Horror Literature through History

by Matt Cardin

  Several Gothic Hawthorne tales stage ambivalent encounters for the reader with revolutionary violence. In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832) Robin undertakes a confused, surreal, nocturnal journey within eighteenth-century Boston to find the titular kinsman and the advancement he offers. Robin finds his corrupt kinsman tarred, feathered, and led by a mob with a satanic Janus-faced figure at its head, which presages philosopher Walter Benjamin’s Janus-like angel in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). The ghostly title figure of “The Gray Champion” (1835) manifests to spur on Puritans at key moments of political violence. The internal splits between Congress-men and King’s men and the latter’s doomed cause in the U.S. revolution are symbolized via a revel (which was influential on Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” [1842]), a satanic portrait, a pestilent piece of aristocratic dress, and a timely death in Hawthorne’s four-part “Legends of the Province House” (collected together 1842): “Howe’s Masquerade” (1838), “Edward Randolph’s Portrait” (1838), “Lady Eleanore’s Mantle” (1838), and “Old Esther Dudley” (1839). “Earth’s Holocaust” (1844) speculates on humanity’s either past or future immolation of all tokens of political, sexual, militarist, penal, economic, literary, and religious authority.

  Hawthorne’s short fictions’ major theme offers various haunting yet obscure epiphanies that vex characters’ relations with their intimates as well as their society and its values. “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) recounts the shattering effect on the seventeenth-century Puritan title character’s religious, social, and marital faiths (his wife is even named Faith) after a nocturnal forest experience or dream of a satanic encounter and a witches’ sabbath. The eighteenth-century Rev. Hooper veils himself in “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836) for life and even burial against a never specified sin with seeming sexual overtones. His veil feminizes him, breaks his engagement, and makes him a social pariah. Originally intended for a longer romance, the title character of “Ethan Brand” (1850) returns home after a long, successful search for an unpardonable sin that he found within his own intellect.

  One of Hawthorne’s most overt ventures into the didactic is “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” (1837), for the titular scientist’s sociological experiment hinges on the short-term Fountain of Youth. Perhaps Hawthorne’s most interesting film adaptation, Twice-Told Tales (1963), ironically adapts only that tale from the collection along with “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) and Hawthorne’s second major romance The House of the Seven Gables (1851). The Twice-Told Tales film participates in the 1960s–1970s U.S. and U.K. trend of horror anthology films and stars Vincent Price in the midst of his ten-film cycle of (loose) Poe adaptations (1960–1969). Consequently, the segment for “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” alters the tale into a romantic, Poe-esque rivalry between old friends over corpse preservation and resurrection occasioned by mysterious water.

  Despite his central concern with sin, Hawthorne explored many variants of the Gothic. The frontier Gothic “Roger Malvin’s Burial” (1832) offers the failure of funerary rites for its title character in the Fourth Anglo-Abenaki War in what is now Maine. The riddle story “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe” (1834) centers upon a murder mystery. It and London’s simultaneous moral confusion and intimate surveillance in “Wakefield” (1835) anticipate Poe’s proto-detective tale “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) and subsequent detective fiction. “The White Old Maid” (1835) is near to a traditional ghost story, and its emphasis on unsettling feminine mourning anticipates Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930). “Feathertop” (1852) follows the Gothic tradition of asexual reproduction and synthetic life from Hoffmann’s “The Sand-man” (1817) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). A witch animates the title character, a scarecrow that thinks it is a man, to court a judge’s daughter for an unspecified revenge. “Feathertop” is one of the most adapted Hawthorne tales, both in its original form and as extended into Percy MacKaye’s stage melodrama The Scarecrow (1908), which adds sentiment and Satan. Hawthorne was an early U.S. speculative fiction writer with tales such as “The Birth-Mark” (1843), “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” but Feathertop’s smoking iconography influences the titular automaton of the first science fiction dime novel, Edward Ellis’s The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868).

