by Matt Cardin
German romanticism explored doubles as people with strange spiritual affinities, almost occult in their connection. Jean Paul Richter, who coined the term Doppelgänger in 1796, had a huge influence on Goethe’s and Kleist’s pursuit of the theme. It was rendered Gothic by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s use of the double in The Devil’s Elixirs (1814) and most famously in “The Sand-man” (1816). The latter’s delirious proliferation of doubles was the subject of Sigmund Freud’s study of the unheimlich or “the uncanny,” where the double is theorized as a species of familiar thing rendered unnerving or strange, such as a lifelike doll, waxwork, automaton, corpse, or identical other. Freud, following Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic essay “The Double” (1914), reads the figure as a projection from the inside that returns as an implacable persecutor from the outside.
Fevered horror at the double’s awful proximity entered English literature most memorably with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where Victor Frankenstein’s monstrous creation becomes an intimate shadow and relentless destroyer. This logic echoed her father William Godwin’s study of paranoid persecution, Caleb Williams (1794), and went on to influence a whole chain of fictions about persecutory doubles, such as James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” (1839), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Double (1846). One of the most sustained explorations of the theme was in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, who spoke of his own double life in Edinburgh, between pious family and student debauchery, and who was fascinated by the real-life case of Deacon Brodie, the outwardly respectable Edinburgh citizen who concealed a criminal double life. His interest culminated in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), the story of an artificial splitting of personality by a doctor in which the second self, initially more virile and energetic than the cramped and timid professional medic, spirals down into degeneracy, crime, and eventual self-destruction. The book was instantly taken up as a defining metaphor of modern man both in conventional moral terms and in modern psychological theory. Frederick Myers, who coined the term “multiplex personality” in 1885, warmly praised Stevenson for providing a new language for a psyche where consciousness was a narrow part of the spectrum, hiding the powers of the “subliminal” mind. Stevenson’s double was a decidedly physical creature; Guy de Maupassant’s masterpiece, “The Horla” (1887), renders the double more ambiguously a subjective, psychological split.
Frankenstein’s monster warns his maker, “I shall be with you on your wedding night,” and fulfills the promise, arriving to kill the bride and leave the two locked in a perpetual warring dyad. The overtones of sexual panic in the theme of the double have been constant since the myth of Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection. In the modern era, it becomes a means of exploring same-sex desire without quite naming it. This is implicit in, say, Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde (although some of his first readers saw it plainly enough), or in Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” (1908), or even more obliquely in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1912). Oscar Wilde, however, rendered this subtext dangerously explicit in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and the text was used as damning evidence at Wilde’s prosecution for “acts of gross indecency” in 1895. Even at this critical moment in the formation of modern sexual identities, however, the theme of the double was flexible and not always reducible to sexual meanings. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the mirroring and constant inversion of the values of light and dark, West and East, Europe and Africa, Marlow and Kurtz, use doubling to very different effect to explore the complicities of geopolitical interdependence.
Since 1980 and the emergence of the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress, dissociative disorders have often been investigated in the wider culture through the Gothic trope of the double. Stephen King, for instance, has explored traumatically dissociated selves from The Shining (1977) to Dolores Claiborne (1992) and explored psychic splitting as the core of his own creative process, as in The Dark Half (1989). The terror of doubling haunts the films of David Lynch, as the demonic double continues to be an abiding theme of modern horror film, with perennial remakes and adaptations of Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and explorations of psychic splitting from Black Swan (2011) to the update of Dostoevsky’s The Double (2014).
Roger Luckhurst
See also: Frankenstein; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; “The Horla”; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; “The Sand-man”; The Shining; Stevenson, Robert Louis; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The Uncanny; “The Yellow Wall-Paper.”
Further Reading
Binet, Alfred. 1977. On Double Consciousness: Experimental Psychological Studies. Washington: University Publications of America.
Freud, S. [1919] 2003. “The Uncanny.” Translated by David McLintock. In The Uncanny, edited by A. Phillips, 121–162. New York: Penguin Books.
Rank, Otto. 2009. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study. Translated by Harry Tucker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Tymms, Ralph. 1949. Doubles in Literary Psychology. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes.
DRACULA
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) was not the first vampire story published, but it was the most important, establishing the popularity and conventions of the vampire narrative. Vampires, creatures who return from the dead to feed upon the living by drinking their blood, have been popular figures in European and Middle Eastern folklore, and classical literature mentions several vampires. The history of the vampire in English is also older than Dracula; John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) was popular, as was James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood (1845–1847) and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Stoker’s Dracula, however, fixed in the popular imagination the image of the night-stalking, garlic-fearing vampire as a dark, mysterious, cloaked European aristocrat who can transform himself into a bat and who searches out and destroys his victims, usually beautiful young women.
