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ISBN 13: 978-0-582-29055-6 (pbk)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Punter, David.
The literature of terror : a history of gothic fictions 1765
to the present day / David Punter.
p. em.
Previous ed. published in 1 v.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
Contents: v.I. The gothic tradition
ISBN 0-582-23714-9 (v. 1)
1. English literature-History and criticism. 2. Gothic revival
(Literature) 3. Horror tales, English-History and criticism.
4. Horror iales, American-History and criticism. 5. American
literature-History and criticism. I. Title.
PS408.G68P8 1966
823'.0872909-dc20 95-30686
CIP
Typeset by 20 in lO/12pt Baskerville
CHAPTER 1

Gothic and decadence

Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Bram Stoker,

Arthur Machen

What is remarkable about the 'decadent Gothic' of the 1890s is that

out of a cross-genre with only doubtfully auspicious antecedents
should have proceeded, in the space of eleven years, four of the
most potent of modern literary myths, those articulated in Robert
Louis Stevenson's DrJekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's Picture
of Dorian Gray (1891), H. G. Wells's Island of Dr Moreau (1896) and
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Here again we have a burst of sym-
bolic energy as powerful as that of the original Gothic: alongside
Frankenstein's monster, the WanderingJew and the Byronic vampire
we can set the Doppelganger, the mask of innocence, the maker of
human beings and the new, improved vampire of Dracula. As we
look at these books, we shall see certain interconnections - at any
rate in terms of theme, even where authorial stances may be quite
different - but one thing can be said at the outset which underlines
the meaning of decadence in connection with these texts, and that
is that they are all concerned in one way or another with the
problem of degeneration, and thus of the essence of the human.
They each pose, from very different angles, the same question,
which can readily be seen as a question appropriate to an age of
imperial decline: how much, they ask, can one lose - individually,
socially, nationally - and still remain a 'man'? One could put the
question much more brutally: to what extent can one be 'infected'
and still remain British?
The text in which these questions are least on the surface is also
the earliest of them, DrJekyll and Mr Hyde, which needs no introduc-

1
The Literature of Terror
tion as the best-known Doppelganger story of them all. It follows on
from an easily identifiable Gothic tradition, including James Hogg's
Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and Edgar Allan Poe's 'William
Wilson' (1839), both of which influenced Stevenson, yet it has cap-
tured the popular imagination more strongly than any of the others,
feasibly partly because of its 'contemporary', metropolitan setting
and detective-story trappings, but feasibly also because of a stranger
phenomenon, its obvious connection with actual late Victorian fears
about similarly untraceable murders, centred on the archetype of
Jack the Ripper. It is interesting in passing to note that, while Jekyll
and Hyde itself is not in any overt way concerned with the Gothic
problem of the aristocracy, popular imagination nevertheless has
had its way by tying the text in with this body of semi-legendary
history which unmistakably is aristocracy-oriented: the one thing
nobody ever seems to have thought about Jack the Ripper was that,
when unmasked, he might be someone working class or unknown.
Jekyll and Hyde is, from one aspect, the record of a split personality,
and the nature of the split is in its general outline one now familiar
to a post-Freudian age, although one which Stevenson outlines with
particular sensitivity: 'the worst of my faults', says Jekyll, describing
his youth,
was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the
happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my
imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than
commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about
that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of
reflection, and began to look round me, and take stock of my progress
and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound
duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such
irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set
before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of
shame. It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations, than
any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and,
with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me
those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man's
dual nature. 1

This is a very rich passage. One must, of course, be careful not to

interpret it as the narrative voice, since it is part of Jekyll's own
statement, and Jekyll is certainly remarkably pompous and possibly
a self-deceiver. However, Jekyll's view seems to be that the split in
his being has derived much less from the presence within his psyche
of an uncontrollable, passionate self than from the force with which
that self has been repressed according to the dictates of social

2
 Gothic and decadence
convention. The original tendency of Jekyll's alter ego, so he claims,
was by no means towards the vicious, but rather towards the 'loose',
a neutral desire for certain kinds of personal freedom which has
been repressed by the 'imperious' need not only to conform to, but
also to stand as a public example of, strict virtue. Jekyll's problem,
surely, is largely put as a social one, and one can interpret it in two
connected ways: literally, as the problem of a member of a 'respect-
able', professional upper middle class, who is supposed to 'body
forth' social virtue in his person and to eschew any behaviour,
however harmless, which might tend to degrade that stance, and
also metaphorically as the problem of a member of a 'master-race'.
Jekyll's difficulties are those of the benevolent imperialist: they are
not at all to do with the political problem of sanctioning brute force,
but with the maintenance of dignity under adverse circumstances. It
is strongly suggested that Hyde's behaviour is an urban version of
'going native'. The particular difficulties encountered by English
imperialism in its decline were conditioned by the nature of the
supremacy which had been asserted: not a simple racial supremacy,
but one constantly seen as founded on moral superiority. If an
empire based on a morality declines, what are the implications for
the particular morality concerned? It is precisely Jekyll's 'high views'
which produce morbidity in his relations with his own desires. Thus,
of course, the name of his alter ego: it is the degree to which the
doctor takes seriously his public responsibilities which determines
the 'hidden-ness' of his desire for pleasure. Since the public man
must be seen to be blameless, he must 'hide' his private nature,
even to the extent of denying it be any part of himself. And although
this is in one sense a problem locatable within a particular historical
development, we can also sense in it echoes of older Gothic prob-
lems: it is, Jekyll claims, his 'aspirations' which render him particu-
larly liable to psychic fragmentation, just as the younger Wringhim's
aspirations towards total purity caused his breakdown.
But Jekyll's aspirations are of two kinds: they are moral and social
aspirations, but they are also scientific aspirations, as in the case of
Frankenstein. The great strength of Jekyll and Hyde lies in its attempt
to connect the two more clearly even than Mary Shelley had done,
and to show that Jekyll's familiar desire to 'make another man'
stems from problems in the organisation of his own personality.
Like Frankenstein (1818) and The Island of Dr Moreau, Jekyll and
Hyde relies upon and even exploits public anxieties about scientific
progress and about the direction of this progress if undertaken in
the absence of moral guidance, but this aspect seems to be largely

