The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. Dorothy Scarborough
the sensation, common in nightmares, of feeling yourself falling from immeasurable height. The same thrill of suspense is communicated by the climax in Lewis’s and Mrs. Dacre’s Gothic novels, where the devil takes guilty mortals to the mountain top and hurls them down, down. The horrible potentialities of shadows suggested frequently in dreams is illustrated by Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story where the accusing spirit comes back as a haunting shadow on the wall, rather than as an ordinary ghost, tormenting the living brother till his shadow also appears, a portent of his death.[70] The awful grip of causeless horror, of nameless fear which assails one so often in nightmares is represented in The Red Room,[71] where black Fear, the Power of Darkness, haunts the room rather than any personal spirit. It is disembodied horror itself. Wilkie Collins illustrates the presaging vision of approaching disaster in The Dream Woman. The nightmare horror of supernaturalism is nowhere better shown than in Maupassant’s La Horla where the sleeper wakes with a sense of leaden weight upon his breast, and knows that night after night some dreadful presence is shut in with him, invisible yet crushing the life out of him and driving him mad.
The nightmare motifs are present to a remarkable degree in Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters, or the House and the Brain. There we have the gigantism of the menacing Thing, the supernatural power given to inanimate objects, the ghostly chill, the darkness, and the intolerable oppression of a nameless evil thing beside one. Vampirism might easily be an outcome of dreams, since based on a physical sensation of pricking at the throat, combined with debility caused by weakness, which could be attributed to loss of blood from the ravages of vampires. F. Marion Crawford’s story, For the Blood Is the Life, is more closely related to dreams than most of the type, though probably Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most horrible.
The curious side of supernaturalism as related to dreams is illustrated by The Dream Gown of the Japanese Ambassador,[72] and the more beautiful by Simeon Solomon’s Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep. Mary Wilkins Freeman has a remarkable short story, The Hall Bedroom, which is one of the best illustrations of the use of dream imagery and impressions. Here the effects are alluring and beautiful, with the horror kept in the background, but perhaps the more effective because of the artistic restraint. Odors, sights, sounds, feelings, are all raised to an intensity of sensuous, slumbrous enjoyment, all subliminated above the mortal. The description of the river in the picture, on which the young man floats away to dreamy death, similar to the Japanese story referred to by Hearn, helps to give the impression of infinity that comes only in dreams. Algernon Blackwood in numerous stories not only uses the elements of dreams and nightmares but explicitly calls attention to the fact. Dream supernaturalism is employed in Barry Pain’s stories, in Arthur Machen’s volume,[73] and in many others. Freud’s theory of dreams as the invariable result of past experiences or unconscious desires has not been stressed in fiction, though doubtless it will have its inning presently. A. Conan Doyle’s The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange is an amusing story of the relation of definite wishes and dreams of the ghostly.
These are some of the sources from which the later writers of occultism have drawn their plots. They represent a distinct advance over the Gothic and earlier supernaturalism in materials, for the modern story has gained the new elements without loss of the old. The ghostly fiction of to-day has access to the animistic or classical or medieval themes, yet has the unlimited province of present thought to furnish additional inspiration. There never was a time when thinking along general lines was more spontaneously reflected in fiction than now, and supernatural literature claims all regions for its own. Like every other phase of man’s thought, ghostly fiction shows the increasing complexity of form and matter, the wealth of added material and abounding richness of style, the fine subtleties that only modernity can give.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.