A-Level Literature Non-Examined Assessment

Name: _______________________Non Exam Assessment: COURSEWORK

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ - Samuel Coleridge

‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ - Oscar Wilde‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ - Charlotte Gilman

‘The Bloody Chamber’ - Angela Carter

Students write a comparative critical study of two texts on a theme of their choice

The word count is 2,500 words (not including quotations or academic bibliography and references)

The task must be worded so that it gives access to all five assessment objectives (AOs)

Two different authors must be studied (one text pre-1900)

This piece of coursework is worth 20% of your course marks for A-Level. This piece will be marked out of 25 but then doubled for AQA /50.

See below the Assessment Objectives for the NEA:

AO1 – Articulate informed, personal and creative responses to literary texts, using associated concepts and terminology (see concept and term help sheet), and coherent, accurate written expression. 7marks

AO2 – Analyse ways in which meanings are shaped in literary texts [considering structure, form and language]. 6marks AO3 – Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received.

6marks

AO4 – Explore connections across literary texts. 3 marks

AO5 - Explore literary texts informed by different interpretations. 3 marks

CHOOSING A COMPARATIVE TEXT:

Each text outlined on the front page should be studied in depth and detail by you at home as well as at school for optimum marks.

Choose two texts that offer good opportunities for comparison and contrast. One should be pre 1900 and you should study two different authors.

Your comparison should focus equally on both texts. You can pick your text based on a particular theme, setting

(representations of London / social setting eg: women in society), structure, image or character.

Suggested themes for exploration with the NEA:

• the struggle for identity • crime and punishment • minds under stress (Female ‘hysteria’)• nostalgia and the past • the Gothic (settings, characters, tropes etc.)• satire and dystopia • war and conflict • representations of race and ethnicity • representations of sexuality • representations of women • representations of men • representations of social class and culture

Other possible secondary texts to compare to main text:

• Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ – Science and Religion• Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ – Supernatural/Occult, Identity, Orientalism

(Edward Said)• R. L. Stevenson’s ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ – Supernatural,

Identity, Doppelgangers/Doubling, Degeneration and Evolution (Charles Darwin)

• Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ – representation of women, class (Karl Marx), Gothic settings

CHOOSING A COURSEWORK QUESTION:

It should allow you to equally address the Assessment Objectives above.

Example questions:

• Compare and contrast the presentation of women in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.

In what ways do you think the Gothic settings of these texts help the writers to shape the presentation of females?

• Emma Mason (2014) argued that ‘Oscar Wilde … [amongst others was one of] the first to be taken seriously as Christian thinkers.’

Compare and contrast the extent of religious influence in Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

• The Aesthetic movement Wilde argued that ‘art for art’s sake’

• In Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ he quotes Heinrich Heine (1919) who argued "The double has become an image of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons." 

Compare and contrast the horrifying impact or notion of ‘doubling’ in ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ and in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.

• Marina Warner (2016) examines how Carter’s use of ‘mask[s] have offered a helpful disguise to some of the boldest spirits’.

Compare and contrast how Carter uses masks to disguise identity in a short story from ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and in Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

"Secret meaning is not a hidden layer but a hidden organisation of the surface".  In light of this view, compare and contrast the presentation of the hidden or secret in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. 

"The Gothic imagination turns upon a fear of objects, in particular the individual's anxiety of becoming subject to forces beyond its control”. In light of this view, compare and contrast the ways the Gothic settings of your chosen texts help the writers to shape their presentation of heroines in peril.   

“Terror awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; horror contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them." How far do you find this a pertinent comment when comparing and contrasting the presentation of the sublime in

Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and one of your chosen texts?

“The role of women in the gothic genre is as victims, always subject to male authority.” Compare and contrast the implication of this statement to the narrator of 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and the presentation of Sybil Vane in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. 

Basis for creating your NEA question:

- Literary theory or statement from a piece of criticism that supports your idea/interpretation: “…………………………………………………………………”

Compare and contrast how [author] shows ____________________________ in [text one] and [second author] in [second text].

CHECKLIST:

Embed quotes. Analyse individual words and the connotations. Explore a variety of interpretations. Short snappy introduction and conclusion. Slot linguistic and literary terminology into your analysis (this stark

adjective suggests… Carter uses a short, simple sentence to highlight… The use of the omniscient narrator in this section creates… Wilde satirises…. Coleridge uses ambiguity to… Dramatic tension is demonstrated through… Lord Henry symbolises…

Cover a lot but write concisely (not an analysis of a small part only). Say something creative, literary or linguistic about a quote (otherwise don’t

quote it!). Remember to comment on writer’s craft eg: Wilde suggests… (don’t speak

about the characters as if they are real people!). Remember to comment on the reader’s possible interpretations eg: Many

readers see this as a reference to… Use your knowledge of the writers – political beliefs, literary movement,

their own lifestyle and contextual factors. Don’t forget to use LITERARY theory and ideas to support your arguments or

use it as a springboard to explore your own interpretation.

Suggested literary readings via topics:

Gothic

Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Leitch et al. (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001) 929-952.

Makinen Merja, ‘Learning a new song? The Bloody Chamber and the Gothic’ in EMagazine e45, September 2009.

Aestheticism

Burke, Edmund, ‘The Sublime’ (1757) in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Leitch et al. (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001).

Wilde, Oscar ‘Preface to Dorian Gray’ (1891) in The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Marshall Cavendish Ltd, 1986).

Romanticism

Burke, Edmund, ‘The Sublime’ (1757) in Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Leitch et al. (London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001).

Identity

• Warner, Marina ‘Angela Carter: fairytales, cross dressing and the mercurial slipperiness of identity’ (2016) on British Library catalogue <https ://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/ angela-carter-fairy-tales- cross-dressing-and-the-mercurial-slipperiness-of-identity> [accessed on 31st

May 2019].

Religion• Mason, Emma (2014) ‘Religion, the Bible, and Literature in the

Victorian Age’, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture, accessed via: <https://www.academia.edu/2896526/_Religion_the_Bible_and_Literature_in_the_Victorian_Age_Juliet_John_ed._The_Oxford_Handbook_to_Victorian_Literary_Culture_Oxford_University_Press_2014_> [on 31st May 2019].

Critical Quotations on ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

"The lack of motivation, the perversity. . .is exactly the significant thing about the Mariner's act" Warren, Robert Penn, "A Poem of Pure Imagination," Kenyon Review 8 (Summer 1946):39l-427, rpt. in Selected Essays (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), pp. 233-50.

‘The mother in Coleridge's unconscious mind was a person whom he both loved and hated.’ Beres, David, "A Dream, a Vision, and a Poem: A Psycho-Analytic Study of the Origins of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 32 (1951): 97-116.

“[The Mariner] has had some vital experience, the implication of which he can neither understand nor communicate in any other than the terms of conventional piety." Dyck, Sara, "Perspective in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'," Studies in English Literature 13 (Autumn 1973): 603"The essence of the poem is a private sense of guilt, intense out of all proportion to public rational standards" Harding, D. W., "The Theme of 'The Ancient Mariner'," Experience into Words (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 59.‘[T]here are more invisible than visible things in the universe’ Perkins, David, ed., English Romantic Writers (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 405. Burnet epigraph, translated from Latin“The mind in the nightmare state is cut off from the "stabilizing external realities", and "forsakes the familiar world for the freely associating and uncontrolled imagination."Magnuson, Paul, Coleridge's Nightmare Poetry (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974)."The Christian structures of authority governing the Mariner's world . . . are in vital conflict with antagonistic and apparently demonic forces which refuse to remain in the obscurity into which they have been cast.

Gothic Quotations

o "The Gothic imagination turns upon a fear of object, in particular the individual's anxiety of becoming subject to forces beyond its control", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.127

o "The chief anxiety of Gothic is possession, so that personal identity is dismembered, either by invasion of the body .. or by physical transformation", Paul March-Russell, "The Short Story: An Introduction", Edinburgh UP, 2009, p.193

o "Gothic signifies a writing of excess ... Gothic writing remains fascinated by objects and practices that are constructed as negative, irrational, immoral and fantastic", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.1)

o "Uncertainties about the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominate Gothic fiction ... The decade of the French Revolution was also the period when the Gothic novel was at its most popular", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.5)

o "In the eighteenth century the emphasis was placed on expelling and objectifying threatening figures of darkness and evil, casting them out and restoring proper limits ... In the nineteenth century, the security and stability of social, political and aesthetic formulations are much more uncertain. ... Gothic became part of an internalised world of guilt, anxiety, despair, a world of individual transgression", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.10)

o "One of the principal horrors lurking throughout Gothic fiction is the sense that there is no exit from the darkly illuminating labyrinth of language", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.14)

o "In the period dominated by Romanticism, Gothic writing began to move inside", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.91)

o "[Frankenstein] was dramatised, in burlesque and melodramatic forms, fifteen times by 1826. The theatre was important in the process of popularising Gothic terrors and horrors", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.105)

o "In the mid-nineteenth century there is a significant diffusion of Gothic traces throughout literary and popular fiction, within the forms of realism, sensation novels and ghost stories, especially", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.113)

o "At the end of the nineteenth century familiar Gothic figures - the double and the vampire - re-emerged in new shapes", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.135)

o "It has been the cinema that has sustained Gothic fiction in the twentieth century", Fred Botting, "Gothic" (Routledge, 1996) (p.156)

o "'Gothic lies at the very boundaries of acceptable ; hence it is linked with a historically remote time, or with the religiously suspect, the exotic and the foreign' - David Punter

o  'The location and action of the tales indicates the extent to which they represent values and demands that lie outside the bounds of the conventional and the acceptable' - David Punter

o 'Gothic fictions seemed to promote vice and violence, giving free reign to selfish ambitions and sexual desires beyond the prescriptions of law or familial duty' - Fred Botting

o "Relations between real and fantastic, scared or profane, supernatural and natural, past and present, civilised and barbaric, rational and fanciful, remain crucial to the Gothic dynamic of limit and transgression" – Fred Botting

o "Gothic castles, villains and ghosts, already made clichéd and formulaic by popular imitation, ceased to evoke terror or horror." -Fred Botting

o ‘Terror grows out of suspense while horror produces disgust.’ - Fred Botting

o ‘In many Gothic novels, the castle represents a threatening, sexually rapacious masculine world in which women are trapped and persecuted.’ - Pete Bunten

o ‘The villain is always the most complex and interesting character.’ - David Punter

o "Whether in appearance or behaviour, monsters function to define and construct the politics of the 'normal' they police the boundaries of the human, pointing to those lines that can’t be crossed" – David Punter

LITERARY TERMS

Allegory A story with a primary or surface meaning and a secondary meaning. A story that can be read on two levels

Alliteration The repetition of the same consonant sound, especially at the beginning of words

Allusion A reference to another event, person, place or work of literature, often implied rather than explicit

Ambiguity Use of language where the meaning is unclear or has more than one possible interpretation

Ambivalence Displaying more than one attitude Anaphora The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of

successive phrases, clauses or lines eg  ‘We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end . . . We shall fight them on the beaches . . . .We shall never surrender.’

Antithesis Contrasting ideas or words balanced against one another in a parallel construction eg ‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more’

Assonance The repetition of similar vowel soundsArchaic Obsolete words or phrases Avant-garde Term used to describe modern artists or writers whose

works are deliberately experimentalBallad A song or poem which tells a story usually in simple or

colloquial languageBathos An anticlimax or sudden descent from the serious to

the ridiculousBlank verse Unrhymed iambic pentameterCaesura A conscious break in a line of poetryCatharsis The purging of the emotions which takes place at the

end of a tragedyCharacterisation The way a writer creates his characters in a narrative

so as to attract or repel our sympathyChiasmus In rhetoric, two corresponding pairs arranged not in

parallels but in inverted order eg ‘Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country’

Cliché A phrase, idea or image which has been used so much that it has lost much of its original impact, meaning and freshness

Colloquial Used in everyday speech and languageConceit An unexpected comparison between two apparently

dissimilar things or ideasConnotation An implication or association attached to a word or

phraseContext That which surrounds, and gives meaning to,

something else eg the historical background to a text or the wider text as context to an extract

Couplet Two successive lines of verse which rhyme

Denouement The ending of a play or novel where ‘all is revealed’ and the plot is unravelled

Device a particular word pattern, figure of speech, combination of word sounds, etc., used in a literary work to evoke a desired effect or arouse a desired reaction in the reader eg rhetorical devices

Diction A writer’s choice of wordsDialogue The conversation between characters in a novel,

drama, etcDidactic Intending to preach or teach, often containing a

particular moral or political pointDramatic irony When the development of the plot in a play allows the

audience to possess more information about what is happening that some of the characters themselves

Dramatic monologue A literary, usually verse, composition in which a speaker reveals his or her character, often in relation to a critical situation or event, in a monologue addressed to the reader or to a presumed listener

Dramatic tension The structure of a play in order to allow the suspense felt by the audience to ebb and flow

Eclectic Drawing upon a large number of sources or influencesElegy A poem, usually sad and reflective, sometimes, though

not always, associated with deathEllipsis The omission of a word or phrase necessary for a

complete syntactical construction but not necessary for understanding; a mark or series of marks (eg . . . ) used in writing or printing to indicate an omission, especially of letters or words.