3
 The Literature of Terror
metaphorical. The scientific emphasis is very perfunctory; Jekyll
himself slides over it, suggesting that details would only bore. What
he does not slide over is his series of attempts to comprehend the
precise nature of the relation between himself and Hyde, which
Stevenson carefully avoids describing merely as a relation of
opposites. Hyde is not Jekyll's opposite, but something within him:
the fact that he is smaller than the doctor, a 'dwarf', demonstrates
that he is only a part whereas Jekyll is a complex whole, and this is
underlined in one of Stevenson's more startling insights: 'Jekyll had
more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indiffer-
ence' (Works, IV, 75). This, of course, was precisely the aspect of
relationship which Mary Shelley suppressed in connection with Fran-
kenstein and his monster, probably because such 'unnatural'
creativity seemed too close to a parody of the divine. Stevenson
admits to Hyde's status as a parodic 'son of God', but only at the
expense of certain other authorial repressions, principally sexual.
• Not only does the relation between Jekyll and Hyde exclude women,
the whole tale moves - like Dorian Gray and Dr Moreau - in a
world substantially composed of leisured bachelors, and even when
Stevenson ostensibly tries to portray Hyde's tendency towards sexual
excess and deviance, which could hardly not be at the root ofJekyll's
fastidious disgust, he can get almost nothing on paper.
Most of Hyde's nastiness is withheld: Stevenson deals with it
merely in generalities, and whether this is because of Jekyll's revul-
sion or of a poverty in Stevenson's ability to imagine the sexually
criminal remains obscure: 'into the details of the infamy at which I
thus connived (for even now I can scarce grant that I committed
it)', Jekyll says, 'I have no design of entering; I mean but to point
out the warnings and the successive steps with which my chastise-
ment approached' (Works, IV, 72). He does then proceed, however,
to allude to one incident, which we have already been told about,
when Hyde has been seen to meet a child at a street corner, and
to have 'trampled calmly over the child's body and left her scream-
ing on the ground'. 'It sounds nothing to hear', says Enfield, who
is telling Utterson the story, 'but it was hellish to see' (Works, IV, 6).
He is right: it does sound nothing to hear, and it is not even very
easy to imagine. It lingers in the memory, but only because of its
strangeness, which may have been Stevenson's purpose. It is, of
course, symbolic: it is designed to show the inhumanity of Hyde
where a more purposive crime would not. Hyde is described here
as a kind ofJuggernaut, and it is his 'thing-ness' which finally appals
Jekyll: 'this was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed

4
 Gothic and decadence

to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and
sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the
offices of life' (Works, IV, 83).
Again, there is a problem here, a further reticulation of the
Doppelganger structure, about the relation between Stevenson and
Jekyll. It is reasonable that Jekyll should not want, or be able, to
acknowledge Hyde as in any way human, and indeed that onlookers
like Enfield should hold whatever opinion they please, but
Stevenson himself appears to stop short of certain realisations. If it is
indeed repression which has produced the Hyde personality, further
denial of Hyde's claims can only result in an ascending scale of
violence. And this, of course, is exactly what happens, but Stevenson
shows no clear signs of knowing why. Jekyll's later attempts at
repression compound Hyde's fury: 'my devil had been long caged,
he came out roaring' (Works, IV, 76). There is an underlying pessi-
mism in the book which results from Stevenson's difficulty in seeing
any alternative structure for the psyche: once the beast is loose, it
can resolve itself only in death. Jekyll rather feebly suggests at one
point that, if he had been in a different frame of mind when he
first took the drug, the second self thus released might have been
very different: the prospect of an alternative Hyde, constructed of
sweetness and light, is attractive but perhaps somewhat unrealistic.
Julia Briggs's work suggests that the issue of the relations between
the human and the bestial which occurs in Stevenson, Wells, Stoker
and later in such writers as Forster and Lawrence springs largely
from the attempt to deal with Darwinian revelations about the
nature of evolution. 2 Thus Jekyll's transformation is a change of
state of the most extreme kind: when he takes the drug, 'the most
racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea,
and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of
birth or death' (Works, IV, 68). This is the reversion of the species,
the ever-present threat that, if evolution is a ladder,. it may be
possible to start moving down it. Not surprisingly, this threat cannot
be named in the text: Jekyll says that he has brought on himself 'a
punishment and a danger that I cannot name' (Works, IV, 37), and
Hyde is constantly spoken of as possessing unexpressed deformities.
As in much Gothic, there is a dialectical interplay here between
the unspeakable and the methods of verification evidenced in the
complexity of narrative structure, but post-Darwinian fears have
given a new twist to the concept of degeneration. Early in the story,
Utterson suggests that something unspoken from the past may be
coming to claim Jekyll:

5
The Literature of Terror
He was wild when he was young; a long while ago, to be sure; but in
the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ah, it must be that;
the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace;
punishment coming, pede claudo, years after memory has forgotten
and self-love condoned the fault. (Works, IV, 19)

But in the context of the tale, Utterson is, despite the encouraging
pun in his name, an old-fashioned moralist, and his attempt to
impose a conventional 'sins of the fathers' explanation fails. If Hyde
represents a 'ghost' and a 'cancer', it is a general one: the absence
of just limitations goes farther than Utterson cares to think. The
human being may be the product of a primal miscegenation, a
fundamentally unstable blending, which scientific or psychological
accident may be able to part.
And this problem of the double self is, of course, also central to
The Picture of Dorian Gray, the record, as Wilde puts it in Radcliffean
terms, of the 'terrible pleasure' of 'a double life'. The gilded Dorian
used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the
Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one
essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad
sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange
legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with
the monstrous maladies of the dead. 3

A casual wish on Dorian's part severs the links, and he becomes

free to live a life of vice and self-indulgence without losing his looks
or his youth, while his portrait records his depravity in terms of
physical decay.
The problem of distinguishing narrator from character is very
great in Wilde, particularly because of his aphoristic habits: it is not
easy to know what to make of the multiple resonances of Dorian's
opinion that
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that
tyrannised most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of
whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we
thought we were experimenting on others we were really
experimenting on ourselves. (Dorian, p. 59)

Here, as elsewhere, Dorian Gray incorporates the problems of the

1890s in a jewelled nutshell. We have a burgeoning awareness of
the existence of the unconscious, of that fountain from which spring
desires and needs a thousand times stronger than those to which
we can admit; a sense of the dire situations which result from
the liberation of those passions; and the complicated metaphor of
experimentation, which runs through all four of these texts. In

6
 Gothic and decadence
Dorian Gray, it is perfectly clear that one cannot restrict the concept
of experimentation to science: Dr Jekyll and Dr Moreau experiment
on malleable flesh, Sir Henry Wotton and Dorian - in different
ways, but there are Doppelganger complexities here too - artificially
mould the mind.
Artifice is perhaps the key term: how much, if at all, do scientific
and psychological discoveries help us to mould ourselves, and are
the possible shapes into which they can project human life neces-
sarily at all desirable. It is characteristic of Wilde's late romanticism
that the means of moulding should be not science but the art of
painting, but the tenor of the metaphor is the same: is there any-
thing we can do with this knowledge, on the one hand of our
myriad-mindedness and on the other of our proximity to the beasts,
which will be other than harmful?
The answer of the 1890s was unanimous: No. This is more surpris-
ing in Wilde than in the other writers, because it places limits of a
severe kind on his apparent decadence: Dorian Gray encourages no
faith in artifice, either artifice on others or the self-artifice which is
supposed to be the crux of decadence. Wilde's fear of decay is even
more vividly expressed than those of Stevenson or Wells: Dorian
throws a pall over his picture,
to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the
corruption of death itself - something that would breed horrors and
yet would never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would
be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty,
and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful.
And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive.
(Dorian, p. 119)

