The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. Dorothy Scarborough
clank of more than mortal armor was heard behind. … The walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the center of the ruins. “Behold the true heir of Alfonso!” said the vision.
This reminds one of an incident in F. Marion Crawford’s Mr. Isaacs, where the Indian magician expands to awful size, miraculously draws down a mist and wraps it round him as a cloak. Zofloya is frequently spoken of as immense, and it is said that “common objects seem to sink in his presence.” In the last scene the wicked Victoria sees the Moor change from a handsome youth to a fierce gigantic figure. A diabolic apparition eight or nine feet high pursues a monk,[27] and the knight[28] engages in combat with a dæmonic giant who slays him. The devil in The Monk is represented as being of enormous stature, and much of the horror excited by the man-monster that Frankenstein created arises from the creature’s superhuman size. In most cases gigantism connotes evil power and rouses a supernatural awe in the beholder. The giant is an Oriental figure and appears in Vathek, along with genii, dwarfs, and kindred personages, but the Gothic giant has more diabolism than the mere Oriental original. He seems to fade out from fiction, appearing only occasionally in later stories, while he has practically no place in the drama, owing doubtless to the difficulties of stage presentation.
Insanity as contributing to the effect of supernaturalism affords many gruesome studies in psychiatry. Madness seems a special curse of the gods or torment from the devil and various instances of its use occur in Gothic fiction. The devil in Zofloya, at Victoria’s request, gives Henrique an enchanted drug which renders him temporarily insane, during which time he marries Victoria, imagining her to be Lilla whom he loves. When he awakes to the realization of what he has done, real madness drives him to suicide. In The Castle of Caithness the wicked misanthrope goes mad from remorse. He imagines that the different ones he has murdered are hurling him into the pit of hell, until, in a maniac frenzy, he dashes his brains out against the prison walls. In Ethelwina the father who has sold his daughter to dishonor flies shrieking in madness through the corridors of the dungeon to escape the sight of his child’s accusing specter. Poor Nanny in Hogg’s Brownie of Bodbeck is described as having “a beam of wild delight in her eye, the joy of madness.” She sings wild, unearthly songs and talks deliriously of incomprehensible things, of devilish struggles.
Melmoth uses the idea with special effectiveness. The insanity of the young husband whose bride is mysteriously slain on their wedding day by the supernatural power accompanying Melmoth, may be compared with the madness of the wife in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor. Maturin also shows us a scene in a mad-house, where a sane man, Stanton, is confined, whom Melmoth visits to offer exchange of destinies. Melmoth taunts him cruelly with his hopeless situation and prophecies that he, too, will go mad from despair. We hear Stanton’s wild cry, echoed by a hundred yells like those of demons, but the others are stilled when the mad mother begins her lamentation—the mother who has lost husband, home, children, reason, all, in the great London fire. At her appalling shrieks all other voices are hushed. Another impressive figure in the mad-house is the preacher who thinks himself a demon and alternately prays and blasphemes the Lord.
Charles Brockden Brown rivals Maturin in his terrible use of insanity for supernatural effect. The demented murderer in Edgar Huntley gives an impression of mystery and awe that is unusual, while Wieland with its religious mania produced by diabolic ventriloquism is even more impressive. Brown knew the effect of mystery and dread on the human mind and by slow, cumulative suggestion he makes us feel a creeping awe that the unwieldy machinery of pure Gothicism never could achieve. In studies of the morbid mentality he has few equals. For psychologic subtlety, for haunting horror, what is a crashing helmet or a dismembered ghost compared with Brown’s Wieland? What are the rackings of monkish vindictiveness when set against the agonies of an unbalanced mind turned in upon itself? What exterior torture could so appeal to our sympathies as Wieland’s despair, when, racked with religious mania, he feels the overwhelming conviction that the voice of God—which is but the fiendish trick of a ventriloquist—is calling him to murder his wife and children as a sacrifice to Deity? Such a tragedy of dethroned reason is intolerably powerful; the dark labyrinths of insanity, the gloom-haunted passages of the human mind, are more terrible to traverse than the midnight windings of Gothic dungeons. We feel that here is a man who is real, who is human, and suffering the extremity of anguish.