Empathy A feeling on the part of the reader sharing the particular experience described by a writer or character

Enjambment The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause

Feminine rhyme Rhymed words of two or more syllables, when the last syllable is not stressed: finding/grinding, ladle/cradle

Figurative language Language that is symbolic or metaphorical and not mean to be taken literally

Free verse Verse written without any fixed structure in either metre or rhyme

Half rhyme Imperfect rhyme: live/loveHyperbole Deliberate and extravagant exaggerationIambic Term used to describe a rhythm based upon feet of

two syllables in which a weak stress is followed by a strong stress

Imagery The use of words to create a picture in the mind of the reader

Internal rhyme Words rhyming within a line of verse

Irony At its simplest level it means saying one thing while meaning something else - don’t confuse with sarcasm which is spoken, often relying on tone of voice and is much more blunt than irony

Litotes An understatementMasculine rhyme A poetic line ending on an accented or stressed

syllableMetaphor A comparison of one thing to another in order to make

description more vividMeter The regular use of stressed and unstressed syllables in

poetryMock-heroic of or pertaining to a form of satire in which trivial

subjects, characters, and events are treated in the ceremonious manner and with the elevated language and elaborate devices characteristic of the heroic style

Monosyllabic a word with just one syllableMotif Repeated phrases, images, descriptions or incidentsMultiple narrators A number of those who tell a story so that it is told

from different points of viewMyth Story usually concerning gods which is related to, or

attempts to, explain religious beliefs Narrative stance the point of view from which a story is toldOctave a group of eight lines of verse, esp. the first eight lines

of a sonnet in the Italian form (cf sestet); a stanza of eight lines.

Omniscient narrator The teller of a story who knows everything (ie not a character within the story)

Onomatopoeia The use of words whose sounds copies the sound of the thing or process that they describe

Oxymoron A figure of speech which joins together word of opposite meanings

Pace the progress or development of plot or performance Paradox An apparently self-contradictory statement Parody An imitation of a specific work of literature or style

devised so as to ridicule its characteristicsPathetic fallacy The attribution of human emotions or characteristics to

inanimate objects or to nature; for example, angry clouds; a cruel wind.

Pathos Moments in literature that evoke strong feelings of pity and sorrow

Persona a character in a literary workPersonification The attribution of human feelings, emotions or

sensations to an inanimate objectPerspective Point of viewPhallocentric Feminist term used to describe the way societies are

organised according to masculine valuesProse Any kind of writing that is not verseProtagonist The main character or speaker in a poem, monologue,

play or story

Pun A play on words that have similar sounds but quite different meanings

Quatrain A stanza of four linesRhyming couplets A successive pair of lines which rhymeRhythm Metrical or rhythmical form; meter; the pattern of

recurrent strong and weak accents, vocalization and silence, and the distribution and combination of these elements in speech

Satire a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule

Setting the place or time in which the action of a novel, play, film, etc., takes place

Rhetoric Originally the art of speaking and writing in such a way as to persuade that audience to a particular point of view. Now it is often used to imply grand words that have no substance to them

Trochee A metrical foot of two syllables in which the accent or stress falls on the first syllable

Satire The highlighting or exposing of human feelings or foolishness within a society through ridiculing them

Simile a figure of speech in which two things are explicitly compared, using the word like or as

Soliloquy A speech in which a character, alone on stage, expresses their thoughts and feelings aloud for the benefit of the audience, often in a revealing way

Sonnet A fourteen line poem, usually with ten syllables in each line. There are various ways in which the lines can be organised, but often they consist of an octave and a sestet. (Octave = 8 lines; Sestet = 6 lines)

Staging the process, or manner in which a play is resented on the stage

Stanza The blocks of lines into which the poem is dividedStream of consciousness A technique in modern literature – an attempt to

convey all the contents of a character’s mindStyle The individual way in which a writer has used language

to express their ideasSub-plot A secondary storyline in a playSub-text Ideas, themes or issues that are not deal with overtly

by a text but which exist below the surface meaning of it

Suspense Pleasurable excitement and anticipation regarding an outcome, such as the ending of a mystery novel

Symbol Like the use of images, symbols present things which represent something else

Symbolism The practice of representing things by means of symbols or of attributing symbolic meanings or significance to objects, events, or relationships; also the movement, theory, or practice of the late 19th-century Symbolists.

Syntax The arrangement of words in a sentence

Theme The central idea or ideas that the writer explores through the text

Tone The tone of a text is created through the combined effects of a number of features, such as diction, syntax, rhythm etc. The tone is a major factor in establishing the overall impression of the piece of writing

Tragic hero a literary character who makes an error of judgment or has a fatal flaw that, combined with fate and external forces, brings on a tragedy

Tricolon A list of three eg ‘Education, education, education’Unreliable narrator The teller of a story who cannot be trusted because of

a biased point of view or who does not know the whole story

The GothicProfessor David Punter takes you beyond the stereotypes of modern Goth style, with a survey of the origins of the Gothic and its key features.What is the Gothic? You might initially think of 'Goth culture' - black robes, black lips, vampire fixations, a certain type of music. Or perhaps Gothic films, which have a long history from Hammer horror through to far more recent remakes of Gothic texts like Dracula and Frankenstein. But the Gothic, in fact, has an even longer history and a broader cultural spread. Asking the questions when, where, what and why might help pin down this fascinating and long-lived cultural phenonmenon.

When is the Gothic?In some ways, this is the most confusing question of all. We might want to trace the Gothic back to the original Goths, whose history is now mostly lost but who have been credited with a part in the last days of the Roman Empire and the sack of Rome. But the Goths left almost no written records, and were mostly unheard of until the 'first Gothic revival' in the late eighteenth century. In Britain this revival involved a series of attempts to 'return to roots', in contrast to the classical model revered in the earlier eighteenth century.

The notion of the Gothic as a reaction against the classical tradition had a considerable impact during the romantic period, and affected almost all the major romantic writers in different ways. William Blake was an upholder of the Gothic as against the classical. Coleridge's ballad 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is distinctly Gothic in its use of supernatural machinery.

It is against this background that we see the emergence of the Gothic novel, as part of a second 'Gothic revival', in the nineteenth century. This time it was an architectural revival which looked back to the great English medieval cathedrals for inspiration, rather than to the Greek and Roman architecture which had so greatly influenced the period of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. (Perhaps the best-known example of the 'neo-gothic style' is the Houses of Parliament.) The crucial features of this style were ornateness, soaring perspectives - part of the Gothic preoccupation with the sublime - and a kind of religious intensity.

From this time on, the Gothic has continued to exert an influence. We can find it in the ghost story, which became extraordinarily popular during the Edwardian period when writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James and H.G. Wells (despite his scientific turn of mind) wrote a number of distinctly Gothic tales. And we can find it in the more contemporary period with the evolution of the horror story in the hands of writers like Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell and Dean Koontz. We can find it too in parodies of the Gothic, from Jane Austen's early nineteenth-century satire Northanger Abbey, written at the height of the Gothic novel craze, to more modern pastiches and parodies.

Where is the Gothic?So the Gothic stands for a continuing set of revivals, or ways of revivifying the past but where do we find it? The Gothicism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was far more broadly spread than just Britain. German culture was particularly crucial, with any number of 'Gothic plays' produced during the period, some by rather poor writers but others by major figures such as Schiller. This German Gothic drama, interestingly, provides the roots of that staple of nineteenth-century English culture, the melodrama, with its swooning maidens, moustache-twirling villains and upright heroes. In France, the infamous Marquis de Sade wrote the first major criticism of the Gothic, attributing its growth to the dangers and terrors of the French Revolution.

The Gothic was also influential in America from the late nineteenth century onwards. Almost all of today's writers of horror fiction look back to Edgar Allan Poe as their master; but more traditionally-minded American writers, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James wrote Gothic too. James's novella The Turn of the Screw, often filmed, remains one of the most startling, and indeed inexplicable, of Gothic works, with a panoply of ghosts and a narrator of the utmost unreliability - not for nothing was one well-known critical article on the book titled 'The Squirm of the True'!

What is the Gothic?1. TextsDespite its variety, the central ground of the Gothic remains a series of novels written in Britain between, roughly, 1760 and 1830. The very first of these is often said to be Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, although to the modern reader Walpole's giant helmets, speaking pictures and other supernatural paraphernalia may seem comic rather than Gothic. The works which were perceived at the time as most distinctively Gothic were those of Ann Radcliffe - chiefly The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian - and The Monk by Matthew Lewis. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, though now usually seen as Gothic, appeared a little late in the period and was arguably more concerned with the perils of scientific experimentation than with the problems of ghosts and haunting which preoccupied the Gothic.The second wave in the late nineteenth century was, perhaps, an accompaniment to fin de siècle notions of decadence and degeneration: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Another less well-known but fascinating Gothic text from this period is Richard Marsh's The Beetle.

2. MotifsWe may prefer to define the Gothic by a series of motifs. The principal one is the Gothic castle, as in Dracula's castle and in works by Walpole, Radcliffe and many later writers, Angela Carter among them. The castle is gloomy, forbidding, a place where maidens find themselves persecuted by feudal barons, a reference to a medieval past which somehow remains as the site of our worst fears and terrors.

The persecuted - or at least pursued - maiden is another major motif, the idea of somebody defenceless exposed to tyranny and loss. As, of course, is the ghost. Ghosts have never been absent from literature - think, for example, of Shakespeare's Hamlet - but in the Gothic we are constantly in the presence of ghosts, or at least of phenomena which might be considered ghostly, even if, as in the case of Radcliffe, they are usually explained away in the final few pages.

Then, of course, there is the vampire, who makes his first significant appearance in John Polidori's The Vampyre but becomes a source of obsession in much nineteenth-century literature. A particularly interesting example is the lesbian vampire in Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla, although it is Stoker's Dracula who has most indelibly fixed himself in the minds of English readers.And alongside these, there are all manner of monsters - Mary Shelley's is the most obvious - as well as zombies and the walking dead. A further, long-lived motif is the double. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the most obvious example. The life-or-death experience of discovering, or being discovered by a double, runs right through Gothic literature.

3. MoodAlternatively, one might think of Gothic more in terms of mood. From the earliest days of Gothic fiction, it has been conventional to make a distinction between 'terror' and 'horror': 'terror' being something more shadowy, more insubstantial, harder to pin down, 'horror' standing for gross physical shock. But whichever way one looks at this, the central mood of the Gothic is fear.In the Gothic, this mood always has something to do with the past, with 'what comes back', with the 'revenant'. Usually the ghost that returns in the Gothic has some connection with an evil deed the protagonist has committed in the past, although occasionally there seems little clear reason for the 'return' - Walter de la Mare's short stories contain some good examples of what we might call 'undeserved haunting'.

4. Outside the mainstreamThese days - although perhaps also at the time of the 'original Gothic' - the Gothic is conventionally identified as a specific subgenre of literature. This is at its most obvious in bookshops, where 'horror' is set apart from other fiction, and systematically marked out by publishers, with black, glossy covers, and so on, as a sub-genre on a level with science fiction, fantasy and romance. Gothic, then, is perhaps partly defined, and has been for two centuries, as a form of writing not wholly within the 'mainstream', even though its effects can be felt in many other mainstream works such as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre or the novels of Dickens.

Why is the Gothic?This is a very complicated question, with six possible answers, that might apply in a mingled way to any specific text.

1. SocialSome argue that the Gothic is a response to anxieties that the ancient feudal, aristocratic order might return to unsettle bourgeois conventions, a set of conventions which, on the surface, seemed certain of dominance during the eighteenth century but which were, perhaps, not quite as secure as they seemed. De Sade's theory was that the Gothic was related to the French Revolution; but perhaps it might be better to say that the Gothic is related to the uncertainties of revolution in general, of how sure we can be that forces that seem utterly defeated might not live on in a different form.

2. PsychologicalFreud famously identified the unconscious as that place in the mind from which nothing ever goes away: thus ghosts and hauntings are figures arising from our psychological past, figures of fear that we thought we had banished but which continue to live on inside us. There is a clear connection with the world of dreams; many commentators on dreams have said, for example, that in our dreams we are frequently objects of pursuit - thus the pursued maiden would be an instance of dreams writ large. We might also say that

Gothic fiction enacts our fear of death but perhaps also the reverse, that it represents our fear of immortality, of living a life - like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner - from which no release is possible.

3. FeministThen again, we might point to the preponderance of suffering women in the Gothic, and say that what the Gothic really enacts is a struggle between the genders, a struggle in which men always have the upper hand. Texts such as Jane Eyre, of course, partially reverse this idea, since Jane, in a sense, 'wins'; but what she wins is an aged and blinded version of the man she loves. Certainly a great deal of Gothic fiction has been written by women, from Radcliffe through to Rice; and, much Gothic fiction, emblematically Dracula, seems to form itself around what psychologists might call 'eve-of-wedding fantasies' - those fantasies of lost freedom which women in particular have - or have had - before marriage (though ironically at the height of the Gothic, women had little freedom to lose!). There is a whole strand of criticism devoted to the 'female Gothic' - one of its main arguments hinges on the motif of the castle and its relation to the constrained domestic sphere which most women, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were forced to inhabit.

