Gothic Machine: Textualities, Pre-cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture, 1670-1910

GOTHIC MACHINE

SERIES PREFACE

Gothic Literary Studies is dedicated to publishing groundbreaking scholarship on Gothic in literature and film. The Gothic, which has been subjected to a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, is a form which plays an important role in our understanding of literary, intellectual and cultural histories. The series seeks to promote challenging and innovative approaches to Gothic which question any aspect of the Gothic tradition or perceived critical orthodoxy. Volumes in the series explore how issues such as gender, religion, nation and sexuality have shaped our view of the Gothic tradition. Both academically rigorous and informed by the latest developments in critical theory, the series provides an important focus for scholastic developments in Gothic studies, literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory. The series will be of interest to students of all levels and to scholars and teachers of the Gothic and literary and cultural histories.

SERIES EDITORS

Andrew Smith, University of Glamorgan

Benjamin F. Fisher, University of Mississippi

EDITORIAL BOARD

Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts

Richard Fusco, St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia

David Punter, University of Bristol

Chris Baldick, University of London

Angela Wright, University of Sheffield

Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona

Gothic Machine

Textualities, Pre-Cinematic Media and Film in Popular Visual Culture

1670–1910

David J. Jones

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

CARDIFF

2011

© David J. Jones, 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

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British Library CIP Data

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

ISBN    978-0-7083-2407-3

e-ISBN  978-1-78316-114-0

The right of David J. Jones to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

C

ONTENTS

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Introduction

1 Memento Mori, Griendel and the Forerunners, Schröpfer and Schiller: German Popular Visual Culture 1670–1800. Friedrich Schiller’s Der Geisterseher/The Ghost-Seer, Sturm und Drang and Magic-Lantern Shows

2 Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, the Marquis de Sade and Inter-Medial Influence: The Publishers, Readership, Visual Spectacle and the Staging of Gothic 1790–1830

3 Etienne-Gaspard Robertson’s Gothic Fantasmagorie and E. T. A. Hoffmann

4 Gothic Renewal and Bifurcation: Sheridan Le Fanu, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Strange Tale, Charles Dickens, Pepper’s Ghost and Etienne-Jules Marey. The Daguerreotype and Diablerie in French Visual Media

5 ‘In or around the Winter, 1895’: From the Prelude to Cinema Proper. French Gothic Symbolism, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, J.-K. Huysmans, the féeries of Georges Méliès and Alice Guy Blaché’s Esmeralda

6 ‘Another Kind of Showman’: Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Robert Paul, Albert Smith and Film’s First Frankenstein. Anglo-American Gothic in the Age of the First Films 1895–1910

7 Conclusion: French Extremity

Notes

Bibliography

A

CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Portions of this study have appeared elsewhere and I am pleased to be able to include them here. Sections of chapter 3 have appeared as David Annwn, ‘Returning to fear: new discoveries in Robertson’s Fantasmagoria’, The New Magic Lantern, 10/4 (autumn 2008). Two sections of chapter 4 have appeared as ‘Dazzling ghostland: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Phantasmagoria’, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 6 (July 2009) and ‘The gnome’s lighted scrolls: consumerism and pre-cinematic visual technologies in The Mystery of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, Journal of Stevenson Studies, 7 (November 2010). My thanks to the editors.

My thanks also to Fabienne Poupon, Lester Smith, Howard Wood, Kristy Davis, Mervyn Heard, Michael Kilgarriff and Helen Smith.

I

LLUSTRATIONS

1 Overlay of phantasmagoria on detail of d’Orbay’s floorplan

2 View northwards to the north-eastern corner of the cloisters: Fantasmagorie

3 View looking to eastern wall of cabinet de physique: Fantasmagorie

4 Advertisement for Walker’s Patent toy version of Pepper’s Ghost Show, Lester Smith collection

5 Mina’s focalization, close-up still 1: Dracula’s Diorama

For Lesley and my family

Introduction

Diorama: A mode of scenic representation in which a picture, some portions of which are translucent, is viewed through an aperture, the sides of which are continued towards the picture; the light, which is thrown upon the picture from the roof, may be diminished or increased at pleasure, so as to represent the change from sunshine to cloudy weather etc.¹