  Hawthorne’s first three years of the 1850s mark one of the most impressive productive periods of any U.S. writer; in addition to his final achievements in short fiction like “Ethan Brand” and “Feathertop,” he released his first three major romances: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance (1852). The Scarlet Letter presents itself, in the Gothic tradition of James Macpherson and Horace Walpole, as a found manuscript, incorporating historical figures of seventeenth-century Boston and the sinister forest surrounding it. The colony’s Puritan authorities impose the eponymous scarlet “A” upon Hester Prynne for her adultery and refusal to name the father of her infant daughter Pearl. But the ambivalent symbol also has enchanted and artistic overtones, and a few years later it provides a strange communion for Pearl, an impish and religiously irreverent child. The Scarlet Letter is one of the most striking treatments of crime and punishment in U.S. literature, with scenes of Hester’s social exclusion and her and later her secret lover’s suffering on the scaffold. Hester’s lover, Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, is mercilessly shadowed by her cuckold, the sinister scholar and physician Roger Chillingworth. The reverend’s and the doctor’s scenario follows the combination of demonic malignancy and homoerotic intimacy within Gothic romances like Frankenstein and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

  The Blithedale Romance (1852), a roman à clef, fictionalizes Hawthorne’s time at the 1840s Brook Farm commune, based upon Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism. The romance is Hawthorne’s brightest and least Gothic, but its narrator remains dissatisfied with rural idiocy and toil in its commune as well as alienated, modern Boston. Of the two major female characters during the romance’s climax, one is unveiled as the mysterious mesmerist referenced throughout, and the other, driven by a striking but unclear provocation, drowns herself. The recovery of the rigid, drowned corpse provides the most haunting scene. Hawthorne’s romance likely influenced George Eliot’s novella The Lifted Veil (1859) given their shared enervated, acute male protagonists; independent women seen as inscrutable and fatal; ingratiating, transgressive scientists; and twining of clairvoyance with modern media technology.

  The House of the Seven Gables exerted a profound influence on New World Gothic and New England horror writers. But perhaps Hawthorne’s most underappreciated achievement is his final complete long work. The Marble Faun (1860) combines Gothic romance, a novel of artists, and an Italian travelogue from Hawthorne’s and his family’s tour abroad. The Marble Faun culminates tendencies toward urban Gothic in his prior major romances and tales like “Molineux” and “Wakefield.” Its descriptions of the Eternal City render Rome’s catacombs and carnival as a sprawling web for his characters, at once inspiration and ensnarement. Hawthorne’s intricate Roman cityscape anticipates Sigmund Freud’s extended metaphor in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), conjoining the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious to the city’s fragmentary and sometimes unexpected preservation of its long architectural history. The romance’s plot concerns three young U.S. fine artists and the Italian count of Monte Beni. Following the mold of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne contrasts his two female painters. Miriam, the archetypal Dark Lady, is speculated to be of Jewish-, German-, or Afro-American ancestry with a sinister past. Joyful Count Donatello, thought to be part human and part faun, falls in love with Miriam, who inadvertently suborns him into murdering a mysterious figure from her past. The painter-copyist Hilda, the Fair Maiden, is an innocent but dreadfully harsh in her judgment of Donatello and Miriam for this crime. She is loved by the sculptor Kenyon. This romance of secret sin and ambiguous enthrallment informs Louisa May Alcott’s late
thrillers involving foreign liaisons and artists as well as Henry James’s narratives of artists, U.S. expatriates, and tourists in Italy, despite his critical reservations about this particular Hawthorne work. The complex overlays of different narratives and its vivid descriptions of place and art make The Marble Faun a sophisticated elevation of Hawthorne’s Gothic project.

  Ill health in his last years limited Hawthorne’s writing, but he left several variant manuscripts for two different romance narratives, one inspired by his consular service in England and a superstition about an ancestral curse of bloody footprints as well as another concerning the Elixir of Life in revolutionary Concord. Some of these variants were posthumously published in the nineteenth century. He died in his sleep in 1864 and is buried at Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord, Massachusetts, near Louisa May Alcott and many other renowned U.S. writers. He was survived by his wife Sophia, née Amelia Peabody, a fine artist and diarist. They had three children: Una, who edited one of her father’s manuscripts but died young; Julian, a notable writer and editor of romances and mysteries; and Rose, a poet and later a nun.

  Bob Hodges

  See also: Alcott, Louisa May; Ancestral Curse; Gothic Hero/Villain; The Haunted House or Castle; The House of the Seven Gables; Lovecraft, H. P.; Mad Scientist; Poe, Edgar Allan; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; Weird Tales; “Young Goodman Brown.”