4. Scientific/technologicalGothic, perhaps, tests the limits of the human. It does so in relation to ghosts, hauntings and the undead; but it also does so, most obviously in Frankenstein, in relation to the role of the divine and the question of how human ambition might overstep the boundaries of creation - this is, of course, also a gender argument, since Frankenstein also usurps the role of women in reproduction. The Gothic, though, might be seen as tracing the limits of what is possible for the human, and thus as questioning how far scientific and technological development might enable people to extend themselves without threat of divine retaliation - The Island of Doctor Moreau is one example of this, as are some of the graphic novels of Neil Gaiman. Behind it all lies a question of the value of science as opposed to human feeling.

5. PassionsThe earliest writers of the Gothic (and critics of it) made it clear that they were 'against reason' - they did not accept the classic Enlightenment view that humans are mainly driven by reason. On the contrary: the Gothic reminds us that we are mainly driven by our passions. This may be a good or a bad thing. It may be a good thing insofar as we might feel emotional intensity towards certain people or causes; it may be a bad thing insofar as it drives us into obsession or madness. At all events, the Gothic deals in illicit desires, in what is prohibited by society; it deals in emotional extremes, whether terror or love; it deals in the terrifying forces which, in so many modern films, may besiege the ordinary house or ordinary lives, and sees them as evidence for forces inside ourselves with which we find it difficult, if not impossible, to come to terms.

6. Popular cultureAnd so I return to where I began, with popular culture. Gothic was, from its inception, a 'popular' form. Ghost stories were regularly published in Dickens's Christmas annuals. More recently, there is the long-running series of M.R. James's ghost stories shown on television at Christmas. Now, of course, with the huge stands of horror fiction in the bookshops, we may say that the Gothic has come into its own again.

ConclusionThere is no one simple definition of the Gothic. Perhaps most useful of all is to think of it in terms of certain key cultural and literary oppositions: barbarity versus civilisation; the

wild versus the domestic (or domesticated); the supernatural versus the apparently 'natural'; that which lies beyond human understanding compared with that which we ordinarily encompass; the unconscious as opposed to the waking mind; passion versus reason; night versus day. And in so doing, perhaps we can make more sense of the connections between the Gothic in romantic poetry, or the nineteenth-century Gothic novel and its modern descendents, the Gothic film or Goth fashion style. Try applying these oppositions to the text you're reading, whether it be an early novel, a short story or poem and see where they take you in understanding the essential qualities of this very rich and varied genre.

Article Written By: Professor David PunterThis article first appeared in emagazine 29, September 2005

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner –

Samuel T Coleridge

A Study in Guilt – The Rime of the Ancient MarinerDr Andrew Green explores Coleridge’s thinking about guilt, confession and Christian absolution and the poetic structures, motifs and images that he uses to develop these themes. This is a particularly illuminating angle for students reading the poem in the context of the topic of Crime Writing for AQA B Literature but also for other students studying this text.

What Constitutes Crime?It’s an interesting question, and the answer isn’t as obvious as it might seem. On one level, crime is breaking the law. But behaviour that is not strictly illegal (such as adultery) can have profound effects similar to crime – betrayal, guilt, deception, vengeance. Crime, therefore, has social as well as legal dimensions and is often based on unwritten codes of ‘acceptable’ behaviour. Coleridge explores such issues in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in which the eponymous Mariner suffers for his contravention of accepted codes of behaviour.

ConfessionCrime writing tends to portray the commission of crime, its motives and its detection. Coleridge’s focus in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, however, is different. The Mariner cursorily states his crime (‘With my cross-bow/I shot the albatross’) so there is no need for detection, and Coleridge spends no time exploring the Mariner’s motivations in killing the bird. Instead, he explores the nature of guilt and the ways in this affects the Mariner and those around him.

While he has not committed any legal crime, the Mariner nevertheless suffers considerable emotional strain. When he kills the albatross – an apparently arbitrary and motiveless act of violence – he sets in train a sequence of events beyond his control which rises to a terrifying crescendo of punishment and remorse, all portrayed in his vivid and disturbing confession. The word ‘confess’, of course, has both legal and religious connotations. When the Mariner has shot the albatross his guilt is symbolised by the hanging of the bird’s carcase around his neck:

Instead of the cross, the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung

The dead weight of the albatross is a portentous parody of the religious symbol of the cross. The ominous presence of the bird is foreshadowed in the threatening storm-blast of Part I which strikes with portentous ‘o’ertaking wings’ and casts the dark ‘shadow of his foe’. The ensuing events of the narrative feed the Mariner’s guilt and punishment, the on-going effects of which are signalled when the spirits at the end of Part V pronounce:

The man hath penance done.And penance more will do.

The sea and creatures from the deep may be seen as an externalisation of the Mariner’s guilt. His horror is evident:

The very deep did rot: O Christ!That ever this should be!Yea, slimy things did crawl with legsUpon the slimy sea.

When the ghostly crew sails the ship back to England the Mariner seeks to expiate his sins. He meets a hermit – the first of his ‘confessors’ – and pleads with him: ‘O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!’. The telling

of his tale provides the Mariner with some temporary relief (‘And then it left me free’), but not permanent release. Unlike Christian confession, which leads to absolution, the Mariner’s ‘confession’ can never do so; he is obliged by some inner compulsion repeatedly to confess. As he tells the wedding guest in Part VII:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,That agony returns:And till my ghastly tale is told,This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;I have strange power of speech;That moment that his face I see,I know the man that must hear me:To him my tale I teach.

The Mariner cuts an alarming figure and the Wedding Guest is in his thrall, captured by both his ‘skinny hand’ and his ‘glittering eye’. The Mariner is compelled by guilt to tell and re-tell his tale but, as the word ‘teach’ implies, his story also has a cautionary function. More than that, however, it not only teaches but also insidiously darkens its hearers with vicarious guilt and experience. The Wedding Guest emerges from the poem ‘A sadder and a wiser man’.

Christian ImageryColeridge employs religious imagery extensively in the poem. The framing context for the Mariner’s tale is a religious ceremony – a wedding – and his story of death, guilt and punishment erupts into this joyful occasion, blighting the happiness of the hapless Wedding Guest. This is not the world of conventional religion, however. Coleridge immediately establishes the Mariner’s tale as somehow distant from the realms of established belief. As the ship moves ‘Below the kirk’ at the outset of the poem, Coleridge takes us into uncharted waters and spiritual realms. He employs Christian imagery and related trains of language of good and evil in daring ways to demonstrate the forces battling for control of the Mariner’s mind and soul.

When we first encounter the albatross it appears as a kind of good spirit:

As if it had been a Christian soul,We hailed it in God’s name.

In the light of this, the killing of the bird seems all the worse. The impact on the Mariner of shooting the albatross is evident to the Wedding Guest who can read the torment in his face and prays:

‘God save thee, ancient Mariner!From the fiends, that plague thee thus!’

Like the prayers of the Mariner himself, however, the petitions of the Wedding Guest are fruitless. Dark and evil forces pervade the world Coleridge conjures in the poem. The Mariner has to face the ‘evil looks’ of the crew when the ship is becalmed in the wake of his actions. After the crew have all died, he reads clearly ‘the curse in a dead man’s eye’, and goes on to describe this in spiritual terms as a curse that

would drag to hellA spirit from on high.

Coleridge’s use of imagery of good and evil here and throughout the poem reinforces the Mariner’s observation in Part II that the killing of the albatross is ‘a hellish thing’. Coleridge transmogrifies the bird into a powerful and symbolic spiritual force driving the ship, the Mariner and his narrative.

Coleridge also uses sudden shifts in state (e.g. from life to death, from stillness to movement, from peace to torment) to explore the Mariner’s guilt. Here he does so in vivid terms as day violently lurches into night:

The sun rim dips; the stars rush out;At one stride comes the dark.

Coleridge uses similarly stark eschatological oppositions (souls/bodies, bliss/woe) in portraying the sailors’ deaths, and terms that invoke the slaying of the albatross:

The souls did from their bodies fly, –They fled to bliss or woe!And every soul, it passed me by,Like the whizz of my cross-bow!

Finally, when the sailors rise and become the ghostly crew, Coleridge suggestively intertwines the biblical stories of Elijah’s encounter with God in the mountains (1 Kings, 19) – where God manifests himself as a still voice after the wind, the earthquake and the fire – and Ezekiel’s experience in the valley of the dry bones (Ezekiel 37) – where God raises a mighty army from the bones of dead men.

The Colour of GuiltIn many ways the language of the poem is highly pictorial and the becalmed ship appears as if part of a seascape:

As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean.

Fittingly, Coleridge makes significant use of colour to represent the emotional world of the Mariner. In Part I, when the ship is encircled by ice – a monochrome world of black and white – Coleridge highlights the whiteness of ‘the snowy clifts’. His most striking effects are achieved, however, when he employs other colours.

Red, with its associations of danger, anger and passion plays a particularly important role in colouring our view of events. After the albatross is killed, Coleridge describes the sun as ‘Nor dim nor red’. The strange indeterminacy of hue captures neatly the liminal emotional state the Mariner has entered. When the ship is becalmed, red is again significant in the oppressive ‘copper sky,/The bloody sun’ the Mariner observes. This is followed by the glow of other-worldly ‘death-fires’ dancing on the sea in an arcane and disturbing rainbow burst of colour:

The water, like a witch’s oils,Burnt green, and blue and white.

Coleridge also makes striking use of colour when describing the woman on the death-ship:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,Her locks were yellow as gold:Her skin was as white as leprosy.

The contrast of vibrant red, yellow and gold with diseased white suggests her enthralling wantonness. Similarly in Part IV the ‘still and awful red’ of the sea and the ‘Blue, glossy green, and velvet black’ of the water-snakes with their colourful tracks (‘a flash of golden fire’) are set against the blackness of night and the sparkling white of hoar-frost. Coleridge’s use of colour provides not mere pictorial detail, but a means of capturing horror and guilt, evil and danger.

ConclusionThe strange and colourful world of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is a liminal space where opposites collide and where Coleridge can explore the true nature of guilt. As reality meets fantasy, good meets evil and madness meets sanity, ‘safe’ and established certainties are obliged to give way to the disconcerting realisation that the world is a guilty and dangerous place.

Article Written By: Dr Andrew Green is a senior Lecturer at Brunel University London. He is course leader for the BA in Contemporary Education.This article first appeared in emagazine 72, April 2016.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’A Level student Zoe Enstone considers whether Coleridge’s poem, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is anything more than an adventure story.

Some critics have suggested that in writing ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Coleridge has created nothing more than a fantastic adventure story. To what extent do you agree with this assessment?

‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ has many interpretations, and certainly cannot be described as simply a ‘fantastic adventure story’ due to the intense use of symbolism throughout the poem. It’s only an adventure story when interpreted at a literal level and when none of the deeper meanings or ideas are taken into account. It can be said that there is a lot of action taking place, and as Warren states it is a work of pure imagination’ which may indicate the more simplistic interpretation. However, as Warren goes on to qualify, just because it is fictional this ‘does not mean it is meaningless.’ The poem expresses a moral, on an allegorical level and also from a Christian point of view, as some critics have associated the Albatross with Christ. There are allusions to the ‘Wandering Jew’ idea and the concept of the ‘One Life’, as well as social comments regarding the slave trade. Elements of Coleridge’s personal life also complicate the interpretation of the poem, which is clearly not just an adventure story.

Gravil states that the premise about the ‘Christian drama of sin, repentance and salvation’. The Mariner shoots the Albatross in an unconscious moment, and goes on to be punished for his sin. The Albatross was innocent, and is even referred to as a ‘Christian soul’. The ‘spirit’ from the ‘land of mist and snow’ was said to have ‘loved the bird that loved the man/who shot him with his bow’, which is a clear reference to Christ being killed by man, and the ‘spirit’ refers to God. It has even been stated that the Albatross may have been the Mariner’s chance of salvation by showing hospitality and love towards it but as he kills it, he is forced to repent forever by re-telling his painful tale.

Language used in the poem has biblical allusions, such as ‘cross-bow’ and the Albatross was hung round his neck like a ‘cross’. The importance of prayer is shown, as the Mariner is unable to pray and suffers a great deal, but he ‘blesses’ the sea creatures unaware and states the ‘self same moment meant I could pray’ and ‘The Albatross fell off, and sank.’ When the Mariner learns to love all of God’s creatures and shows kindness towards them, he gains some forgiveness for his crime and his suffering is eased a little. This links with the idea of the ‘One Life’ which states that God is within every creature and so should be respected, and certainly not killed for no reason. It has been observed that Coleridge held religious beliefs, and that he had a ‘fear of being damned for some involuntary sin and as Gravil goes on to say, ‘this central drama of transgression obviously relates’ to this.

This ideal relates to the psychological and therefore biographical interpretation of the poem. Miall uses Freudian theory to explain the action in the poem, and clearly disproves that it is simply an adventure story. Coleridge’s father died when he was eight years old which caused severe trauma. Coleridge reverted back to an earlier stage of development where the Oedipus complex was active, and he felt hatred towards his father. Coleridge remembered this feeling and therefore, felt he had killed his father, and felt a great deal of guilt. Coleridge projected this psychological ordeal onto the Ancient Mariner to help him resolve the feelings of guilt and ease his pain. We can see the same uneasiness and inexplicable murder by the Ancient Mariner, and the punishment and guilt which arise out of the situation. Coleridge was also said to be a lonely man and rather socially isolated, which is also a theme of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. He state that he was ‘Alone, alone, all, all alone,/Alone on a wide, wide sea!’ and confirms the extent of this by stating ‘So lonely twas that God himself/Scarce seemed there to be’.

