W Hughes

Introduction: Defining the Relationships between Gothic and the Postcolonial

The Gothic has historically maintained an intimacy with colonial issues, and in consequence with the potential for disruption and redefinition vested in the relationships between Self and Other, controlling and repressed, subaltern milieu and dominant outsider culture. Such things are the context of obvious, visible irruptions of the colonial Orientalistexotic into the genre, whether these be the absolutist power and pagan excesses of Beckfords Vathek (1786), the Moorish demonic temptations of Zofloya (1806) or the perverse, corrupting influence of a western invader upon a primitivised European in the ImmaleeIsadora episodes of Maturins Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). These are, in a sense, horrors beyond, the exoticism of time and space distancing the problematic text from the comfortable, identifiable world of the contemporary and the homely a reassurance comforting even in a reading of the Irish episodes of Melmoth the Wanderer, where geographical marginality anticipates a borderland as distant from metropolitan sensibilities as effective as those of later writers such as Hope Hodgson, Machen or Rolt. The colonial is both kept at a distance and in a state of suggestive vagueness, of resemblance rather than obvious representation, its horrors accessible though thankfully not immanent

Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism

Theories of postcolonialism and scholarship on the Gothic might, superficially, appear to be the product of rather different intellectual, cultural and historical traditions. The Gothic, a fantastical literary form that had its heyday in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries might seem to inhabit a different world than that confronted by writers working in postcolonial contexts in the twenty-first century. However, the picture is more complex than this because an historical examination of the Gothic and accounts of postcolonialism indicate the presence of a shared interest in challenging post-enlightenment notions of rationality. In the Gothic, as in Romanticism in general, this challenge was developed through an exploration of the feelings, desires and passions which compromised the Enlightenment project of rationally calibrating all forms of knowledge and behaviours. The Gothic gives a particular added emphasis to this through its seeming celebration of the irrational, the outlawed and the socially and culturally dispossessed.

The origins and implications of J. S. Le Fanu's 'Green tea'

Despite being praised as ‘the archetypal English ghost story’ by no less an authority than M. R. James, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’ has been the subject of relatively little protracted criticism. The few critical studies which consider the story, first published in All the Year Round in 1869, are for the most part apologetic in tone, and writers as diverse as Julia Briggs and Jack Sullivan read the work simply as a component of the author’s later collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), or pass over its explicit Swedenborgian content in favour of a commentary upon its pioneering ‘psychic doctor’, Martin Hesselius. If ‘Green Tea’ is not the celebrated Uncle Silas, neither is it the provocative ‘Carmilla’: in consequence, it is, seemingly, not the stuff of criticism. The one apparently authoritative commentary upon the story, a scattering of pages in W. J. McCormack’s Dissolute Characters (1993), details what the author believes to be a definitive source for the clerical theme and spectral monkey of ‘Green Tea’—an 1841 article on ‘German Ghosts and Seers’, published in the Dublin University Magazine some twenty years before Le Fanu purchased the publication. McCormack rather hastily concludes that the two central figures in this article—a clergyman who is confronted by a disembodied pair of eyes and a physician who drinks green tea—‘merge in Le Fanu’s Reverend Jennings’. Le Fanu, as it were, has expanded a paragraph into a short story, has made an Irish article about Germany into what McCormack argues is an Irish ghost story set in England, another consequence of the pressure brought to bear upon Le Fanu by Richard Bentley, his English publisher, who wished to commission not Irish narratives but stories ‘of an English subject and in modern times’. At first sight, this argument appears reasonable enough. McCormack’s thesis, however, is implicated not merely within the context of literary biography but also within the academic discipline of Irish Studies, and the latter arguably imposes a limitation as to what might be said about Le Fanu’s milieu and sources. Within the institution of Irish Studies, it might be suggested, a subtle pressure is all too often brought to bear, its imperative being to reclaim such writers as Le Fanu, Stoker and Wilde as generically or distinctively Irish writers, even where their literary productions were shaped by a Londonoriented publishing industry as much as by an Anglo-Irish selfhood predicated upon educational and behavioural co-ordinates which link the Irish ascendancy to its English counterpart. The disciplinary context, as it were, demands the pre-eminence of the Irishpublished essay, its absorption into the Irishness of the journal, its proclamation as a singular source, an Irish source, for a ghost story that ought rightly to have been set in Ireland. Le Fanu, though, cannot easily be regarded as being this passive. He was, after all, not merely an author but a commissioning editor in his own right, and a voracious reader and purchaser of books and journals. His role was arguably as active as much as it might have been passive, and in any case implicated him in a publishing field that was dispersed far

Introduction: Bram Stoker, the Gothic and the Development of Cultural Studies

The history of Dracula as a text in the critical field arguably mirrors the change and development of that field over the last half of the twentieth century. Grandiose as this statement may seem, it is no exaggeration. The fortunes of this apparently ephemeral text replicate the transfer of the specific cultural activity of criticism from a tradition which, in the words of F.R. Leavis, made ‘important distinctions’ as to who and what was fit to be studied, to the open-ended and methodologically pluralist practice of Cultural Studies.1 Essentially, Stoker’s novel has undergone a series of changes in status in accordance with both what has been thought appropriate for the subject of criticism, and the nature of the methodology customarily employed in analysis.

