It is in the hands of nineteenth-century Gothic writers that mutual fertilization between old folk tales and time-worn Gothic trappings is made possible. Clive Bloom, in Gothic
Horror, distinguishes horror and Gothic fiction by pointing out their difference in functions.
While Gothic fiction originates as an aesthetic outlook, horror exists for the purpose of effect:
“Horror is the usual but not necessarily main ingredient of gothic fiction and most popular gothic fiction is determined in its plotting by the need for horror and sensation” (Bloom,
Gothic 2). Tales of horror are not always narrated with artistic sophistication. Some stories
might be told with no other intention than to scare readers. Therefore, storytellers do not bother to render the tales artistic since it does not always require artistry to create the effect of horror. Starkly told stories can be as scary as, or even scarier than, stories told in a more literary form in which characters, symbols, and themes are carefully wrought to endow the tales with symbolic import. In Danse Macabre, King cites a classic horror story “The Story of the Hook” as an example of brutal violence simply sketched in order to “scare the shit of little kids after the sun goes down” (34). Simple as it is, “The Story of the Hook” is found similar“in its plot and construction” to Flannery O’Connor’s more intricately composed story “A Goodman Is Hard to Find” (King, Danse 33). While the story of the Hook highlights its shocking impact on readers, a structurally similar story of escaped criminals going on a
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killing spree is complicated in O’Connor’s hands to the effect that the tale is equipped with means to probe into the human condition or to explore multiple problems—being confronted by dangerous runaway criminals is only one of them which the author is probably least concerned about—of life. O’Connor’s story differs aesthetically from the story of the Hook, which “offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice” and does not “aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit” (King, Danse 33). What O’Connor does with her story is not unlike what Gothic writers have attempted to do by means of their supernatural tales. According to Bloom’s distinction between Gothic and horror fiction, Gothic writers employ supernatural elements to investigate human nature whereas horror fiction authors are more absorbed in depicting horror—whose nature is presumed inexplicable—than explaining it: “If the gothic is concerned with the manipulation and exploration of feeling (human nature) then horror is more closely concerned with the manipulation of effect” (Gothic 11). Since effect is held to be the province of horror writers, the element of horror in Gothic fiction is consequently attributed to the need for sensationalism.
While horror contributes to Gothic fiction’s popular appeal, Gothic elements equip horror tales with aesthetic and philosophical means to probe into the problems of the world.
The Gothic apparatus has been aesthetic and literary since its inception in the eighteenth century. Bloom identifies the origins of Gothicism as “an aesthetic outlook and literary condition first and foremost” (Gothic 2). Therefore, modern horror stories have been lent the sophistication found wanting in old folk tales of horror thanks to the addition of the literary elements of Gothicism: “It was gothicism with its formality, codification, ritualistic elements and artifice . . . that transformed the old folk tale of terror into the modern horror story”
(Bloom, Gothic 2). Edgar Allan Poe is believed to be the first contributor to the refinement of popular horror tales by joining horror and Gothic elements, when “the old ‘German’ gothic is
finally brought into contemporary setting” by him (Bloom, Gothic 2). Poe has found supernatural tropes of physical horror in the “old-style gothic” to be proper vehicles for the horror of the mind, which Bloom deems as the prevalent subject matter of the “new-style gothic” (Gothic 3). The fear of the unknown, symbolized by the supernatural in the old-style Gothic, is made analogous to the fear of the self whose senseless drive worries people even more than supernatural occurrences do: “Poe’s tales are those of the irrational, concerned with perversity, monomania and obsessions related to an ego-directed mysticism in which knowledge of the unknown coincides with knowledge of the self” (Bloom, Gothic 5). What Robert Geary says of the development of the ghost story also applies to that of horror fiction.
While the dreads for the unknown in nature are not lessened, though people erroneously assume the contrary as science and technology progress in methods of investigation, they discover a new source of anxiety, the uncontrollable impulsive part and the unknowable unconscious of themselves: there is “a teleological movement from the supernatural to the psychological” and in the modern psychological ghost story “the weird figures of demons, vampires, and specters reappeared but this time in their true forms, as symbols of the unconscious” ( 292).