Valdine Clemens writes that in keeping ‘with the Gothic practice of retrieving psychically archaic material for the purpose of cultural commentary, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) draws upon medieval and folk traditions of vampirism. Dracula’, she continues, referring to the character, ‘signifies a violent return of buried life’.²

When we read the description of the famous count’s arrival on British shores we also note a feature which, at first glance, seems to signify the return of an outmoded way of seeing, a spectacle of optical illusion:

There was a bright full moon, with heavy black, driving clouds, which threw the whole scene into a fleeting diorama of light and shade as they sailed across. For a moment or two I could see nothing, as the shadow of a cloud obscured St Mary’s Church and all around it … Whatever my expectation was, it was not disappointed, for there, on our favourite seat, the silver light of the moon struck a half-reclining figure, snowy white. The coming of the cloud was too quick for me to see much, for shadow shut down on light almost immediately, but it seemed to me as though something dark stood behind the seat where the white figure shone, and bent over it.³

This is, of course, the first view the reader is given of Dracula in England, focalized through the troubled gaze of Mina Murray. The moon shining on cloud throws the perceived scene ‘into a fleeting diorama’ and not, alternatively, into the likeness of one. Any metaphoricity of the words here is, at best, glancing.

Since it has been generally concluded that the action of the novel takes place in the late 1880s, we might pause to ask ourselves why the scene alongside the church reminds this young trainee school­teacher, an enthusiastic follower of the ‘New Woman’ ideal, of a diorama, a type of entertainment which had enjoyed its heyday more than forty years previously. Moreover, why should such a dramatic moment in a novel published in the early years of cinema be visual­ized in terms of a pre-cinematic optical entertainment at all?

The question is given added emphasis when we remember that elsewhere, Bram Stoker had stressed his characters’ reliance upon up-to-date fin-de-siècle technologies. Maud Ellmann has written of the author’s fascination with new and cutting-edge machines, which manifests itself in repeated usage of typewriters in the novel and also embraces innovations like stenography, telegraphy, phonology and the Kodak camera.⁴

There was certainly nothing new in a writer using images of a diorama to imply, for example, a retrospective comparison of time-schemes or a glimmering, luminous subject. George Eliot employed dioramic changes to expose Bulstrode’s egotistical visualization of himself in Middlemarch (1874). In The Return of the Native (1878), Thomas Hardy calls the candle-lit images of a card game reflected in the player’s eyes ‘a complete diorama’.⁵

So Stoker’s was far from an isolated textual citation of this optical display, yet we might wonder why such references persisted so vividly into the age of cinema proper. It is when we consider the work of that purveyor of mid-nineteenth-century Gothic Sheridan Le Fanu’s oeuvre that we begin to perceive the closest links between a wide range of pre-cinematic technological media and the Gothic. His novels and short stories cite those kindred optical technologies of the magic lantern, the diorama and the phantasmagoria more than the work of any other writer in English during the period. As this study will explore, this kind of reference also occurs in the work of Dickens, R. L. Stevenson and E. T. A. Hoffmann and increases exponentially with the degree to which their work involves Gothic tensions.

It seems clear, then, that Stoker was employing well-established uncanny associations linking Gothic horror literary production and optical technologies when he made Mina’s first view of Dracula a dioramic scenario.⁶ Even before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) appeared with its coded references to ‘lantern-of-fear’ shows, and subsequent citations of phantasmagoria and diorama in The Last Man (1826), the Gothic novel was already inextricably linked with these technologies.

Perhaps the first prominent critic to perceive such a link was that most famous author of trangressively violent tales: in reviewing Gothic novels in 1800, the erstwhile Marquis and at that time Citizen de Sade wrote that:

Perhaps at this point we ought to analyse these new novels in which sorcery and phantasmagoria constitute practically the entire merit … foremost among which I would place The Monk, which is superior in all respects to the strange flights of Mrs Radcliffe’s brilliant imagination.⁷

Sade associates these works by British writers with E.-G. Robertson’s lantern-of-fear show which was currently drawing crowds at the Capuchin convent in Paris. For Sade, the work of the two major exponents of Gothic already contained and, in fact, was synonymous with the phantasmagoria. It is an extraordinary assertion but a well-founded one because, as Sade probably knew, a slide of the ‘Bleeding Nun’ from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), as well as other Gothic images, were already in use at the convent phantasmagoria; Lewis’s novel was, in turn, heavily dependent on Sade’s own terrifying tales of the cloister, and Robertson’s show quoted from a German roman involving spectral lantern illusion. Thus a complex mesh of intense trans-medial energies was already in operation by the time Sade made his observation.

