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Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic
Page published by Andrew Smith on Friday, December 16, 2016
As we moved into the colder and longer nights of winter, the Book Channel
find this the perfect season to delve into some of the recent scholarship on
Gothic literature. Readers’ imaginations drift late into the dark nights
pondering this season of stillness. Andrew Smith peers deeply into this
darkness to explore nineteenth-century ideas of death and grief in his essay
commissioned by the Book Channel. He is the author, editor, or co-editor,
of nineteen volumes of criticism on the Gothic and is a past president of the
International Gothic Association. Currently, he is Reader in NineteenthCentury English Literature at the University of Sheffield. His recent works
include, Gothic Death 1740-1914: A Literary History. Manchester
University Press, 2016 and the edited volume The Cambridge Companion
to Frankenstein. Cambridge University Press, 2016. --Assistant Editor Jacob
C. Jurss
How to think about death in the context of romanticism has become a topic of recent critical
debate—one that has moved the discussion beyond consideration of the elegiac impulse in
romanticism to explore more widely how romantic models of mourning influenced a later generation
of poets. Mark Sandy in Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning (2013) explores how grief and
mourning were negotiated by a range of romantic poets who influenced how later poets, such as
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and W.B. Yeats, articulated feelings of loss. Paul Westover
in Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860 (2012) examines how the graves of the
literary dead became objects of pilgrimage, which generated a shared literary culture that was
grounded in honoring the dead. How the dead might be represented in a largely, although not
exclusively, Gothic prose tradition provides a helpful way of rethinking the place of the dead in the
culture of the long nineteenth century.
Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016. https://networks.hnet.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothic
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It might seem obvious to assert that the Gothic has an
interest in the death drive, but a close exploration
of the connection between death and the Gothic
indicates a rather different picture. In Gothic Death
1740-1914: A Literary History, I argue that graveyard
poetry, which was a precursor to the late eighteenthcentury Gothic, suggests that death should not
necessarily be regarded as a topic of “horror.” Edward
Young, for example, in Night Thoughts (1742-45)
emphasized the ability to perceive our place within a
divine cosmos in which death merely functions as a
moment of transition to a spiritual realm. Young took
this further in “Conjectures on Original Composition”
(1759) in which he suggested a link between death and
creativity, as both require an imaginative engagement
with divine inspiration. Eighteenth-century critics, such
as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, claimed that the
dead inspire empathy in the living as we come to pity
their plight. Death, in other words, does not function as
a source of horror and this is also clear from how death is represented in a number of Gothic texts as
a symbolic force that requires an imaginative act of interpretation. Indeed, we might say that in the
eighteenth century death in the Gothic was repeatedly associated with acts of creativity, while in the
later nineteenth century death became transformed into a topic requiring scientific scrutiny. The text
that bridges this moment is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
In the 1831 preface to Frankenstein Shelley dwelled on the
pressure she was under to create a story after the famous
ghost story reading competition at the Villa Diodati in the
summer of 1816. She recalled that she was asked, “‘Have
you thought of a story?’… and each morning I was forced to
reply with a mortifying negative,” until she had a dream in
which:
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together, I saw the hideous
Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016. https://networks.hnet.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothic
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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phantasm of a man stretched out, and then … show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.
This nightmare vision indicates the novel was, if we take Mary at her word, inspired by an image of
death. Literary creativity, in this instance, was thus rooted within a vision of the dead. The creature’s
construction was also, within the novel, repeatedly represented as a creative act. The creature
becomes like a literary text who is assembled from various sources. Significantly the novel indicates
that the creature is not just assembled from body parts, but he is also intellectually assembled by
reading lessons grounded in some of the big books of the Western tradition, including Marquis de
Volney’s Ruin of Empires (1791), Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (ca. 120), Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s The
Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and perhaps most important John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674).
The creature is therefore a bookish composite whose construction implicates romantic conceptions of
the creative imagination, meaning that Victor Frankenstein is cast as a scientist who resembles an
author (and Victor’s name is telling in that regard, as it was the nickname of Mary’s husband Percy
Shelley).
Frankenstein can be read as the culmination of a romantic Gothic
tradition, which had suggested that representations of death, and
the moods associated with it, depended on acts of creativity. Ann
Radcliffe, for example, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) invoked
a muse of melancholy “To paint the wild romantic dream, / That
meets the poet’s musing eye” to summon a mood, a process that
tacitly grants a literary provenance to feelings of
melancholy. Frankenstein takes this one step further by also
emphasizing the important role of the reader (not just the writer).
The creature is, after all, a reader. The text of the novel also
purports to be a letter, written up by Robert Walton who is sending
it to his sister. Frankenstein thus bridges a historic development in
representations of death in the Gothic as it brings together images
of writing (Mary’s agonized account of artistic inspiration in the
1831 preface, and how that is worked through into the novel) with
issues of reading. This shift to the reader in relation to death is
illustrated by the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe’s tales “Mesmeric Revelation" (1844) and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845) explore
death-like states through a quasi-scientific analysis that Poe was to elaborate in his long
essay Eureka (1848). Death in Poe, in keeping with the earlier Gothic tradition, is really about
something else as the tales focus on the limitations of a scientific evaluation of death. Death is, again,
not a source of obvious horror (although the dead body may be) but rather an object for scientific
scrutiny. Eureka suggests that death might not be the end, as scientifically considered atomic life
cannot be destroyed, and may even be positively recomposed in some form of physics-sanctioned
resurrection. The fin-de-siècle Gothic also construes death as a problem of interpretation and this is
clear in how death is represented in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016. https://networks.hnet.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothic
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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In Dracula the key scene is in the graveyard at Whitby where
the aging Mr. Swales tells Mina Harker that, “‘There’s
something in that wind … that sounds, and looks, and tastes,
and smells like death.’” This intimation that Count Dracula is on
his way indicates that the Count is the personification of death
who is about to arrive in Whitby, a place associated with the Jet
industry which produced funerary jewellery. Decoding the
Count becomes, at a symbolic level, a way of explaining away
death. Dracula may seem to represent death as Gothic, but in
reality the novel suggests that what is horrific is that the dead
won’t stay dead. Death is a release in Dracula, which is clear
from the moments of peace that flicker across the faces of the
staked vampires.
The dead do not in the end function as sources of horror in the Gothic. They become a device through
which to explore ideas about the creative imagination, or to explore the limitations of scientific
analysis, or to suggest that there is ultimately a fate worse than death.
Recommended Readings
Davison, Carol Margret. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1764-1824. Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 2009.
Killen, Jarlath. History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914. Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
2009.
Sandy, Mark. Romanticism, Memory, and Mourning. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013.
Smith, Andrew and William Hughes, eds. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Westover, Paul. Necromanticism: Travelling to Meet the Dead, 1750-1860. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012.
Wright, Angela and Dale Townshend, eds. The Romantic Gothic: An Edinburgh
Companion . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016. https://networks.hnet.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothic
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Citation: Andrew Smith. Book Channel Essay: Death and the Gothic. The H-Net Book Channel. 12-16-2016. https://networks.hnet.org/node/1883/pages/155176/book-channel-essay-death-and-gothic
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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