Transnational Gothic
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Literary and Social Exchanges in
the Long Nineteenth Century
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Monika Elbert
Montclair State University, USA
and
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Bridget M. Marshall
University of Massachusetts, Lowell, USA
© Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall and contributors 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall have asserted their right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
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Published by
Ashgate Publishing LimitedAshgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East
110 Cherry Street
Union RoadSuite 3-1
FarnhamBurlington
Surrey, GU9 7PT
VT 05401-3181
EnglandUSA
www.ashgate.com
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Transnational Gothic: literary and social exchanges in the long nineteenth century.
1. Gothic revival (Literature) 2. Gothic fiction (Literary genre) – History and criticism.
3. Literature and transnationalism – History – 19th century.
I. Elbert, Monika M. (Monika Maria), 1956– II. Marshall, Bridget M.
809.3’8729–dc23
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Transnational gothic: literary and social exchanges in the long nineteenth century / edited
by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Gothic fiction (Literary genre)—History and criticism. I. Elbert, Monika M. (Monika
Maria), 1956– II. Marshall, Bridget M.
PN3435.T68 2012
809.3’876—dc23
ISBN 9781409447702 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409447719 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781409473480 (ebk – ePUB)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the
MPG Books Group, UK.
2012025011
Contents
List of Contributors Acknowledgments vii
xi
Introduction Bridget M. Marshall and Monika Elbert
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Part 1 Old World/New World
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1A Transnational Perspective on American Gothic Criticism Siân Silyn Roberts
Transcultural Gothic: Isaac Mitchell’s Alonzo and Melissa
as an Early Example of Popular Culture Christian Knirsch
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The Old Gothic and the New: The Trollopes’ Wild West Tamara Wagner
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Frontier Bloodlust in England:American Captivity Narratives
and Stoker’s Dracula Roland Finger
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Part 2 Gothic Catholicism
5Demonizing the Catholic Other:Religion and the
Secularization Process in Gothic Literature Diane Long Hoeveler
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6A Woman with a Cross:The Transgressive, Transnational
Nun in Anti-Catholic Fiction Nancy F. Sweet
97
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The Paradox of Catholicism in New England Women’s Gothic Monika Elbert
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Part 3 Anglo-American Genre Exchanges: Poetry, Short
Stories, Theater
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The Haunted Transatlantic Libertine: Edmund Kean’s
American Tour Melissa Wehler
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Transnational Gothic
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Gothic Prosody: Monkish Perversity and the
Poetics of Weird Form Daniel Robinson
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Transnational War Gothic from the American Civil War
to World War I Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
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Part 4 Social Anxieties and Hauntings
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All This Difficult Darkness: Lynching and the Exorcism
of the Black Other in Theodore Dreiser’s “Nigger Jeff” Keith B. Mitchell
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“Duppy Know Who Fi Frighten”: Laying Ghosts in
Jamaican Fiction Candace Ward
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“At rest now”: Child Ghosts and Social Justice in
Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing Roxanne Harde
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14Stranger Fiction: The Asian Ghost Tales of Rudyard Kipling
and Lafcadio Hearn Mary Goodwin
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Chapter 14
Stranger Fiction: The Asian Ghost Tales of
Rudyard Kipling and Lafcadio Hearn
Mary Goodwin
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A central feature of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction is a confrontation with a
monstrous Other, an aggressive alien presence that threatens to invade the home
area and menace the very heart of civilization, as Bram Stoker’s Dracula seeks
to relocate to London, to stalk its bustling urban population, and Mary Shelley’s
monster, abandoned and unloved, takes its revenge on its creator’s family. But
writers of Gothic fiction have also made gestures in the opposite direction, out
beyond the boundaries of “civilized” social contact toward the imperial frontier,
in work described by David Punter and Glennis Byron in The Gothic as the
intersection between the political and cultural forces of empire with concepts of
racial difference and the irruption of colonial guilt and fears of the Other (54–8).
This form of cultural crossing had a particularly rich development in the ghost
tales of Rudyard Kipling and Lafcadio Hearn, Western writers who were longterm residents of Asia. The “haunting” presence of the British empire in India, and
of Western incursions in fin de siècle Japan, manifested itself literally in stories
by Kipling and Hearn in scenes flooded with typical Gothic features including
revenants, ghosts, superstitious practices, supernatural events, mysterious legends,
goblins, ghouls, shape-shifters and thwarted, murderous lovers.
In the same fin de siècle moment in the U.S., African American scholar W.E.B.
