Male Imprisonment and Female Wanderers: Sir Charles Grandison’s Influence on the Gothic Novel

Samuel Richardson’s final novel Sir Charles Grandison (1753-1754) is his least known and least read today, but its significance in literary history should not be underestimated. It is particularly important as a source for Gothic literature. While Richardson’s earlier novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) may at first seem more likely predecessors of Gothic literature because of their depictions of abducted women—a theme that recurs in Sir Charles Grandison when Harriet Byron is abducted by Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, and subsequently rescued by Sir Charles, thus bringing about the two lovers’ introduction—Sir Charles Grandison has many additional elements that influenced the Gothic tradition a generation or two after its publication.

Sir Charles Grandison – the Oxford University Press edition runs about 1600 pages. The novel was originally published in seven volumes.

The most obvious influence of Sir Charles Grandison is that it was the first major English novel to have scenes set in Italy. In the novel, Sir Charles travels the continent and ends up in Italy where he has a romantic relationship with Clementina della Porretta after he befriends her brother Jeronymo. A large chunk of the novel concerns whether or not he will marry her while Harriet Byron waits, admiring Clementina but secretly hoping in the end she will be Sir Charles Grandison’s wife. Clementina’s family is against the marriage and sends Clementina off to her cousin Laurana, who ends up locking her up and mistreating her. Clementina consequently suffers from mental problems for the remainder of the novel. Clementina eventually decides she cannot convert from Catholicism to marry Sir Charles and he refuses to convert to Catholicism. Clementina then desires to become a nun, but her family is against this decision, for which she suffers more bouts of mental illness. In the end, the novel is left unresolved whether she will marry the Count of Belvedere as her family wishes, although she does agree not to enter the convent.

These issues all were sources for Gothic literature. Italy would soon be depicted in the novels of Ann Radcliffe—specifically The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797)—as a place of intrigue and horror. Catholicism would also be negatively portrayed in Gothic novels. Radcliffe’s The Italian and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796) are among the countless Gothic novels filled with corrupt and even sex-crazed priests and nuns. Other novels like Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) would depict the injustices of Catholicism, specifically through the Spanish Inquisition and scenes of men and women being held as prisoners and specifically men being tortured by the Church.

Themes of female abduction were more common in Gothic novels, but scenes of men being tortured were not uncommon, and Sir Charles Grandison early on brings such an idea to the forefront. In Volume V, Letter XL, Sir Charles fears that the Italian Lady Olivia, who is in love with him, will kill him or abduct him and hold him as a prisoner in her castle. (The Oxford University Press edition of the novel edited by Jocelyn Harris notes of this scene that Grandison may be remembering a scene from Handel’s opera Rinaldo in which the hero is abducted by Armida. Handel’s opera, in turn, was based upon Jerusalem Delivered by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso. In the poem, the Saracen sorceress Armida abducts the crusader Rinaldo, planning to kill him, but then she falls in love with him and takes him to an island where her love for him makes him forget about the crusade.) Of course, there are sorceresses and seductresses throughout medieval and classical literature. Lancelot is captured by Morgan le Fay and kept as a prisoner in her castle. Odysseus is held captive by Calypso. Regardless, Grandison’s fears provided a more modern setting for such an abduction that might have influenced Gothic novelists.

Samuel Richardson reading Sir Charles Grandison aloud to friends

Although Clementina might be seen as an early version of the female Gothic wanderer for how she is mistreated by Laurana and falls into madness (madness is a common theme in later Gothic novels such as The Woman in White (1859) and Dracula (1897), Lady Olivia is perhaps the truest Gothic wanderer figure in the novel. Olivia is already jealous that Grandison is in love with Clementina. She wants him for herself, but while he continues to be polite to her, he refuses her love. Not only does she attempt to abduct him in Italy, but twice, once in Italy and once when she travels to England, does she attempt to stab him with a poniard. She is unable to handle her passion and the unrequited love and rejection that result. At another point in the novel, Sir Charles learns that she is threatening to have the Holy Tribunal (inquisition) arrest him—imagine Sir Charles, a Protestant Englishman, held captive by the Catholic Church as a heretic. As Fox’s Book of Martyrs shows, such situations did happen when Protestants from abroad entered foreign countries. Fortunately, Olivia’s threats and even murderous actions never amount to any real danger for Sir Charles, who continues to be kind and act like a gentleman toward her. (Today, he could and should get a restraining order against her.) In the end, she gives her consent (not that he needs it) to Sir Charles to marry Harriet, but she continues to hate Clementina, wishing they could both enter into a nunnery where she could exult over Clementina for the heartbreak she has caused her. The Gothic possibilities of her tormenting Clementina only add to Olivia’s Gothic wanderer aspects. She is a character lost and unable to prevent herself from acting irrationally and cruelly, to her own detriment. She is also a wanderer to some degree in that in the novel’s finale (an appendix featuring letters to readers discussing what became of the characters), she is one of the characters of whose futures Richardson does not bother to give us an account.

Dueling and crossdressing are featured in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, one of Sir Charles Grandison’s literary descendants

Lady Olivia is not a major character in Sir Charles Grandison, and readers are likely to forget about her over time, but she may have set a precedent for several other women in literature who were also unable to deal with their passions. In Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), the title character is in love with Sir Clarence Hervey, who in many ways resembles Sir Charles Grandison. He is a perfect gentleman but torn between loving two women. While he ultimately marries Belinda, he has been raising his ward Virginia to be the perfect wife. Notably, Sir Charles Grandison has a ward, Emily Jervois, who is in love with him. Edgeworth’s plot is obviously influenced by Richardson’s. Lady Olivia has a literary sister in the character of Harriet Freke, who although not the victim of unrequited love, nevertheless is violent and aggressive like Olivia. Her outlandish and unfeminine behaviors extend to crossdressing and encouraging Belinda’s friend Lady Delacour to dress as a man and engage in a duel. Harriet lives up to her surname of being a “freak” because of her far from ladylike behavior. The reader is left haunted by Harriet Freke, a villain in the novel, and yet a modern reading can be more sensitive to her. She is an early feminist character in a world not ready for her; as a result, she is a Gothic wanderer of the first degree.

The influence of Sir Charles Grandison upon Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina (1778) has been noted by many critics since Evelina largely follows Sir Charles Grandison’s pattern of being a conduct book disguised as a novel. Evelina finds herself pursued by the obnoxious Sir Clement Willoughby, a literary descendant of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, while secretly being in love with the Grandison-like Lord Ormond. Personally, however, I believe the influence of Sir Charles Grandison upon Burney is most apparent in her last novel, The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties (1814). In that novel, the title character is Juliet, who flees from France to England after being forced into marriage to a French officer. Similarly, Clementina flees Italy, crossing in secret to England when her parents try to force her to marry the Count of Belvedere. Later, Clementina’s family follows her to England and her brother Jeronymo makes a point of saying they travel “incognito.” In The Wanderer, Juliet also travels incognito and the narrator even refers to her as “the incognito.” Juliet falls in love with Harleigh, another seemingly perfect male and literary descendant of Sir Charles Grandison. Harleigh has his own Lady Olivia in Elinor Jodrell, a young woman madly in love with him, although he does not return her affections. Once rejected, Elinor goes a bit crazy. She dresses up like a man and also threatens to commit suicide. While in the end she renounces her suicidal attempts, the reader is left haunted by her passion and her pain over her unrequited love. (For more on the Gothic elements of The Wanderer, see my book The Gothic Wanderer.)

Burney’s The Wanderer examines the plight of women trying to survive through work in a hostile male world.

Finally, in Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1809) there is Joanna, Countess of Mar, madly in love with Sir William Wallace. She is a true female Gothic wanderer who resorts to treachery as well as crossdressing to try to win the man she loves, even though he repeatedly rejects her. I have previously written at this blog about The Scottish Chiefs.

One final element of Sir Charles Grandison that may have inspired the Gothic is Sir Charles’ cousin Everard Grandison. Although a minor character, he is a male Gothic wanderer in his own dissolute behavior. Not only does he get a woman into trouble, resulting in having to marry her, but he develops a gambling addiction. Gambling is a major form of transgression in Gothic novels. Characters like Valancourt in The Mysteries of Udolpho fall into debt through gambling. (For more on gambling in Gothic literature, see my book The Gothic Wanderer).

Many critics both in Richardson’s time and since have argued that Sir Charles Grandison was too perfect a character as a model of male conduct. Among his literary descendants is Valancourt, a man so seemingly perfect that in 1860, William Makepeace Thackeray wrote “‘Valancourt? And who was he?’ cry the young people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmammas’ gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. He and his glory have passed away.” When Emily St. Aubert first meets Valancourt, he does indeed seem like the perfect young man. Later, when she accompanies her aunt and her aunt’s new husband, Montoni, to the castle of Udolpho, Emily imagines Valancourt following her and then later thinks he must be a prisoner in the castle (just as Sir Charles imagined being Olivia’s prisoner). Valancourt never got to Udolpho, though. Instead, he gets caught up in gambling debts and ends up in debtor’s prison. As Sir Charles’ literary descendant, Valancourt ends up a disappointment, but not so much that Emily doesn’t marry him regardless.

