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Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016.https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothicLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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Book Channel Essay: Death and the GothicPage published by Andrew Smith on Friday, December 16, 2016

As we moved into the colder and longer nights of winter, the Book Channelfind this the perfect season to delve into some of the recent scholarship onGothic literature. Readers’ imaginations drift late into the dark nightspondering this season of stillness. Andrew Smith peers deeply into thisdarkness to explore nineteenth-century ideas of death and grief in his essaycommissioned by the Book Channel. He is the author, editor, or co-editor,of nineteen volumes of criticism on the Gothic and is a past president of theInternational Gothic Association. Currently, he is Reader in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His recent worksinclude, Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History. ManchesterUniversity Press, 2016 and the edited volume The Cambridge Companionto Frankenstein. Cambridge University Press, 2016. --Assistant Editor JacobC. Jurss

How to think about death in the context of romanticism has become a topic of recent criticaldebate—one that has moved the discussion beyond consideration of the elegiac impulse inromanticism to explore more widely how romantic models of mourning influenced a later generationof poets. Mark Sandy in Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (2013) explores how grief andmourning were negotiated by a range of romantic poets who influenced how later poets, such asAlfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and W.B. Yeats, articulated feelings of loss. Paul Westoverin Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860 (2012) examines how the graves of theliterary dead became objects of pilgrimage, which generated a shared literary culture that wasgrounded in honoring the dead. How the dead might be represented in a largely, although notexclusively, Gothic prose tradition provides a helpful way of rethinking the place of the dead in theculture of the long nineteenth century.

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Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016.https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothicLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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It might seem obvious to assert that the Gothic has aninterest in the death drive, but a close explorationof the connection between death and the Gothicindicates a rather different picture. In Gothic Death1740-1914: A Literary History, I argue that graveyardpoetry, which was a precursor to the late eighteenth-century Gothic, suggests that death should notnecessarily be regarded as a topic of “horror.” EdwardYoung, for example, in Night Thoughts (1742-45)emphasized the ability to perceive our place within adivine cosmos in which death merely functions as amoment of transition to a spiritual realm. Young tookthis further in “Conjectures on Original Composition”(1759) in which he suggested a link between death andcreativity, as both require an imaginative engagementwith divine inspiration. Eighteenth-century critics, suchas Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, claimed that thedead inspire empathy in the living as we come to pitytheir plight. Death, in other words, does not function asa source of horror and this is also clear from how death is represented in a number of Gothic texts asa symbolic force that requires an imaginative act of interpretation. Indeed, we might say that in theeighteenth century death in the Gothic was repeatedly associated with acts of creativity, while in thelater nineteenth century death became transformed into a topic requiring scientific scrutiny. The textthat bridges this moment is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

In the 1831 preface to Frankenstein Shelley dwelled on thepressure she was under to create a story after the famousghost story reading competition at the Villa Diodati in thesummer of 1816. She recalled that she was asked, “‘Haveyou thought of a story?’… and each morning I was forced toreply with a mortifying negative,” until she had a dream inwhich:

I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together, I saw the hideous

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Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016.https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothicLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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phantasm of a man stretched out, and then … show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

This nightmare vision indicates the novel was, if we take Mary at her word, inspired by an image ofdeath. Literary creativity, in this instance, was thus rooted within a vision of the dead. The creature’sconstruction was also, within the novel, repeatedly represented as a creative act. The creaturebecomes like a literary text who is assembled from various sources. Significantly the novel indicatesthat the creature is not just assembled from body parts, but he is also intellectually assembled byreading lessons grounded in some of the big books of the Western tradition, including Marquis deVolney’s Ruin of Empires (1791), Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (ca. 120), Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s TheSorrows of Young Werther (1774), and perhaps most important John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674).The creature is therefore a bookish composite whose construction implicates romantic conceptions ofthe creative imagination, meaning that Victor Frankenstein is cast as a scientist who resembles anauthor (and Victor’s name is telling in that regard, as it was the nickname of Mary’s husband PercyShelley).

Frankenstein can be read as the culmination of a romantic Gothictradition, which had suggested that representations of death, andthe moods associated with it, depended on acts of creativity. AnnRadcliffe, for example, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) invokeda muse of melancholy “To paint the wild romantic dream, / Thatmeets the poet’s musing eye” to summon a mood, a process thattac i t ly grants a l i terary provenance to fee l ings ofmelancholy. Frankenstein takes this one step further by alsoemphasizing the important role of the reader (not just the writer).The creature is, after all, a reader. The text of the novel alsopurports to be a letter, written up by Robert Walton who is sendingit to his sister. Frankenstein thus bridges a historic development inrepresentations of death in the Gothic as it brings together imagesof writing (Mary’s agonized account of artistic inspiration in the1831 preface, and how that is worked through into the novel) withissues of reading. This shift to the reader in relation to death isillustrated by the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe’s tales “Mesmeric Revelation" (1844) and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845) exploredeath-like states through a quasi-scientific analysis that Poe was to elaborate in his longessay Eureka (1848). Death in Poe, in keeping with the earlier Gothic tradition, is really aboutsomething else as the tales focus on the limitations of a scientific evaluation of death. Death is, again,not a source of obvious horror (although the dead body may be) but rather an object for scientificscrutiny. Eureka suggests that death might not be the end, as scientifically considered atomic lifecannot be destroyed, and may even be positively recomposed in some form of physics-sanctionedresurrection. The fin-de-siècle Gothic also construes death as a problem of interpretation and this isclear in how death is represented in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

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Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016.https://networks.h-net.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothicLicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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In Dracula the key scene is in the graveyard at Whitby wherethe aging Mr. Swales tells Mina Harker that, “‘There’ssomething in that wind … that sounds, and looks, and tastes,and smells like death.’” This intimation that Count Dracula is onhis way indicates that the Count is the personification of deathwho is about to arrive in Whitby, a place associated with the Jetindustry which produced funerary jewellery. Decoding theCount becomes, at a symbolic level, a way of explaining awaydeath. Dracula may seem to represent death as Gothic, but inreality the novel suggests that what is horrific is that the deadwon’t stay dead. Death is a release in Dracula, which is clearfrom the moments of peace that flicker across the faces of thestaked vampires.

The dead do not in the end function as sources of horror in the Gothic. They become a device throughwhich to explore ideas about the creative imagination, or to explore the limitations of scientificanalysis, or to suggest that there is ultimately a fate worse than death.

Recommended Readings

Davison, Carol Margret. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824. Cardiff: University ofWales Press, 2009.

Killen, Jarlath. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914. Cardiff: University of Wales Press,2009.

Sandy, Mark. Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013.

Smith, Andrew and William Hughes, eds. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Westover, Paul. Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860. Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2012.

Wright, Angela and Dale Townshend, eds. The Romantic Gothic: An EdinburghCompanion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.