Du Bois set out to explore the cultural and historical experience of the African
American from the inside out—from the “souls,” as he put it, of “black folk”
(1903). Kipling and Hearn, meanwhile, projected their narratives into and upon
the “souls” of cultural and racial Others, reaching toward ghosts from other
cultures entirely. However, Kipling and Hearn used native figures, folktales, native
religion and rituals in quite different ways. In Kipling’s short stories, including
“The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” “The Mark of the Beast,” and “The
Phantom Rickshaw,” and Hearn’s collections of “weird tales” drawn from legends
and folktales of old Japan, there is a complex and disturbing display of real and
imagined contact among cultures that is shaded by empire and western contact, as
well as by “imperial shades.” In this essay I explore the ways in which the “alien”
setting of ghost tales by Kipling and Hearn creates new possibilities for the Gothic
genre and shapes as well the moral priorities in the works. I attempt to respond in
particular to David Punter’s assertion in his Introduction to the Companion to the
Gothic that “to interpret the Gothic correctly we need to pay attention not only to
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an already conventional dialectic of civilization and barbarism […] but also to a
phenomenon of inner exile” (xiii). This matter of exile takes on new significance
with the geographical displacement of Gothic writing and settings, in the case of
Kipling and Hearn, to the imperial frontier in Asia. Traditionally identified with
claustrophobic enclosures—victims shut up in dungeons, moldering in towers,
immured in walls—Gothic spaces take a different shape out on the borders of
empire, where the walls are internal, and claustrophobia is as much a moral
response as a physical or psychological sensation.
Efforts to define the Gothic have proved problematic, as Punter and Byron
point out in their introduction to The Gothic, although many critics have come to
think of the Gothic “in terms of a psychological argument, to do with the ways
in which otherwise repressed fears are represented in textual form” (xviii). Grace
Kehler asserts that the Gothic “functions more broadly as a technology or mode
[…] that achieves its unsettling effects by highlighting both the vulnerability of
the self to the world and the obstreperousness of the sensations at work in the
individual” (438), although theorists such as Julian Wolfreys and Robert Miles
refer to it variously as a “trope,” “aesthetic,” or “discourse” (454). On familiar
ground in England or Continental Europe, the Gothic novel offers conventions
and motifs that include turbulent weather (“wuthering heights”), ruined mansions,
ancient ancestral curses, sinister aristocratic foreigners threatening vulnerable
young women, and supernatural visitations. Many of these elements are present in
the earliest Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe, Horace Walpole, and Matthew Lewis,
and evolve in new directions through the nineteenth century in the work of the
Brontë sisters and Edgar Allan Poe, among others. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818) ushered in the age of science fiction, and the Victorian period in the latter
part of the century saw a turn toward more lurid blends of horror, science fiction
and crime fiction, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde (1886).
One important new form of the genre in the late Victorian period is imperial
Gothic, defined as “fiction in which imperial exploration and power figure centrally”
in the text, as with Rudyard Kipling, or where empire appears in “a more disguised
role,” as in Jane Eyre (1847) (Punter and Byron 44). In the imperial variation as
exemplified by H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886) and H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr.
Moreau (1896), the tale is set “out there” on the imperial frontier, where threats
include evil sorceresses, mad scientists, revenant mummies and de-evolution into
beastliness. The imperial horror-adventure tale culminates in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness (1902), in which the colonial agent Kurtz is overtaken by the powers
of native darkness and degenerates into savagery. Typically, the “evil” in such
fiction originates on the frontier, among native or subject peoples, reflecting an
“Orientalist” bias in which, as Edward Said has claimed, “the Oriental is [perceived
to be] irrational, depraved (fallen)” (40). Said maintained that “Orientalist” biases
were used to rationalize European colonial rule as necessary for taming the
uncivilized and irrational, while at the same time “colonial rule was justified in
advance by Orientalism” (39). Such attitudes would be reinforced by a body of
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Stranger Fiction
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fiction that located the threat to order, reason, good government and Christian
values “out there” on the imperial frontier.
If Gothic fiction typically involves a peril from outside that threatens the stability
of the bourgeois European home, as with Dracula’s plan to take up residence in
London, the colonial or imperial version of the genre conjures the return of those
repressed under colonial rule, whose desire for revenge threatens the stability
of the empire. In their introduction to a special edition of Gothic Studies on the
postcolonial Gothic, William Hughes and Andrew Smith discuss what they see as
the long-standing relationship between the Gothic and empire: “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” (1). In both the home and away versions of Gothic fiction, moral closure
is often achieved by the end of the work with bourgeois Christian, Eurocentric
values reasserting themselves to “right” the narrative. Count Dracula is hunted
down and killed by the Van Helsing party, whereupon his spell—particularly his
hold on young women, and English real estate—is broken. Typically the source
of horror is vanquished by a brave and right-minded fellow, or the monster is
destroyed by its own evil, as in the case of Ayesha, the sorceress of Haggard’s She,
who bursts into flames at the conclusion, and that of the deranged Dr. Moreau, who
is killed by one of his own laboratory creatures.
But if in imperial Gothic fiction moral closure typically involves restoration
of dominant Western values and defeat of a malevolent Other, particularly an
“Oriental,” racialized Other, such is frequently not the case in Kipling’s ghost tales.
Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865 to a British art teacher and his wife,
and after an education in England returned to work in Lahore in 1882 as an editor
and writer on the Civil and Military Gazette. Identified with the British Empire
body and soul, aesthetically and ideologically, Kipling frequently wrote of the
soldiers and civil servants laboring on the frontier to advance the interests of the
British empire. Often in Kipling’s stories the colonial experience is seen to derange
the colonizer and body forth an “unease” or dis-ease already latent within him.