It is clear that the poem expresses a moral and is didactic in tone. This moral may be simply an allegorical level rather than taking religious matters into account. The killing of the albatross is, according to Miall, a ‘Violation of the principle of cosmic love’, as the Mariner clearly does not have any respect for life itself as he can kill so easily and thoroughly. The punishment of the Mariner is not by God but by ‘Nature herself’ as the basic laws of Nature have been violated by the Mariner’. The Mariner gains some forgiveness when he learns to live and respect all of nature in the water snakes, and so is ready to rejoin the ‘great chain of universal life’. On this level the Mariner is an ‘everyman’ figure, and the poem has a message to all – to respect nature and life. Indeed the moral expressed at the end of the poem states ‘he prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small’. This moral has a Christian and allegorical interpretation, and these two aspects are combined throughout the poem. There are many references to ‘God’ and heaven, but equally the supernatural elements in the poem are frequent. The Mariner’s ‘glittering eye’ suggests hypnotism, the sea

snakes are clearly not of this world, there are mentions of ‘witches oils’, ‘spirits’ and ‘ghosts’, all of which are not Christian. Equally, penance would not be decided by a throw of a dice by the phantoms, and in Christian dogma, forgiveness should be granted if the undivided body repents, but the Mariner is forced to re-tell his tale. J. Pratt suggests that the ship represents a body of a man and so experiences difficult situations just like a man. The Mariner symbolises the soul of this man, which reflects Coleridge’s view that the body was simply a vessel for the soul. This symbol is powerful, as the ship can be steered to some extent, but is at the mercy of winds and currents also, i.e. other influences. The south pole symbolises hell, and the invisible winds that blow them there represent the same effect of the world’s temptations luring a person to hell. England represents heaven, and so the body, i.e. the ship, must die so that the sail, i.e. the Mariner can enter. Indeed, the ship sinks and the ‘Pilot’s boy’ retrieves him like an angel. This clearly combines the Christian and allegorical levels, and it can be seem that elements of both are used.

The inclusion of the glosses links with this point and proves that the story is not just on a literal level. According to Gravil, they ‘help to emphasise that it belongs to an unusual dimension of experience – one that has to be interpreted by us. At the start of the poem, the glosses simply re-state what is going on in the poem, such as ‘The ship driven by a storm toward the south pole’. However, by the end of this section they also show judgement such as ‘And the Albatross begins to be avenged’, which is not explicitly stated in the poem. The glosses also take on a more Christian view at times, and talk of ‘penance’ and he ‘beholdeth God’s creatures of the great calm’. This shows that, according to Gravil, ‘Its function may be to invite you to participate in the process of interpretation’, and that Coleridge desired the reader to decide for themselves as to which way to interpret the poem. Indeed, the glosses distract the reader away from the poem, and slow the reading of it, which is important, as the fast pace of the metre may make the reader rush through the stages and not appreciate their meaning.

Some critics claim there are references to the slave trade in the poem, and that a social comment is being made. There are no direct references to this, but certain lines hint at the possibility, such as ‘black lips baked’. Also, the great number of men in the ship is suspicious, as 200 people would not be needed to sail a ship. It is obvious that the ship was sailing south as it came to the south pole, which could confirm the singular trading vessel theory. Some critics believe that the ‘slaying of the sea-bird’ is ‘simply not a sufficient crime in itself’ to justify the extreme punishment. Gravil suggests that it ‘symbolises the huge burden of historical guilt acquired by a nation which could be due to the slave trade, imperialism and war.’ Indeed, Joseph Conrad wrote The Heart of Darkness, and was said to be greatly influenced by Coleridge and especially ‘The Ancient Mariner’. This book deals heavily with the slave trade and morals surrounding it, which hints that Coleridge was making a statement about this issue.

The idea of the poem being merely about action is also disproved by the elements it draws from sea tales. The ‘Spectre of the Flying Dutchman’ was a European maritime legend and elements can be seen in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The Flying Dutchman was a spectre ship doomed to sail forever, and this parallels the phantom ship in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. A dice game is also involved in which the fate of a man is decided, again linking to ‘The Ancient Mariner’. These legends were aimed to introduce and have a moral meaning, as well as including action, so are not just adventure stories.

In conclusion, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ has many interpretations, many different levels. It can be seen in the literary sense as an adventure story, but this would ignore the effect of the glosses and the obvious didactic elements of the poem.

Article Written By: Zoe Enstone, A2 English Literature student, Sale Grammar SchoolThis article first appeared in emagplus 21, September 2003.

Voices in The Ancient MarinerKate Ashdown explores the links between the voices which resonate through Coleridge's poem, the layered process of composition and the genre of the text.'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is compelling, beautiful, challenging and ultimately confusing. It refuses classification as it plays with, and then rejects, meaning. It feels like a first-person narrative but it is actually a text of many voices, held within a third-person framework.

What type of text?In fact, just what type of text is it? The title and the bare bones of the action - summarised in the argument which headed the 1798 version - suggest that this is a narrative. It's a traveller's tale about a journey to the South Pole and back again. The title - 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Seven Parts' - suggests a time and a teller. However, the title itself has undergone changes from 1798 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere in Seven Parts' to 1800 'The Ancient Mariner: A Poet's Reverie' and then in 1817 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Seven Parts'. These changes are more than just spelling. The lost archaisms of the first version built on the conscious medievalism of the poem and brought a whole time-travel feel to the poem. The 1800 addition of 'A poet's reverie' breaks the suspension of disbelief (Coleridge's own phrase) and forces upon the reader the idea of a poet at work, inventing and crafting a character.

And not just one author. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' was first published in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads. This important volume was anonymous but contained the work of Coleridge and his (at the time) good friend William Wordsworth. The 1800 qualification is part of Wordsworth's reorganisation and representation of this whole volume - a revised edition which was published in two volumes with only Wordsworth's name on the title page. This second edition pushed Coleridge's poem from its position opening the volume and Wordsworth also persuaded his friend to modernise the spelling and eradicate other archaisms.

Coleridge listened to Wordsworth and the changes were made. Actually Wordsworth's involvement in the genesis of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' begins even earlier than 1800 and the history of the poem's composition is alive with different voices:

In the autumn of 1797, he [Coleridge], my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon with a view to visit Linton and the valley of the Stones near to it; ... in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the 'Ancient Mariner', founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank. Much of the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention, but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading Shelvocke's Voyages, a day or two before, that while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. 'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident was thought fit for purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. The gloss with which it was subsequently accompanied was not thought of by either of us at the time, at least, not a hint of it was given to me, and I have no doubt it was a gratuitous afterthought. We began the composition together on that, to me, memorable evening. I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular

And listened like a three years' childThe Mariner had his will.

These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C has with unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his mind, as they well might.It's worth noting how voices are at work in Wordsworth's writing: the passive 'in the course of this walk was planned the poem'; the contrast of reported speech for Coleridge against the vibrancy and dominance of the direct speech Wordsworth gives himself; finally that sinisterly muted criticism with its disingenuously generous 'as they well might', all combine to deprive Coleridge of a voice. Richard Holmes recounts a wonderful anecdote in Coleridge: Darker Reflections, the second volume of his biography of Coleridge, from a soiree hosted by Charles Lamb in 1817:

Crabb Robinson observed one moment of exemplary comedy, when both of the poets could be heard quoting verses to their listeners. Moving surreptitiously between the two groups, Robinson found Coleridge quoting Wordsworth's poetry by heart; and Wordsworth quoting '- not Coleridge's, but his own'. It needed no comment.

So the voices of Wordsworth (supplying not just plot, but lines) the voices of Shelvocke through his 'Voyages', of Cruikshank through his dream, all combine. And looking at Dorothy Wordsworth's journal for this time it is clear that her voice, too, contributed to the development of the poem.This is not a criticism or an accusation of plagiarism. Coleridge and Wordsworth planned to work together, to tap into one another's strengths and to collaborate in just this way. Coleridge had already composed an unfinished play with Southey and another friend, Robert Lovell, on the death of Robespierre. His favourite medium of conversation means that he was most alive and most responsive when in dialogue. His living arrangements throughout his life demonstrate his need for company, for an audience. His famous London lectures dramatically improved when he abandoned his formal notes and addressed his audience as if he were in conversation with friends.

Shifts in genreColeridge's many revisions of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' lift the poem off the page to give it the dynamic of conversation, changing its genre entirely. What starts as a Gothic adventure story is altered firstly by the addition of the quotation from Burnet and then by the glosses. The Burnet quotation is adapted from Archaeologiae Philosophicae, a text published in 1692 which suggests that the story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man is an allegory. So just why is Coleridge beginning his poem with the 17th-century Burnet, a man who in his earlier Sacred Theory was arguing against Newton that the earth was the fixed, central point of the universe and who had to resign his office at court because of the controversy surrounding his later 1692 work? The reference suggests academic argument, voices of science raised against voices of faith. It foregrounds what we don't know and need theories and imagination to account for.

The role of the glossesThe glosses in many ways continue this alteration of the text from narrative to non-fiction, from traveller's tale to travelogue. Many of the glosses, it is true, summarise and clarify:

Ah! well a-day! what evil looksHad I from old and young!Instead of the cross the AlbatrossAbout my neck was hung.However, some glosses develop and analyse:And some in dreams assuréd wereOf the Spirit that plagued us so:Nine fathom deep he had followed usFrom the land of mist and snow.

Suddenly the gloss, from an anonymous, even transparent, précis has become the voice of another character: an academic editor, someone whose serious study and cross-referencing turns the tale into an important document of discovery - one which shows where science and religion touch.Actually the glosses frequently offer more than the clarification which was their ostensible purpose. The voice of Coleridge the dramatist is at work and the typography - which complicated his publishers' task enormously - deliberately foregrounds the new voice. But should we trust in the authority of the gloss to interpret the poem for us?

The gloss and the text combine to proclaim the story as one of sin and punishment, followed by contrition and redemption:

And now this spell was snapt:

Coleridge makes his ancient Mariner proclaim in Part VI and the gloss reads:

The curse is finally expiated.

Sure enough, the ship reaches port and the Mariner is rescued by the Hermit, the Pilot and the Pilot's boy - that significant trinity. However, there are clearly problems with such a simplistic solution. Firstly it ignores

the fact that the tale does not end here. In point of fact Coleridge turns his Mariner into the archetype of the Wandering Jew, a man condemned to wander the earth until Doomsday, so that the story will never end:

I pass, like night, from land to land;I have strange power of speech;That moment that his face I see,I know the man that must hear me:To him my tale I teach.

Now the archaic spelling and turn of phrase work to transform the Mariner into some mystic time traveller. The wonderfully Gothic simile - 'I pass, like night' - abstracts the man into some force of nature.

Silent voicesAnd what about the other characters in the tale? The Mariner redeems himself with love:A spring of love gushed from my heart,And I blessed them unaware:Sure my kind saint took pity on me,And I blessed them unaware.

- but the crew have suffered with him and died for him, and then been transformed into revenants in particularly gruesome imagery:

All stood together on the deck,For a charnel-dungeon fitter:All fixed on me their stony eyes,That in the Moon did glitter.

Significantly they have no voice. Did they deserve to die? The gloss seeks to explain this point:

But when the fog cleared off, they justify the same, and thus make themselves accomplices in the crime.

The language of explanation here is suddenly legal, a real change from the weight of the religious symbolism and insistence on sin throughout the poem.This semantic switch reveals Coleridge is orchestrating his reader's concerns for the crew and challenging us with the inequality of the punishment. The very silence of the crew becomes a voice which shouts as their eyes curse the ancient Mariner, full of grievance and hard anger. Then suddenly and very deliberately Coleridge identifies one of the crew personally:

The body of my brother's sonStood by me, knee to knee:The body and I pulled at one rope,But he said nought to me.

This is a moment that evokes a supreme loneliness with a different but equal power to those famous lines:

Alone, alone, all, all alone,Alone on a wide wide sea!

The conflict of voices culminates in the 'moral' of the poem:

Farewell, farewell! but this I tellTo thee, thou Wedding-Guest!He prayeth well who loveth wellBoth man and bird and beast.He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;For the dear God, who loveth us,He made and loveth all.

Here the Mariner becomes the voice of a seer. The conclusion seems controlled and safe, with the simplicity of a child's prayer or Sunday School lesson or, indeed, Cecil F. Alexander's hymn 'All things bright and beautiful'.But this tidy moral is not designed to sit easily in a poem where vengeful polar spirits have stirred 'nine fathom deep' and mystical voices of 'the Polar Spirit's fellow-dæmons, the invisible inhabitants of the element, take part in his wrong; and two of them relate, one to the other, that penance long and heavy for the ancient Mariner hath been accorded to the Polar Spirit, who returneth southward.' In the insistently Catholic world of the ancient Mariner, how comfortable should we be with the power of the Polar Spirit?

The spectre-woman and her DeathmateOf course, the voice which is the most impossible to assimilate into the comfortable doctrine of the concluding verses is that of the Spectre-Woman and her Deathmate:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,Her locks are yellow as gold:Her skin is as white as leprosy,The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,Who thicks man's blood with cold.