The Gothic, indeed, was not interested in perfect men like Sir Charles. Rather, the flawed men like Sir Hargrave Pollexfen become the notorious villains of the Gothic, although a Sir Charles Grandison-like character would often step in to save the heroine, but even then, they sometimes proved ineffective, just as Valancourt does, and even Harleigh, in The Wanderer does not resolve Juliet’s problems, though he does end up marrying her.

Samuel Richardson, regarded by some literary critics, as author of the first true novel, Pamela, or Vertue Rewarded.

In conclusion, I don’t think one can minimize the influence of Sir Charles Grandison on Gothic literature. It was likely read by all the major Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was a book read repeatedly as a source of morals and good conduct and, therefore, likely instilled into its readers’ brains until its repetition had the influence that Stars Wars or Star Trek in their repeated reimaginings have upon movie-goers today. It is hard to imagine the Gothic would be what it was if Sir Charles Grandison had not been written.

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Tyler Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition, The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, The Children of Arthur novel series, and Haunted Marquette: Ghost Stories from the Queen City. Visit Tyler at www.ChildrenofArthur.com and www.GothicWanderer.com.

Bram Stoker’s ‘The Man’ and His Gothic Literary Ghosts

Bram Stoker’s The Man (1905) has received little attention from readers or literary scholars. However, it is actually a very fascinating work that shows how enmeshed Stoker was in Victorian literary traditions. It also reflects the possibility that he was trying to work out his own feelings about women, or possibly himself as a homosexual man. Some critics have considered the novel sexist, but to some degree, it more likely is subversive, a typical method used by the Gothic to push against society’s boundaries, while ending conservatively to be acceptable to the general reading public. And while not a Gothic novel in itself, The Man draws on many Gothic elements.

A cover for a recent edition of The Man – the image fails to portray the novel’s theme and misrepresents the novel.

The Man, to some degree, might be seen as a revision of a minor scene in Dracula and its results, and the question of its sexism revolves around this revision. In Dracula, Lucy suggests that a woman might propose to a man—critics like David J. Skal in Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, argue that Stoker punishes Lucy for this belief with living death when she becomes a vampiress. In The Man, the main female also makes this proposition, but to understand why she suggests it and how Stoker treats her for it, first we need a little background on the novel’s characters.

The primary female character in The Man is Stephen Norman. She is the daughter of a squire who always wanted a son to succeed him, but his wife dies giving birth to their one child, a girl, whom he promises he will love as much as if she were his son. As a result, he raises up Stephen like a boy, giving her a male name and raising her to run the estate. Note that Stephen also has no mother to soften her nature, although she has an aunt who comes to live with them.

The novel begins with a prologue where Stephen and Harold are in a churchyard together. Harold is the son of Stephen’s father’s friend, a minister. They are sitting on tombstones and arguing about whether women can be just. Stephen wants to attend court sessions so she is prepared to be just in her role when she is the master of the estate.

Harold and Stephen have grown up together and are like brother and sister. When Harold’s parents die, he comes to live with Stephen and her father. At one point, the two of them go to explore a crypt and she wants to enter it, but he tells her not to because he knows her mother is in it and he fears it will upset her. Later, she returns and enters the crypt, which causes her to faint. Harold finds her and carries her out, but Stephen is under the impression a neighbor boy, Leonard Everard, carried her out. Harold does not correct her misbelief, and consequently, Stephen begins to think she can admire and possibly love Leonard.

Soon after, Stephen’s father is in an accident and dies. On his deathbed, he asks Harold always to look after Stephen and love her and stand by her if she loves another. Harold agrees to all this, not yet realizing Stephen loves Leonard, and by now, Harold loves Stephen.

Meanwhile, Stephen wants to go to the court sessions. Her aunt tells her that some things women should not know and refers to the tree of knowledge. This is the Gothic theme of forbidden knowledge, and a reference to Eve’s transgression in eating the forbidden true of the tree of knowledge. Stoker here seems to suggest that women who step out of their traditional roles are committing transgressions. The aunt goes on to discuss fallen women, but Stephen says that if women sin in these cases, so do men. Stephen then goes on to tell her aunt that women have just as much right as men to propose when they are in love. Stoker is setting Stephen up for disaster here. She believes women are the equals of men, and now that she has feelings for Leonard, she decides she will propose to him to put her theory into practice. The narrator then tells us her preparations were like those of the devil when tempting Jesus. Like the devil who takes Jesus to a cliff, Stephen asks Leonard to meet her on a hill where he can see all her property and then realize the wealth he would have should he marry her. Stephen, like Satan, is tempting another with riches and power.

Leonard, however, is shocked by Stephen’s proposal. He finds it abnormal for a woman to propose and quickly refuses her. Stephen then asks him to forget about it. However, Leonard has debts and Stephen is rich, so he begins to reconsider. Soon after, he gets drunk and brags in a tavern to Harold that he is going to marry Stephen. Angered, Harold goes to Stephen and proposes to her before Leonard can get to her. She, however, comes to realize he knows about her proposal to Leonard and that Leonard said no. She suspects Harold pities her or that he thinks she’ll say yes to any man, so she refuses him and tells him she never wants to see him again. Harold then decides to leave England.

Leonard now tries to get Stephen to marry him, but she refuses, although she agrees to pay off his debts. I cannot help being reminded in these scenes of Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), in which Emily St. Aubert falls for Valancourt, whom she thinks is perfect, yet we later find out he has made a mess of his life through gambling and getting into debt. Leonard has turned out to be far from Stephen’s equal and she now has a hard time getting rid of him.

Meanwhile, Harold is heartbroken. On the journey to America, he feels tormented. Then a little girl, Pearl, is washed off the ship and he jumps into the sea to rescue her. After that, the little girl is besotted with him and begins referring to him as “The Man.” Her grateful father, Mr. Stonehouse, realizes Harold is tormented and befriends him, suggesting that if Harold is a criminal, he will help him, even offering to adopt him as his son. Harold assures Mr. Stonehouse he is not a criminal, but the idea of changing his identity appeals to him.

Eventually, Harold ends up in Alaska. The author makes it clear he is in the wilderness—this is a time of wandering and being lost, like the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land. Harold is undergoing the dark night of his soul and being much the Gothic Wanderer in his torment. However, he ends up becoming wealthy in the mines and adopts for himself the name Robinson, taken from the mine. He now decides to return to England after an absence of a few years.

Meanwhile, Stephen has inherited a castle from a distant relative and become a countess. She also longs for Harold, gradually realizing she wronged him. In her new home, she is gracious and kind to everyone, seeking to redeem herself. She also meets Sister Ruth, a Quaker woman, who dresses in white and gray, causing her be known as the Silver Lady. To Ruth, Stephen confesses she once killed a man—not physically, but she says she killed his soul. It’s important to note also that Stephen decides to be incognito when she meets Sister Ruth, not telling her at first that she’s the countess. She prefers, like Haroun al-Rashid, we are told, to visit incognito those socially beneath her.

Ironically, Harold’s ship now sinks off the shore of England near the castle Stephen inherited. Stephen sees a man (she doesn’t know it’s Harold) valiantly trying to save lives. Eventually, he swims toward shore, and she has a fire lit (by actually setting a house on fire) to warn him of the rocks that he will be dashed upon. At one point, he looks up at her, dressed all in scarlet, and recognizes her before he is rescued. However, during the rescue efforts, he also goes blind. (One wonders whether the sight of Stephen caused his blindness and whether Stoker is implying she’s a scarlet woman.) At the same time, Stephen is far from a scarlet woman—rather she is praying to God for Harold’s rescue, feeling guilt over how she hurt Harold and asking God to let her atone for the man whose soul she killed by letting her save this man, never suspecting the two men are the same. At times, she thinks how she wishes she had the power of God to rescue, which sounds like pride and a longing to be like God (Satan’s crime), but instead, God hears her prayer and allows Harold to be saved.

Harold is brought to the castle to be cared for. Because he has a beard and his eyes are bandaged, Stephen does not recognize him. Harold, however, realizes Stephen is there and he does not want her to pity him so he tries to get away. When Harold questions the doctor about how high up in the castle he is, the doctor thinks he plans to commit suicide by jumping out the window as a way to end his misery over being blind. Harold then confesses to the doctor that he loves Stephen but wishes to keep his identity secret from her, which is why he wishes to escape. The doctor agrees to keep Harold’s secret and tells Stephen that Mr. Robinson doesn’t like visitors. The doctor doesn’t want Harold to leave because he hopes to cure him of his blindness. I can’t help being reminded of Jane Eyre here, where Mr. Rochester is blind and weakened when the now wealthy Jane Eyre finds him. Stoker has put his male hero in an equally weakened state, even though Harold’s bravery has caused him to be referred to as a “giant” more than once in the novel.