Kipling twists the genre to cast primary blame for the degradation of values on the
Europeans themselves, whose latent corruption emerges when they are transposed
to the frontier, and whose personal flaws prove their own undoing. In reworking
certain Gothic conventions, Kipling’s stories expose as problematic the Self-Other,
Master-Subject formula associated with imperial politics and culture. Kipling’s tales
can be mined for unexpected conclusions and moral “lessons,” and seem indeed to
serve as a spur to moral correction within the Western colonizers themselves.
In the same fin de siècle moment, Lafcadio Hearn, a journalist of Irish and
Greek heritage who had worked as a journalist in New Orleans, Cincinnati and
the French West Indies, moved to Japan in 1890 at the age of 40. Hearn, who
had developed a taste for the macabre, gruesome, and occult in his tenure as a
crime reporter, was drawn to Japan by literary models such as Pierre Loti’s
Madame Chrysanthème (1897), which was one source for Giacomo Puccini’s
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opera Madame Butterfly (1904), as well as Percival Lowell’s Soul of the Far East
(1888), a popular travel account based on the author’s voyages in Asia (Mordell
195). Hearn had collected supernatural lore in New Orleans and the West Indies,
and wrote literary essays including “The Value of the Supernatural in Fiction,”
collected in Talks to Writers (1920), and “Gothic Horror,” from Shadowings
(1900). Hearn, who eventually married a Japanese woman and became a Japanese
citizen, made a name for himself that endures to the present day in Asia with his
observations of Japanese life, customs and history, as well as his reworking of old
legends and tales of the weird and supernatural.
In a review of Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904), Ray
Lawless called Hearn an “Orientalized Poe” (200). But this epithet is misleading,
as Hearn came to regard and use supernatural lore in an entirely different way than
Poe did. In Japan, with his study of karma and Japanese cultural traditions, Hearn
began to regard the “ghostly” as a fertile and positive source of art, of religion,
of generations of families, of historical tradition, indeed of the universe itself.
As Beong-cheon Yu puts it:
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Lafcadio Hearn rapidly departed from conventional Gothicism […]. Hearn
explores the basis of psychic reality in terms of local ghost stories, folk
superstition and mythological subjects. [… In Hearn’s work] the psychic horror
of ghost stories is changed into something entirely different. It begins to assume
a strange beauty, a kind of weird beauty. (“Lafcadio” 57–8)
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It is worth noting that for years Hearn made his living as a travel writer and
journalist, producing sketches of New Orleans, the French West Indies and other
destinations for popular publications. Indeed he first went to Japan as a travel writer,
and published several volumes of essays on curious festivals and customs in the
countryside of Japan. The aspects of Japanese life he sought out for his sketches—
for example, in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan he has chapters on “In the Cave of
the Children’s Ghosts,” “Two Strange Festivals” and “Of Ghosts and Goblins”—
served as a foundation for the weird tales he would “interpret” in later works.1
Unlike Kipling, Hearn was not part of a massive, long-term imperial incursion;
in turn-of-the-century Japan, he would not encounter crowds of western imperial
administrators. Thus was he able to avoid to some extent the “imperial anxieties”
noted by Patrick Brantlinger in Rule of Darkness, including concerns about “the
degeneration of [British] institutions, culture and racial stock” (230). Reflecting
the nervous tensions inherent in imperial rule, Brantlinger notes the three principal
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Recent scholarship of the Gothic has focused on the overlaps and intersections
between travel writing and Gothic writing; see in particular Dennis Porter, Haunted
Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writings (Princeton UP, 1991),
which looks at Freud’s theories about why travelers trying to “recover an original lost home”
(12) find ghosts along the way. See also work by Chris Bongie, Helene de Burgh, Justin
Edwards, Andrew Hammond, George Hughes, Roslyn Jolly, Andrew Ng, Pam Perkins, and
Gina Wisker.
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Stranger Fiction
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themes of imperial Gothic are “individual regression or going native; an invasion
of civilization by the forces of barbarism or demonism; and the diminution of
opportunities for adventures and heroism in the modern world” (230). While Hearn
can be said to have “gone native” as he assimilates Japanese culture, he sees it as
moral progress rather than degeneration. As will be discussed later in this paper,
the development in Hearn’s Gothic art—from a rather morbid obsession with the
gruesome fringes of society, such as in his New Orleans writing to an interest in
spiritual obligations and a moral code of fidelity, even to the dead—moves past the
conventions and typical Orientalist structure of imperial Gothic.
“Anxiety” as regards empire and the rule of subject peoples might also seem an
unlikely claim to make for Kipling, author of Kim (1901) and the children’s tales
in The Jungle Books (1894–95). In his time Kipling achieved lasting fame—and
notoriety—for his support of Britain’s imperial mission. One of the most notorious
concepts associated with Kipling is that of “The White Man’s Burden,” from a
poem he published in McClure’s magazine in 1899 urging the U.S. to take up
the task of developing— “civilizing”—the Philippines after the Spanish American
War. The poet asserts that white Europeans and Americans have the responsibility,
however hard and thankless it might prove, to “lift” the “inferior” races with
education, hygiene, Christianity and most importantly, Western rule:
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Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease. (lines 17–20)
His jingoistic reputation notwithstanding, Kipling seems to turn the imperial
project inside out in the many ghost tales he set in India, casting the shadow of
guilt on the white colonizer for his misconduct and personal failings on the frontier.