This perception of the trans-medial links between Gothic technologies – texts, lantern shows, plays and spectacles – was also widespread in English circles. A few years later, in her retrospective overview of the 1790s, Hester Piozzi wrote:

Science herself suffers from revolutions; and taste no longer classical, cried out for German plays and novels of a new sort, filled with what the Parisians call … phantasmagoria …⁸

Over the same period, the word ‘Gothic’ was also subject to lexical transference. Alfred E. Longueil says that, around 1800, the ‘Gothic romance’ became associated with the ‘romance of the supernatural’ and the term ‘Gothic’ became linked with ‘grotesque, ghastly and violently superhuman’ qualities.⁹ Dale Townshend writes that, as early as the 1740s, ‘Gothic is already a synonym for a native English tradition of sublime supernaturalism’.¹⁰ What is certain is that, over the 1790s, the interest in dark and horrifying visions of human exist­ence intensified over a range of associated media.

In his 1811 Introduction to The Castle of Otranto, Walter Scott expressed his preference for Walpole’s Gothic romances over those of Ann Radcliffe by stating his disapproval of the latter’s ‘explanation’ of phantoms: ‘by referring those prodigies to the operation of fulminat­ing powder, combined mirrors, magic lanthorns, trap-doors, speaking trumpets, and such like apparatus of German phantasmagoria …’.¹¹

It is a statement which ravels together different technologies and, it is to be noted, Scott identifies the phantasmagoria exclusively with the mechanically supplied illusion of supernatural agency in novels, whereas Sade uses the term to refer to both Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’s works, books then involving counterfeit ghosts which could be explained away, but also the satanic presences of The Monk which could not. At once, Scott lists ‘magic lanthorns’ as an accepted part of the literary apparatus of a type of Gothic novel, but also expresses irritation with the pressure en vogue to bow to the inclusion of such formula.

The perception that the term ‘Gothic’ now included an array of different media – novels, plays, poetry, paintings, opera and optical technologies – seems to have been commonplace during the years 1800–30, but also persisted later into the century, to Le Fanu’s work, and on again, at least into the age of Stoker’s diorama metaphor. In Clemens’s terms, Gothic ‘retrieves’ the archaic; it does so because, as this study will explore, it can be defined, in dialectical terms, as a machine and part of the function of this machine is retrieval. The Gothic also carries archaic forms forwards because, as I discuss below, they were originally part of the assemblage which constituted the formative identity of this hybrid genre before a new stage of tech­nological fusion took place circa 1800.

Jerrold E. Hogle identifies such a cultural diffusion occurring up to a century later: ‘The 1900s finally saw the Gothic expand across the widest range in history, into films, myriad ghost stories, a vast strand of women’s romance novels …’.¹² Julia M. Wright similarly sees the Gothic as migrating exclusively and straight from textualities to film: ‘The gothic, a pan-media mode that migrated from novels to drama and poetry and then to film and television, has a long history of engaging the binary construction of gender and race as well as class’.¹³ Yet the Gothic had haunted the devices of moving images, the optical media, from their very inception, and as early as 1800 the term encapsulated an intricately interrelated network of evolving media and also included those complex synergies which linked and held these in tension.

Any appreciation of this complex nexus, though very common in the nineteenth century, was, until very recently, commonly omitted from Gothic theory. Even in terms of recent studies, there is a tendency to focus exclusively upon literature and drama. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles’s Gothic Documents (2000) omits any mention of Gothic optical media even though Fitzball’s ghost-play The Flying Dutchman (1826) cited therein actually featured phantasmagoric effects onstage and the effects in Schiller’s novel Der Geisterseher/ The Ghost-Seer stem from a close knowledge of the lantern-of-fear. Despite resorting to visual tropes such as ‘a variety of spatial forms … Mirror shifts in the ideological fabric’ to describe Horace Walpole’s method, magic lanterns do not merit an appearance in the index of Dani Cavallaro’s The Gothic Vision (2002) – its title, in the context of this omission, perhaps the oddest misnomer of all.¹⁴

Yet paradoxically, over the same period, as the wealth of evidence linking Gothic texts inextricably with visual technology has become evident, the tide has turned and the confidence of Catherine Spooner’s words is symptomatic of this change in critical perception:

Gothic has always, of course, been associated with the popular. From the magic lantern shows of the eighteenth century, through the stage melodramas and ‘penny dreadfuls’ of the nineteenth century, to the great black and white movies produced by Universal Studios between the 1920s and 1940s, Gothic has always been difficult to confine within narrow definitions.¹⁵

In these words, there is no question: the eighteenth-century magic lantern shows were Gothic in the sense that the novels of Radcliffe and Lewis were; indeed, for Spooner, they are amongst that array of the oldest manifestations of the Gothic as Horace Walpole used the word.