The naked Hulk alongside came,And the twain were playing dice;`The game is done! I've won! I've won!'Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:At one stride comes the dark;With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,Off shot the spectre-bark.

There should be no place for this gorgeously Gothic Spectre-Woman in the tidy, safe world of the Christian moral. But the world of the ancient Mariner is neither tidy nor safe. Instead it is a world of accidents and cruelty. The action hinges on a dice game, a game of chance, and so the crew are sacrificed but the Mariner survives.The spectre-bark may depart the action as early as Part III and the seraph-men tidy away the zombie crew in Part VI but the world of magic and splendid horror lives on in the unnaturally bright eye of the ancient Mariner and his mythic Wandering Jew, Wandering Cain's eternal penance:

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,Whose beard with age is hoar,Is gone: and now the Wedding-GuestTurned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,And is of sense forlorn:A sadder and a wiser manHe rose the morrow morn.

A troubling conclusionColeridge forces the troubling collision of worlds through the narrative framework of the poem. He creates the Mariner's voice with the power to hypnotise and stun - both us and the Wedding-Guest. This means he can structure moments of complete confusion when the dominant voice of the ancient Mariner is suddenly and bewilderingly replaced. There is so little of the third-person framework that when the switch comes it is incredibly powerful. Of course, the poem begins in the third person: 'It is an ancient Mariner' and the ending matches this perfectly:

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,Whose beard with age is hoar,Is gone:

Here the dynamic present tense and line positioning create the sense of a magician's exit in a puff of smoke.The Wedding-Guest's interruptions are important too as he is used to show how dangerous a figure the

ancient Mariner is. His appearance physically repels the Wedding-Guest and his story terrifies him - terrifies him to the point at which the Wedding-Guest believes the Mariner himself is a creature of the night from the world of Gothic Horror, rather than a prophet of a Christian God:

'I fear thee, ancient Mariner!I fear thy skinny hand!And thou art long, and lank, and brown,As is the ribbed sea-sand.

'I fear thee and thy glittering eye,And thy skinny hand, so brown.'Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!This body dropt not down.

If the ancient Mariner represents the power of forgiveness, questions still remain. Indeed, Coleridge deliberately constructs a conclusion the facileness of which worries away at the reader. The poem rejects unity and cohesion but we were warned: Coleridge deliberately began with Burnet, voicing his unsettling vision of a world under threat from unknown forces. The problem the concluding moral creates is the fitting ending for a poem designed to terrify, challenging the reader with a world full of unknown and unknowable voices, where all our certainties are removed and it is impossible to distinguish good from evil, or even day from night:

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate ... Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.

I can easily believe that there are more invisible natures than visible ones in all things ... But at the same time we must be vigilant for the truth and keep due proportion so that we may distinguish the certain from the uncertain, day from night.

Article Written By: Kate Ashdown is Head of English at Brighton and Hove High School.This article first appeared in emagazine 46, December 2009.

The Mariner’s ProgressIt's easy to read a poem like The Ancient Mariner and imagine that it's wholly the product of the poet's imagination. But Coleridge, like any other writer, was influenced by his own experiences of reading. And, as Simon Mold argues, many features of Coleridge's poem can be traced back directly to The Pilgrim's Progress, an earlier allegorical journey about spiritual struggle, guilt and faith.

In 1678, whilst imprisoned in Bedford Gaol, the dissenting, unlicensed nonconformist preacher John Bunyan (1628-88) penned his immortal prose allegory The Pilgrim's Progress, which charts the obstacle-strewn journey of its central character, Christian, from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City of eternal life. On his way he is beset with uncertainty and temptation, allegorised as places such as Doubting Castle and Vanity Fair and people he meets with names like Pliable, Talkative and Mr Money-love. Eventually his faith wins through, and he crosses the river of death to be received on the otherside to the sound of trumpets.

A hundred and twenty years later Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), one of the group of Romantic poets well known for their dissenting and nonconformist ways, wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which tells the story of a traveller, also beset with uncertainty and temptation, who finally reaches landfall after a troubled voyage of self-discovery. One might expect that Coleridge, like any other writer of his time, would have been influenced in a general way by Bunyan's work, which had by then run into many editions; but I believe that The Rime was influenced by The Pilgrim's Progress in significant ways beyond the obvious fact that both works describe a journey - ways that shed light on Coleridge's reasons for writing the poem as he did.

The son of a clergyman, Coleridge was probably exposed to The Pilgrim's Progress at an early age, as it is an obvious work for a man of the cloth to have had in his library. That he definitely knew it well, and admired it, is evident from a remark from Table Talk, a collection of his comments about literary matters published posthumously in 1835:

The Pilgrim's Progress is composed in the lowest style of English, without slang or false grammar. If you were to polish it, you would at once destroy the reality of the vision. For works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Drawing attention to its 'lowest style of English' is not a criticism: this is precisely the register - the plain man's speech - that he and Wordsworth had attempted in the Lyrical Ballads (1798). His own work of imagination, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, takes its cue from Bunyan in employing a provincial form (the ballad), lacing it with consciously old-fashioned language and leaving in a certain amount of unpolished rough-and-readiness.

Marginal NotesThere is, moreover, one particular feature of The Rime that has caused much furrowing of brows - namely, the marginal notes that Coleridge added to later editions of the poem, such as:

The ancient Mariner beholdeth a sign in the element afar off or The ship suddenly sinketh.

Whatever the artistic effect of these, their models are to be found staring us in the face in The Pilgrim's Progress. Examples like:

Evangelist findeth Christian under Mount Sinai, and looketh severely upon him and Talk between Goodwill and Christian

are inserted throughout the work in exactly the same way as they are found in Coleridge's poem. An alert reader of the day who was merely moderately well read could not have failed to make the connection. Were these marginal notes of Coleridge's - in, apparently, deliberately archaic language - a broad hint that, in some measure, his poem was a kind of Pilgrim's Progress for his own times?

Structure and FormMore connections emerge if one examines aspects of structure and form. Both works employ the tale-within-a-tale genre: Bunyan's narrator experiences the story 'under the similitude of a dream', which has a protagonist of its own, namely Christian; similarly, Coleridge's Wedding Guest listens to the tale told by the ancient Mariner himself, a tale that, as has often been remarked, has many dreamlike and indeed nightmarish qualities. The Mariner himself falls at one point into a 'swound' (as does Christian, in Doubting Castle: Bunyan employs this very word) during which he is discussed by two disembodied Voices.

Both works concern themselves with a journey into the unknown which the protagonists, after various reversals and the gaining of knowledge, manage to survive. Of course the respective resolutions differ: Christian attains his heavenly immortality in a blaze of triumphant faith, whilst the Mariner returns from his voyage to a kind of limbo, doubtless reflecting the religious uncertainties of Coleridge's day.

Allegory and SymbolismThe Pilgrim's Progress unashamedly proclaims itself an allegory (the author invites us to 'Turn up my metaphors' in the Epilogue) and, while Coleridge famously saw allegory as mechanical and inferior to symbolism, the allegorical nature of The Pilgrim's Progress could well have inspired the symbolism of The Rime - which has, in fact, in spite of Coleridge's views, been interpreted as an allegory of the Fall of Man and his subsequent Redemption, notably by the critic Wilson Knight.

Both works certainly draw upon Christian imagery; curiously, the pagan elements in The Rime are foreshadowed by Bunyan's inclusion of the folkloric 'hobgoblins' and 'foul fiends' that beset Christian. And, at the end of both narratives, each protagonist has to cross a final stretch of water in order to reach his goal.

Storyline ConnectionsAs far as the respective storylines go, there are of course many differences in general content and specific detail: Coleridge took The Pilgrim's Progress as a starting point, not as a template to be slavishly followed. Nonetheless some of Bunyan's ideas remain, albeit in modified form. His tale is populated with a whole panoply of sinners, who represent temptations that one might find in any medieval morality play; Christian eventually fights them all off, with the occasional temporary reverse. In Coleridge's poem comparable temptations (shooting an innocent creature, almost embracing the sin of despair) are embodied within the character of the Mariner - so the latter work is more modern, psychologically speaking. Yet vestiges remain: the only two named characters met by the Mariner are the allegorically-styled Death and Life-in-Death, who dice for the souls of the ship's crew, a scene reminiscent of the Roman soldiers dicing for the raiment of Jesus as he hung upon the cross. The prison imagery here

And straight the Sun was flecked with bars...As if through a dungeon-grate he peered

reminds us of the lottery of Christian's trial by Bunyan's Lord Hate-good and his corrupt Vanity Fair jurors, who throw him into a barred cage, and eventually into prison. His companion, Faithful, is initially not so fortunate: he suffers the tortures undergone by Christ and any number of martyrs, but is then received into Heaven - as indeed are the souls of the Mariner's crew.Even a snippet of Bunyan's diction during this episode might have filtered through to Coleridge:

the men [Christian and Faithful] told them...that they were going to their own country, which was the heavenly Jerusalem

which one might compare with the Mariner's ecstatic cry:

Oh! Dream of joy! is this indeedThe light-house top I see?Is this the hill? Is this the kirk?Is this mine own countree?

The AlbatrossPerhaps the most intriguing symbolism bequeathed by The Pilgrim's Progress to Coleridge concerns the albatross, which is deliberately rhymed with 'cross' and hung around the Mariner's neck by the crew, as symbol of his burden of guilt. It may not by now come as a surprise to learn that Christian also has a burden on his back, which he is unable to shake off during the first part of his journey; this, too, represents a burden of sin.

Both works include a key moment when the protagonist is freed of his burden. In Christian's case, it is after he begins to climb the steep and narrow way to heaven, when he comes upon a wayside cross.

So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell off from his back...and I saw it no more...Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him that the sight of the cross should thus ease him of his burden.

By being true to his newly-understood faith Christian is released from his burden.

Similarly, the albatross falls from the Mariner's neck when he blesses the water snakes that he had earlier dismissed as 'slimy things': his true instinct to treat God's creatures as equals causes him to bless them 'unaware' - so, symbolically, his period of forgiveness can begin now he is able, like Christian, to pray. Both protagonists still have difficulties to overcome. Both turning points, additionally, are marked by the image of water. In Christian's case

...he looked again, even till the springs that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks.

And in the words of Coleridge's marginal note:

By the grace of the holy Mother, the ancient Mariner is refreshed with rain.

A Journey of the SoulIn a sense it is not too surprising that Coleridge should have been influenced by The Pilgrim's Progress since, like its author, he was on his own uncharted poetic journey along with his fellow Romantics. As a youth Bunyan was notoriously godless, and The Pilgrim's Progress is on one level the autobiographical tale of his own progress from darkness into light. Coleridge too struggled with his own demons, and The Ancient Mariner might partially reflect his own troubled journey as a creative artist.

Moral WorksFinally, each work could reasonably be termed a 'morality'. There are words of wisdom at the end of Coleridge's poem:

He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and smallalong with the more enigmatic:A sadder and a wiser man,He rose the morrow morn.

Bunyan likewise addresses the reader in his 'Author's Apology':

This book will make a traveller of thee,If by its counsel thou wilt ruled be.

He ends with an injunction that surely could easily have been endorsed by the author of The Ancient Mariner:

O then come hither,And lay my book, thy head, and heart together.

Article Written By: Simon MoldThis article first appeared in emagazine 53, September 2011.

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The Ancient Mariner - reading through timeRick Rylance considers the discordant elements in 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and asks whether readers today have to share Coleridge's own reading of his poem.

As you read this, the albatross is threatened with extinction in the southern seas. Wide ocean trawlers, especially the kind that use 'long lines', are producing a careless, devastating and unintended result. In long-line fishing, the lines stretch for miles over the sea's surface armed with thousands of hooks. Fish are caught in them. The albatross go for the fish. The hooks and lines snare the bird. It dies a victim of a barb somewhat smaller than that of the Ancient Mariner's 'little crossbow' in Coleridge's famous poem. But it is many times more effective.

It is easy to read 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' as a parable; that is as an entertaining story that carries a serious message. Many critics have done this, including the poet himself. Samuel Taylor Coleridge - who was one of the greatest critics as well as one of the greatest poets of the early nineteenth century - fretted endlessly about the meaning of his poem. As it went through different versions he changed the text as many writers do. For instance, he added marginal glosses - short prose statements printed alongside the verse - whose aim appears to be to reveal the meaning of the lines. (Some modern editions print these; some do not. It is worth seeking them out if you do not have them in your copy.) Sometimes, these marginal glosses provide a simple shorthand summary of the action, like subtitles: 'The ship drawn by a storm toward the south pole' (Part I, line 40). Sometimes, they explain a mechanism in the plot: 'The Mariner hath been cast into a trance; for the angelic power causeth the vessel to drive northward faster than human life could endure' (Part VI, line 421). And sometimes they appear to give the moral of the tale directly, as does the very last one: 'And to teach by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth' (Part VII, line 610).