Introduction: Reading beyond Dracula

The opening words of Hall Caine’s obituary notice for his close friend and fellow author succinctly crystallise the nineteenth-century myth of Bram Stoker. In obituary tributes, Stoker is consistently portrayed as a gentleman of ‘great height and fine physique’ who ‘seemed to give up his life’ to his employer’s service, so much so that his achievements as Irving’s ‘fidus Achates’ could only be satisfactorily discerned through the successes of the actor’s long career.2 Caine, alone, tempers the portrayal of this ‘massive and muscular and almost volcanic personality’ with a privileged view of Stoker’s ‘big heart’ and an intimation of ‘his humanity’. Even these, though, find their expression in the context of Irving’s Lyceum Theatre: for Caine, Stoker’s ‘tender’ nature is remembered at ‘the front of a box-office, the door to the gallery, the passageway to the pit’.3 It would seem, therefore, that the Victorian and Edwardian public viewed Stoker largely as an appendage of Irving, a mythicised figure with a symbolic as well as actual role, rather than as an individual — or as an author — in his own right.

The Casework Relationship: Le Fanu, Stoker and the Rhetorical Contexts of Irish Gothic

This chapter explores the stylistic connections between J. S. Le Fanu’s influential ghost story ‘Green Tea’ and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Reading the two fictions through the rhetorical model of medical casework, it notes how both authors drew upon clinical paradigms as well as their own legal training in order to produce works that depict instances of malpractice on the part of a consulting physician. Within this context, the function of fictional editorship is discussed, as is the relationship of form to fiction produced within an Irish Gothic context.

The Un-Death of the Author: The Fictional Afterlife of Bram Stoker

As an author, Bram Stoker has long been the subject of an intense process of fictionalisation. This process is, arguably, almost totally a consequence of the critical drive to interpret Dracula through the biography of its author, to trace its origins in what have been conventionally interpreted as the significant but traumatic incidents of Stoker’s life, from his mysterious childhood illness to the alleged syphilis which supposedly hastened his death. As Barbara Belford asserts in the Introduction to her Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (1996), Calumnies have been spawned to justify the premise that no genial Irishman could have written such a perversely sexual novel. In biography and fiction, Stoker variously has been given a frigid wife, a penchant for prostitutes (particularly during their menstrual period), a sexually transmitted disease, and inherited insanity. (1996: x)

Writers of Gothic

Ainsworth made his first venture into sensational fiction with ‘The Test of Affection’ (European Magazine, 1822), a tale that relies heavily on artificial ‘SUPERNATURAL’ devices in the ANN RADCLIFFE mode for its effect. It was followed by ‘The Spectre Bride’ (Arliss’s Pocket Magazine, 1822) and his early Gothic tales were collected in his first book, the anonymous December Tales (1823). All of this youthful work — which displays more enthusiasm than polish — was produced while Ainsworth was living in Manchester, where he had been born in 1805.

Who is the third who walks always beside you? Eliot, Stoker and Stetson in 'The waste land'

Academic criticism has long speculated regarding the influence of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), though the novel itself is named neither in the poem nor in its at times ironic endnotes. The interface of the two works is inevitably problematic. Stoker’s ‘prurient, highly coloured sensationalist prose’, according to A. N. Wilson’s introduction to the 1983 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Dracula, ensures that Tt is not a great work of literature’.1 Conversely, The Waste Land, according to Calvin Bedient, is ‘the quintessential poem of Anglo-American modernism’—a text, in other words, unequivocally worthy of serious study and a suitable recipient, therefore, of a more favourable critical hyperbole.2 It is this gap between the serious and the sensationalist, between the unanimously accepted and the merely tolerated—in genre as much as in choice of texts—that has coloured the way in which academic criticism has reacted to the apparent presence of Dracula in The Waste Land. The intertextual trace of Stoker’s novel has been noted, but never explored at length. Unlike the allusions to Dante, Spenser or Shakespeare in The Waste Land, Dracula, a text neither historically canonical nor venerably antique, is conventionally mentioned merely in passing during analysis. If not an embarrassment, then it is an inconvenience for criticism—a private joke on Eliot’s part, never adequately explained, never worthy, indeed, of the effort of explanation, at least in the rarefied field of Modernist criticism.

‘Un Vrai Monsieur’: Chivalry, Atavism and Masculinity

There is a still discernible ironic edge to The Entr’acte’s response to Stoker’s attempted rescue of a Thames suicide. Through the incident, the columnist mocks the theatrical partnership of Irving and Stoker, holding up the latter as a sort of managerial Sancho Panza to his employer, and suggesting further that this physical heroism may be paralleled by equally spectacular feats of business acumen in the future.