  Further Reading

  Bidney, Martin. 2008. “Fire, Flutter, Fall, and Scatter: A Structure in the Epiphanies of Hawthorne’s Tales.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 50, no. 1: 58–89.

  Brodhead, Richard. 1990. Introduction to The Marble Faun, ix–xxix. NY: Penguin, 1990.

  Elbert, Monika. 2008. “Dying to Be Heard: Morality and Aesthetics in Alcott’s and Hawthorne’s Tableaux Morts.” In Death Becomes Her: Cultural Narratives of Femininity and Death in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Elizabeth Dill and Sheri Weinstein, 19–36. Newcastle: Cambridge.

  Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.

  Pearson, Leland. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

  Twice-Told Tales. 2005. DVD. Dir. Sidney Salkow. 1963. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM Midnite Movies.

  Wineapple, Brenda. 2003. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Random House.

  HEARN, LAFCADIO (1850–1904)

  Best remembered today for his volume of Japanese ghost stories Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), Patrick Lafcadio Tessima Carlos Hearn was in his day the chief interpreter of Japanese culture and literature for Western audiences. In Japan he is still well regarded, although considered old-fashioned. Like many Westerners of the era, he took a romantic view of the Orient, celebrating its ancient and traditional culture at precisely the time (particularly in Japan) when that culture was vanishing in the face of rapid modernization. His writings hover on the borderline between folklore and literature, a mixture of translation, retelling, and his own embellishments.

  Hearn was born on the Greek isle of Lefkada to an Irish father and a Greek mother. The father soon abandoned the family. Hearn was raised in Dublin for a time, then sent to school in France and England. He lost sight in one eye during a schoolyard “accident” in England, which may have been an incident of bullying. He was essentially dumped in America, penniless, and left to make his way. After enduring great poverty and sleeping on the streets, he eventually became a journalist in Cincinnati, where he specialized in accounts of lurid crimes and other salacious stories. He married a black woman, Alethea Foley, which was illegal at the time. This “scandal” cost him his job and brought more poverty. The marriage was not a success. He continued as a journalist and moved to New Orleans, and also spent some time on the island of Martinique, where his extensive writings about these places brought him some measure of fame.

  The Touch of Nightmare

  One of Hearn’s most fascinating contributions to the literature of horror is a little piece—part story, part essay, part memoir—titled “Nightmare-Touch.” Collected in his book Shadowings (1900), it sets out to examine the question of why, exactly, people are afraid of ghosts. Hearn’s answer is penetrating and highly memorable:

  Nowhere do I remember reading a plain statement of the reason why ghosts are feared. Ask any ten intelligent persons of your acquaintance, who remember having once been afraid of ghosts, to tell you exactly why they were afraid,—to define the fancy behind the fear;—and I doubt whether even one will be able to answer the question.

  . . . Now I venture to state boldly that the common fear of ghosts is the fear of being touched by ghosts,—or, in other words, that the imagined Supernatural is dreaded mainly because of its power to touch. Only to touch, remember!—not to wound or to kill.

  But this dread of the touch would itself be the result of experience,—chiefly, I think, of prenatal experience stored up in the individual by inheritance, like the child’s fear of darkness. And who can ever have had the sensation of being touched by ghosts? The answer is simple:—Everybody who has been seized by phantoms in a dream.

  Elements of primeval fears—fears older than humanity—doubtless enter into the child-terror of darkness. But the more definite fear of ghosts may very possibly be composed with inherited results of dream-pain,—ancestral experience of nightmare. And the intuitive terror of supernatural touch can thus be evolutionally explained. (Hearn 2010, 224–225)

  Matt Cardin

  Source: Hearn, Lafcadio. [1900] 2010. “Nightmare-Touch.” In The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce, edited by Michael Newton, 224–230. New York: Penguin Classics.

  Hearn always had a taste for the bizarre and colorful, and he gathered much supernatural lore. A collection of writings from this period, Fantastics (1914), contains stories and prose sketches, some of them developed into full stories, all in a florid, poetic style. He published several highly regarded translations, including translations of Théophile Gautier’s One of Cleopatra’s Nights (1838) and Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874).