Bram Stoker, who was over six feet tall, and might be considered a giant and “a man” in his own right, seemed to prefer being submissive to other males.

These scenes of Harold, his identity unknown, living in Stephen’s house, also remind me of Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), where the adulterous wife returns in disguise as a governess to care for her children, only in this case, it is the future husband, not the wife who is in disguise. Since the wife in East Lynne was adulterous, here we can almost think Stephen was adulterous in propositioning Leonard when Stephen, at least in Harold’s heart, already belonged to Harold. Perhaps a stretch, and Stoker isn’t drawing straight analogies, but the influence seems likely to East Lynne or similar hidden identity cases in Victorian fiction, which are countless.

Of course, Stephen will eventually learn the truth about the blind man’s identity. It comes about when the Stonehouses, hearing of Harold’s bravery when the ship sank, come to visit Stephen, suspecting he is “The Man.” As they tell Stephen about their previous meeting with Mr. Robinson, Stephen realizes that “The Man,” “Mr. Robinson,” and Harold are all one. Eventually, she takes the Stonehouses to him. Once he removes his bandage, all is revealed except the love beating in Stephen and Harold’s hearts. At this point, Pearl tells Stephen that she always wanted to marry “The Man,” but that Stephen should actually do it because while he saved her, Stephen saved him when she lit the fire to rescue him.

Stephen is now older and wiser, but while she realizes now that she loves Harold, she does not dare to propose to him but waits for him to propose to her. When the proposal doesn’t happen, she goes to Sister Ruth, who then arranges for Harold to come to her. Of course, Sister Ruth arranges it so the two can be together. And we learn here that Sister Ruth is a recluse from the world because of a tragedy in her past that she wishes to prevent happening again for Stephen and Harold. (Sister Ruth then might be considered a Gothic wanderer herself, though her redemption is not through love but through helping others.)

The end of the novel may be considered very sexist. We are told that now Stephen knows her “Master” and that when she knows Harold loves her and will come to her, “She was all woman now; all-patient, and all-submissive. She waited the man; and the man was coming.” Of course, submissiveness seems sexist to modern readers, but it was conservative for Stoker’s time, perhaps overly conservative in an age when women had become fighting for their rights.

I am left thinking we can read this novel in various ways. First, as Stoker’s concern that women were getting too much power and stepping out of their bounds, or second, we can read it as his being supportive of women and showing the difficult situations they are in, showing us how Stephen is rejected by her society for her mannish ways and so, ultimately, she has no choice but to submit to a man. And while the novel’s title refers to Harold, it isn’t until nearly two-thirds of the way into the novel when Pearl starts referring to Harold as “The Man” that we even know who the title refers to. Given that Stephen acts like a man and has a man’s name, one might think she is “The Man” for the first part of the novel. So is Stoker being subversive, or sexist and conservative?

And then there is the issue of Stoker’s closeted homosexuality. Countless critics have talked about his working relationship with actor Henry Irving and how Irving was a dominant male who treated Stoker like a toady and how Stoker may well have relished it, having a masochistic side. Stoker was himself a giant of a man like Harold, and yet he acknowledged Irving as his master (boss) and was submissive to him. We are left then wondering whether Stoker was comparing himself to Harold, ultimately submitting to a woman who acted like a man (Stoker may have physically been Irving’s superior yet submitted to a physically weaker man) or does Stoker see himself as like Stephen, feminine in truth despite a masculine appearance and, therefore, ready to submit to his “Master.”

There are no easy answers to these questions. I think much more analysis needs to be done on The Man. It is definitely a fascinating novel of identity issues, gender issues, and Gothic themes that is firmly enmeshed in a Victorian literary tradition.

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Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD, is the author of The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, a study of nineteenth-century British Gothic literature from 1794 (The Mysteries of Udolpho) to 1897 (Dracula) with a look at twenty and twenty-first century texts like Tarzan of the Apes, Anne Rice’s vampire novels, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. Tyler has also written Haunted Marquette, a history of hauntings in his native city of Marquette, Michigan, Spirit of the North: A Paranormal Romance, and the historical fantasy series The Children of Arthur, which details the story of King Arthur and his descendants, beginning with Arthur’s Legacy and including Lilith’s Love, which is largely a sequel to Dracula. You can learn more about Tyler at www.GothicWanderer.com, www.ChildrenofArthur.com, and www.MarquetteFiction.com.

The Northanger Novels—They Give a New Meaning to the Word “Horrid”

Jane Austen, whose love for the Gothic, even by parodying it, has helped to keep the Gothic tradition alive, even inspiring new Gothic works like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in recent years.

In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818), the heroine Catherine Morland and her friend Isabella Thorpe delight over reading the popular Gothic novels of the 1790s. While they are busy reading Mrs. Radcliffe’s well-known The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and plan to go on then to her novel The Italian (1797)—two of the best-known and best-written of the Gothic novels of the period—Isabella creates a list of seven other “horrid” novels that she suggests they read. This list includes two novels by Eliza Parsons, Castle of Wolfenbach (1793) and The Mysterious Warning (1796), Clermont (1798) by Regina Maria Roche, The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by Ludwig Flammenberg (pseudonym of Carl Friedrich Kahlert), The Midnight Bell (1798) by Francis Lathom, The Orphan of the Rhine (1798) by Eleanor Sleath, and Horrid Mysteries (1796) by the Marquis de Grosse. Two of the novels, The Necromancer and Horrid Mysteries were translated into English from German. The others are by English authors.

Northanger Abbey is responsible for keeping the seven horrid “Northanger” novels’ memory alive.

I will not discuss here all the novels but simply make a few comments. I have been reading them as they have been reprinted by Valancourt Press (which has done us a great service by reproducing them and so many other obscure but significant literary works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Unfortunately, I read all of them other than Horrid Mysteries, which I just finished, before I had a blog so I did not write about them as I read them.

The truth is the plots of these novels are largely forgettable so I can’t comment on them other than to recall that the two novels by Parsons and Clermont by Roche were very readable. (Plot summaries of all seven novels, some brief, some extensive, can be found on Wikipedia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northanger_Abbey#Allusions_to_other_works by clicking on links to the individual works).The finest of the novels was, in my opinion, The Orphan of the Rhine. It is the only one I can remember any of the plot to. The title orphan is a young woman in hiding. There is also a dastardly marchese who commits several crimes but repents on his death bed—a surprisingly early form of the Gothic wanderer villain redeemed. That said, I read this novel along with my friend, Jane Austen scholar Ellen Moody, who ended up writing the introduction to the Valancourt edition, and she pointed out that the marchese is not punished for his crimes but gets off easily by dying in the end; furthermore, while he repents, the marchese is forced into his confession. As for the other novels, the plots were convoluted and not memorable and would be difficult to summarize.

But one of these novels stands out as being truly “horrid” and not because of its ability to shock but because of its horrid plotting and writing. That novel is aptly titled Horrid Mysteries, and in the introduction to the Valancourt edition, Allen Grove makes this same point, that the writing may be considered horrid. He also points out that the disparity between the novels of Radcliffe and a novel like this one shows how undiscerning the reading public was in its desire for Gothic thrills.

Horrid Mysteries is the most convoluted if not the overall most horridly written of the Northanger novels.

Horrid Mysteries has a ridiculous, convoluted, and often hard-to-follow plot about a young man named Carlos who gains the attention of a secret society, the Illuminators in Bavaria. He is initiated into their rites but while they claim to be on his side, they continually seem to be working against him. He is often pursued or harassed as well by a creature named Amanuel (his name is always italicized), who seems to be some sort of spirit or “genius”—an evil spirit apparently, although at times Amanuel seems to act to save Carlos’ life when he is in favor with the secret society. (Amanuel ends up killed in the end so just how supernatural he is isn’t clear.) Carlos goes through no end of adventures, including loving Elmira, who ends up dying and being buried, only to show up later alive—the secret society allegedly faked her death. Later, Elmira is shot and again dies before Carlos’ eyes, only to return yet again. Finally, she dies and stays dead. Carlos ends up with another wife later, Adelheid, who gets him back into the secret society’s good graces—or is working for the secret society against him since she ends up having an affair with a baron associated with the society whom Carlos kills when he catches them together. Carlos then sends Adelheid to a convent to repent for her sins until she is worthy of him again. Eventually, she returns to him and Carlos is finally told he is safe from the society because the police investigated the baron’s murder, which caused the society to disband. Through four volumes, we follow these and Carlos’ other escapades across Europe, watching him often have romances with various women or spend time with male friends who are romancing women or have attractive wives who want to romance Carlos.