What is this moral? In this case, the marginal gloss underlines the point made in the verse itself. This is what the Mariner tells the transfixed Wedding Guest at the close of the poem; it is the point of his tale:

Farewell, farewell! But this I tellTo thee, thou Wedding Guest!He prayeth well, who loveth wellBoth man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and small;For the dear God who loveth us,He made and loveth all.(Part VII, lines 610-17)

The moral has two parts. The first is ecological (as we would now call it): it teaches respect for nature and the interdependence of natural things, of human beings with the environment. The second is Christian: God made the world and made it in love (hence the rather hymn-like rhythms and phrasing of these lines). The Mariner's unprovoked and pointless act of destruction in shooting the albatross is therefore an offence both ecological and theological. Learning this, with the compulsion to transmit it to others, is the punishment the Mariner endures for his sin. And he is good at his mission. Despite being hijacked on his way to a party, the Wedding Guest learns the lesson and wakes the next day 'a sadder and a wiser man'. But do you feel sadder and wiser?

As it happens, I endorse one of the Mariner's messages (the ecological one) but not the other: Christian faith is not part of my personal beliefs. Coleridge, of course, believed both. In fact, he would have thought it nonsense to believe the one without the other. The existence of benign, interdependent nature proved for him the existence of a loving God. This was a common and comforting belief in his period and was usually called 'natural theology'. Half a century later, Darwin's theory of evolutionary natural selection, with its implied view of nature as 'red in tooth and claw' (as a later poet, Tennyson, put it), caused so much offence because it violated the reassuring assumptions of natural theology. Coleridge did not live to read Darwin's work and as he grew older his consoling beliefs became more prominent. He became, as many do, more conservative. The marginal glosses to the poem first appeared in 1817, 19 years after first publication and reflect the older poet's more conservative reading of a poem written during a period of youthful radicalism.

But in responding to the poem, does it matter whether we endorse its beliefs or not? After all, what we have here is a fiction and not a position statement for the Christian Greens. This is a big question and it is one involved to a greater or lesser extent in reading all literary works. The answer to it, inevitably, is yes ... and no. Of course it matters that we engage seriously with the ideas expressed in literary works, though that doesn't mean that we have to agree with them. We might - indeed we should - want to identify complications. In the case of Coleridge's ecological Christianity, for example, we could point out that the Ancient Mariner's fellow sailors might not share his benevolent view without some persuasion. They, after all, die horribly with little just cause, and their conversion into spirits ('inspiriting' as the marginal gloss has it at line 327) seems meagre comfort to me.

It is equally difficult sometimes to determine exactly what the ideas contained in literary works are. This is, I think, something particular to the nature of works of art, including literature. It is, indeed, one of their great qualities. Art seems to be one of the few areas of human communication whose purpose is the generation of paradox in order to excite debate. Thus literary works, like other art forms, can depict dreadful suffering, but in beautiful ways. The emotions they stimulate can therefore be a little perplexing. We respond with horror to suffering, but can also be uplifted by the mode in which it is expressed. When Wilfred Own writes a harrowing poem about death in the trenches of the First World War called 'Futility', one sensible response is to think that life is pointless in the face of such loss. But another response wonders why write a poem, which is an act of creative affirmation, if life is indeed so dreadful? Between these two poles lies the poem's implied protest against anonymous, industrial-scale death in war.

So literary works excite diverse responses. Let's look again at those marginal glosses in 'The Ancient Mariner'. One of the reasons Coleridge put them in was decorative. On the page, in the right sort of typeface, with all those antique word forms and spellings, the poem looks older than it is: it looks like an ancient ballad as well as featuring an ancient sailor. (Originally it was called 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere'; and look at all those 'prayeths' and 'loveths' and 'thous' in the quotation on page 28. These were no more a normal way of speaking in Coleridge's day than in ours.) The marginal glosses imitated the look of old books when their use was common. So in one sense 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere' is a fake. It is not a fraud in the sense of deliberately trying to deceive the reader. But it is a knowing imitation of something else, something older, and something that struck its first readers as very odd and disconcerting. William Wordsworth was Coleridge's close friend and co-author of the Lyrical Ballads, the volume in which 'The Rime' first appeared. He thought the book's unpopularity (it hardly sold any copies at first) was due entirely to the 'strangeness' of 'The Rime', the first poem in the book, which, he wrote, 'deterred readers from going on'.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is a ballad. This means it is a poem that tells a strong story in a simple, repetitive form (usually four-line verses rhyming ABAB). Originally designed to be declaimed or sung, ballads are the ancestors of folk songs and nursery rhymes, though nobody knows much about their composition, who wrote them, or how they were performed. What is also mysterious is what they mean or meant. Old ballads like 'Tam Lin' or 'Long Lankin' or 'Thomas Rhymer' are puzzling because it is hard to discern a meaning in the way that, say, Wilfred Owen's poem has a meaning, albeit a complex one. These ballads have common features (violence, the supernatural, stark, bold stories, for instance) but they rarely have an obvious message or moral. Their skills of succinct story telling with powerful incident are one reason for their continuing popularity, and explain why there are versions of them to be found all over the world. (They were particularly popular in Coleridge's day, which is one reason why he wanted to fake one: though not very effectively, according to Wordsworth.) But another reason lies in their intriguing obscurity of meaning. Ancient ballads have no obvious designs on us. They tell a story and leave it there. As a result, readers are left to find their own significance.

Though we can see that at one stage at least Coleridge appears to have had a firm sense of the abstract meaning of 'The Ancient Mariner', there is plenty in the poem that does not follow the script. We have pointed to the horrible fate of the Mariner's fellow crew members, and it does not take much to raise other discordant elements. Nature is not always benign, nor is it always pleasant:

The many men, so beautiful!And they all dead did lie:And a thousand thousand slimy thingsLived on; and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting sea,And I drew my eyes away;I looked upon the rotting deck,And there the dead men lay.(Part IV, lines 236-43)

This poem, like other great literary works, creates discordant messages and great effects. And because the effects are great, and the messages troubled and troubling, it can accommodate multiple ideas and perspectives. 'The Ancient Mariner' can be read as a religious parable; or as an ominous eco-fable; or as a study in the psychology of guilt and trauma.

This last perspective was one to which the twentieth century, with its history of spectacular atrocity, was drawn. Modern readers have emphasised the psychology of the Mariner's ordeal: his compulsion to warn against catastrophe; his longing to repeat over and over again, to every wedding guest he meets, his un-vanishing demons, the horrible sights he has witnessed. An example can be found in the pictures surrounding this article.

'The Rime' is an intensely visual poem and it has had many great illustrators. Among these was Mervyn Peake. Peake was a war artist during the Second World War, and one of the first British soldiers into the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen after its liberation. He produced his illustrations to 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' during the war, and what he read in Coleridge's poem seems to have resonated with what he witnessed as a war artist. Looking at these images, it is not difficult to see how leading issues in the poem - despair, desolation, guilt among them - come to the fore. Peake's response to the poem, it seems, was some distance from Coleridge's benign Christian and ecological optimism.

That literary works can excite very different responses is not a matter for regret or embarrassment. It is one of the rewarding features of great works, one of whose disconcerting triumphs is the ability to make us respond in different ways. It is the enduring fascination of poems like 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' that they travel across time, and between different readers, with refreshed, vivid, stimulating immediacy.

Article Written By: Rick Rylance is Professor of English at the University of Exeter. He is editor, with Judy Simons, of Literature in Context (Palgrave 2001), a collection of essays on the contextual study of literature aimed, in part, at A Level students and teachers.This article first appeared in emagazine 21, September 2003

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian GrayDr Juliet Harrison considers the significance of the portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray – and why the novel is named after it rather than its protagonist. 

Have you ever wondered why this novel isn’t just called Dorian Gray? After all, you would think that a character who occupies such a central role, might be awarded the eponymous title. Surely he has earned it? The fact that he is knocked off top billing suggests that he is somehow incidental, and it is the picture that is indispensable to the novel. It could be argued that the ‘picture’ in the title is the picture of Dorian Gray as created by Wilde in the novel, but even if this is the case, the character of Dorian Gray is defined by his portrait. Without Dorian, the title implies, this text could still work, but The Picture of Dorian Gray without the picture is like Hamlet without the prince.

Why the Picture?What is less apparent is why. Why has Wilde upstaged Dorian with the picture? There is the obvious argument that is plot-related: characters’ lives change because of Dorian’s actions; Dorian changes because of the portrait, and the picture is, therefore, essential to the journey Dorian makes from an innocent, to a murderer and a blackmailer. It is clear that this process provides the reader with a visual commentary on the deteriorating state of Dorian’s soul, and in so doing it neatly illustrates the division of body and soul, and of the double. Here, then, is an apposite symbol for mask and reality: for the hypocrisy of Victorian society, where it is possible, the novel shows, to live a separate life hidden beneath a veneer of respectability, wealth and/or beauty. More profoundly, perhaps, having a supernatural portrait punctuating this novel changes our expectations. The portrait is the only supernatural element in otherwise realistic settings with a cast of realistic characters, and it catapults us into the realm of the impossible; into Gothic fantasy. The plot, therefore, can now escape any limitations that realism may have imposed upon it and anything becomes possible. Except, that is, for the ending: as any well-read A Level English Literature student knows, any bargain or pact involving the supernatural will not turn out well.

Raising Questions about ArtSo, clearly the picture is at the heart of the novel; it’s the one thing that most people remember about the plot; it’s symbolic, metaphorical, it even changes our expectations of the work. What is perhaps less obvious is that placing a painting at the centre of a text foregrounds numerous theoretical questions related to the conception, the production, the reception and the interpretation of art.

When we think about a Victorian portrait, there are specific things we are sure we know. One certainty is that we may, as inquisitive, intelligent human beings, interpret it as we wish. The meaning lies, we know, with the spectator rather than with the author. Another certainty is that the portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray doesn’t exist beyond the text, and it’s on these two aspects that this article will focus. 

In a novel that Wilde later defended as simply being ‘an essay on decorative arts’ it’s perhaps not surprising that both of these ‘certainties’ are questioned and undermined. It’s not straightforward to place a picture at the heart of a text because in doing so, you are immediately drawing attention to the process of creation. Wilde is writing in a tradition that stretches back to Ancient Greece. It even has a name: Ekphrasis or Ecphrasis from the Ancient Greek, meaning to speak out. 

Questioning Art and Questioning the TextEssentially, ekphrasis is a literary description of a picture or visual work of art. And it doesn’t really matter if it is Homer or Oscar Wilde, the objective is the same: to describe a visual work of art so that the reader can see it. And the effect is the same: to draw attention to how we understand a work of art. It follows that if we are thinking about how the painting was conceived and produced, about Basil’s subjective rendition of Dorian Gray, for example, then we should also be thinking about the difficulties of recording anything objectively. If we are thinking about the way in which the two men look at the painting with such obvious partiality, then we might also think about our own reception of any text.

Let’s turn to the thorny issue of interpretation first, and to the idea that the spectator can create the meaning. It’s probably reasonable to assume that when you look at a picture, for example, despite the fact

that you may well be influenced by a number of factors, you expect to be able to make up your own mind about its meaning. 

What Do We Know About the Picture?So let’s go back to the eponymous picture, and decide whether we are being allowed to look at it objectively. What do we really know about it? We know that it is a ‘full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary beauty’. (p 1 Chapter 1) The narrator tells us this on the first page of the novel, and we, as experienced readers, presume (certainly at this point of the novel) that the narrator is reliable. We know that it shows Dorian’s lips, and Dorian’s hair. We know about the frame and about the location of the picture both at the start of and throughout the novel. Through Dorian, we monitor the changes, and then at the close of the novel we see it reinstated to its former glory: 

a splendid portrait of [Dorian ...] in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty.Chapter 20

What is interesting is that for such a central character, we really know very little about its physical appearance. What is Dorian wearing? What stance is he taking? What brush strokes are used? What’s the background like? There is no detailed description, and instead, we are told how to read it.The opening scene characterises our relationship with this picture. Two men admire it, and we see the portrait through their eyes. Regardless of the fact that we live in the twenty-first century, and regardless of the fact that we may not be male, and regardless of the fact that we may not find young men attractive, we may only see this picture as, for example, 

[a] young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves [...] A Narcissus.

And it is through this recognition, that we begin to realise that we can’t ever see the picture itself, we can only ever see it filtered through others.Can we fight it? Can we read against the grain? Can we stand up against the novel and say that we don’t believe that Basil ‘skilfully mirrored’ Dorian’s ‘gracious and comely form’? (Chapter 1). Can we shout down Lord Wotton’s claim that this is ‘the finest portrait of modern times’? (Chapter 2). Of course not. We have to believe their interpretation in order to make sense of the novel. If Dorian isn’t the ‘beautiful creature’ (Chapter 1) as described by Lord Wotton, and if the work isn’t a ‘wonderful likeness’ (Chapter 2) that captures a moment in time, then Dorian’s powerful beauty, that fuels the whole plot, dissolves.

It’s a leap of faith to trust a biased description of a portrait that is, at first a ‘masterpiece’ and a ‘shadow of [Dorian’s} own loveliness’, and that then loses its hair begins to grin and, in the penultimate stage, oozes blood from its hands. 

So let’s return to firmer ground, and to the premise that this sinister portrait at least remains within this novel. Have a search on the internet to check. Type in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and search ‘images’. The numbers of depictions of Dorian Gray’s portrait are huge. The portrait has a life of its own. It has seeped out from the novel and multiplied. And not only visually. This is an extract from The Portrait of WH, written by Oscar Wilde in 1889: 

It was a full-length portrait of a young man […] of quite extraordinary beauty.