The tendency toward psychological investigation in modern horror fiction is thought to result from a changing concept of evil since the middle of the nineteenth century.46 Manuel Aguirre notes in the age of Victorian horror a new conception of evil as spreading and turning inward. Though the numinous elements are found ubiquitous in nature, the human psyche begins to be regarded as one of the greatest mysteries: “numinous elements are described both in Nature and in the average individual . . . When the Other comes to be defined partly in terms of mind, a metaphysical relativity seems to set in whereby the Numinous—and by
46 Robert D. Hume holds a different view on Gothic fiction’s tendency toward psychological investigation. He argues that the potential of Gothic fiction for exploring the human mind has always been there since Walpole:
“As early as Walpole (1764) there is a considerable amount of concern for interior mental processes” (283).
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this is meant now, primarily, Evil—ceases to be a purely external affair: Evil has an inner, subjective human component” (Aguirre 206). Supernatural phenomena occurring to the nobility in the crumbling castle and the decrepit monastery in far-off lands, characteristic of a
“taste for medievalism,” have gradually been replaced by strange happenings most of which have everything to do with unaccountable motivations and behaviors of middle-class characters in modern settings such as “middle- class homes or hotels: bedrooms, libraries, or gardens” (Bloom, Gothic 12). The recycling of old Gothic tropes does more than adapting time-worn trappings to the changing environment. The focus has been shifted from the supernatural to the grotesque to facilitate the representation of the disturbed or deranged human mind: “the modern grotesque takes the Gothic supernatural and shapes or misshapes it into something that is somehow all wrong, mad, or insane” (Hyles 63). The supernatural is seldom held responsible for the world’s disorder with our gradual realization that if we trace the roots of all the problems in contemporary society, we always find human beings, whose troubled or perverse minds lead to one form of social disturbance or another. However, supernatural elements remain a vehicle for the causes of real-life problems: for instance, King
“has covered up the sources of all the world’s problems—human beings—with the supernatural outer shells of misfortune and supernatural interference” (Davis 26). Since the mind’s perversity is believed to contribute to the chaotic situation of the modern world, the old Gothic apparatus is modified to refer to, in symbolic terms, the world’s troubles and their causes.
In Bloom’s view Gothicism as an aesthetic outlook has proved to be versatile when the time-worn trappings of the old-style Gothic are renovated to fit the contemporary world in modern horror stories: “horror stories have moved away from the trappings of Gothicism, and settings and atmosphere and style are dictated by contemporary events, psychology and social realism” (Gothic 2). Gothic devices are not discarded because they are so malleable that they
can be easily fit to modern situations or made suggestive of contemporary issues: “Gothicism is . . . so versatile that it can be superadded to otherwise oppositional characteristics . . .”
(Bloom, Gothic 2).47 The reuse of old Gothic elements by modern horror writers is thought by Bloom as the way the limited repertoire of horror can be expanded: “the repertoire of horror is relatively limited and conservative and many authors will combine or develop elements already known to their readership” (Gothic 12). Therefore, the success of horror writers does not lie so much in inventing new tropes as in recycling old ones. King’s fiction is no exception. He is not known for creating unprecedented monsters. His monsters, human or inhuman, are original in that they stand for something to which they were not made analogous before: “Almost entirely derivative, King’s popular culture genius lies in his ability to redesign standard Gothic lore, to interpret rather than to originate” (Pharr, “Dream” 115).
Among the constantly reiterated Gothic tropes, King regards “the Vampire,” “the Werewolf,”
and “the Thing without a Name” as “archetypes” which have a profound influence on modern horror literature: “they stand at the foundation of a huge skyscraper of books and films—those twentieth-century gothics which have become known as ‘the modern horror story’” (Danse 60-61). The central place of these three archetypes in horror literature can be showcased when King talks about horror movies and films from the 1950s to the 1980s by categorizing them according to their respective connection with the three: “I believe it’s impossible to discuss horror in the years 1950-1980 with any fullness of understanding unless we begin with [Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula and Frankenstein]” (Danse 60).