In the Jungle Books story “Letting in the Jungle,” the child hero Mowgli takes
revenge on a village for threatening violence against him and his adoptive parents
by encouraging the jungle creatures to reclaim the land occupied by the village,
and chase the humans away. Mere months later, the jungle has covered all, and
Mowgli’s revenge is complete (187–212). In a number of Kipling’s ghost stories,
the “jungle” of consequences for immoral acts by a white male colonist—often
his adultery or mistreatment or disrespect of natives—overtakes the guilty party.
In these stories the Gothic embodiment of fear is not that of an external threat, but
of the corruption the westerner carries within himself, another sort of “white man’s
burden.” The message from these tales seems to be that an ethical code is more
difficult to keep to far from the oversight of one’s “civilized” compatriots, thus
making it easy to go astray on the frontier.
A typical pattern in Kipling’s tales of the supernatural is that a colonial civil
servant is in over his head in a situation he cannot control, and eventually is
destroyed by his own weaknesses. Kipling’s characters are typically British civil
servants in India; the problems they encounter are often related to sexual dalliances
and professional rivalries, as well as cultural clashes with the native population.
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Kipling doesn’t “go native” or evince an ethnographer’s interest in Indian culture,
although he shows broad and generous sympathy for many native characters in
Kim. The non-Europeans in his fiction are frequently types rather than individuals,
often used as “straw victims” to flog the British for their failings.
In “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” (1885), a waking nightmare in the
style of Poe or Kafka, the English imperial engineer Jukes falls into a no man’s
land, an Indian city of the dead in a sand pit where natives thought to have died but
who subsequently revived are abandoned. In this isolated pit from which escape
is impossible, Jukes finds that the inhabitants of this city of those abandoned
for dead do not observe the usual colonial social hierarchies. Once subservient
and submissive to the Sahib, these “undead” natives do not defer to him in the
pit; indeed they hardly notice him at all, intent as they are on their own survival.
Reduced to the same basic human needs as those he once governed, Jukes endures
a nightmarish disorientation of identity in a post-postcolonial setting: “Here was a
Sahib, a representative of the dominant race, helpless as a child and completely at
the mercy of his native neighbours” (13). Although for the most part unmolested
by the natives in the pit, Jukes must (literally) eat crow along with the others in
order to survive—a fitting karmic burden. The story ends with his rescue by a
loyal servant but the reader is left with the feeling that Jukes’ humiliation has
been complete.
What is “strange” about Jukes’ ride is that its Gothic elements—confinement
in a nightmare, from which there seems no escape; sudden and humiliating loss
of identity, for unknown causes—invert the Orientalist pattern, laying guilt and
blame with the colonizer rather than with a monstrous “other.” In his plight Jukes
seems to internalize the failures of empire, reflecting Glennis Byron’s description
of the great anxiety over national, social and psychic decay, in step with the waning
of imperial power in late Victorian Britain, as described by Max Nordau: “the day
is over, the night draws on” (qtd. in Byron 132). Jukes’ nightmare is a form of
“internal exile” (recalling Punter’s directions for scholars of the Gothic), in which
all his assumptions of easy and natural superiority over the Indian natives break
down, as he is stranded in a no-man’s land in which the standards he has grown
accustomed to no longer apply.
In several of Kipling’s weird tales, British colonials who show disrespect to
local gods, religion and social culture are summarily punished. In “The Mark of
the Beast” (1890), the narrator relates the story of a colonial civil servant, Fleete,
who insults a local god by grinding his cigar into its icon. The western narrator,
who has remarked that “All gods have good points, just as have all priests” (131),
is horrified by Fleete’s deed. Cursed by a leper who tends the temple, Fleete
soon transforms into a raving beast and is given up for dead by a western doctor.
Strickland, the colonial police officer, realizes that supernatural forces are at work,
and manages with the narrator to capture the temple leper and force him to remove
the curse. When Fleete recovers, he recalls nothing of what has happened to him,
and is not apparently changed in any way. The narrator himself sees at the end
that “no one will believe a rather unpleasant story”; he remarks with biting irony
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that “it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods of the heathen are
stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is justly condemned”
(141). This Kipling version of the imperial Gothic story recalls David Punter’s
comments on the difficulty in identifying the role Gothic modes of writing play
in the circulation of fears. Punter asks: “Is the Gothic … pestifugous, or is it a
pestiduct? Does it spread contamination, or might it provide a channel for the
expulsion of contaminating materials? What Gothic perhaps suggests is that such
a differentiation is impossible …” (Introduction xii).2 Kipling uses the Gothic
mode flexibly, to provoke unease while uncovering flaws in the dominant colonial
culture, particularly in the imperial insensitivity to local customs.