Sound familiar? The portrait really does have an independence from the text, as it manifests itself intertextually in other texts, as it multiplies across the internet, and even seems to break out of fiction.

Thus, in 1880, at the height of his fame, Wilde had a life-sized portrait of himself done in oils. He was made bankrupt following the trials, and he had to sell all his belongings including the portrait. His friends took pity on him and brought it so that they could return it to him when he was released from prison. Such was the public’s rejection of Wilde that just before he was released in 1900 he made arrangements to rent a room. He planned to have the portrait taken there, and hidden away from public view. And so life imitates art.

As well as its remarkable supernatural qualities, this picture has unusual characteristics: we aren’t free to interpret it in the text, and it has an independence from this work, and from fiction itself. This is a powerful entity indeed: surely one that has well and truly earned its place in the title of the novel.

Article Written By: Dr Juliet Harrison is a former English teacher, now working as a freelance writer.

This article first appeared in emagplus 66 on the emagazine website, December 2014.

The Picture of Dorian Gray - CriticismA selection of criticism on The Picture of Dorian Gray to challenge your reading, extend your interpretation and open up the text.

Read the extract you have been given. Use the prompts below to help you talk about your piece of criticism and the impact it has on your

interpretation of the text.o gives you fresh knowledge/information about the novel that's useful in reading the novelo further develops your interpretation of the novelo opens up the text for you in a new and thought-provoking wayo challenges your interpretation of the novel.

Highlight one or two short phrases that you might use in an essay to develop your argument or viewpoint.

Write a paragraph in which you use the quotation to sharpen up or further your analysis of the novel.

Extract 1Its parable-like simplicity and the rather painful remorselessness of its concluding chapters have made it possible for readers to underestimate the subtlety of The Picture of Dorian Gray. So clearly does its famous plot move to its ineludible climax - so explicitly are its major points articulated (the poisonously charming Lord Henry is told: 'You cut life to pieces with your epigrams') - that the complexity of Oscar Wilde's imagination is likely to be minimized. While in one sense The Picture of Dorian Gray  is as transparent as a medieval allegory and its structure as workmanlike as that of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, to which it bears an obvious family resemblance, in another sense it remains a puzzle: knotted, convoluted, brilliantly enigmatic. If one might be 'poisoned by a book' (as poor Dorian charges he has been, by Huysmans' rather silly novel), The Picture of Dorian Gray might very well be that book. [...]

Joyce Carol Oates: The Picture of Dorian Gray’: Wilde's Parable of the Fall Author(s) Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 1980)

Extract 2However, the intrusive style of The Picture of Dorian Gray  is not always evident. In fact, this style is more often absent than present; examples of it are interspersed throughout a narrative style that is otherwise essentially unobtrusive. By appearing only intermittently, the stylistically intrusive passages then draw attention to themselves as they stand out against the rest of the narrative space. In a sense, these passages defamiliarize the reader to their language, and, in almost all cases, such passages appear only after what could be called crisis points in the narrative. These crisis points exist at various places in the novel where an important dramatic effect occurs. At these crisis points, the novel's plot either threatens to become realistic or to draw significant attention to itself. However, in each case, the crisis is followed either by a stylistically self-conscious passage or (in a few instances) is related in a stylistically self-conscious manner. By foregrounding stylistically intrusive passages within these crises, Wilde diminishes the novel's moral aspects.

John G. Peters: Style And Art In Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray: Form As Content Victorian Review, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Summer 1999)

Extract 3Though in some ways rather carelessly written and quite conventionally melodramatic, the novel grips hard, sustaining a genuinely disturbing atmosphere of gothic suspense, festooned with bejewelled strings of the peculiarly Wildean paradoxes that would soon make him the toast of the West End. The story of the beautiful young man whose portrait ages and becomes hideous while he remains unblemished by the vicious life he lives, until finally he destroys it, thereby killing himself, continues to haunt the 21st-century imagination....

Simon Callow: The Guardian, 2009

Extract 4In The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde examines frankly the consequences of substituting an aesthetic for an ethical conscience. He raises a fundamental question about the aesthete's creed: how can art, which is imbued with good and evil, be both aesthetically beautiful and morally destructive? Lord Henry Wotton uses Wilde's language of paradox and the circular and contradictory logic of The Critic as Artist, but he cannot be taken simply as Wilde's mouthpiece. He ultimately challenges the basic premise of the book, that of transformation. Dorian and Basil Hallward also reveal aspects of Wilde's psyche. Basil through his portrait and Lord Henry through his word painting both recreate Dorian in their own image and likeness. This narcissism, whether linguistic or sexual, acts as a central metaphor for indulging in sterile and fruitless actions. Wilde compounds his book with not one but three versions of the Faust legend to reinforce this point. The Picture of Dorian Gray  is at once an attack on dualism (the soul/body, art/life split) and an exposure of the aesthetic attempt at reconciliation as a widening of that split.

Dominic Manganiello: Ethics and Aesthetics in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Dec., 1983)

Extract 5The Picture of Dorian Gray  is a curious hybrid. Certainly it possesses a supernatural dimension, and its central image is gothic; yet in other respects it is Restoration comedy, energetically sustained for more than two hundred pages. It approximates the novel Henry would write if he had the ambition - a book as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. The supernatural element, however, is never active except in terms of the portrait. It would be quite ludicrous if introduced to Henry's drawing room society, and it is really inexplicable given the secular nature of Dorian's personality. Evidently diabolical powers are stirred by Basil's art, but Basil himself has no awareness of them, apart from a certain uneasiness regarding the morality of his relationship to Dorian. Is the devil responsible? But does the devil exist? Hell is hardly more than theoretical to Wilde, and heaven is equally notional; when Dorian is attracted to the Catholic church it is primarily for the sake of exotic ritual, ecclesiastical vestments, and other somewhat ludicrous treasures of the church, which Wilde delights in cataloging. The consequences of a Faustian pact with the devil are dramatized, but the devil himself is absent, which suggests that the novel is an elaborate fantasy locating the Fall within the human psyche alone.

Joyce Carol Oates: The Picture of Dorian Gray’: Wilde's Parable of the Fall Author(s) Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 1980)

Extract 6The portrait grows uglier by degrees, the mirror more beautiful by contrast, and Dorian more obsessional in his petition of both. During this process a terrible beauty is first borne, then born again:

He himself ... would ... stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.

....each new sin, howsoever committed and with whomsoever enjoyed, ultimately serves the same old solitary purpose, sending Dorian back to his closet so he may consult portrait and mirror again. Whether 'homo' or 'hetero' in relation to its presumed external objects (and the text authorizes both), Dorian's eroticism remains fundamentally self-motivated and self-directed. Having locked his attic door behind himself, Dorian consults the portrait with 'quicken[ing]' pulse and pleasure, mirror tight in hand. The sheer recursivity of this process - from sin to altered image; from altered image to image-altering sin - only enhances the uncanny power that holds Dorian in thrall to portrait and mirror alike, precisely because they are so unlike. Observing his own incremental self-differentiation so excites 'his sense of pleasure' 'that he laugh[s] back at him[self ] from the polished glass,' ever 'more enamoured of his own beauty,' even as he simultaneously grows 'more and more' entranced by the internal 'corruption' that the portrait just as truly returns to his solicitous eye. In the mirror Dorian rivals himself for beauty, in the portrait for ugliness.

Christopher Craft: Come See About Me: Enchantment Of The Double In The Picture Of Dorian Gray Representations, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Summer 2005)

Article Written By: emagazine editorsThis article first appeared on the emagazine website as part of emagplus 62, December 2013.

The Picture of Dorian Gray - A Celebration or Critique of the Aesthetic Life? Article Written By: Mike Haldenby is an English teacher at Park High School, Harrow.This article was first published in emagazine 58, December 2012.Oscar Wilde clearly drew on his own life in his novel about urban life in his times. Mike Haldenby asks whether the novel form allows him a platform for unashamedly expounding his aesthetic beliefs and lifestyle, or whether, instead, it pulls him towards moral conclusions that are surprisingly at odds with these.

When Oscar Wilde set himself the task of writing what was to be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, he was very aware of - and, probably, somewhat challenged by - the demands of a format which by 1889 was defined by a number of widely accepted conventions. Popular Victorian literature had tended to offer idealised tales in which perseverance, effort and integrity eventually triumphed, with virtue rewarded and wrongdoers punished, many tending towards an earnest and wholesome denouement with issues resolved and harmony re-established. This was at odds with Wilde's aesthetic, which demanded that art should rise above and beyond the offering of values or moral judgements. He consequently belittled Tennyson ('the Homer of the Isle of Wight'), grew disillusioned with Swinburne, called modern novels 'unreadable' and apparently had scant regard for the social conscience of Dickens who 'influenced only journalists'.Yet much of The Picture of Dorian Gray explores Wilde's own views of art, which in itself suggests the possibility of taking a moral position, or one that at the very least was out of sympathy with the conventional morality of his times. Could Wilde write a novel that was essentially a joyous exploration of his Bohemian, hedonistic lifestyle, or, as a novelist, would he end up making moral judgements about a lifestyle with which he himself was so clearly associated? The ending of the novel perhaps brings this into doubt.Before The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde's output had been prolific but indiscriminate. He'd produced reams of reviews, articles and short stories but had yet to tackle an extended, detached narrative with all its focused structural and generic demands. Much of this early output is personal, and carries an unmistakeable Wildean tone and flavour. For example, in an early draft of one of his most powerful contemporary pieces, The Decay of Lying (1889) he had delivered a barely disguised autobiographical treatise on the definition of art, and even his most functional reviews - of, often, the most prosaic subjects - suggest that his lifestyle was his main source of inspiration. While most Victorian autobiographers

largely opted for a seemingly impersonal tone wherein the author defended his or her life course without anguished admissions of guilt or expressions of regretJ. Carlisle

Wilde lays himself bare in his fiction, prose and journalism alike, expressing personal views and justifications to all and sundry.Unfavourable ReceptionEssentially an urban novel moving seamlessly between the most civilised and depraved corners of Wilde's city, The Picture of Dorian Gray was from the outset derided and misunderstood by virtually the whole of the literary establishment of the time. Macmillan felt it had 'unpleasant elements', and when Lippincott's Monthly Magazine agreed to serialise it, the novel was banned by W.H. Smith's who called it 'filthy'. Critics were scathing; the St James' Gazette felt that its content was a matter for 'the police, not the critics'. The Scots Observer famously asked, 'why go grubbing about in muck heaps?', stating that the book's only possible audience could be 'outlawed noblemen...and perverted telegraph boys', interestingly implying an attachment of blame to the exploited telegraph boys alongside the exploiting noblemen. 'If the British public can stand this', said writer and friend of Wilde John Addington Symonds, 'it will stand for anything.'Completing the first draft was clearly difficult; Wilde wrote with 'carelessness [and] impatience [...] often allowing [his characters] to articulate his own sentiments' (Ellmann: 300). In an attempt to address comments which had focused heavily upon the book's immorality, Wilde's addition of a preface was intended for the final published version which, he hoped, would convince and perhaps mollify those who had failed to understand what he was attempting to teach about aestheticism, hedonism and conscience. However, this preface simply reinforced the prejudices of those who were hungry to see the novel as a peephole into Wilde's own 'feasting with panthers' lifestyle. Additionally, the epigrams which litter the narrative of The Picture of Dorian Gray echo the very misogynistic, faux-aristocratic and witty opinions with which Wilde had titillated and entranced listeners in countless Mayfair salons. His voice speaks loudly on every page of the novel.

This substantiated already entrenched opinions; Wilde was now officially decadent, seen to be shamelessly promoting his corrupt lifestyle through his work. Famously, when questioned as to the source of the voice of the novel, Wilde was unable to argue objectively; he claimed:

Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry what the world thinks me; Dorian is what I would like to be in other ages, perhaps.

He was notoriously arch in such matters.

Hedonism and Lord Henry WottonIf Basil Hallward, the artist, represents Wilde's own pure commitment to aestheticism, Walter Pater's love of art for art's sake and the acceptance that art need have no moral purpose, then this intellectual stance is overshadowed somewhat by the character of Lord Henry Wotton. To those close to Wilde and to the public in general, this character seemed far more cast in the mould of the author. He seems to embrace a more hedonistic, immoral way of life, without the intellectual underpinning. Famous throughout salon society for his candour, Wilde's voice was heard most clearly through Wotton, both in terms of style and content, sharing his own erotic sensibilities with little concern for disguise: 'a new Hedonism! That is what our century wants!'Lord Henry, the pleasure-seeking, free spirited rake, the misogynistic man-about-town who (like Wilde) married then quickly tired of his barely-acknowledged wife, is enraptured (as is Basil Hallward) by Dorian's youth and powerful physical attraction. But where Hallward's attraction is spiritual, 'Greek' and platonic in the real sense of that word, Lord Henry's intentions are physical and far from honourable. This, according to Neil McKenna in his scurrilous, but hugely engaging, biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, is at the heart of The Picture of Dorian Gray; a 'proclamation' of Wilde's sexuality 'by whispers, hints and illusions.' McKenna sees the novel as a clear and 'rousing declaration of Oscar's own allegiance to the love that dare not speak its name'. Wotton, who articulates 'a new, daring and dangerous sexual philosophy', does so with Wilde's own evangelism, it seems:

we can have in life one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Richard Ellmann cites an anecdote of Wilde's drawn from his imprisonment in Reading Gaol. On exercise, he heard a prisoner mutter:

'What are you doing in this place, Dorian Gray?' 'Not Dorian Gray ... Lord Henry Wotton,' he replied.