Gothic trappings, such as supernatural forces and fabulous monsters, are malleable in that they function like myths and archetypes. Myths and archetypes are created to symbolize unknowable phenomena or experiences: Joseph Campbell defines myth as “traditional
47 What Bloom has in mind are Batman comics and films. Skyscrapers in New York at night can be as ominous as decrepit castles and monasteries in Gothic fiction: “sine the 1980s, Batman comics and films have invented a neo-or-retro-gothic amongst the art deco of New York’s skyscrapers, making these the equivalent of the crumbling castle and monastic ruins of old” (Gothic 2).
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metaphor addressed to ultimate questions” (qtd. in Ingebretsen xxxv).48 As stand-ins, myths and archetypes hold an ambiguous relationship with their referents. It is difficult to ascertain what they point to because they are substitutes, whose allusions to reality are vague for being produced by imagination when people are confronted by incomprehensible occurrences. The dread for the unknown since the dawn of civilization has been expressed through myths and archetypes whose purpose is to give shape to the inexplicable with recourse to the inventiveness of the human mind:
The human mind forces experience into familiar shapes so that it can comprehend it, but in so doing it simplifies into stereotype and myth, which themselves seem then to us to have safely embodied the less pleasant of those experiences, mental or physical, by objectifying and fictionalising them in this way. Stereotypes, myths and fictions are shorthand, but they exercise a control on the expressions and forms of the everyday world. (Wisker 245)
Archetypes often found in horror literature are created to deal imaginatively with people’s fears and anxieties in the face of the unknown. Writers do not always imbue them with social, cultural, or political relevance, though. In The Literature of Terror, David Punter distinguishes between ghost stories which are highly mannered—those of M. R. James, for instance—and those which could be employed as symbols to express real-life fears and anxieties. In his view it is in the latter class that the more important constituents of Gothic can be found, such as “the exploration of paranoia, the fear of the intrusion of the barbaric, the alienation accompanying divisions between social groups and between areas of knowledge and feeling” (Literature 118). Since an archetype is usually linked obscurely to its counterpart in reality, it is accordingly easy to separate it from the original context and reuse it in another
48 King admits to the influence of mythic theories of Joseph Campbell on his writings during an interview with Tony Magistrale collected in Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half: “I was introduced to Joseph Campbell by Peter Straub many years ago, and I was particularly taken by the book Hero with a Thousand Faces (3).
text to articulate similar or dissimilar fears.
Moreover, popularity contributes to the chameleonic existence of a Gothic archetype.
Whenever an archetype is redesigned, reapplied, or rewritten, its meaning changes as the context changes. Alluding to Burt Halten’s idea of the myth pool, “that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to the films, have communally bathed,” King states that the three foundational archetypes of modern horror literature are part of the myth pool in which people search for tropes for their otherwise unnamable fears (Danse 61). Studying the case of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Paul O’Flinn reveals that the meaning of the monster multiplies as it is subject to constant reproductions from books to films to comics to names of merchandise. The search for the “true” meaning of the monster is proved impossible even before the seemingly endless adaptations and reuses.
Even Shelley is indecisive about the meaning of the creature. In her early days, the text implies her sympathetic feelings toward working-class people whose livelihoods are threatened by technological developments. Moreover, her suspicion about scientific pursuits without the check of society is also evident when she contrasts Frankenstein’s isolated scientific research with Walton’s polar exploration with a crew. However, she turns conservative in her 1831 introduction when she voices opposition to scientific pursuit that goes beyond the bounds established by God. In later cinematic reproductions the ideas of working-class insurrection and unrestrained technological developments are often disassociated from the original story to accommodate new expressive or ideological needs.
Taking Universal’s Frankenstein for instance, O’Flinn notices that Shelley’s compassion for the working class is warped into worries of the conservatives about mob violence resulting from a sky-high rate of unemployment in the depths of Depression. When the structure of fear changes later, the fear of unchecked scientific pursuit is singled out to imply people’s apprehension about the destruction of the world by atomic or hydrogen bombs in The Curse
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of Frankenstein released in 1957.