Dracula is an epistolary novel; it is told through the letters, journal entries, telegrams, and diaries of Dracula’s victims and hunters. The novel begins with solicitor Jonathan Harker leaving London for Transylvania to assist Count Dracula, who is planning to move to England to purchase several properties. Once there he discovers that Dracula is a vampire, is attacked and bitten by him, and is left a prisoner in Dracula’s castle. Dracula journeys to England by ship, and when he arrives he attacks the beautiful young Lucy Westenra and then Mina Murray, Jonathan’s fiancé. Lucy dies and becomes a vampire and Mina sickens. Jonathan, who has escaped from the castle, marries Mina and together, with the help of Lucy’s three suitors and a learned German doctor and vampire hunter, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, they hunt Dracula, who flees to his castle in Transylvania only to be killed by the fearless vampire hunters.
The novel is far more complex than suggested by its plot summary, which has become a stereotype after its use in the many Dracula film and television adaptations. Stoker’s vampire narrative works because he was successful in using the plot to develop complex characters and address significant social issues while writing an effective horror story. Dracula himself is no one-dimensional monster. Although a ruthless killer and sexual predator, Dracula is also capable of human fear and love, aware of his long history, and interested in modern life and science. Abraham Van Helsing is a professor of medicine, psychology, literature, and law who combines modern (nineteenth-century) science (he uses blood transfusions and the telegraph) with traditional religion (he carries a crucifix and a blessed communion host) to save Mina and destroy the vampire. Mina Murray Harker is probably the most complicated character. She is a “modern woman,” which at the turn of the twentieth century meant that she questioned the secondary role women held in Western society. She works. She knows how to use the latest technology, including the typewriter and recording cylinder. And although in Dracula she plays the role of the traditional vampire victim, she is also the one who pu
lls together all of the various observations and insights about Dracula that enable the novel’s male heroes to track down and finally destroy the vampire.
The Beetle by Richard Marsh: The Book That Outsold Dracula
The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh is a Gothic novel involving an ancient Egyptian creature that has traveled to London to take revenge upon a member of Parliament. Published at the end of the nineteenth century, The Beetle was a massive commercial success that for years outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published only two months earlier.
Situated in a period marked by increasing unease concerning Britain’s growing empire as well as other issues such as the New Woman and modernity, The Beetle explores this anxiety with an unsettling finesse. Divided into four sections that are each narrated by a different character, The Beetle focuses on Paul Lessingham, a lawmaker who harbors a great secret regarding time spent in Egypt. Lessingham, a rising political star in Parliament, is pursued by the Beetle, a horrific Egyptian creature that has infiltrated London and is able to take control of the bodies of those unfortunate enough to cross its path. As a member of the political body responsible for the growth of the British Empire, Lessingham is the standard nineteenth-century colonialist whose exploits across the globe have made entire cultures and people beholden to the British crown. Yet the Beetle’s pursuit of Lessingham through London raises the issue of when the colonialist becomes the colonialized; the central fear that Britain itself could be colonialized due to its central role as a colonizer are explored in haunting detail by Marsh’s text. The Beetle thus voices late nineteenth-century concerns related to the fears of radical change in the social order without any strong resolution, suggesting that there is little the British people can do to reverse the change to their society that they have unwittingly brought about.
Joel T. Terranova
One of the reasons for the popularity of Dracula is its dramatization of the cultural conflicts facing Western readers both at the time of its original publication and afterward, right up to the present day. At the end of the nineteenth century, many European and American readers saw white, patriarchal, Christian, European society under attack from within and without. The values of colonialism and the superiority of European culture were questioned. Traditional roles of workers and employers were being challenged, and feminism raised questions about the nature of the family and sexuality. Dracula was presented as an aristocrat with “the blood of Attila” in his veins who was planning to invade England, seduce and mesmerize women (the pure heart of the family according to Victorian ideology), and infect the population with his vampirism. He represented a physical and moral threat to the English homeland. Dracula’s weapons of violence, sexuality, and supernatural power could only be confronted by the best of Western culture, and Stoker’s team of vampire hunters include a learned professor, a doctor, a lawyer, an American businessman, an English nobleman, and a woman pure of heart—the best of the West against the foreign threat.
Stoker secured the dramatic rights to Dracula when it was published, and upon his death his wife gave permission for the development of a theatrical version of the novel by British actor, director, and playwright Hamilton Deane. The production opened in London on February 14, 1927. After a successful British run the play was brought to New York, where, with Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the title role, it was successful again. Carl Laemmle of Universal Studios bought the film rights to the play and the novel, and in 1931 director Tod Browning’s movie Dracula was released, with Lugosi starring in the title role. Dracula has returned to large and small screens in a variety of adaptations ever since. Among the most famous and most successful of these later versions are director Terence Fisher’s Dracula, a.k.a. Horror of Dracula (1958), for Hammer Films, starring Christopher Lee as a powerful, dominating Dracula (Hammer Films went on to make six additional Dracula adaptations, all but one starring Christopher Lee); John Badham’s Dracula (1979) starring Frank Langella as a romantic Dracula; and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), one of the only major adaptations that attempts to remain largely faithful to the novel. A number of film critics argue that the best adaptation of Dracula is F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which was made in Germany without the permission of the Stoker estate, and which remains one of the finest examples of silent film. Another candidate for the “best” accolade, and another example of an adaptation that remains faithful to the source novel, is Philip Saville’s 1977 BBC miniseries Count Dracula.