In a further twist on Gothic conventions, this time concerning the female in
peril, Kipling often depicts European men, rather than women, in danger over
sexual misdeeds and moral lapses. In these stories, Kipling offers a new version of
generic conventions concerning sexuality, in which typically the female protagonist
discovers the power of her sexuality, and is endangered by this knowledge, as can
be seen in stories ranging from Jane Eyre (1847) to the modern fairy tales of
Angela Carter in Burning Your Boats (1995). Glennis Byron has written in “Gothic
in the 1890s” of the late Victorian crisis over gender roles; with “the breakdown
of traditional gender roles, the confusion of the masculine and the feminine, was
seen as a significant indication of cultural decay and corruption, an attack on the
stability of the family structure” (139). In Kipling’s India, the colonists are far
from the normal constraints on social behavior that would govern in England,
making the setting a breeding ground for moral “lapses.” But in Kipling’s tales,
it is the male who is threatened and frequently punished for a sexual misstep,
with the implication that a character flaw—rather than some monstrous external
threat—has corrupted the lonely and bored colonial.
In “The Phantom ‘Rickshaw” (1888), Theobald Jack Pansay, a British colonial
administrator in India, is haunted by the ghost of a woman he jilted after a fling
in which they fell “desperately and unreasoningly in love” (73). After making it
known to the married Agnes Keith-Wessington that he was “sick of her presence”
(73), Pansay dumps her and takes up with a new young woman. After speaking
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2
The same question can be asked of other Kipling stories in which the erring
European is abruptly and brutally warned of cultural missteps. In “The Return of Imray”
(1891), Imray, a career colonial civil servant, disappears. It turns out that Imray was killed
by his servant, Bahadur Khan, who believed that Imray was a wizard who had bewitched
his child. Imray had patted the child on the head and called him beautiful; ten days later,
the child died of fever. However, the western observers in the story do not lay blame on
the Indian servant, but on Imray for not having known how to behave with native servants
even after serving in India for four years: “simply and solely not knowing the nature of the
Oriental, and the coincidence of a little seasonal fever,” Imray died (211). Other stories in
which this theme figures include “The Bisara of Pooree,” “At the End of the Passage,” “The
Sending of Dana Da,” “Haunted Subalterns” and “In the House of Suddhoo,” among many
others. A good online reference with Kipling stories searchable by themes is: <http://www.
kipling.org.uk/rg_index.htm>, which also has links to the Kipling Journal.
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cruelly to Mrs. Wessington, he does briefly admit his guilt: “I was the offender,
and I knew it” (73). Mrs. Wessington soon dies, apparently of heartbreak. But not
long after she returns in a ghostly carriage that only he can see, following him
everywhere and driving him out of his mind. He loses his fiancée and finally his
will to live, resigning himself to a hellish eternity by the side of his demon lover.
But at the end he is still ambivalent about his fate, feeling
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a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion against the unreasonableness of it all.
There were scores of men no better than I whose punishments had at least been
reserved for another world; and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I
alone should have been singled out for so hideous a fate. This mood would in
time give place to another where it seemed that the ‘rickshaw and I were the only
realities in a world of shadows. (85)
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At last, however, he sees the justice in his punishment: “For as surely as ever
woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my
punishment is even now upon me” (89). In an essay analyzing the “hesitation” in
the narrative, William Scheik points out:
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Through much of the experience Pansay hesitates between a natural and a
supernatural explanation of events […]. “But you shall judge for yourselves” (p.
5), Pansay writes, and this important remark directs our attention to the readers
of Pansay’s narrative, which comprises most of the short story. […] We identify
with the narrator, whose framing introductory remarks Kipling insightfully
added in a revision of the story; with the narrator we hesitate as we struggle to
judge for ourselves whether Pansay’s experiences are real or imaginary. Like the
narrator we remain uncertain. (49)
It is noteworthy that Scheik focuses on the reader’s “uncertainty” as regards the
supernatural events in the narrative, not on Pansay’s deed itself. The matter of the
man’s unchivalrous behavior is not, apparently, a central concern in a traditional
“Gothic” reading of the work, but it can be argued that whether Pansay’s experience
of the “phantom” rickshaw was real, or simply a figure of his guilty imagination, is
secondary to the fact of his cruelty toward Mrs. Wessington.
In “At the Pit’s Mouth” (Under the Deodars 1888), another illicit love affair
provides the background as the British lover of a married woman dies in a strange
accident, apparently punished for his extramarital dalliance. The Man’s Wife, as
she is called, and her lover meet in a graveyard to avoid being the target of gossip.
In one of these rendezvous, the lover, identified only as the Tertium Quid, has a
foreboding of his death, “as if a goose had walked over my grave” (24). He does
indeed die soon after, when his mare slides down in mud and he is buried under
her. His lover is not harmed, but she takes to her bed in a nervous collapse, and
misses his funeral.