Wilde has no doubt that Dorian's repressed desires are as horrible

as Jekyll's, not only morally horrible but also inelegant; the much-
vaunted divorce between moral and aesthetic categories is simply
not there in Dorian Gray, which is structurally a simple morality tale,
more so even than Jekyll and Hyde, and certainly more so than
Dracula. Like Stevenson, Wilde is locked in the realisation that
repression gets you both ways: Sir Henry advocates liberation, claim-
ing that if we repress our desires 'we degenerate into hideous pup-
pets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too
much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the
courage to yield to' (Dorian, p. 23). Dorian does his slightly insipid
best to avoid this fate, but ends up in exactly the same stat~. Sir
Henry's anthropological speculations have a lot to be said for them:

7
The Literature of Terror
The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial
that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse
that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.... The
only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your
soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself,
with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and
unlawful. (Dorian, p. 18)

So far so good: 'sooner', perhaps, 'murder an infant in its cradle

than nurse unacted desires'.4 But Dorian cannot escape doom that
way, and possibly Wilde's reasoning is similar to Stevenson's: both
Dorian and Hyde 'go native', they both renounce the repressive
morality of the dominant culture, but all they achieve is an assimi-
lation to the apparently even worse 'morality' of the lower classes.
Wilde's version of the London environment is again Stevenson's,
and again lifted out of Dickens but shorn of even the severely
truncated sympathy we find in Oliver Twist (1838): Dorian
remembers
wandering through dimly-lit streets, past gaunt black-shadowed
archways and evil-looking houses. Women with hoarse voices and
harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by cursing,
and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque
children huddled upon doorsteps, and heard shrieks and oaths from
gloomy courts. (Dorian, p. 88)

There are two possible but contradictory conclusions one might

draw from this nexus of urban visions: on the one hand, that
Dickens, Stevenson, Wilde were themselves too deeply imbued with
middle-class morality to grant any validity to alternative kinds of life,
on the other that they had seen too clearly the depredations which
that morality had wrought upon its underdogs to grant any credence
to the survival of lower-class integrity. It has been said that deca-
dence is fundamentally a middle-class attitude, and this is borne out
by Dorian Gray. There is, says Basil Hallward, the artist, 'a fatality
about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that
seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings' (Dorian,
p. 3). But, elegant though this thought may be, it does not support
the conclusions of the story: Schedoni, in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian
(1797), could indeed claim kudos from such a fatality, as could any
Byronic hero, but Dorian is not of the same stature at all. His crimes
and his feelings are alike petty and dilettante, and his doom evokes
neither compassion nor the more elevated sympathies of tragedy.
Again, Wilde tries to fuse psychological speculation with character-

8
 Gothic and decadence
istics taken from the older Gothic, but does not convince us of the
grandeur of necessity:
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or
for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre
of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful
impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of
their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move.
(Dorian, p. 190)

This reminds us less of the fate of the tragic hero than of the
indulgent self-assessment of Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins's The
Woman in VVhite (1860), but Fosco has a saving irony absent from
Dorian Gray: he is also considerably more effective, in almost any
terms, than any of Wilde's characters.
As the core Gothic theme of Jekyll and Hyde is the Doppelganger,
the core theme of Dorian Gray is the quest for immortality,
accompanied with appropriate speculations on the relations between
art and life and between beauty and vice. A significant twist in
Wilde's dealings with these themes, however, is that his protagonist
is hardly a hero but rather a hero-worshipper, whose own hero, Sir
Henry, is really rather unconnected with the doom which afflicts
Dorian. The vitality, the fire, the primitive barbaric energy of the
Gothic hero are absent. Wilde himself talks about the continuing
power of Gothic images to affect the psyche:
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn,
either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost
enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen
joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more
terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in
. all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art
being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have
been troubled with the malady of reverie. (Dorian, p. 131)

But his attempts to reinvoke this condition are tired, perhaps with
the natural fatigue of accomplished paradox, perhaps because of the
lack of bite in the social fears on which he plays. Dorian chooses to
ape an aristocratic life-style, but he is not an aristocrat, at least not
in any of the more worrying senses. It is, finally, unclear how much
seriousness Wilde invests in this matter of style. When Lytton Stra-
chey says of Horace Walpole that 'he liked Gothic architecture, not
because he thought it beautiful, but because he found it queer', 5
the sensibility sounds very much like Wilde's, and the embarrass-
ment one feels at Castle of Otranto (1764) is similar to that in Dorian
Gray. Who is being made fun of in a passage like this:

9
The Literature of Terror
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was
lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry
Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-
coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed
hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and
now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the
long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge
window, producing a kind of momentary japanese effect, and making
him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through
the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the
sense of swiftness and motion. (Dorian, p. 1)

Most probably the target is the reader: in any case, the primary
effect of Dorian Gray is surely, unlike that of Jekyll and Hyde, cathartic.
Where Jekyll and Hyde raises issues and does not resolve them, thus
remaining to haunt the mind, Dorian Gray wraps up issues in a way
that purges them of real importance. Dorian is not at root a figure
whose fate affects the rest of us.
In terms of this schema, Wells's The Island ofDr Moreau is definitely
more closely related to Jekyll and Hyde, and of course even more so
to Frankenstein, another text which owes a large part of its continuing
popularity precisely to its failure to establish a coherent pattern out
of its intellectual elements. Since it is perhaps rather less well known
than Jekyll and Hyde or Dorian Gray, it may be as well to give a brief
account of the plot. It is the first-person narrative of Edward Prend-
ick, introduced by his nephew, who confirms the minimal points
that his uncle has been shipwrecked and rescued, with an interval
of almost a year between, but states that his uncle's version of the
intervening time has never been accepted. Prendick's own account,
thus introduced, tells how he was rescued from a ship's boat by a
strange craft equipped with a drunken captain, a collection of ani-
mals, and a man named Montgomery, an outcast ex-medical student
who appears to be in charge. Due to an altercation with the captain,
Prendick is put off with the others at their island destination, and
there encounters Moreau himself. He is surprised by many features
of the island, which, he is assured, is a kind of biological research
station, but particularly by its other inhabitants, some of whom
appear to be men, although of no race he has ever encountered,
others to be somehow between men and animals. He is also dis-
turbed by screams of pain heard during the nights, and eventually
forms the conclusion that Moreau, whose name he has now remem-
bered as that of an exiled vivisectionist, is reducing men to an
animal state by surgery, for dire purposes of his own. An explanation
follows, in which Prendick is humiliated to find that Moreau is