While there are secret societies in the novel, there’s only one really haunted castle scene, and overall, Horrid Mysteries is more of a picaresque novel of a young man’s adventures in the style of Tom Jones than a Gothic one. Indeed, it’s a wonder anyone could suffer through all four volumes of it—I did, but I found myself confused much of the time even though I took notes as I read to try to keep the multitude of largely undeveloped characters straight. There are plenty of sexual trysts and adulterous relationships to make Catherine Morland or any young female reader blush—in fact, I doubt any Gothic novel is so sexual except perhaps the much better written The Monk (1796) by Matthew Lewis.

The Orphan of the Rhine, a definition imitation of Mrs. Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, is probably the best of the Northanger novels.

For many years, scholars thought the seven Northanger novels were titles invented by Jane Austen, but research has now restored all of them to us. I would recommend readers curious about Gothic fiction and these novels in particular to start out by reading Northanger Abbey, then Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and maybe The Italian, though I’m not a big fan of it and prefer her other novel The Romance of the Forest (1791). Once you understand the superb Gothic of Radcliffe, you can appreciate the works of her imitators, and all seven of these Northanger novels are in imitation of her except perhaps Parson’s Castle Wolfenbach which was published the year before Udolpho but not before The Romance of the Forest. I’d suggest you start with Orphan of the Rhine and then try Parsons’ novels, and then if you have the stomach for it, go on to the other ones, including the two German translations, which fall under the category of masculine rather than feminine Gothic (a complicated designation but a basic terminology would be that the feminine Gothic focuses on female heroines. I discuss these terms in more detail in my book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption.)

These Gothic novels are but a footnote in literary history and would have been forgotten completely if not for Jane Austen, but while I did not care for all of them, the better ones still have the ability to give us the kinds of thrills and chills our ancestors experienced more than two centuries ago, and in truth, we would not have our superhero and vampire stories today if these books had not been written.

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Tyler Tichelaar, Ph.D., is the author of The Children of Arthur series, beginning with Arthur’s Legacy and including Lilith’s Love which is largely a sequel to Dracula. His scholarly nonfiction works include King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition and The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. You can learn more about him at www.GothicWanderer.com and www.ChildrenofArthur.com.

Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde: A Missing Link to Romanticism and the Gothic

This blog might well be titled, “Charlotte Smith, where have you been all my life?” because Smith was a major influence on the development of the early novel, and yet I only just discovered Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) about a year ago when my friend Ellen Moody began blogging about her. Then I began to wonder why I had never heard of her. She was a poet much respected by the Romantics—in fact, she was a distant relative by marriage of Wordsworth and gave him letters of introduction when he went to France. She also wrote ten novels that were very popular and influential in their day. She wrote them all between 1788 and 1798. The first, Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle, was a bit immature in style and structure, but it set the tone for much of her later work. The plot concerns an orphan, the believed illegitimate daughter of a nobleman, who, to make a long story short, discovers she is the legitimate daughter of her father and therefore the rightful heir to the castle, despite the manipulations of a rather sinister uncle. Emmeline also has a series of troublesome suitors before she marries the man she loves. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Radcliffe when I read it—the sinister uncle, the illegitimacy, all feel very Gothic, although it is not a Gothic novel.

Charlotte Smith’s second novel, Ethelinde, has just been released by Valancourt Books as a critical edition with an introduction by Ellen Moody.

Then I read Smith’s second novel, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (1789). By her second novel, Smith had matured into an accomplished novelist. The novel has just been released for the first time in a critical edition by Valancourt Books, complete with an introduction and notes by Ellen Moody. Upon reading this book, I could well see why Moody feels such enthusiasm for Smith.

Moody had previously told me that Smith uses Gothic elements in her novels, although none of the novels can be rightly termed Gothic. I would certainly not consider Ethelinde to be Gothic, but there are some Gothic elements in it, and Moody says that it was an influential novel upon Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen, which I can well believe. In her introduction, Moody draws parallels between the novel and Austen’s Mansfield Park specifically.

When I read Ethelinde, I really felt like it was a bridge between the earlier eighteenth century novelists and Radcliffe and Austen. There is much in the novel that owes a debt to earlier sentimental or sensibility novels and the novel of manners. At one point, Ethelinde is in danger of being raped, a clear nod to Richardson’s Clarissa (1748). Ethelinde is also subjected to a host of disagreeable relatives, which reminded me a great deal of Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778). In Evelina, the title character is more or less persecuted by her middle class relatives who lack genteel manners. In this novel, Ethelinde has both middle class and wealthy relatives, none of whom are quite as comical as in Evelina, but who still have comical elements and some of them are far more cruel in their snobbery and putting on airs once Ethelinde finds herself largely without a protector and penniless.

But what most interested me about this novel was how it is a precursor to Romanticism and Radcliffean Gothic. The Romantic Movement is usually dated from 1798 when Wordsworth and Coleridge published The Lyrical Ballads, but there is much in Smith that shows Romanticism was already alive a decade earlier. Ethelinde opens at Grasmere Castle, a fictional castle in the Lake District. It was so popular with readers that many went to the Lake District and came away disappointed that it wasn’t real. It’s possible that the depiction of the castle inspired Wordsworth later to settle in Grasmere. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were admirers of Smith’s poetry as well, which often focused on nature.

Ethelinde is at the castle with a pleasure party that includes her cousin, Lady Newenden, and her husband Sir Edward Newenden. The first volume of this five-volume novel takes place at the castle and concerns Ethelinde enjoying nature while also being courted by some disagreeable young, rich men who are friends of her relatives. Eventually, she meets a young man, Montgomery, who seems to be at one with nature and develops a connection with him, especially after he saves her from drowning while all the other men stand and watch or yell at the servants to save her. Montgomery is the character whom I believe is referred to in the subtitle as the recluse. He and his mother live humbly and isolated in Grasmere, but they are of genteel blood. Ethelinde is immediately taken with Montgomery, who at first seems like a character right out of Wordsworth.

The attention to nature in this first volume of the novel also predates Radcliffe’s focus on nature in her novels. In Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Emily St. Aubert is constantly admiring the beauty of nature and feeling how it calms the soul. By comparison, the villains in the novel, especially Montoni, do not notice nature or see it as a solace or inspiration to the soul. In Ethelinde, the title character enjoys nature, while her obnoxious cousin, Lady Newenden, can find no pleasure in it, constantly complaining she is cold or hot when she is outdoors and fretting over her health—often for attention. Lady Newenden quickly becomes one of the villains of the novel when it is revealed she is likely to or already cheating on her husband. Before the novel is over, Sir Edward will separate from his wife; he will also be accused by her parents of being the adulterer because it becomes obvious that he has feelings for Ethelinde. While in time Sir Edward admits to such feelings, Ethelinde remains true to her love for Montgomery.

Another significant theme in the novel is that of illegitimacy. Smith had already played with this theme in Emmeline, and it was a common theme in earlier novels such as Evelina. Smith, however, does not make illegitimacy so shocking or detrimental as does Burney. In Evelina, the heroine is concerned that her father will not recognize her as his legitimate daughter. In Ethelinde, while Ethelinde is clearly legitimate, many of the supporting cast of characters are not, including Mrs. Montgomery’s brothers and her niece. Nor is illegitimacy something that leads to Gothic situations of incest as in Radcliffe where it nearly leads to a marquis raping his niece in The Romance of the Forest (1791). In her book Art of Darkness, the critic Ann Williams remarks, “Gothic plots are family plots; Gothic romance is family.” The same is true in Ethelinde, minus the Gothic elements. There are twists and turns and surprises along the way for the relatives, most notably when Montgomery’s illegitimate cousin ends up being married to Ethelinde’s brother, Harry Chesterville.

Smith, although focusing on a female main character, and therefore writing what could be considered feminine Gothic, if the book were truly Gothic, also plants the seeds for the masculine Gothic in two of her characters, Harry Chesterville and Sir Edward Newenden. In masculine Gothic novels, such as Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1795), William Godwin’s St. Leon (1799), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), the male characters are often tormented by guilt over their past crimes, by how their poor decisions destroy their families, and by longing for what they cannot obtain. In the novel, gambling, which will be a major transgression in Gothic literature (see Chapter 4 of my book The Gothic Wanderer), leads to the destruction of Ethelinde’s family’s wealth. Her father cannot control his gambling and thus loses most of the family fortune. Then her brother goes on spending sprees that ultimately bankrupt them. While Ethelinde’s father, Colonel Chesterville, feels great guilt over what he has done and fears for Ethelinde’s wellbeing as a result, it is her brother, Harry Chesterville, who becomes the true Gothic wanderer figure who commits transgression through his inability to curb his spending. He ends up in debtor’s prison, leading to his father’s worries turning into illness and his eventual demise. Harry is tormented, describing himself as the “murderer” of his own father. At one point, he becomes so consumed with guilt that he attempts suicide. Harry is like other men in Gothic fiction who seem unable to stop their addictions—fortunately, he is Ethelinde’s brother and not lover. Radcliffe would allow Emily St. Aubert, her Gothic heroine, to marry Valancourt, who also falls into the gambling transgression in The Mysteries of Udolpho, although Valancourt is, thankfully, not a villain and has all the attractions, initially, of Montgomery in his love for nature.