In these stories and others, westerners on the imperial frontier suffer from a
bad conscience, perhaps a consequence of being far adrift from the moral markers
of their home culture. In Kipling’s version of the imperial Gothic, the burden
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carried by the white man is his own conscience. Rather than being threatened
by a corrupt, deadly East, the European is destroyed by something that arises
from within his character. The colonial frontier is merely the setting in which the
European’s self-destruction takes place, driven to an inevitable conclusion by the
westerner’s character flaw, rather than evil spirits of the “east.” The claustrophobic
milieu of the typical Gothic setting “at home,” in Europe, shifts in Kipling’s work
to a kind of moral claustrophobia, or internal exile, on the imperial frontier. In
tapping away at the bad conscience of his fellow colonists, Kipling offers proof
of Fred Botting’s claim in “In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture,” that
“‘Gothic’ thus resonates as much with anxieties and fears concerning the crises
and changes in the present as with any terrors in the past” (3).3
If Kipling’s focus and main object of blame was the erring European, Lafcadio
Hearn included hardly any Western figures at all in his writing on Japan. Embracing
Japanese life first as a travel writer, Hearn mined local folklore traditions, religion
and culture for sources for his sketches and tales, which he used to evoke an
idealized romantic past of his adopted nation. Like Kipling, Hearn used his foreign
setting for his own purposes in his work, but his tales functioned as a kind of escape
for the besieged and weary Westerner rather than as a scourge to conscience.4
Romantic and sensitive, out of joint with the times, Hearn hid inside his ghost tales
and legends of old Japan from the modernization policy spearheaded by the Meiji
government, which in the period between 1868 and 1912 opened Japan to the
world in a search for modern technology and new knowledge. This worried Hearn,
who was convinced that “Japan should keep other races at arm’s length” (Stempel
15). As Japan developed into Asia’s first industrialized nation, Hearn condemned
Japan’s slide toward a policy of imperialism in the region. All there was to love in
Japan, he affirmed, was passing away: “All that was noble in old Japanese life—its
moral code, its household religion, and its unselfishness. Everything is now passing
away. […] The New Japan will be richer and stronger and in many things wiser;
but it will be neither so happy nor so kindly as the Old” (qtd. in Mordell 202).
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3
For Kipling scholarship, in particular as regards Victorian fin de siècle anxieties
over empire, see Elsie B. Adams, Charles Adams, Stephen D. Arata, Tim Bascom, Patrick
Brantlinger (2007), Nora Crook, Peter Havholm, John Kucich, Jesse Oak Taylor, Diane
Simmons, and Angus Wilson. For responses to Kipling’s Gothic tales in particular, see
Terry Caesar, John Coates, William B. Dillingham, Elliot L. Gilbert, Norman Page, John H.
Schwarz, and Joanna Scutts.
4
Recent studies on Hearn include Lafcadio Hearn in International Perspectives,
edited by Sukehiro Hirakawa (Global Oriental 2007), which draws on papers presented
at Hearn conferences in Athens (1998), Tokyo (2000), Martinique (2001 and 2002) and
Japan (2004). Hirakawa also edited an earlier series of Hearn studies, Rediscovering
Lafcadio Hearn (Fokstone, Kent: Global Oriental 1997), from papers given at the first
Hearn International Symposium in Matsue City in 1990. See also Jonathan Cott, Carl
Dawson, Susan Fisher, Rolf J. Goebel, Junko (Hagiwara) Umemoto, Sukehiro Hirakawa
(2000), Naoko Thornton and Yoko Makino. For general background on Japanese legends
and literary Gothic, see Henry J. Hughes.
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As he watched with dismay the creeping modernization that threatened to eclipse
entirely the “magical” past of old Japan and its foundation in legend and fairy
tale, Hearn grew deeply concerned about the decay of cultural morality, the
role of history in a culture’s future, and the preservation of traditions in art. In
“My First Day in the Orient,” Hearn makes explicit the “supernatural” connections
that link generations of artists:
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The idea whose symbol has perished will reappear again in other creations—
perhaps after the passing of a century—modified, indeed, yet recognizably of
kin to the thought of the past. And every artist is a ghostly worker. Not by years
of groping and sacrifice does he find his highest expression. The sacrificial past
is with him; his art is an inheritance; his finders are guided by the dead. (Writings
from Japan 25)
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Hearn’s stories of the supernatural frequently address moral issues involving
the past, and offer as well a critique of modernization as it affected Japanese
village life. When the Gothic enthusiasts of the eighteenth century plumbed
the “medieval” European past, they celebrated what they imagined to be its
archaic, crude, barbaric and pagan traits as a source of cultural strength: “fruits
of primitivism and barbarism possessed a fire, a vigour a sense of grandeur which
was sorely needed in English culture” (Punter, Literature of Terror 5). When
Hearn championed the “aristocratic” past of Japan, he found in it not extremity of
passion or barbarous lust but a kinder, more civil, indeed more civilized society.