10
 Gothic and decadence
doing exactly the reverse and trying to form a man from the beasts,
with varying success. The mixed crop of failures which inevitably
accrues lives in a village of hovels on the island, restrained from
violence by laws which Moreau has implanted in them, but these
start to become ineffective and the beast-men return to the beast,
killing Moreau and Montgomery on the way. Prendick manages to
survive amid the wreckage of the island society, and is eventually
rescued.
On the surface, this is another fable about the dangers of scien-
tific progress unrestrained by moral compunction: we are clearly
meant to be appalled both by the pain caused to the animals and
by the condition to which many of them are reduced.
Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could have sympathised at
least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I
could have forgiven him a little even had his motive been hate. But
he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. 6

But Prendick's attitude is by no means consistent, which renders

many of the scientific points ambiguous. Writing, we must remem-
ber, after his return to civilisation, he comments on the moment
when he remembers where he had previously heard Moreau's name,
and adds that when his .experiments became known
the doctor was simply howled out of the country. It may be he deserved
to be, but I still [sic] think the tepid support of his fellow investigators,
and his desertion by the great body of scientific workers, was a shameful
thing. (Moreau, p. 38)

The principal problem, however, concerns the status of pain in the

story. At one level, Moreau appears to be practising an extreme
form of surgery with variable results, but at another he seems to be
performing a less clearly scientific kind of operation, in which the
important feature of the 'humanising' process is the actual experi-
ence of pain for its own sake. 'Each time 1 dip a living creature into
a bath of burning pain', says Moreau, '1 say, This time 1 will burn
out all the animal, this time 1 will make a rational creature of my
own' (Moreau, p. 84). Human rationality, for Moreau, seems to be
largely dependent on transcending pain: 'the store men and women
set on pleasure and pain ... is the mark of the beast upon them,
the mark of the beast from which they came. Pain! Pain and pleasure
- they are for us, only so long as we wriggle in the dust ... ' (Moreau,
p. 81). Yet it is by the threat of further pain that Moreau keeps
control over the beast-men: presumably this is supposed to be a

11
The Literature of Terror
mark of their inadequacy, yet Moreau implants fear of pain in them
as a substitute for a moral law.
The purely scientific point is thus confused with a set of moral
arguments about the difference between man and beast, as it is in
Frankenstein; and similarly Prendick's objections to Moreau's proce-
dures are considerably vitiated by his admiration for Moreau himself,
grudging as it is. In the discussion where Moreau reveals his true
aims, Prendick says that he found himself 'hot with shame at our
mutual positions' (Moreau, p. 76). Like previous hero/villains,
Moreau exercises an enormous power over his fellow men. When
Prendick first ventures on a journey to discover the island's secrets,
Moreau catches him: 'he lifted me as though I was a little child'
(Moreau, p. 56), says Prendick, and when Moreau dies, Montgomery
collapses completely and returns to drink: 'he had been strangely
under the influence of Moreau's personality. I do not think it had
ever occurred to him that Moreau could die' (Moreau, p.115).
Moreau is described, oddly, as having an exceptional, perhaps god-
like, serenity, evidenced precisely in the absence of motive by which
Prendick is fascinated: 'you cannot imagine', says Moreau to Prend-
ick, rightly, 'the strange colourless delight of these intellectual
desires' (Moreau, p. 81).
Thus far, the ambiguity of the text is a common Gothic ambiguity,
in which the seeker after forbidden knowledge is condemned while
being simultaneously surrounded by a halo of admiration. With
very pleasing irony Wells portrays Montgomery after Moreau's death
venting his spite and fear on the puritanical Prendick: 'You logic-
chopping, chalky-faced saint of an atheist, drink', he shouts, 'you're
the beast. He takes his liquor like a Christian' (Moreau, p.116).
Certainly we are left feeling that there is a genuine vision at the
root of Moreau's behaviour, even if through rejection it has turned
obsessional, and it is also very difficult to answer the questions which
the text raises about the happiness of the beast-men in the way
Wells appears to want them answered: how does one determine
whether a half-man is more or less happy or pained than the beast
from which he came?
But Moreau is not only a Faustian seeker: he is also a more
contemporary symbol. At one point Moreau, Montgomery and
Prendick go forth to reassert their control over the beast-men, who
come out of the jungle towards them:
As soon as they had approached within a distance of perhaps thirty
yards they halted, and bowing on knees and elbows, began flinging
the white dust upon their heads. Imagine the scene if you can. We

12
 Gothic and decadence
three blue-clad men, with our misshapen black-faced attendant, standing
in a wide expanse of sunlit yellow dust under the blazing blue sky, and
surrounded by this circle of crouching and gesticulating monstrosities,
some almost human, save in their subtle expression and gestures, some
like cripples, some so strangely distorted as to resemble nothing but the
denizens of our wildest dreams. (Moreau, p. 98)

This is the Gothic vision of empire on which the book is founded.

The 'black-faced' attendant is, of course, literally black-faced
because he is himself a beast-man, but the play on black and white is
nonetheless sustained throughout. Moreau himself is both white-
haired and white-faced; Prendick, as we have seen, is 'chalky'; it is
'white dust' with which the dark-skinned beast-men cover themselves
as a sign of submission. Moreau, whose island is, significantly,
marked on maps as 'Noble's Isle', is the white 'aristocrat' who
presides over a colonial society in which the fears of reversion
which we have already seen in Jekyll and Hyde and in Dorian
Gray are ever-present, both in the beast-men and in the 'white
trash' Montgomery. His attempts to prevent this reversion are
unsuccessful but ultimately heroic, for he dies, surely, in the
attempt to purify the race.
None of this, of course, is to think of Wells as a racist: far from
it. The point is that The Island of Dr Moreau represents a confluence
of, first, old Gothic themes of aspiration and dominance; second,
the fears about human status and dignity generated by Darwin; and
third, as a natural metaphorical accompaniment, images of white
imperialism in its decline. But just as in Dorian Gray, the strands do
not hold together: like Sir Henry Wotton, Moreau has considerable
insight into the operations of repressive ideology, but his advocacy
of alternatives is condemned by the text. 'Very much', says
Moreau, 'of what we call moral education is ... an artificial modifi-
cation and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into cour-
ageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious
emotion' (Moreau, p.79). But Wells fails to keep this suggestion,
with its Freudian and Darwinian connotations, firmly in mind, and
describes Moreau's process of humanisation in two rather different
ways. The first beast-man Moreau makes is said to have begun his
new life 'with a clean sheet, mentally; had no memories left in
his mind of what he had been' (Moreau, p. 82). Yet Moreau is also
said not to be experimenting with freedom from conditioning, but
rather to be forming beast-men who will be obedient to his own
moral and social ideas:

13
The Literature of Terror
they had certain Fixed Ideas implanted by Moreau in their minds,
which absolutely bounded their imaginations. They were really
hypnotised, had been told certain things were impossible, and certain
things were not to be done, and these prohibitions were woven into the
texture of their minds beyond any possibility of disobedience or dispute.
(Moreau, pp. 87-8)

As Frankensteinian creator, Moreau wants to form a free being, free

from the natural constraints of pain and pleasure; as imperialist, he
wants to form a slave, and the best kind of slave, of course, does
not know that he or she is one.
The arguments are partly difficult to sort out because Moreau is
not himself particularly concerned with the little society of rejects
which he is producing; as far as he is concerned they are merely
signs of failure. It is Montgomery who takes an interest in them.
The society which thus accidentally emerges is one which repeats
many features of ordinary human societies: an interesting and
resonant one is that 'the females were less numerous than the
males, and liable to much furtive persecution in spite of the
monogamy which the Law enjoined' (Moreau, p. 89). More import-
ant, their 'human-ness' does not stick: they retain 'the unmistakable
mark of the beast'; 'the stubborn beast flesh grows, day by day, back
again' (Moreau, pp.46, 83). At a very basic level, the message is a
simple and conservative one: do not interfere in the natural order.
What is left doubtful, however, is whether such interference is wrong
on moral grounds, or merely impossible to achieve fully, and also to
what extent the experience of pain is an essential part of Moreau's
process. Answers to the two hypothetical questions which one would
like to ask - what Prendick or Wells would think if Moreau were
successful, and what the situation would be given the benefits of
anaesthesia - cannot be extrapolated from the text.
If this makes for a somewhat confused work, it also makes for a
rich one. The story has strong elements in it of Defoe and more
particularly Swift. The language used by and to the beast-men is
oddly biblical, which reinforces the image of a perverted island
paradise, and the ending, with Prendick returning to civilisation
on'ly to find that he keeps regarding his fellow men as themselves
bearing the mark of the beast, is identical to the ending of Gulliver's
Travels. The Island of Dr Moreau brings the reader face to face with
a problem which had accompanied Gothic visions since the time of
William Godwin and Mary Shelley, but which had been given an
extra twist by Darwin: where do we locate the blame for terrors
which are the effect of social conditioning? It could simply be said

14
 Gothic and decadence
that Moreau's ends do not justify his means, but Prendick at least
seems to feel rather doubtful about this, and there are strong hints
that the kinds of pressure under which the beast-men live are not
really all that different from ordinary social pressures. Moreau's
island is partly a microcosm, partly a polemical distortion: its
terrifying effect derives partly from Wells's handling of conventional
adventure-story techniques, but more from the sense of vertigo
with which we apprehend the relation between the beast-men and
ourselves.
Fundamentally, all three of these works are concerned with the
problem of the liberation of repressed desires. The discoveries of
Darwin combined with psychological developments to produce, first,
a revelation that the personality contains depths which do not
appear on the surface of everyday intercourse, and second, a fear
that the Other thus postulated may relate to the bestial level which
evidences human continuity with the animal world. In the light of
this double supposition, experiments of the kind made deliberately
by Jekyll and Moreau and accidentally by Dorian Gray become
fraught with more terror than a similar experiment implied in
Frankenstein, because experimentation is coming to be seen as tinker-
ing with the self. Thus the 'double self' which had been hypoth-
esised by Hogg and others received a basis in scientific speculation,
and the whole question of man's relations to the beasts came to be
examined - and mythologised - anew. But a myth supposes two
moments in time: the moment of origin, creation, differentiation
which needs explanation, and the contemporary moment in terms
of which communicable myth must be cast. Thus Stevenson, Wilde
and Wells found themselves necessarily assimilating the intellectual
problems of their age to the actual social structures within and
about which they wrote. In the case of Stevenson, the problem of the
beast within becomes cast in terms of the difficulties of professional,
public, respectable life: the doctor, of course, is the symbol of the
union between scientific exploration and respectability. In the case
of Wilde, the whole issue is cast archaically in the old Gothic categor-
ies of aristocratic life-style and its relation to primal cruelty. In The
Island of Dr Moreau, as befits the work of a writer more politically
concerned than Stevenson or Wilde, the question of reversion is
linked to a series of agonising speculations on the inner significance
of empire, with its attendant insistence on the preservation of both
class and racial integrity.
The whole complex of problems received by far its most signifi-
cant treatment, however, in Bram Stoker's greatly underrated Drac-

15
The Literature of Terror
ula, which is not only a well-written and formally inventive sensation
novel but also one of the most important expressions of the social
and psychological dilemmas of the late nineteenth century. For
obvious reasons, the intellectual content of Dracula has not been
taken seriously; yet it deserves to be, less because of any distinction
in Stoker's own attitudes and perceptions than as a powerful record
of social pressures and anxieties. It has always been a difficult book
to place, largely because if one accepts the conventional view of the
expiry of Gothic before the middle of the nineteenth century Drac-
ula becomes a kind of sport; but in fact it belongs securely with
Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray and The Island of Dr Moreau, while tran-
scending all of them in its development of a symbolic structure in
which to carry and deal with contradictions. The use of the term
'myth' to describe a work of written literature is open to abuse, but
if there is any modern work which fits the term adequately, it is
Dracula, if on the grounds of reception alone.
At the heart of Dracula (if the pun may be forgiven) is blood.
The vampire thrives on the blood of others, and the whole effort
of Van ReIsing and his colleagues is to fight this one-way flow of
blood, by transfusion and any other possible means. 'The vampire
live on', says Van ReIsing in his broken English, 'and cannot die by
mere passing of the time; he can flourish when that he can fatten
on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us
that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenu-
ous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special
pabulum is plenty. But he cannot flourish without this diet; he eat
not as others.'7 Rere, as elsewhere in Dracula, is a religious inversion,
brought out the more strongly by the biblical tone of Van ReIsing's
discourse: the blood is the life. Stoker is well aware of the rich
possibilities for ambiguity and bitter humour in this central motif.
When Van ReIsing recounts the ship's captain's response to his
vampire passenger, there is a vertiginous interplay of conventional
swear-words and deeper ironic significance: Dracula
give much talk to captain as to how and where his box is to be place;
but the captain like it not and swear at him in many tongues, and tell
him that if he like he can come and see where it shall be. But he say
'no'; that he come not yet, for that he have much to do. Whereupon
the captain tell him that he had better be quick [sic] - with blood -
for that his ship will leave the place - of blood - before the turn of
the tide - with blood.
(Dracula, pp. 322-3)