Charlotte Smith, whose own life with an abusive husband she had to leave, causing her to turn to her pen to support herself and her children, included many autobiographical elements into her novels.

While Ethelinde will love and eventually marry Montgomery, his forest god appeal wears off as the novel continues and he is seen as a bit more one-dimensional. The really interesting male in the novel, who also is a forefather to the masculine Gothic wanderer figure, is Sir Edward Newenden. In her introduction to the novel, Moody compares Sir Edward to Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), who is tormented by love for the woman he cannot have. In the end, Sir Edward is in the same situation, loving Ethelinde, torn between his love for her and social proprieties that make him try to work things out with his wife. When Lady Newenden dies and Sir Edward is finally free to marry Ethelinde—she believes Montgomery has died at sea at this point—Montgomery dramatically reappears and Sir Edward is forced to step aside to see another man marry the woman he loves. Actually, even if Montgomery hadn’t reappeared, Ethelinde makes it clear that her love for Montgomery would make it impossible for her to marry Sir Edward.

Sir Edward is interesting because he is mentally tormented, but not quite a transgressor. I would argue that he did commit a transgression in marrying Lady Newenden for her money, but we are definitely intended to sympathize with him. He is also an early version of several other characters who haunt the pages of near-contemporary novels because they cannot have the love they desire. Interestingly, those characters are usually women. In Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1800), Harriet Freke cannot have the man she loves because she is too outspoken and even crossdresses—her last name is no accident—women who are not feminine are freaks. In Burney’s The Wanderer (1814), the outspoken Elinor, believed to be a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft, also fails to obtain the hero’s love. Both women are examples of transgressing against the patriarchal code while the true heroines of the novels are sufficiently feminine and well-bred enough to know their place in society. Sir Edward, by being a divorced man and having married for money, has also transgressed against society and morality, and therefore, is not worthy of winning the heroine’s hand.

Finally, I would add that the novel has many interesting references to the colonies. Many of the male characters go to the colonies to seek their fortunes. While Smith does not overtly speak out against the exploitation that occurs because of the colonies, they are, to some extent, depicted as dangerous or immoral places. It is in the West Indies that Mrs. Montgomery’s brother, Harcourt, ends up having an illegitimate daughter (not that that can’t happen in England, but it is a sign that morals are lessened in the colonies), and Montgomery nearly dies when returning to England from India. Later novelists would be more brutal in the threat the colonies pose to morality in England—especially the Bronte sisters in Jane Eyre (1847), Wuthering Heights (1847), and Villette (1853), H. Rider Haggard in She (1886), and Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897).

In short, Ethelinde and Charlotte Smith played a central role in the development of the novel of manners, the Gothic, and Romanticism. I would refer people to Moody’s introduction for more about Smith’s influence on Jane Austen. Certainly, Ethelinde has been neglected for far too long. It is a missing link between Richardson, Burney, and Radcliffe. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Romanticism, the Gothic, and the development of the novel.

You can purchase the new edition of Ethelinde from Valancourt Books at or at most online or local bookstores.

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Tyler Tichelaar, Ph.D., is the author of The Children of Arthur series, beginning with Arthur’s Legacy and including Lilith’s Love which is largely a sequel to Dracula. His scholarly nonfiction works include King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition and The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. You can learn more about him at www.GothicWanderer.com and www.ChildrenofArthur.com.

Paul Féval and the Vampire Gothic: The Path from Radcliffe to Stoker

In my previous blog, I talked about Paul Féval’s first vampire novel, The Vampire Countess (serialized 1855, published 1865). In this blog, I will discuss his other two vampire novels Knightshade (1860) and Vampire City (1875). But first, let me explain my title.

Ann Radcliffe never wrote a vampire novel, but no one can deny her place at the forefront of Gothic novelists. She was really the first major influential Gothic novelist with the success of her books The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). While numerous other Gothic novelists were her contemporaries, they were all likely influenced by her. Her popularity caused even non-Gothic novelists like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen to include Gothic elements in their novels. Consequently, Radcliffe is not only the mother of the Gothic but the mother of the vampire novel.

She also had a tremendous influence upon French literature. In his prologue to Vampire City, Feval states whether seriously or tongue-in-cheek that there were no less than forty printings of The Mysteries of Udolpho published in France in the early nineteenth century. Regardless of the number, Mrs. Radcliffe was extremely popular in France. Consequently, it is no wonder that Paul Féval chose to pay Radcliffe tribute in a mocking way in his novel Vampire City.

Paul Feval on the cover of a French edition of his works.

As for Stoker, my interest in Féval began when I first heard he had written three vampire novels decades before Stoker’s Dracula (1897), so I was naturally curious whether Stoker had read them. I discussed this possibility somewhat in my last blog. There isn’t much of an influence if any apparent between Féval’s novels and Stoker’s Dracula, but nevertheless, there may have been some influence, even if indirectly. I will note a few of the possible influences below.

First, let us look at Féval’s short novel Knightshade (its true French name is Le Chevalier Ténèbre. It was published in book form in 1860, but actually is a later work than The Vampire Countess which was published in 1865, but serialized in 1855. The novel is about two brothers named Ténèbre. One is a vampire and the other an oupire. Vampires, of course, drink blood, while oupires are eaters of human flesh.

The story begins at a party where Baron von Altheimer is entertaining the guests with a story about the brothers. The baron tells how the brothers impersonated gypsies to get inside Prince Jacobi’s home where they abducted his daughter, Lenore, for a ransom. The irony is that the baron is actually one of the brothers and also present is his brother, who is impersonating a clergyman. In fact, the brothers are masters of impersonation. The baron even claims his goal is to capture the brothers and bring them to justice, all part of his ruse.

I won’t spoil the story by telling it all, but eventually, a young marquis, who was at the party, discovers the secret and begins to hunt down the brothers. In the process, he also falls in love with Lenore, and with Prince Jacobi’s help, the brothers’ resting place is discovered. According to Féval, the brothers must return to their graves once a year. If their hearts are burned with a red-hot iron, then the world can be rid of them. (This is one of Féval’s vampire rules—that they die by a red-hot iron, unlike Stoker’s stake through the heart.)

The killing of the vampires is carried out, but at the end, we are told their criminal activities continue, suggesting they have somehow risen from the grave.

Knightshade is considered an early work of metafiction and introduces vampire brothers.

In the book’s introduction and afterword, Brian Stableford talks about how Féval never quite wanted to give full credit to the supernatural, and so he leaves the reader wondering whether the brothers really were vampires or they are just using vampirism as one of their disguises to confuse people and carry out their crimes. Stableford also notes that Féval is writing an early form of metafiction here where characters tell tales and include themselves in the tales. The novel itself references Galland, and Stableford refers to the novel as using the Galland’s formula. Galland was the translator of The Arabian Nights into French, which had a huge influence on French and indeed on Gothic literature with its stories within stories, but also in its cliffhangers.

But did the novel influence Stoker? There is only one small detail that I think might suggest that Stoker read the novel. Lenore has a small pet dog, and that dog is named Mina. I have at least seen one literary critic remark that the source for Stoker’s female protagonist in Dracula, Mina, is unknown. Mina is not an English name, so why did Stoker choose it? I wonder whether he took it from Féval.

While Knightshade is an interesting and entertaining novel, it suffers from what many of Féval’s other novels, including The Wandering Jew’s Daughter and The Vampire Countess suffer from—a confusing narrative that makes you almost feel like you’re reading a fragment or poor translation. This is largely due to the novels being serialized and Féval making them up as he writes each installment without a master plan or outline. Such, however, is not the case with Vampire City. It was still serialized and the plot wanders about in a nonsensical way at times, but there is a stronger narrative drive to it that makes it entertaining reading and carries the reader along fairly effortlessly.

The premise of Vampire City lies in Féval’s desire to mock Ann Radcliffe and her Gothic form. Stableford suggests it is the first real Gothic parody novel, although I would argue that Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) both are parodies of the form, and as Stableford points out, even what is considered the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), can hardly be taken seriously.

However, Féval’s parody far surpasses anything prior to it. I agree with Stableford that it is a novel far ahead of its time and may be the first horror-comedy, which is what the Gothic has largely devolved to in our own time. I complained in my last blog about authors who lack sincerity in writing Gothic novels, and that was the case with Féval’s first two vampire stories, but here he is intentionally parodying, and so the lack of sincerity is not grating but amusing.