Hearn held in high admiration the samurai code of devotion, loyalty, and selfdiscipline, a motif that appears in many of his ghost tales. Finding direct parallels
between this ancient Japanese warrior class and the European nobility and gentry
of the Middle Ages, Basil Chamberlain emphasized that “with them, as with us,”
in the essence of Old Japan, “all gentlemen must be soldiers, and all soldiers
gentlemen … . The Samurai’s word was his bond, and he was taught to be gentle as
well as brave” (415–16). When the promises are kept, the character is to be admired;
when broken, however unreasonable the demand of the promise, particularly in
love matters, the character is punished severely, often by a gruesome death. As Yu
points out, Hearn’s tales reinforce the basic principles of karma:
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It is one’s desire or will that keeps on turning the wheel of karma. In these
Japanese legends, too, there seems to be no more intense human desire or will
than love. For the sake of love many a ghost returns to its former human world,
either visibly or invisibly, and fulfills its original wish. (“Lafcadio” 64)
The relationships forged in these stories reach across the divide between the living
and the dead, reinforcing values like loyalty, devotion, honesty and courage.5
5
See for example “The Story of O-tei,” in which the samurai Nagao is betrothed to
a girl who falls ill before their wedding. She tells him that they will meet again and then
dies; he mourns her at an altar he has built in her memory. Many years pass; he wanders
the countryside, stopping one day at a remote village inn. The inn maid reminds him of his
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In Hearn’s tales, devotion is measured by an eternal or infinite yardstick, to death
and beyond; it is a cowardly act indeed to try to save one’s own life if in the attempt
one breaks one’s word. In “A Passional Karma,” the lover, a handsome young
samurai, “selfishly” attempts to evade his ghostly lover, and meets a gruesome
end. Shinzaburo meets and admires the daughter of a powerful local chieftain. He
promises to call on her again; however, fearing that her father would disapprove,
he avoids her. In time she wastes away and dies; her faithful servant dies soon
after. Months later the samurai hears footsteps outside his home at night. It is the
lovely young woman accompanied by her maid. Happy to see him, she comes
calling every evening at the same hour. Eventually the neighbors and a priest see
that the young woman is a ghost who will destroy the young samurai. The priest
pastes holy texts all around his home so the ghosts cannot enter. But by a trick
Shinzaburo’s servant is made to remove one paper, and the ghostly maiden and
her servant fly in through the small opening, and the samurai ends choked to death
by his ghostly lover.
But true to the samurai code—and strange enough to Western sensibilities—
the narrator of the tale concludes that Shinzaburo, for evading his responsibility
and attempting to save himself even from a fearful apparition, is “contemptible”:
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Shinzaburo was a Buddhist,—with a million lives behind him and a million lives
before him; and he was too selfish to give up even one miserable existence for
the sake of a girl that came back to him from the dead. Then he was even more
cowardly than selfish. Although a samurai by birth and training, he had to beg a
priest to save him from ghosts. In every way he proved himself contemptible; and
O-Tsuyu did quite right in choking him to death. (Lafcadio Hearn’s Japan 246)
In tracing Hearn’s career before Japan, we can see a marked evolution in
his Gothic aesthetic. From 1877 in New Orleans, Hearn spent ten years as a
correspondent for such periodicals as the New Orleans Daily Item, TimesDemocrat, Harper’s Weekly, and Scribner’s Magazine, producing descriptions of
the seamy side of New Orleans, such as voodoo queen Marie Laveau and occult
practices in Louisiana, as well as pieces covering the distinctive culture, cuisine
and population of the area.6 But his use of Gothic themes and the supernatural
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dead fiancée. Suddenly the young maid is possessed by the spirit of the dead fiancée, telling
him in her voice that she is the lost girl promised to him. Later the inn girl forgets what she
has said, but they marry and live together happily (Kwaidan 23–8).
6
Hearn’s writings for national publications, such as Harper’s Weekly and Scribner’s
Magazine, helped create the popular reputation of New Orleans as a place with a Europeaninfluenced culture distinct from that of the rest of North America. His best-known Louisiana
works are Gombo Zhebes, Little Dictionary of Creole Proverbs in Six Dialects (1885); La
Cuisine Créole (1885); and Chita: A Memory of Last Island, a novel based on the hurricane
of 1856, first published in Harper’s Monthly in 1888. Harper’s sent Hearn to the West Indies
as a correspondent in 1887. He spent two years in Martinique and produced two books:
Two Years in the French West Indies and Youma, The Story of a West-Indian Slave, both
in 1890. In the past few decades, and especially in the years following the 2005 hurricane
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begins to change from a rather morbid, Poe-like fascination with the gruesome
and macabre, to a positive and benign view of the power and value of things
unseen, in his writing on Japan. In “Some Thoughts about Ancestor Worship,”
Hearn speaks of “the ghostly” as the source of all art, history, life, and religion.
