic, derives its definition of “fantastic” fiction almost entirely from a study of The Turn of the Screw. Todorov finds very few examples of what he would call the “pure” fantastic stories, and, because of its carefully constructed uncertainty about the existence of the supernatural, The Turn of the Screw is, for him, the most perfect expression of the “pure” fantastic tale.
The Turn of the Screw has been the subject of numerous adaptations in a variety of media. Benjamin Britten, the famous English composer, transformed the story into an opera. It was dramatized for the stage under the title The Innocents, debuting in 1950, and the play was adapted for a film of the same name in 1961. In 1972, director Michael Winner released The Nightcomers, a film meant to tell the story of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel before their deaths, starring Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beacham.
Michael Cisco
See also: Frame Story; James, Henry; Psychological Horror; Spiritualism; Unreliable Narrator.
Further Reading
Heller, Terry. 1989. The Turn of the Screw: Bewildered Vision. Boston: Twayne.
James, Henry. 2009. The Turn of the Screw. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Smith, Allan L. 1993. “A Word Kept Back in The Turn of the Screw.” In Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, edited by Clive Bloom, 47–63. London: Pluto Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Wilson, Edmund. 1976. “The Ambiguity of Henry James.” In The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, 88–132. New York: Noonday.