Like many Gothic novels, Vampire City has a narrative frame. Paul Féval writes himself into the novel, complaining about how the English are pirating his novels. He has a fictional female friend named Milady (perhaps a tribute to Dumas’ character in The Three Musketeers) who tells him she knows where he can get a wonderful story to write about. She takes him to England where he meets the ninety-seven-year-old cousin of Ann Radcliffe, who tells him a story about Radcliffe that explains her fascination with the Gothic and where she got the material for her novels.

Féval’s version of Radcliffe, who is called Anna or She throughout, has been compared to the character of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and not without merit since Anna ends up pursuing and helping to destroy a vampire.

The story begins when Anna Ward is about to marry William Radcliffe (her husband in real life). Féval was aware that very little was known about the details of Ann Radcliffe’s life, and so he felt she was fair game to do with as he liked. In fact, he draws upon a short biography written by Sir Walter Scott for the few details about her life that were known at the time. In the novel, Anna leaves her home on the morning of her wedding, leaving her bridegroom behind, because she has received a letter from her cousin Cornelia’s prospective bridegroom, Ned, that Cornelia has been kidnapped.

Vampire City creates a fictional vampire hunter version of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe in a way reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The kidnapper turns out to be Monsieur Goetzi, who is a vampire. Anna and a servant then head to the continent and end up pursuing Monsieur Goetzi across Europe in an effort to kill him and rescue Cornelia. They first find Ned at an inn where he has been attacked by Goetzi and is lingering near death. They also meet Polly, who has become practically a vampire herself because Goetzi attacked her. She is his first victim, and consequently has a special connection to him. She says that only she can help kill him, which must be done by inserting a key in his breast at a specific hour when he is weak. (Féval is making up his own rules about vampires as he goes along and there are numerous instances of this throughout the novel. Prior to Dracula setting the standard for what vampires can and cannot due, vampire characteristics were fair game to make up, although some standards had already been set in books like Polidori’s The Vampire (1819) and Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847), and Féval is intentionally going overboard in his parody.) Meanwhile, Goetzi is able to elude the vampire hunters again and again—he does this partly because all of his victims become part of him in a sense and can even seem to double for him or at least serve his purposes. At one point, he escapes by crossing water and brings all his doubles or companions with him. They all actually enter inside of him and then he lays flat on the water and floats on his back, feet forward to his destination.

The humor is evident throughout the novel. Anna and her companions finally make it to Vampire City where all the vampires reside. They get inside the city and manage to cut out Goetzi’s heart, but then the other vampires awaken and pursue them. Eventually, the vampire hunters are saved by the sound of celestial music. It turns out their rescuer is not an angel, but the godlike Arthur, a young nobleman whose true identity Anna’s cousin says she cannot reveal, and the music is caused by him playing a lute as he drives by. He is completely oblivious to how he has saved Anna and her companions. (At the very end, it is revealed that the godlike Arthur was really the young Duke of Wellington.)

Other humor is often pointed at Radcliffe herself. Allow me to quote a few passages. This first one is taken from the scene where she is about to leave home to go to the continent on her rescue mission:

“Although she had not yet composed any of her admirable works, she already possessed the brilliant and noble style which Sir Walter Scott was to praise to the skies in his biography. Indeed, she could not help exclaiming: ‘Goodbye, dear refuge. Happy shelter of my adolescence, adieu! Verdant countryside, proud hills, woodlands full of trees and mystery, shall I ever see you again?’”

You cannot help laughing out loud if you’ve read Radcliffe because her heroines do talk in such affected style, although the style seems Romantic rather than absurd when reading Radcliffe because she draws the reader so fully into her fictional worlds.

In several places, Féval tries to use Radcliffe’s style of introducing supernatural events and then always providing a realistic explanation for them. In this passage, he explains how at the crucial moment, a supernatural event like the characters falling into a pit that suddenly opens in the ground is possible.

“The earth suddenly opened up to engulf them, thus confirming the presentments of our Anna. If you balk at believing in the instantaneous formation of a deep pit, I will freely confess that the personal opinion of our Anna was that a cave-in had already taken place, caused by the high tides of the new moon. The principal charm of a narrative like ours is its realism. And besides, in making further progress we shall encounter more than enough hyperphysical incidents. She was fond of that word—which could, I suppose, be rendered ‘supernatural.’”

In fact, the novel is supremely funny. I rarely laugh out loud when reading, but I did so several times while reading Vampire City.

One final example of how Féval tries to give rational explanations for the supernatural comes with the very end of the novel when Anna has gotten herself into a very sticky situation, then wakes up to find it was all a dream and that it is her wedding day. But Féval goes a step further, having Anna’s cousin, in telling the story, assure us it wasn’t all a dream because after she marries, Anna goes to the continent and discovers the places she visited and many other events that have happened that seem to have coincided with her dream, perhaps a sign that she has the second sight.

I think Vampire City was simply ahead of its time in its mocking of the Gothic and consequently was overlooked as a minor work, but any student of the Gothic will find it a treat to read.

But what of Féval’s influence on Stoker? In his Afterword, Stableford states without reservation “Stoker certainly never read Féval.” He also mentions the influence of LeFanu’s Carmilla (1871-2) upon Dracula and says that LeFanu probably never read Féval. However, Stableford says that Féval, LeFanu, and Stoker all read Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Esprits, et sur les Vampires (1746) by Dom Augustin Calmet, which clearly was a huge influence on vampire fiction so it is not surprising if there are coincidental similarities in their works.

D

Bram Stoker, whose novel Dracula would set the standard for vampire characteristics.

Personally, however, I think there are some similarities that might suggest Stoker read Féval. As I mentioned earlier, the name Mina might have come from Féval. Not that it wasn’t an existing name, short for Wilhelmina, but it is not a common English name to my knowledge—perhaps the name similarity is a coincidence, perhaps not.

Perhaps the most striking similarity concerns Mina’s relationship with Dracula and Polly’s relationship with Goetzi. In Dracula, Mina Harker, because she is Dracula’s victim, is able to help lead the men to Dracula when he flees across the continent. In Vampire City, Polly is able to do the same, and throughout the process, she is both longing to destroy Goetzi to get revenge as well as sympathizing with him. Similarly, Mina is torn between the vampirism in her and her desire to destroy Dracula. Polly actually goes a bit further and becomes Goetzi once his actual body is destroyed. I don’t know of any cases where vampires have doubles in the form of their victims before Féval or again until Dracula, which makes me think there could be an influence here.

Another similarity is the use of animals. Neither Polidori’s vampire, nor Varney the Vampire, nor Carmilla, nor any of the other pre-Stoker vampires appear to have doubles or control over animals who serve them. In Vampire City, however, the vampires often have dogs, bats, and other creatures serving them. In Dracula, the vampire not only has control over such creatures but can turn into them.

Many critics have also written about homosexual elements in vampire literature and in Dracula particularly. Stoker never goes so far as to make it explicit, but in Féval when the vampires awaken in Vampire City, they are described as “The men of considerable stature, but for the most part effeminate; the females, by contrast, were both tall and bold.” These sound like typical stereotypes of effeminate gay men and butch lesbians to me.

Finally, is it a coincidence that Arthur is a hero and savior in Vampire City and that there is an Arthur Holmwood among the male heroes in Dracula? Holmwood is Lord Godalming while Féval’s Arthur turns out to be the future Duke of Wellington, who was himself “Honorable” as the third son of an earl in his youth, the age at which he appears in Vampire City.

We may never know whether Stoker read Féval, and to some extent it does not matter. To say Stoker drew from Féval may in some ways limit Stoker’s genius. To say Féval influenced Stoker may make it seem like Féval’s work is inferior to Stoker’s. It may be a detrimental argument for both their sakes. That said, one cannot help wondering, and I do not believe either author is more or less important if Stoker was influenced by Féval. Both made significant contributions to vampire literature and deserve to be read and acknowledged for it.

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Tyler Tichelaar, Ph.D., is the author of The Children of Arthur series, beginning with Arthur’s Legacy and including Lilith’s Love which is largely a sequel to Dracula. His scholarly nonfiction works include King Arthur’s Children: A Study in Fiction and Tradition and The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption. You can learn more about him at www.GothicWanderer.com and www.ChildrenofArthur.com.

The Introduction to “The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption”

If you’re curious about my new book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Gothic Fiction from 1794-Present, here is the introduction to the book, giving insight not only into what the book is about but also why the Gothic is so popular and why it matters today.

Introduction

Our Long Love Affair with the Gothic

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard—I saw them not—
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,—
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

         I love the Gothic. Most of us do, even if we don’t know exactly what the term “Gothic” means. It may mean different things to all of us, yet those things are closely related. Some of us might think of the Goth look where teenagers wear all black. Others might think of Gothic cathedrals. And a smaller percentage of us might think about classic Gothic literature—the great eighteenth and nineteenth century novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and several others.