His analysis includes an interesting contrast between Eastern and Western
attitudes toward the dead and the past:
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[The dead] are thought of—as our collections of folk-lore bear witness—rather
with fear than love. In Japan the feeling is utterly different. It is a feeling of
grateful and reverential love. It is probably the most profound and powerful
of the emotions of the race,—that which especially directs national life and
shapes national character. […] the Japanese never think of an ancestor as having
become “only a memory”—their dead are alive. (Kokoro 165)
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According to Yu, for Hearn, “lovers are all artists in one way or another […] and
all artists ought to be lovers at heart” as well (An Ape 63). Both artist and lover
are inspired by the same flow of ghostly energy and experience, and both living
lovers and artists owe a debt to the dead. Yu claims that the “archetype of all
Hearn’s ideal lovers” is Ito Norisuke, a young samurai in Hearn’s “The Story of
Ito Norisuke,” who is led into a ghost house in a remote forest and introduced
to the reincarnation of his true love from another era (An Ape 63). Very soon
the living man wastes away in an attempt to return to his dead lover, again loyal
to a promise made many lifetimes earlier. Honoring his bond with the spirit of
his lost love even at the cost of his own life, he longs to pass on into the next
world (139–66).
Hearn, whose collection of more than 50 reinterpreted Japanese legends
“constitute a quarter of his total production in Japan,” came to believe that “the
ghostly is not the periphery of the human, but the very center of it, the very spirit
of it: […] everyman is haunted by ghosts” (Yu, “Lafcadio” 63). Inspired by his
study of Buddhist theories of reincarnation and karma, Hearn moved beyond a
voyeuristic obsession with the macabre toward a comprehensive vision of the
supernatural as a source for all artistic and cultural inspiration. The weird are with
us always, but not necessarily as our antagonists; their role is to bear witness
to the continuum of human life and the necessity of behaving honorably toward
inhabitants of both the seen and unseen worlds. For Hearn, the Gothic mode was
a passageway toward spiritual development and moral improvement; a code of
responsibility and discipline, rather than raging unbridled passion and the extremes
of emotion that clutter the landscape in Western Gothic writing.
Hearn’s assimilation of Japanese culture and values is key to understanding
the power of his version of Gothic, reshaped to encompass moral and spiritual
experience. His travel writing evinces a deep cultural immersion in Japanese
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Katrina, Hearn’s value as a chronicler of New Orleans has received renewed interest. See in
particular new collections of Hearn’s New Orleans work by S. Fredrick Starr, Delia LaBarre
and a biography by Jonathan Cott.
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life; unlike for example eighteenth-century Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, who
used Italy as a setting in several works—although she hadn’t been there “and
didn’t need to go,” having easy access to travel texts with vivid depictions of Italy
(Perkins 35)—Hearn doesn’t use Japan simply as an exotic prop in his writing.
In his enthusiasm for the traditions of old Japan, Hearn assimilates values which
are not modern, not Western, not Victorian, and not Christian. As Rolf Goebel
writes, in his “First Day in the Orient,” Hearn confesses to a temple guard that he
is neither Christian nor Buddhist, but his visit to the temple is motivated by his
“quest for intellectual and moral, not necessarily religious, growth” (200).
As Hearn is transformed by the experience of travel and cultural immersion in
Japan, his Gothic aesthetic becomes more capacious, encompassing dimensions
beyond the merely strange and curious. Entering Japan as a travel writer seeking
the weird and outrageous, Hearn eventually reworked the Gothic mode to make it
speak to issues such as the responsibility of the artist, the moral debt owed by the
living to the dead, and the many difficulties involved in finding one’s place in the
world—anywhere in the world. As Hearn scholar Hirakawa writes, “Hearn was a
rare Westerner who was able to intuit subtleties of the Japanese world of the dead.
He could sympathize with Japanese ghosts” (Introduction x). What had been mere
strange tales in New Orleans evolved into a transformative theory of art and of
moral improvement, in ghostly observations of ghostly Japan.
The conventions of imperial and postcolonial Gothic, typically centering on
a Self-Other relationship between Western colonial overlord and an uncivilized,
beast-like native, undergo a sea change in the work of Kipling and Hearn,
writers who lived in Asia for much of their careers and whose “dislocation”
from their native places seemed to have a powerful effect on the development
of their Gothic aesthetics. Kipling and Hearn found new uses for the genre as
a moral prod: Kipling flogs imperials for their brutish insensitivity and moral
shoddiness, and Hearn’s stories admonish moderns for lack of discipline and
fidelity to principle. Hearn mourns the loss of the noble ideals of old Japan, while
Kipling writes of the danger of letting oneself abandon basic values, with swift
retribution visited on the errant Westerner whose bad conscience haunts him no
matter how far he runs to avoid it. In Kipling, the tendency is to demonize the
European who doesn’t fit in, to find holes and weaknesses in colonial culture
where horrors might filter through. Hearn meanwhile shapes his Japanese tales
of the supernatural to reinforce concepts such as the debt of gratitude owed the
dead and other principles of honor in Japanese society. Rather than echoing the
familiar Gothic paradigm of fear of an unknown external peril, the work of these
writers often serves as a spur to ethical behavior learned from the inside out. New
models of moral behavior in relation to both Self and Other emerge from their
innovations to the Gothic genre; the “remote” perspective of a geographical and
cultural remove lends clarity to the moral exercise.
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Works Cited
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Adams, Elsie B. “No Exit: An Explication of Kipling’s ‘Wayside Comedy.’”
English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 6.3 (1967): 180–83. Project Muse.
Web. 5 Nov. 2011.
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