Perhaps the most hideous aspect of insanity in the terror novel is that of the lycanthrope in The Albigenses. The tragic wolf-man imagines himself to be a mad wolf and cowers in his lair, glaring with gleaming, awful eyes at all who approach him, gnawing at a human head snatched from the graveyard. There are various other uses of insanity in the novel of the period, but these will serve to illustrate. The relation between insanity and the supernatural has been marked in later literature.
The use of portents is a distinct characteristic of the horror romance. Calamity is generally preceded by some sign of the supernatural influence at work, some presentment of dread. Crime and catastrophe are forefelt by premonition of woe and accompaniment of horror. In The Accusing Spirit supernatural thunder heralds the discovery of the corpse in its winding-sheet, and the monk says, “Yes, some dread discovery is at hand. These phenomena are miraculous; when the common laws of nature are violated, the awful portents are not sent in vain.” In The Romance of the Castle, an anonymous story, a woman hears the clock strike two and announces that she will be dead at three.
This night an awful messenger sent from that dread tribunal from whose power there is no appeal, by signs terrific foretold my fate approached—foretold my final moment. “Catherine, behold!” was all that issued from the specter’s lips, but in its hand it held a scroll which fixed my irrevocable doom, in letters which fascinated while they appalled my sight.
She keeps her appointment promptly. Her experience might be compared with the vision which revealed his date of death to Amos Judd in James Mitchell’s novel of that name, and to the foreknowledge in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil.
In The Spirit of the Castle,[29] the ghost of the old marquis knocks three times on the door preceding the arrival of the heir, and a black raven flies away as he enters. At the approach of the true heir to the estate from which he has been kept by fraud in The Old English Baron, the doors of the ancient castle fly open, upon which the servants cry, “The doors open of themselves to receive their master!” When Walpole’s usurping Manfred sees the plumage on the miraculous casque shaken in concert with the brazen trumpet, he exclaims, “What mean these portents? If I have offended——” At this point the plumes are shaken still more strenuously, and the helmet is equally agitated when the great sword leaps in. Manfred cries to the apparition, “If thou art a true knight, thou wilt scorn to employ sorcery to carry thy power. If these omens be from heaven or hell, Manfred trusts to righteousness to protect his cause.” But the omens bring bad luck to Manfred.
There is much use of portent in Melmoth. The specter of the Wanderer appearing just before the old man’s death predicts the spiritual doom of the dying. As the old uncle is almost breathing his last, he cries out, “What the devil brings you here?” at which the servants cross themselves and cry, “The devil in his mouth!” Melmoth, the Wanderer, is a walking portent of evil, for the priest is unable to pray in his presence, the communion bread turns viperous when he is there and the priest falls dead in the attempt to exorcise the fiendish power. Mysterious strains of music sound as heralds of disaster in several Gothic novels, as[30] where the inexplicable strains are heard only by the bride and groom preceding the strange tragedy that befalls them.
At the approach of a supernatural visitant in the terror novel the fire always burns blue—where there is a fire, and the great hearth usually affords ample opportunity for such portentous blaze. The thermometer itself tends to take a downward path when a ghost draws near. The three drops of blood shed from the statue’s nose in Otranto, while ridiculed by the critics, are meant simply as a portent of evil. Prof. William Lyon Phelps points out[31] that the idea did not originate with Walpole, but was familiar as a superstition regarding premonition of ill, as referred to in Dryden’s Amboyna, IV., 1. This instance may be compared with the much more skillfully handled omens in later drama, as Maeterlinck’s and Ibsen’s, particularly in The Emperor and Galilean. Various other portents of ill appear in Gothic fiction.[32]
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