But the blood which gives Dracula his life is, as usual in vampire

16
 Gothic and decadence
legendry, not merely literal. Dracula the individual needs blood, but
Dracula is not merely an individual; he is, as he tells Harker, a
dynasty, a 'house', the proud descendant and bearer of a long
aristocratic tradition. He recites to Harker a catalogue of the gallant
feats of his ancestors, ending thus:
when, after the battle of Mohilcs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we
of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would
not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys - and the
Dracula as their heart's blood, their brains, and their swords - can
boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the
Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too
precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories
of the great races are as a tale that is told. (Dracula, pp. 38-9)

The long historical progression of the bourgeoisie's attempts to

understand the significance of noble 'blood' reaches a point of
apotheosis in Dracula, for Dracula is the final aristocrat; he has
rarefied his needs, and the needs of his house and line, to the point
where he has no longer any need of any exchange-system or life-
support except blood. All other material connections with the 'dis-
honourable' bourgeois world have been severed: the aristocrat has
paid the tragic price of social supersession, yet his doom perforce
involves others. Cheated of his right of actual dominion, his power
is exerted in mere survival: his relationship to the world is the
culmination of tyranny, yet it is justified in that it is not his own
survival that he seeks but the survival of the house, and thus, of
course, the survival of the dead. Stoker brings out the ambiguity in
the legends very well when Dracula tells Harker his history:
In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he
spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained
by saying that to a 'boyar' the pride of his house and name is his own
pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever
he spoke of his house he always said, 'we', and spoke almost in the
plural, like a king speaking. (Dracula, p. 37)

It is impossible to tell whether what is at stake is Dracula's personal

longevity or his total identification with his line.
And if one looks again at the old legends themselves, what
emerges as very obvious is that they were partly invented to explain
the problem of the connection between aristocracy and immortality.
To the peasantry of central Europe, it may well have seemed that
the feudal lord was immortal: the actual inhabitant of the castle
upon the mountain might change, but that might not even be
known. What would have been known was that there was always a

17
The Literature of Terror
lord; that by some possibly miraculous means life and title persisted,
at the expense, of course, of peasant blood, in the literal sense of
blood shed in battle and in cruelty~ Dracula can no longer survive
on blood of this kind; he needs alternative sources of nourishment
to suit his socially attenuated existence. The dominion of the sword
is replaced by the more naked yet more subtle dominion of the
tooth; as the nobleman's real powers disappear, he becomes invested
with semi-supernatural abilities, exercised by night rather than in
the broad day of legendary feudal conflict.
But thus far Dracula is merely another variant on the vampire
legendry which we have already seen in John Polidori's 'The Vam-
pyre' (1819), another modification of pre-bourgeois fears of tyranni-
cal violence imaged in terms of the primal fear of blood-sucking.
What makes Dracula distinctive is Stoker's location of this set of
symbols within late Victorian society. Over against the 'house' which
Dracula represents Stoker places the bourgeois family, seen around
the moment of maximum bonding, on the eve of marriage. Dracula
is a dramatised Gonflict of social forces and attitudes: opposite the
strength of the vampire we are shown the strength of bourgeois
marital relations and sentimental love, as in Mina's letter to Lucy
after her marriage to Harker.
Well, my dear, what could I say? I could only tell him that I was the
happiest woman in all the wide world, and that I had nothing to give
him except myself, my life, and my trust, and that with these went my
love and duty for all the days of my life. And, my dear, when he kissed
me, and drew me to him with his poor weak hands, it was like a very
solemn pledge between us ...
Lucy dear, do you know why I tell you all this? It is not only because
it is all sweet to me, but because you have been, and are, very dear
to me. It was my privilege to be your friend and guide when you came
from the schoolroom to prepare for the world of life. I want you to
see now, and with the eyes of a very happy wife, whither duty has led
me; so that in your own married life you too may be all happy as I am.
(Dracula, p. 115)

The list of structural oppositions is long. Dracula stands for lineage,

the principal group of characters for family; Dracula for the wildness
of night, they for the security of day; Dracula for unintelligible and
bitter passion, they for the sweet and reasonable emotions; Dracula
for the physical and erotic, they for repressed and etherealised love.
And at the kernel of this structure is embedded the further oppo-
sition between Dracula and his arch-enemy Van Helsing, who is
imported to put a stiffening of science and reason into the 'team':

18
 Gothic and decadence
He is seemingly arbitrary man, but this because he knows what he is
talking about better than anyone else. He is a philosopher and a
metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day; and
he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron nerve,
a temper of the ice-brook, an indomitable resolution, self-command,
and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and
truest heart that beats - these form his equipment for the noble work
that he is doing for mankind - work both in theory and practice, for
his views are as wide as his all-embracing sympathy.
(Dracula, p. 121)

Van ReIsing is a superman, and therefore combines in himself a

number of contradictory qualities, but the emphasis in his character
is on order, neatness, reserve, in Freudian terms on those aspects
of the ego which serve the purpose of quashing the tendency
towards chaos and libidinal fulfilment which would otherwise dis-
rupt social and psychological organisation. Dracula's is the passion
which never dies, the endless desire of the unconscious for gratifi-
cation, which has to be repressed - particularly on the eve of mar-
riage, of course - in order to maintain stable ideology. Re is 'un-
dead' because desire never dies; gratification merely moves desire
on to further objects. There is, for Dracula as for the unconscious,
no final satisfaction, for his very nature is desire.
Towards these structures the text manifests a socially revealing
ambivalence. One of the aspects of decadence was the supremacy
of the moment of attraction in the continual dialectic of attraction
and repulsion which characterised the relation between the domi-
nant middle class and its 'un-dead' predecessor. From the bourgeois
point of view, Dracula is, like Schedoni, Frankenstein and Dorian
Gray, a manic individualist; from his own point of view, which is not
absent in the text, he is the bearer of the promise of true union,
union which transcends death. From the bourgeois point of view,
Dracula stands for sexual perversion and sadism; but we also know
that what his victims experience at the moment of consummation
is joy, unhealthy perhaps but of a power unknown in conventional
relationships. Dracula exists and exerts power through right immem-
orial; Van ReIsing and his associates defeat him in the appropriate
fashion, through hard work and diligent application, the weapons
of a class which derives its existence from labour. Lest some of this
seem fanciful, we can cite some of Stoker's dream symbolism:
I didn't quite dream; but it all seemed to be real. I only wanted to be
here in this spot - I don't know why, for I was afraid of something -
I don't know what. I remember, though I suppose I was asleep, passing
through the streets and over the bridge. A fish leaped as I went by,