We love the Gothic partly because we have a fascination with being scared. I love to be scared—I don’t go for the gory horror films of today, but I love suspense and the greatest Gothic literature builds up such suspense. But more importantly, Gothic literature reveals much about who we are, what we fear, and to what we aspire.

I was always fascinated with the Gothic—commonly called horror, or simply, when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, what was “scary.” I didn’t know the term Gothic and wouldn’t know it until well into high school, but I knew the Munsters, the Addams Family, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Broom-Hilda the Witch, and countless other characters in popular culture from that time who were often watered down children’s versions of the Gothic.

I remember the “Creature Feature” film being shown Saturday afternoons on TV50 from Detroit, and I loved Love at First Bite (1979) starring George Hamilton as Dracula—when it was broadcast on TV for the first time, my brother and I had a big fight over the TV (we only had one in the house in those days) because it was aired opposite Yogi’s First Christmas, which he wanted to watch.

I was the proud owner of the Weebles Haunted House complete with Weebles that “wobble but they don’t fall down”—including the witch with a removable pointy hat, a glow-in-the dark ghost, two Weeble children to be scared, secret panels, trapped doors, and a treasure chest with bats inside. All of it scary but wonderful!

In fourth grade, I was Dracula for Halloween—I remember still the thrill of running so my cape would flap in the wind, and I can still taste the plastic vampire teeth. Nor did I ever miss going through a Haunted House at the fair, and my friends and I commonly played haunted house, turning our bedrooms or the family room into a mansion of monsters and ghosts. Again, I was always Dracula.

And perhaps best of all, I owned the wonderfully dramatic record The Story of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein from Power Records. This fabulous 33 1/3 record came with a read along book in graphic novel form (we called them comic books back then) and it combined into one dramatic tale the stories of its title characters. I played this record over and over again and still have my copy today. I constantly quoted it to others, including the pivotal scene when the werewolf (oddly not the Wolfman but Vincent von Frankenstein’s girlfriend Erika—Wolfwoman, I guess) attacks the Count, causing him to become enraged and reveal himself by declaring, “You dare!! You dare lay your paws on me! On me?! Low beast, you’ll die for this, die at the hands of the Prince of Darkness…FOR I AM DRACULA!” Recently, when I was working on this introduction, I dug out the record to engage in nostalgia and left it on my coffee table. My brother came over to visit and saw the record there and rolled his eyes. When I asked whether he wanted to listen to it, he said, “No, I never want to have to listen to that record again.” Apparently, I played it one—or maybe fifty—too many times.

But all these details could be dismissed as children’s games and just good fun (despite the fanatics who would ban The Wizard of Oz, or more recently, the Harry Potter books and films because they contain depictions of witchcraft). Only, I think on some innocent level that I could not have articulated when I was ten years old, I was even then searching for meaning—to understand the mystery of life, even if it were only the simplified notion of good and evil. I was a very religious child who had read the entire Bible by fifth grade, loved to play at being various characters from the Bible—mostly Moses or Jacob—and wanted to grow up to be a priest. So if I were such a “religious nut”—as one friend called me—how do I explain my fascination with horror and the supernatural?

And how explain my curiosity over an activity that countless children have attempted over the years? Yes, I am one of those many children who locked himself in the bathroom in the dark, stared into the bathroom mirror, and then tried to find out whether it was true that if I could say, “Bloody Murder!” one hundred times without blinking, the devil would appear in the mirror. But I was never able not to blink before I could say it one hundred times, or I would inevitably lose count.

Still, the quest for forbidden knowledge was strong in me at an early age. The fascination with Good and Evil thrilled me like it does many children, but I wanted proof that the supernatural forces of Good and Evil truly existed. Years later, when I discovered Percy Shelley’s lines quoted above, I was stunned by how perfectly he captured what I felt, his experiences matching mine of nearly two centuries later. And like Shelley, I eventually grew to love Intellectual Beauty.

As I reached my teen years, I discovered literature, having always loved to read, and soon novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and the works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen became my primary fascination. It would be Jane Austen who really converted me into being a disciple of the Gothic. When I was about sixteen, I listened to an audio book version of Northanger Abbey with an introduction that explained the novel’s purpose as a satire of the Gothic novels, particularly of Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Of course, I had to read Mrs. Radcliffe. Her novel had to be special ordered from the bookstore and although it was well over 600 pages, I devoured it in a week, reading it every free minute before and after school. The prose was beautiful, the suspense fabulous, the Gothic world frighteningly fascinating. I went on to read the rest of Radcliffe’s novels while I was still a teenager as well as reading other Gothic classics like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and William Beckford’s Vathek (1786). Dracula (1897) and Frankenstein (1818) followed, and in college when I discovered the Romantic poets, I could put all these books into context.

What was it about these books that thrilled me so much? Why did The Mysteries of Udolpho seem like such a wonderfully pleasant book to read, as well as a suspenseful page-turner? What about Dracula made me afraid to go to sleep, yet want to read it again—and enjoy the original novel so much more than the film versions of it—save for Coppola’s fabulous Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)? I don’t know that I asked myself that question until the late 1990s when my fascination with literature and my desire to be a novelist led me to being a Ph.D. candidate in the literature program at Western Michigan University. The result would be my writing a dissertation titled The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, which has now been expanded into this book. And I wasn’t the only enthusiastic student of the Gothic—at least two of my fellow doctoral candidates at the time also wrote about the Gothic in their dissertations.

Of all the subjects a person could write a dissertation on, why did I choose nineteenth century Gothic novels? I also loved Dickens, the Arthurian legend, Anthony Trollope, eighteenth century epistolary novels—why choose the Gothic over one of these topics? The reason was because I could relate to the Gothic; it resonated with me in ways those other great literary works did not at that time in my life. And I wanted to write about why it resonated with me, why I thought the Gothic mattered so much to people—I wanted to write what was called a “reader-response” dissertation, but I was dissuaded from it by my professors—told it would not be good for my academic career.

Now that I have long since left academia behind, I can straightforwardly say that academics too often forget that while they are the keepers of the culture, in order to pass that culture on, they have to show people why that culture matters—how it still relates to them. While at Western Michigan University, I had the opportunity to co-teach a class on the British Survey of Literature with Dr. Stephanie Gauper. During that class, she commented to me about my teaching, “The students like you because you make them understand how the literature is relevant to their lives. Most teachers don’t do that.” I always felt that was one of the greatest compliments I ever received. And while, in my dissertation, I made the mistake not to explain why the Gothic mattered and was still relevant to our lives, in this book, written for a wider audience, I wish to remedy that by stating that the Gothic is very relevant to our lives, that it speaks to us today, two hundred years after the great Gothic novels were written because what the people in the decades following the French Revolution and during the Victorian period dreamt, feared, longed for, and sought, is still what we dream, fear, long for, and seek today. The Gothic is perhaps the most relevant piece of literature for the twenty-first century, and its continuation in the novels of Stephen King and Anne Rice, the popular books and films of the Twilight series, and the countless vampire books, films, and television series being produced each year, testify to this fact.

But how does it speak to us? Why is it still relevant to us? Let me give one more example from my own history to make my point.

In the fall of 1995, I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the same state as my hometown of Marquette, but nearly five hundred miles from home—in fact on a different peninsula—I might as well have been in another state, in some ways, in another country. I had culture shock in Kalamazoo—it was the big city compared to what I was used to—I didn’t know the people, the city streets, the weather, the mindset of those people. I was isolated, lonely, and downright miserable in Kalamazoo, wondering why I had ever made the decision to leave my hometown, but realizing the job market in Upper Michigan offered nothing for me, so I would have to go on to finish my degree, to become an English professor, and to take a job wherever one might exist—meaning I would never get to return home. I felt even more depressed and despairing when I looked at the future. If not for good friends and family and a telephone to talk to them on, I never would have gotten through those years. I would have defined these feelings as homesickness if I had not discovered a better word for it. That word I learned that first semester at Western Michigan University while taking a course on the Brontë sisters.

I decided in that class to write my final paper on the theme of colonialism in the Brontës’ novels. In my research, I came across the term “displacement” to describe the African character in one of the Brontës’ juvenilia. Instantly, I understood that word as perfectly describing my own feelings and experience. I was displaced. I was convinced that while I loved teaching and studying literature, I would never get to go home—I felt depressed when not terrorized by the thought. The job market in academia was such that it was unlikely I would ever find a tenure-track job at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. I foresaw myself moving from one university to another, always separated from my family and friends.