  By this time he had already showed an interest in the Orient, retelling Chinese legends as Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), but when Harper & Brothers sent him to Japan in 1890 to write books and magazine articles, he fell in love with the country and stayed there, eventually becoming a Japanese citizen. His Japanese tales, found in such books as Kwaidan, Shadowings (1900), In Ghostly Japan (1899), Kotto (1902), The Romance of the Milky Way (1905), and others are of great interest to connoisseurs of the fantastic and horrifying. His wandering samurai, Buddhist priests, and ordinary peasants are constantly encountering malevolent ghosts, faceless demons, a lethal female snow demon, vampire-like creatures whose heads detach and fly around at night, a corpse-eating ghost that is the spirit of a greedy priest punished for his sins, and many more spooks and situations unfamiliar to Western readers, all told in beautiful prose, which becomes more spare and restrained in Hearn’s later period. Also of interest is his 1898 lecture “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction,” in which he argues that both tales of the supernatural and real-world beliefs in supernatural phenomena have their origin in dreams and nightmares.

  Darrell Schweitzer

  See also: Devils and Demons; Gautier, Théophile; Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things; Vampires.

  Further Reading

  Hakutani, Yoshinobu. 1898. “(Patricio) Lafcadio (Tessima Carlos) Hearn.” In American Short-Story Writers, 1880–1910, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel and William E. Grant. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 78. Detroit: Gale.

  Hearn, Lafcadio. [1898] 2008. “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction.” In “A Hideous Bit of Morbidity”: An Anthology of Horror Criticism from the Enlightenment to World War I, edited by Jason Colavito, 267–278. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.

  McWilliams, Vera, 1946. Lafcadio Hearn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.


  HELL HOUSE

  Richard Matheson’s Hell House is a 1971 horror novel about four individuals—physicist/parapsychologist Professor Lionel Barrett, his wife, Edith; and two spirit mediums, Benjamin Fischer and Florence Tanner—employed by a wealthy, dying man named Rolf Rudolph Deutsch to investigate whether there really is life after death. As part of this enterprise, they must enter Maine’s notorious Belasco House, possibly the most haunted house on Earth, and live there for a week in order to divine whatever secrets of immortality it may contain, to be rewarded later with a sum of $100,000 as compensation for enduring its reputed horrors. As is related in the book, the place earned its reputation as “Hell House” due to the diabolical activities of the previous owner, Emeric Belasco.

  As the inquiry proceeds—contrasting the scientific observations of the disturbing phenomena (via Barrett) with the otherworldly aspects of what might be happening (by way of the medium Tanner)—the characters are attacked by the evil dwelling in the house, as the malevolent forces attempt to prey on each individual’s personal fears and weaknesses. The author later adapted the novel into a film, The Legend of Hell House (1973).

  Though arguably one of Matheson’s better known works—a fact that is at least partly due to the popularity of the film adaptation—it is also one of his weakest offerings (something Matheson acknowledged in later interviews). The characters seem dated in retrospect, and the story drags in the second half of the book. But the main weakness is the way Matheson chose to express the notion of evil via sex and gratuitous violence. There is a distracting preoccupation with “corrupt” sexual acts (mainly in the guise of lesbianism and orgies), along with scenes of overt (and grisly) violence, both of which are uncharacteristic of the author’s normal output, and which are unconvincingly rendered in places, probably due to his discomfort with such blatant demonstrations in his work. The end result is a mixed affair, and more than one reader has come away from the book disappointed and comparing the final reading experience unfavorably to author Shirley Jackson’s seminal work, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), which Matheson himself noted later as an influence, though he was not conscious of it at the time he wrote the novel. In the end, Jackson was better able to instill a feeling of dread and fear than Matheson achieves, effectively bridging the divide between a classic Gothic tradition (especially Poe) and the modern sensibilities of jaded audiences who, by the time of Hill House (the late 1950s), had been exposed to the brutal horrors of two World Wars and the blossoming of the mass media with its increasingly bold radio, cinematic, and television fare. Possibly only Peter Straub, author of 1979’s Ghost Story, would consistently approach Jackson’s work in this area, but not until the mid-1970s/1980s.