19
 The Literature of Terror
and I leaned over to look at it, and I heard a lot of dogs howling -
the whole town seemed as if it must be full of dogs all howling at
once - as I went up the steps. Then I had a vague memory of something
long and dark with red eyes, just as we saw in the sunset, and
something very sweet and very bitter all around me at once; and then
I seemed sinking into deep green water, and there was a singing in
my ears, as I have heard there is to drowning men; and then everything
seemed passing away from me; my soul seemed to go out from my
body and float about the air. I seem to remember that once the West
Lighthouse was right under me, and then there was a sort of agonising
feeling, as if I were in an earthquake, and I came back and found you
shaking my body. I saw you do it before I felt you.
(Dracula, p. 108)

This reads almost like a case study in emotional ambivalence. Begin-

ning by establishing that there is a difficulty in assessing Dracula's
reality vis-a-vis the world's, Lucy then goes on to demonstrate that
Dracula represents the 'un-known', that which is not available to
consciousness, and to illustrate this with a succession of images of
the unconscious: the leaping fish, emerging from psychic depths
. like Coleridge's fountain, the howling dogs, symbol of yearning and
wordless need, and the 'something long and dark with red eyes',
which is Dracula but also prefigures the phallic connotations of the
lighthouse. She sinks into the primal fluid of the unconscious,
assailed by sensations which she can only describe as contradictory,
'sweet' and 'bitter', and her soul and body separate as she abandons
responsibility for her situation. Dracula, the unconscious, takes the
sins of the world on his shoulders because his existence, and
the acquiescence of his victims, demonstrate the limitations of the
moral \\Till. Lucy, of course, can only experience the consummation
of the lighthouse and the earthquake while in this trance-like state,
and then translates her experience back into 'safe' terms, 'you
shaking my body'. She sees Mina before she feels her because she
is sinking into the liberation which her conventional self denies:
every time Dracula strikes it becomes harder for his victim to return
to normality.
The myth in Dracula, more clearly even than in other versions of
the vampire legends, is an inversion of Christianity, and particularly
of Pauline Christianity, in that Dracula promises - and gives - the
real resurrection of the body, but disunited from soul. Stoker's
attitude to this is of course shocked, but then Stoker appears from
the text to be almost traumatised by a specific sexual fear, a fear
of the so-called 'New Woman' and the reversal of sexual roles which
her emergence implies. Mina is afraid that 'some of the "New

20
 Gothic and decadence

Women" writers will some day start an idea that men and women
should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or
accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in
future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job
she will make of it, too! There's some consolation in that' (Dracula,
p. 100). Behind the smugness lies disturbance; it is ironic, but with
an irony familiar in the Gothic from Radcliffe on, that precisely the
authorial conservatism of Dracula makes its rendition of the threats
to comfortable Victorian sexual and familial life pointed and percep-
tive. A crucial scene occurs when Arthur visits Lucy, who is failing
fast. When he first sees her, she 'looked her best, with all the soft
lines matching the angelic beauty of her eyes'. But as she sinks into
sleep, this model of femininity and passivity begins to change:
Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums,
drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever. In a
sort of sleep-waking, vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes,
which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft, voluptuous
voice, such as I had never heard from her lips:-
'Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!'
(Dracula pp. 167-8)

Upon which Van Helsing, whose role is to protect against this kind
of overt passion and reversal of roles, comes between them. And
this scene is prefigured by the 'key-note' scene where Harker is
menaced in Dracula's castle by the three female vampires:
All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the
ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that
made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear.
I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me
with those red lips. It is not good to note this down; lest some day it
should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth.
(Dracula, p. 46)

It is hard to summarise Dracula, for it is such a wide-ranging

book, but in general it is fair to say that its power derives from its
dealings with taboo. Where taboo sets up certain bounding lines
and divisions which enable society to function without disruption,
Dracula blurs those lines. He blurs the line between man and beast,
thus echoing the fears of degeneracy in Stevenson, Wilde and Wells;
he blurs the line between man and God by daring to partake of
immortal life and by practising a corrupt but superhuman form
of love; and he blurs the line between man and woman by demon-
strating the existence of female passion. In his figure are delineated
so many primitive fears: he is a shape-changer, a merger of species,

21
The Literature of Terror
the harbinger of ethnic collapse. His 'disciple' Renfield regards him
as a god; and his satanic aspects are all the more interesting if we
remember that his real-life ancestor gained his reputation for cruelty
because of his assiduity in defending the Christian faith against the
marauding Turk. .
Where Moreau constitutes an ambiguous and accidental threat
to empire from without, destroying genetic and racial barriers which
are essential to smooth government, Dracula threatens it from
within, attacking the whole concept of morality by preying upon
and liberating aspects of the personality which are not under moral
control, and colonising on his own behalf by infection in a savage
and quite unintentional parody of imperialism. The ironic refrain
of Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), the perception that you
always kill the thing you love, that only love allows the proximity
which can lead to real damage, is given a savage new twist by Stoker,
in whose text one can see the traces of the illimitable desire which
turns love into possession and demands incorporation of the love-
object. Dracula is the logical culmination of the Victorian and
Gothic hero, the hero in whom power and attraction are bent to
the service of Thanatos, and for whom the price of immortality
is the death of the soul.
Before turning from the problematic of decadence to other forms
of Gothic which continued to exist in late nineteenth-century and
early twentieth-century fiction, there is one other writer whose work,
beginning in the 1890s and continuing through to the 1920s, merits
some comment: Arthur Machen. Machen's books have never
received much attention, a fact about which he grew increasingly
bitter, yet they are the best in the rather sickly field of genre work
which took up Darwinian anxieties as a basis for terror. In 1894,
Machen published a novella called The Great God Pan, in which yet
another doctor performs on a young girl an operation which is
designed to open her 'inner eye' to the continuing diabolical exist-
ence of the Great God; the operation drives her mad, after which
her child, born of her union with Pan, proceeds to confront a series
of other people with visions of the horror which underlies the quiet
surface of life. It is, as Machen says, 'an old story, an old mystery
played in our day, and in dim London streets instead of amidst the
vineyards and the olive gardens'.8 The old story is the story of
Moreau and Dracula, the story of the breaking of taboo boundaries
and the dreadful consequences which result: Pan is a 'presence,
that was neither man nor beast, neither the living nor the dead,
but all things mingled, the form of all things but devoid of all form'

22
 Gothic and decadence
(Pan, p. 20), and when the hell-child finally dies she goes through
the stages of the reversion of the species to the 'primal slime':
I saw the form waver from sex to sex, dividing itself from itself, and
then again reunited. Then I saw the body descend to the beasts
whence it ascended, and that which was on the heights go down to
the depths, even to the abyss of all being. (Pan, p. 109)

The paradox of The Great God Pan is that the visitation which liber-
ates the human being from the repression of false assumptions
also destroys the barriers which retain human individuation: the
liberation of desire returns man to a primal association with the
beast and destroys the soul:
I knew I had looked into the eyes of a lost soul ... the man's outward
form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that
was like fire, and the loss of all hope, and horror that seemed to shriek
aloud in the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness
of despair. (Pan, p. 91)