Miles agrees with Spooner’s emphasis on ‘the popular’ nature of these entertainments as one of the reasons for their grouping under the same generic title, but he places their coalescence later in the eighteenth century: ‘Whether as popular theatre, Minerva romances or supernatural ballads, Gothic was popular – and soon mass – entertainment. Despite differences in genre the Gothic tended to be overtly visual’.¹⁶ It is a judgement implicitly supported by the famous antiquarian painter of lantern slides, H. M. J. Underhill, who writes that:

Lantern shows go back as far as the 17th century and have their roots in the Renaissance science of optics. By the late 18th century the lantern was being used to entertain and shock, in the ghost-raising optical tricks of the gothic Phantasmagoria.¹⁷

It is no accident of lexical slippage then that Robertson’s lantern show is claimed for the Gothic. It has become increasingly apparent to a wide range of scholars of early visual media – Barbara Maria Stafford, Tom Gunning, Robert Miles, Terry Castle and Marina Warner amongst others – that the magic-lantern shows and phantasma­goria are intimately and inseparably linked with the evolution of Gothic writing. Indeed, Robert Miles claims: ‘The links between the Gothic and the rise of visual technology are at once deep and seemingly fortuitous’.¹⁸ He cites the example of Cagliostro, who with ‘his mediums, crystal balls, and spectral lighting’ provided the model for Schiller’s ‘Sicilian’ from The Ghost-Seer. This roving magician’s friendship with Philip James de Loutherbourg, a gifted set designer specializing in ‘necromantic light effects’ and ‘preternatural sounds’, also inspired William Beckford to write Vathek. Cagliostro’s later sufferings at the hands of the Inquisition gave rise to two import­ant Gothic romances from the late 1790s, Radcliffe’s The Italian and Godwin’s St Leon.¹⁹

In fact, on closer scrutiny, it is clear that the cultural complexity of these developments is actually far more exciting, the levels of interchange and synergy far more intense and multivalent than has been previously, even recently, noted. One could add to Miles’s examples above that E.-G. Robertson’s prologue to his Fantasmagorie quotes directly from Friedrich von Schiller’s Die Geisterseher/The Ghost-Seer (1789). Both Mary Shelley’s and Polidori’s work use ideas from the French-inspired tales translated from the German, Fantasma­goriana (1812), and the former author’s Frankenstein (1818) cites a ‘magic scene’ from lantern shows.²⁰ A character in Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) sees that ‘futurity, like a dark image in a phantasmagoria, came nearer and more near, till it clasped the whole earth in its shadow’ and we remember Dracula’s diorama in this context.²¹ Another example of optical-literary synergy might be that glimpsed between ‘The Phantasmagoria, or Wonderful Display of Optical Illusions’ (1801) and Austen’s parodies of Gothic fiction in Northanger Abbey.

In the light of such evidence, Miles asks: ‘to what extent can the Gothic’s numerous filiations with the phantasmagoria be characterised as a deep-structural affinity with the century’s emerging visual tech­nologies?’²² With a view to the assembled evidence, it is to my mind an unavoidable question; my initial answer is that this characterization of deep affinity is itself unavoidable. I would go much further in asserting that the term ‘Gothic’, as we know and inherit it, is the recurrent coalescence and subsequent collective operation of these media.

Yet how did this process of crossover and trans-medial synergy begin and how were these ideas transmitted and encoded in new technological advances through the decades of the nineteenth century? It is part of the remit of this study to explore such questions. It might be straightforward enough, on one level at least, to advance that those optical marvels created to inspire horror in the age of the Gothic Revival might be called Gothic machines. To what extent can the evolving genre, that which we call ‘Gothic’, itself be character­ized as a machine?