I stuck it out to finish my Ph.D. but my feelings of displacement did not get better. The job market—academia itself—was largely a nightmare—the MLA convention like a massive haunted house of pale young men in black suits, looking like blood-drained humans, fearful of interviewers yet hoping to be hired for tenure-track jobs. When I did find a job, it was a lowly one-year instructor position at Clemson University where I was given the equally “blood-draining” task of teaching up to 107 students per semester in a variety of composition and British literature survey courses (one literature and three composition sections). I had, consequently, upwards of five hundred papers per semester to grade and was paid $24,000 a year. And I had to do it in a hellishly hot climate I hated, while again feeling displaced. I have no doubt many people love Kalamazoo and South Carolina and I do not wish to disparage those places—my point is that I was unhappy and felt like a Gothic wanderer in them. Equally, we are all shaped by our individual preferences, likes and dislikes, and we all have different levels of tolerance. Here in Marquette, Michigan, I’m sure many people find our long winters and 200+ inches of snow per winter equally hellish, as roads between six foot snowbanks become like Gothic labyrinths, and bone-chilling temperatures seem like undeserving torture. Any place can be interpreted as “Gothic” if we so choose because Hell is in the mind—and the Gothic is nothing if not an exploration of human psychology and what we fear, as well as how we choose to let guilt and fear color our perspectives—one man’s transgression may be another man’s freedom.

And while my personal example may not seem nightmarish to most, it was like torture to me at the time, and it was in the midst of that nightmare that I began my doctoral dissertation. I chose to write about the Gothic wanderer because I felt myself to be like a Gothic wanderer, displaced and wandering through the mysterious maze of academia and the academic job market. In the chapters that follow, while I will discuss the Gothic novels themselves without commentary on how their themes relate to our lives today—something I don’t doubt my readers can figure out for themselves, let me here briefly list a few examples of how these Gothic wanderer figures speak to who we—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, from all races and religions—are today, and who we have always been.

The Gothic’s popularity arose at the time of the French Revolution as people questioned the legitimacy of their government—the monarchy—as well as the governments that replaced it, and the entire social order and its institutions, especially organized religion. Paranoia and conspiracy theories were common—our political concerns have not changed much today and continue to be reflected in our fiction. Just as the early Gothic novels theorized that certain secret societies were manipulating the French Revolution, today, we are no less fascinated by conspiracy theories—whether it be Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code with its alleged revelation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of the lost bloodline of Christ’s children via Mary Magdalene (the Gothic has always loved to pick on the Catholic Church), or beliefs that the government is withholding information from us about everything from terrorists to UFOs. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. Government has even been accused by some of staging the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq.

Concerns about the patriarchal system, legitimate children, and the sanctity of the family were common in early Gothic novels—how much more today when divorce is prevalent and children are frequently born outside of marriage, mothers take men to court and have DNA paternity tests given to verify who a child’s father may be, while in politics we hear about the need to return to “family values.”

The Wandering Jew is one of the key figures in the Gothic, and although we may not be cursed to wander like him, our jobs and the economy often force us to move to unfamiliar places, to find employment in sectors we feel uncomfortable with, to experience displacement. At the same time, the Wandering Jew is a metaphor for the plight of the Jewish people. The effects of the Holocaust—a horror the nineteenth century Gothic novelists never could have imagined—still haunt us, and the Jewish people still struggle with prejudice and violence directed against them, even after having a homeland established in Israel.

The Rosicrucian Gothic wanderer is obsessed with finding the secret to eternal life. Are we any less obsessed with it today when we value youthfulness, and when studies predict that half of Americans born in the late twentieth century will live to see age one hundred? The Gothic fascination with life-extension continues for us today.

The Gothic concern with gambling is no less relevant today. Gambling in Gothic literature is viewed as a transgression, a way to achieve wealth to advance oneself in society, and consequently, it usually results in destruction for the gambler and his family. Today, gambling is an even bigger problem than it was two centuries ago. We constantly hear tales of lottery winners who waste their millions, only to become bankrupts. We know of people who invest in the stock market, or worse, get taken advantage of in Ponzi schemes, only to lose everything. We continually worry about the economy, and most of us continue to have financial difficulties or an unhealthy relationship with money, while longing for wealth that we falsely believe will solve all our problems.

Working conditions became a Gothic concern with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. In Dickens’ day, horrendous working conditions were being fought against. In the early twentieth century, the rise of unions helped to solve many of those problems, establishing an eight-hour work day and the weekend. But how many of us today find ourselves working long hours? What industry did to the Victorians, modern technology has done to us, making us connected 24/7 and perhaps improving communication but also resulting in expectations to work constantly.

Perhaps no novelist in all of literature has been more visionary or speaks more to our time than the Gothic novelist Mary Shelley. The issues in Frankenstein are the very issues of stem cell research, cloning, and the other quandaries of science we continue to argue over today. The need for responsible science is now more important than ever. In The Last Man, Shelley introduced the fear of a worldwide plague which today remains a terrifying possibility. Shelley’s vision of the future is frighteningly accurate in many ways. In recent decades, the scare of AIDS and the bird and swine flu have made people fear worldwide human extinction as a possibility. The possibility of nuclear war and biological warfare has made it possible that man could someday be responsible for his own extinction, unintentionally, or intentionally. The recent film Contagion (2011) is just one of many works that speak to these fears.

In the Victorian period, a religious crisis arose with the introduction of theories of evolution. Organized religion began slowly to lose its hold over people. Those shifts have only continued to the present day. The understanding that we are spiritual beings having a human experience has become a mantra in recent decades. More and more people have quit subscribing to organized religion but come to describe themselves as spiritual, and this desire to connect with our spiritual (supernatural) selves has led many down less traditional Western paths, including to eastern religions, beliefs in reincarnation, listening to entities who channel their messages through humans, an emphasis upon “the Goddess,” and the creation of new religions such as scientology. In many cases, a general move away from institutional Christianity has not led to atheism but what might be termed a spiritual reawakening that allows humanity, if not the autonomy from God that Milton’s Satan sought, then at least the “faith, hope, and self-esteem” that Percy Shelley dreamt of for humanity.

The vampire is the nineteenth century Gothic wanderer figure who has remained most popular in the twenty-first century and continues to be reinvented. Despite his “evil” nature, he has become glamorous and attractive; the lines between good and evil have been blurred; we now have dark heroes and sympathetic villains. The continuing popularity of the vampire two centuries after he was first introduced to English readers speaks to how much the Gothic still influences our lives today.

While the bulk of this study will cover nineteenth century British Gothic fiction, I will offer in the epilogue some insight into how the themes of that period’s Gothic literature have continued and been transformed in twentieth and twenty-first century literature, some still noticeably Gothic, such as Stephenie Myer’s Twilight series and Anne Rice’s vampire novels, while other influences are hard-pressed to be termed “Gothic” but still have Gothic elements or owe a debt to the Gothic, including such popular figures as Tarzan and Batman.

The Gothic wanderer is still with us today; he has lost a lot of his angst over the centuries, but the figure still fascinates us. This study will hopefully help to explain a little of why we love the Gothic—because we discover in the Gothic wanderer our very selves.

Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D. and Gothic Wanderer

October 31, 2011

Marquette, Michigan

The Gothic Wanderer is on sale now and available by visiting www.GothicWanderer.com

Coming Soon! The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption

Welcome to my new blog, The Gothic Wanderer, created in conjunction with the upcoming publication of my new book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Gothic Literature from 1794-present.

The book will be released this fall. In the meantime, I’ll be blogging about all things Gothic, including classic Gothic literature, Gothic films, and how the Gothic continues to permeate our daily lives.

But for now, here’s a little about the book.

The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption by Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D.

The Gothic Wanderer Rises Eternal in Popular Literature

From the horrors of sixteenth century Italian castles to twenty-first century plagues, from the French Revolution to the liberation of Libya, Tyler R. Tichelaar takes readers on far more than a journey through literary history. The Gothic Wanderer is an exploration of man’s deepest fears, his efforts to rise above them for the last two centuries, and how he may be on the brink finally of succeeding.

Tichelaar examines the figure of the Gothic wanderer in such well-known Gothic novels as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, and Dracula, as well as lesser known works like Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni. He also finds surprising Gothic elements in classics like Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes. From Matthew Lewis’ The Monk to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, Tichelaar explores a literary tradition whose characters reflect our greatest fears and deepest hopes. Readers will find here the revelation that not only are we all Gothic wanderers—but we are so only by our own choosing.

“The Gothic Wanderer shows us the importance of its title figure in helping us to see our own imperfections and our own sometimes contradictory yearnings to be both unique and yet a part of a society. The reader is in for an insightful treat.”

— Diana DeLuca, Ph.D. and author of Extraordinary Things

“Make no mistake about it, The Gothic Wanderer is an important, well researched and comprehensive treatise on some of the world’s finest literature.

— Michael Willey, author of Ojisan Zanoni