This is a lurid version of the process which converted Jekyll into

Hyde; and it happens, as one might expect, almost exclusively to
aristocrats.
The Three Impostors (1895) is a rather more complex book and an
interesting example of a text composed of a series of interlocking
stories, all of which are lies. It is indebted to Stevenson's New Arabian
Nights (1882), and moves through a range of settings which bear
comparison with Conan Doyle's. The stories vary in terms of the
order of interpretation which they advance, but the most significant
of them are committed, like The Great God Pan, to asserting a pseudo-
'natural' explanation for apparently supernatural events. Professor
Gregg, another unfortunate seeker after forbidden knowledge, is
convinced that the horror stories of folk legendry mask facts which
are amenable to scientific discovery: he rejects 'the supernatural
hypothesis of the Middle Ages', saying that 'invention, no doubt,
and the Gothic fancy of old days, had done much in the way of
exaggeration and distortion', and advances a different hypothesis:
'what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still
remained haunting wild places and barren hills, and now and then
repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable
as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain?,g Here Machen's
Celtic sensibility verges on a theory of history according to racial
conspiracy; it is perhaps not surprising that he felt attracted towards
Fascism. 1o
In one sense at least, The Three Impostors might be described as a

23
The Literature of Terror
truly decadent book, in that its content turns back upon itself and
is used as the excuse for a series of ironic arguments about the
nature of fiction. Its protagonists are involved in pondering the
strangeness of the real, while continually being subjected to unsolici-
ted stories which do nothing whatever to help the problem, since
their tellers cannot be trusted. Machen's continual theme is 'the
awful transmutation of the hills' (Impostors, p. 119): the possibility
that the merest sideslip of vision might offer us a world which is
wholly other, and show us the real and awful faces of the demons
who manipulate evolution to serve their own ends.
This transmutation is also the theme of Machen's most impressive
work, The Hill of Dreams (1907), which has been described as the
most decadent book in the English language. Its decadence is not
formal but thematic, the closest connection being to Swinburne.
The hero, Lucian Taylor, finds the world resistant both to his desires
and to his attempts to write a novel, and enters into a dark bath of
pain and sacrifice in which he revolves an endless obsession with
the single moment of dubious love which he has experienced; but
what is distinctive is that Machen manages to describe algolagnic
indulgence without losing his sense of the irony which results from
Lucian's conflict with the real world:
Never did he fail to wake at the appointed hour, a strong effort of will
broke through all the heaviness of sleep, and he would rise up, joyful
though weeping, and reverently set his thorny bed upon the floor,
offering his pain with his praise. When he had whispered the last
word, and had risen from the ground, his body would be all freckled
with drops of blood; he used to view the marks with pride. Here and
there a spine would be left deep in the flesh, and he would pull these
out roughly, tearing through the skin, On some nights when he had
pressed with more fervour on the thorns his thighs would stream with
blood, red beads standing out on the flesh, and trickling down to his
feet. He had some difficulty in washing away the bloodstains so as not
to leave any traces to attract the attention of the servant; and after a
time he returned no more to his bed when his duty had been
accomplished. For a coverlet he had a dark rug, a good deal worn,
and in this he would wrap his naked bleeding body, and lie down on
the hard floor, well content to add an aching rest to the account of
his pleasures. He was covered with scars, and those that healed during
the day were torn open afresh at night; the pale olive skin was red
with the angry marks of blood, and the graceful form of the young
man appeared like the body of a tortured martyr. He grew thinner and
thinner every day, for he ate but little; the skin was stretched on the
bones of his face, and the black eyes burnt in dark purple hollows.
His relations noticed that he was not looking well. n

24
 Gothic and decadence
The Hill of Dreams i.s an over-lush book, and the baroque quality of
Machen's prose sometimes becomes absurd, yet it has a power which
is partly derived from his refusal to sever Lucian completely from
reality: where a Keatsian hero might be able to retreat to a world
of beauty, or a Swinburnian one to a permanent semi-mystical indul-
gence in pain, Lucian remains in contact with his environment,
albeit transmuted by his special vision. His apocalyptic view of
London is comparable with Baudelaire's urban nightmares in inten-
sity if not in execution:
Voices, raucous, clamant, abominable, were belched out of the blazing
public-houses as the doors swung to and fro, and above these doors
were hideous brassy lamps, very slowly swinging in a violent blast of
air, so that they might have been infernal thuribles, censing the people.
Some man was calling his wares in one long continuous shriek that
never stopped or paused, and, as a respond, a deeper, louder voice
roared to him from across the road. An Italian whirled the handle of
his piano-organ in a fury, and a ring of imps danced mad figures
around him, danced and flung up their legs till the rags dropped from
some of them, and they still danced on. A flare of naphtha, burning
with a rushing noise, threw a light on one point of the circle, and
Lucian watched a lank girl of fifteen as she came round and round
to the flash. She was quite drunk, and had kicked her petticoats away,
and the crowd howled laughter and applause at her. Her black hair
poured down and leapt on her scarlet bodice; she sprang and leapt
round the ring, laughing in Bacchic frenzy, and led the orgy to triumph.
(Hill of Dreams, pp. 203-4)

Machen takes to an extreme point tendencies already existing within

decadent Gothic: like Dracula's, Lucian's is the desire which tends
towards death, but unlike Dracula Lucian does not have the super-
natural privilege of attaining gratification, except in his final dream:
And presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her.
She fled away before him through midnight country, and he followed
after her, chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley. And
at last he captured her and won her with horrible caresses, and they
went up to celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath. They
were within the matted thicket, and they writhed in flames, insatiable,
forever. They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of
thousands who gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up
like a black smoke. (Hill of Dreams, p. 266)

Machen provides an epilogue to English decadence, in which beauty

and death are represented as inextricably fused at the root of the
moment of passion.

25
The Literature of Terror
Notes and references
1. Robert Louis Stevenson, Works, ed. L. Osbourne and Mrs R. L. Stevenson (30
vols, London, 1924-6), IV, 65.
2. See Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London,
1977), pp. 20-1, 79-81.
3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture ofDorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (London, 1974), p. 143.
4. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1 790-3), in The Poetry and Prose
of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York, 1965), p. 37.
5. Lytton Strachey, Characters and Commentaries (London, 1933), p. 40.
6. H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (London, 1973), p. 104.
7. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York, 1965), p. 245.
8. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (London, 1913), p. 101.
9. Machen, The Three Impostors, introd. Julian Symons (London, 1964), pp. 110-12.
10. This is, of course, only one of many examples in the Gothic - as in literature in
general - of an oblique relation between a writer's political tendency and the
political content of his writings; a simple point, but one so far largely ignored
in criticism of the genre.
11. Machen, The Hill of Dreams (New York, 1923), pp. 101-2.

26