In 1972 a renewed fascination with Dracula began with the publication of In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends, written by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, who asserted that Stoker based his character on Vlad Tepes, a fifteenth-century Wallachian prince who ruled Transylvania, a province in Romania, and was known as “Dracula” or “the Son of the Dragon.” Vlad was popularly known as Vlad the Impaler because of his penchant for impaling his enemies on wooden stakes. Stoker’s Dracula and the historical Dracula have thus become linked in the popular imagination, although most scholars agree that Stoker borrowed only the name “Dracula” and did not draw on the actual history of Vlad when he was imagining his immortal vampire count.
Jim Holte
See also: Carmilla; The Historian; Stoker, Bram; Vampires; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood.
Further Reading
Holte, James. 1997. Dracula in the Dark: The Dracula Film Adaptations. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Klinger, Leslie S. 2008. The New Annotated Dracula. New York: W. W. Norton.
McNally, Raymond, and Radu Florescu. 1972. In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society.
Miller, Elizabeth, ed. 2005. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 304. Detroit: Thomson Gale.
DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
Dreams—the sensations and images in the mind during sleep—have existed since the dawn of consciousness. When a dream causes psychological or physical terror, it is called a nightmare. The horror story is related to dreams and nightmares on many dimensions. Horror fiction attempts to emulate the feelings of the nightmare—panic, fear, terror, disorientation. In terms of plotting, horror stories run the gamut in their use of dreams: the entire “real” narrative is revealed to have been a dream; the story is a mix of dream and waking; the “dream” is revealed to have been real.
In On the Nightmare (1931), Ernest Jones—one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis—remarks that “there is in English no term that indicates the precise combination of fearful apprehension, of panic-stricken terror, of awful anxiety, dread and anguish that goes to make up the emotion of which we are treating. The striking characteristic of . . . [the] Nightmare is its appalling intensity” (Jones 1931, 24). He examines several motifs characteristic of the nightmare (and also of horror fiction): incubi, witches, demons, vampires, and werewolves.
Jones also focuses on a particularly intense type of nightmare that may be experienced while falling asleep or awakening. During these “hypnagogic” dreams (a term Jones does not use himself), which occur in the liminal space between waking and sleeping, the sufferer believes that he or she is conscious, and may actually rise to a state of semiconscious awareness, but it is a state characterized by physical paralysis; a crushing sense of suffocation, often felt as a literal weight on the chest; and emotions of unbearable terror. Perhaps most distressingly, the hypnagogic visions in this type of dream generally take the form of a malevolent supernatural presence, including such “classic” forms as the “night hag” (a witchlike old crone) and the demonic incubus and succubus of medieval lore. Such experiences have been reported throughout history in cultures all over the globe, and their impact on horror literature and related art has been incalculable.
“Lukundoo”: Inspired by a Nightmare
“Lukundoo” is Baltimore schoolteacher Edward Lucas White’s best known and most reprinted horr
or story. He wrote it in 1907, but its grotesque nature made it unsalable until 1925, when it was finally published in Weird Tales. White suffered from vivid nightmares, which he often turned into short stories. He said he wrote “Lukundoo” exactly as he had dreamed it, and that he had the nightmare after reading “Pollock and the Porroh Man” by H. G. Wells.
Both stories involve white men on expedition in Africa who are driven to suicide by witch doctors’ curses, and both involve decapitated heads and the unreliability of human senses. In Wells’s story, Pollock has a witch doctor murdered and is haunted by his decapitated head throughout his journey back to England. It is ambiguous whether it is a hallucination; he sees it, later he hears it, and then he feels it. Finally, totally unable to trust his senses, he slits his throat. In “Lukundoo,” the narrator, Singleton, is taken to Ralph Stone, an explorer cursed for humiliating a Mangbetu witch doctor. Stone is afflicted with boil-like swellings on his body and has been overheard conversing with a shrill voice while alone. Singleton witnesses miniature living heads bursting through Stone’s skin, and Stone slicing them off. Stone finally succumbs and dies. Singleton relates that he is still unable to believe what he saw and heard.
Generally, in White’s nightmare-inspired stories, suggestive clues build up to a horrifying denouement. Here, tension builds slowly as the reader is told first of the tiny dried heads resembling the witch doctor. This is followed by Stone’s unusual boils, his self-treatment by razor, the mysterious shrill voice, and finally the revelation of the curse. There are also hints that the curse is somehow connected with his past in America and his ex-wife.
Lee Weinstein