49 As each reproduction squeezes out the intended meanings of the original text, Frankenstein’s creature becomes a term whose meaning is either emptied out or partly retained and can accordingly serve a variety of expressive purposes: “the book is reduced to more than an approximate skeleton, fleshed out in entirely and deliberately new ways” (O’Flinn 31). The malleability of Frankenstein’s creature as a Gothic archetype can also be shown by the confusion between Frankenstein and his creature.Though being familiar with the monster, people who do not read Gothic fiction usually have no idea that the monster is nameless and that Frankenstein is the name of its creator: “monster and Frankenstein are muddled, indicating a level in ideology at which the text itself has ceased to exist but a myth and metaphor torn and twisted from it is being strenuously put to work” (O’Flinn 30). King recognizes in the misunderstanding the influence of art on people.
Art is one of the springs of the myth pool from which even people who do not read literature draw metaphors that suit their needs for expression and communication: “One of the things that makes art a force to be reckoned with even by those who do not care for it is the regularity with which myth swallows truth . . .” (Danse 62; sic).
King’s concerns, according to Vernon Hyles, are closer to those of new Gothicism: “the individual psyche is more important than the whole of society or politics, and . . . the disorder and disintegration of the buried life must be charted” (58).50 The archetypes created or
49 The cinematic adaptations that Paul O’Flinn chooses to discuss are Universal’s Frankenstein directed by James Whale, starring Boris Karloff as the monster, and released in 1931 and Hammer Films’ The Curse of Frankenstein directed by Terence Fisher with Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein.
50 In her article “Freaks: The Grotesque as Metaphor in the Works of Stephen King” the psychological bent of modern horror fiction is construed by Vernon Hyles as originating in the nineteenth century when the sublime is replaced by the grotesque as the source of terror. For nineteenth-century Gothic writers, the grotesque is an apter vehicle for human evil and man’s meaningless existence in an absurd universe. According to Hyles, new Gothicism is a literary strand that begins with Brockden Brown—unlike Clive Bloom who regards Poe as initiating the new-style Gothic—and “continues through Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe” (57). The concepts and elements of new Gothicism are also present in works of authors who are not usually considered Gothic or horror writers, such as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Conner. On Hyles’s list of twentieth-century writers that sustain the vitality of new Gothicism there are Nathaniel West, William Styron, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Harlan Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Stephen King. Later in the article Hyles adds Endora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Paul Bowels to her list of “new American Gothics”
(59).
renewed in the hands of nineteenth-century Gothic writers are repeatedly reproduced by modern horror writers, such as King: “The tale of popular horror in the twentieth century can find the beginnings of its influence dating back to” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poe’s “tales of the grotesque,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and Bram Stoker’s
“Dracula” (Davis 13). Punter’s view on the usefulness of novels of the late nineteenth century as metaphors for the concerns of contemporary people testifies to the effectiveness of King’s employment of Gothic symbology to address modern fears and anxieties: in “works from the late nineteenth century—Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Island Dr. Moreau, The
Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula . . . various elements of the Gothic tradition proved still
capable of acting as conductors for a range of new anxieties and attitudes, both historical and scientific” (Literature 118). Like his nineteenth-century predecessors, King still finds Gothic archetypes such as the werewolf useful. In his modern renditions of the werewolf myth, the focus of exploration has shifted from supernaturalism and moralism to the split of the human psyche or psychological disturbance that leads to horrible deeds. What King has in mind as“the real Werewolf” is no other than Edward Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Danse 78). He identifies the “Apollonian/Dionysian conflict” as
the main engine that powers a variety of werewolf tales (Danse 84). However, while Stevenson’s protagonist struggles vainly between “the free will to do evil” and the will “to deny it,” King holds an even darker view on the internal battle (Danse 83). His pessimism results from a suspicion that the battle is nothing but an illusion—the Apollonian potential is not overwhelmed by the Dionysian desire; the struggle is invented to cover up the hideous“the real Werewolf” is no other than Edward Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case