In many respects, a consideration of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson’s phantasmal lantern show in the Paris Capuchin convent in 1799 goes a long way towards answering that question. This spectacle, and the ways in which critics have perceived it, stand at the centre of this study. In her fine essay ‘Revealing technologies/magic domains’, Barbara Maria Stafford writes of the complex ways in which Robertson’s shows referenced and interacted with the literary productions of William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley.²³ That, as we shall see, is only the tip of the iceberg.

Gothic: the wider scene

The increasing quantity and intensity of literary and visual synergy had been apparent as the eighteenth century progressed. The com­mercial practice of using ‘spin-offs’ from novels had been established for twenty years by the time The Castle of Otranto (1764) appeared. The success of popular romances of sensibility initiated by Richardson’s bestselling Pamela (1740) had been spectacular and had created a fashion for consumer item ‘link-ins’:

[In] the series of prints by Joseph Highmore … Some items, ‘fans and straw hats’, allowed female readers to express their identification with the heroine in very public, tangible ways. Upscale, ‘fashionable ladies displayed copies in public places, and held fans painted with pictures of its best-loved scenes. Pamela became a play, an opera, even a waxwork’. It would be read from the pulpit.²⁴

So, while it would be fallacious to project the marketing concepts and jargon of our own age – those familiar notions of revenue streams, tie-ins, crossovers and marketing cues – retrospectively in toto into the late eighteenth century, it is clear that by the 1760s, patterns of appropriation, both commercial adaptation and artistic ‘cross-pollination’, were very well established. Across Europe, there was already a venerable commerce in recasting and translating novels into plays, as in the case of Henry Fielding’s The Mock Doctor: or The Dumb Lady Cur’d (1732) which was an adaptation of Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui (1666). Paintings treated literary subjects and fictional characters; portraitists rendered actors both in and out of role. Lessing’s Laocoön (1766) negotiated the relationships between painting as a synchronic, visual phenomenon and poetry as a dia­chronic ‘art of the ear’, the respective arts existing ‘as two equitable and friendly neighbours’.²⁵ This trans-medial porousness was suc­cessively coded aesthetically, indeed fashionably, into the communities of production as well as sites of outlet and dissemination, and a ready market in broadsides, squibs and parodic sideshows made sure that the speaker of last night’s grand monologue at, for example, the Haymarket Theatre in London might be lampooned in the next day’s street-ballad, farcical dance or in one of Matthew Darly’s famous caricatures.

In writing of twentieth-century communication networks, Herman and Chomsky have focused on ‘structural factors of the mass media’, including ‘ownership and control, dependence on other major fund­ing sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media’.²⁶ Of course, in terms of print and visual cultures, if we extrapolate back into the eighteenth century, we encounter diverse spectra of patronage, ownership and control in terms of presses, reviewers, periodicals, theatres, galleries and the shows of often highly mobile groups of players, showmen and lantern entertainers. The vista of trans-medial entertainment comprised a vast and complex panoply of disparate cultural milieus, all the way from penny broad­sides to large publishing houses, from itinerant peepshows to extrava­gant theatrical spectacles.

We know that, emerging from such a cultural scape, the Gothic at its inception designated an often unstable but also hybrid and resilient medium, and, as such, stretched the bounds of any sense of a pre-established literary genre. It is partly for these reasons that Robert Miles, in rounding off his review of terror literature from the 1790s with a Poundian phrase, writes that ‘the Gothic follows the first law of genre to deviate and make it new’.²⁷ One notes that, within this given period, the ‘making new’ accelerates dramatically.

Additionally, as Michael Gamer has written, the Gothic proved a particularly adaptive genre, especially in a context where ‘genres rarely die out because, as they become more institutionalized, they simply change their position within cultural systems they occupy, or feed and disperse themselves into other forms’.²⁸

Some Marxist critics look for trans-medial homologies, ‘patterns and shifts that replicate themselves across fields’.²⁹ One need only note how, for example, a figure like the biblical Witch of Endor famously pictured in Salvatore Rosa’s painting recurs not just in paintings by William Blake and Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), but also in Robertson’s phantasmagoria, to see such repli­cation in action; later the biblical Witch would be reproduced, with phantasmagoric associations intact (hinting at the figure’s mode of transmission), in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas.³⁰ The search for homologies in such a context is not a difficult one. Crudely put,