Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  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.

  Further Reading

  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).

  Prometheus and Pandora

  Narrative traditions of forbidden knowledge can be divided into two general streams or types:

  Promethean: Named for the Greek god Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mortals, this type consists of narratives in which excessive ambition leads characters to rebel against conventional limits in the search for power and/or knowledge.

  Pandoran: Named for Pandora, the woman in ancient Greek mythology who inadvertently loosed evil into the world (and who was the wife of Epimetheus, Prometheus’s brother), this type consists of narratives in which characters are motivated not so much by ambition as by a transgressive curiosity to know things that they, and that mortals in general, are not meant to know.

  Matt Cardin

  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.

  FRAME STORY

  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 Van
dergrift 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.

  The Monster Wakes

  Frankenstein’s monster as originally portrayed in Mary Shelley’s novel differs dramatically from the mute, shambling version of it that was burned into public consciousness by Universal Studios’ 1931 film adaptation. So does the scene of its animation: in the novel when Victor brings his creation to life, the violent thunderstorm and Gothic laboratory full of sparking electrical equipment are distinctly absent, as are the elatedly histrionic shouts of “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

  It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

  How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black lips. (Shelley 1823, 77)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Shelley, Mary. [1818] 1823. Frankenstein. A New Edition. London: Printed for G. and W. B. Whittaker, Ave Maria Lane.

  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.