Sybil VaneIf Basil Hallward represents an earlier, more idealistic view of Wilde's development, then the depiction of actress Sybil Vane evokes some striking parallels with his marriage. Sybil Vane is described in the novel much as Wilde initially described his wife Constance to Lillie Langtry, as a 'grave, slight Artemis'; Wilde was attracted to the gamine Constance until, ultimately, her youthful boyishness fell away to reveal the woman within - a mother, with (to Wilde, anyway) a surprisingly different shape, and a different function.

Ending with a Moral?Given this close identification with his own life, it might then be regarded as surprising that Wilde concludes the novel in the way that he does. Wilde's protagonist clearly goes into decline. His life becomes meaningless; hedonism gradually loses its allure, and he becomes detached from rational humanity, his freedom turning inexorably into a form of captivity. Like Dr Faustus, whose twenty four years of supernatural power were an empty façade, Dorian Gray's vapid hedonism leads to its inevitable conclusion. When he sees his true nature revealed in the painting, he cannot help but destroy it - and himself - in a condemnation of solipsistic excess. Here, arguably, the novel becomes a denunciation of excess and represents a plea for moderation by Wilde (possibly with a view to averting the legal repercussions of publishing such a text). Yet this seems highly unlikely, given his uncompromising attitudes in such matters and his lack of concern about his public reputation.So is the ending really a condemnation of aestheticism, of hedonism and of unconventional morality? Might it be just as reasonable to argue that Wilde wants Dorian's death to represent a glorious sacrifice, and the ultimate triumph of aestheticism? Does Dorian in fact die with his commitment to the crusade of hedonism intact, perishing nobly rather than compromising that integrity? If viewed in this latter way, The Picture of Dorian Gray becomes a celebration of Wilde's lifestyle, a tragic but triumphant all-or-nothing refusal to accede to conventional moral and social norms. Perhaps, in the end, the most rewarding interpretation is that Wilde wanted his ending to be ambiguous, avoiding final judgements and leaving the reader to question the moral implications of the downfall of Dorian Gray.

Psychology and the Supernatural in The Picture of Dorian GrayProfessor Judy Simons uncovers the mysteries within Wilde’s novel, revealing the narrative devices that take us beneath the glittering surfaces to the darker, more troubling psychological realities of his fictional world. In 1891, the year after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, wrote Oscar Wilde: 

To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely – it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world

It could easily stand as an epigraph for the novel, which at first glance seems to be all glittering surface, distinguished by stylistic elegance and packed with quotable witticisms. The London high society that Dorian Gray inhabits is a world of privilege, populated by charming aesthetes, who idle away their time in frivolous social pleasures, visiting the theatre, congregating in elite gentlemen’s clubs and exchanging cynical bon mots. 

Yet danger and fear lurk beneath this veneer, and as the work progresses, it quickly becomes clear that the tonal brilliance is a façade that masks a penetrating enquiry into the nature of self. This is a study of human psychology in a pre-Freudian age. When Lord Henry Wotton, the enigmatic Mephistophelian figure who triggers Dorian’s downfall, begins 

to wonder whether we should ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of human life would be revealed to us

his position reflects the contemporary interest in post-Darwinian scientific theory and the urge to understand the sources of human behaviour.

The Premise of the StoryThe story employs a deceptively simple premise, that of a man whose wish comes true with consequences that he could never have imagined. It is the traditional stuff of fairy-tales, and it is no coincidence that Dorian’s nickname is Prince Charming, ironically mimicking the archetypal romantic hero – with a tragic twist. 

If it were only the other way! If it were I who was always to be young, and the picture that was to grow old!

exclaims the 20-year old Dorian as he gazes on his completed portrait. 

For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

His words are chillingly prophetic, and with this single, fantastical device, Wilde creates the narrative vehicle for exploring two of his most persistent interconnected themes: the concept of secrecy and the duality of personality. 

The Supernatural and the Terror of Self-DiscoveryWilde was a hugely successful dramatist by the time the book was published, but whereas his comedies famously capture the insouciance of fashionable life, The Picture of Dorian Gray

foregrounds the other, darker, fearful dimension of a life of deception. As modern commentators have noted, fairy-tales themselves, with their repeated motifs of abandoned or stolen children, malign spells, locked rooms and deathlike slumber, give voice to the unspoken terrors of childhood that continue to haunt adult nightmares. When Dorian Gray says to Sir Henry that, 

You have explained me to myself [...] I felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it

he exposes one of the central tenets of supernatural literature, the dread of self-discovery, of uncovering what lies in the murkiest recesses of the mind. 

Throughout the text, the supernatural is constantly evoked to suggest the fears that lie in the depths of the collective unconscious. 

There are few of us who have not wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself. [...] Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there.

This powerful passage gives physical form to the visions that spring from unspoken anxieties that in daylight can be suppressed or brushed aside. Not so at night. In exploring the tension between control and compulsion, the narrative returns insistently to the antithesis between light and dark, day and night, summer and winter. Note for instance the difference between the charged luxuriance of Basil Hallward’s studio in the opening chapter, suffused with intense colour and perfume, and the bleakness of his murder at midnight, when ‘gas-lamps flickered, and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their black iron branches to and fro’. The dramatic imagery mirrors Dorian’s decline from a sensitive and sensuous humanity to a vacuous and vicious existence, rejected by decent people. Like Frankenstein’s monster he becomes an outcast, a replica of a living creature who is incapable of empathy.

The Threatening, Uncanny and AbnormalLate Victorian England saw a surge in the vogue for horror literature and tales of the uncanny. The mid-century popularity of Edgar Allen Poe, the American Gothic writer, had exploited a public appetite for terror and the literary supernatural. The violent deaths and monstrous villains of these stories led to a more general late 19th-century taste for melodrama on the stage and murder mysteries on the page. Fear was peddled everywhere, including in the ‘penny dreadful’ pamphlets sold at street corners, and in the sensational newspaper reports of brutal crimes, such as the lurid accounts of Jack the Ripper, the serial killer who terrorised London’s East End in 1888. This was also the age of the growth of detective fiction, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, unlike the real police force who failed to solve the Whitechapel murders, could always unravel fact from supposition and supply a logical explanation for the abnormal happenings which threatened the security of respectable citizens. The Picture of Dorian Gray offers no such comfort to its readers. Rather, the essence of the novel lies its insistence on the inescapable presence of the irrational in individual lives.

The Disturbing Topography of LondonTrue to the conventions of Gothic literature, the book takes its readers into the realms of the unknown and creates a disturbing alien landscape that echoes the mental and moral torment of its protagonist. Yet unlike earlier works which were often set in distant lands, where it could more easily be assumed that both sorcery and villainy were rife, The Picture of Dorian Gray is located determinedly in London, the supposed heart of the civilised world. Once Dorian descends into the ‘grey, monstrous’ back streets and the opium dens of the docklands, he discovers a city that is a dark continent, a terrain of obscure, labyrinthine lanes and tortuous narrow passages, analogous to the undiscovered recesses of the psyche. Driving through the night over ‘rough-paven streets’, the natural atmosphere itself seems to project a ghastly human aspect. 

The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From time to time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it.

Even the cabman gets lost in this shadowy half-world of material and moral confusion. 

A Portrait of CorruptionThe uncanny is of course not confined to the exterior topography of London’s underworld but is given its most visible manifestation through the ravaged human body in the portrait. This is palpable evidence of a man who has sold his soul to the devil, and the text dwells on the stages of corporeal mutation as a mirror of the distorted self. Dorian’s gorgeous, perfect image decays horribly in line with his journey into moral depravity. As it does so, the reader sees not just the degeneracy of an individual but that of a whole society, where violence, cruelty, corruption and debauched sexuality are seething beneath its sophisticated upper echelons. 

Complex Urges Beneath the SurfaceWhile not suggesting that The Picture of Dorian Gray should be read as a confessional text, it is difficult to ignore the fact that at the time of the work’s composition, its author, like his character, was leading a double-life. A married man with two sons, the fêted playwright and darling of the glitterati was also a closet homosexual, whose illicit liaisons with young men would ultimately result in his conviction for gross indecency and a ferocious prison sentence. Wilde’s work is not alone in its approach to the idea of the destructive potential of unlicensed human appetite. Just four years earlier, Robert Louis Stevenson‘s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) had been an instant bestseller. In its portrayal of an upright professional, a doctor who can change his shape and personality into that of a grotesque brute, that novel exposes both the bestiality that lurks beneath the civilised surface and man’s fascination with the extent of that bestiality. With its homoerotic subtext, The Picture of Dorian Gray takes this fascination one stage further, and it was condemned as ‘unclean’, ‘poisonous’, and 

heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.

But it is Dorian’s moments of despair that make him an ambivalent figure, an obsessive who is trapped by his own overpowering drives. His portrayal mounts a direct challenge to the cherished Victorian view of society as progressive, where civilised nations adopt a superior value system that distinguishes them from animals and from savage tribes. By giving expression to the complex desires that constitute personality, The Picture of Dorian Gray blurs this distinction. Even the most sophisticated of refined tastes can conceal the most primitive urges. In this novel both man and society are split.

Article Written By: Judy Simons is a Research Fellow at the University of London and Emeritus Professor of English at de Montfort.This article first appeared in emagazine 82, December 2018.

Aestheticism – A Rough GuideRebekah Owens explores the rise and reception of a new movement in the late nineteenth century that threatened many values of Victorian society.In the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta Patience (1881) the central character of the story is Reginald Bunthorne. He is described in the list of Dramatis Personae as a ‘fleshly poet’. This was a term used to describe someone in the second half of the nineteenth-century who was a follower of the Aesthetic movement. They were called ‘aesthetes’, and were known to be followers of Beauty, given to posturing about Art in general and writing heavily descriptive, sensual poetry.

The word ‘fleshly’ that is used to describe Bunthorne is an interesting one. The fact that it appears in a work in which Bunthorne is a figure of fun, indicates that it is an expression of ridicule; but this use of the term is rather playful. In fact, ‘fleshly’ was used by a critic called Robert Buchanan in 1871 in an article entitled ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ as a term of disparagement. It was applied to the aesthetes, not as light-hearted mockery, but as a way of discrediting everything they stood for.

Oscar WildeWhat they stood for were the principles expressed in the movement called Aestheticism. The most well-known proponent of Aestheticism, then and now, was Oscar Wilde. He certainly epitomised many of the features of an aesthete enacted by Bunthorne in Patience. He had earned a reputation while at Oxford as a practitioner of Aestheticism by decorating his rooms with objects of beauty, publishing a volume of poetry and becoming known for declaring that he wished he could live up to his exquisite blue china. Such recognition meant that when the theatrical impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte decided to take Patience to America, a real-life Bunthorne was required to go on a lecture tour of the States as a way of prefacing the work. It was Wilde who was chosen for this task.

The Influence of Walter PaterWilde did not resemble the effete, pallid individual that is Bunthorne in the operetta. Behind the talk of the ‘House Beautiful’ and ‘Decorative Art’ was a physically robust man – with an equally robust intelligence. In the early 1870s when Wilde was at Magdalen College, he was drawn to the work of Walter Pater. Pater provided the intellectual foundations of Aestheticism in a work called Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published in 1873. In a famous essay on the painting of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, Pater outlined a new way of looking at art. For other contemporary art critics, such as John Ruskin, the accepted function of a work of art was to convey a message, usually a moral instruction. Art appreciation was in the reflection and discussion of those messages. Pater went against this. For him, the correct response to any work of art was to disregard any hidden messages, any moral instruction, or social commentary. You simply had to appreciate it for what it was.

Art for Art’s SakeThis proposal was the foundation of Aestheticism. It was manifested in a phrase used by the French poet Théophile Gautier which became the rallying cry for the movement – ‘Art for art’s sake’. This meant that art, in all its forms – painting, poetry, sculpture – should not be beholden to any moral or social agenda.

This was a radical change from what had gone before. In the early nineteenth-century the Romantics had considered that art, especially literature, should have a purpose. It could be a medium for the improvement of humanity. A poet was seen as a ‘legislator’, someone whose

writing could lead to such a radical rethinking of accepted moral and social mores that reform would follow. This belief was overturned by the followers of Aestheticism. Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote:

It is not a poet’s business to redeem the age and remould society.

It was not that poets such as Swinburne, who considered themselves to be guided by the principles of Aestheticism, thought that poetry should have no function at all. They emphasised that separating the artistry of a poem from the imposition of social or moral messages allowed the work of art to be considered only for its beauty. For them, the power of such beauty and its contemplation would provide the spiritual nourishment needed as an antidote to the industrialisation and increasing mechanisation that characterised the nineteenth century.

Criticisms of AestheticismThere were those, however, who did not welcome such a radical view of art. Some contemporary critics of the movement mocked it as nothing more than affectation. For them, Aestheticism was not about the serious contemplation of art – it was simply a version of showing off. This can be seen in the way that much of the mockery of Aestheticism in the contemporary press centred upon the figure of the aesthete him – or her – self, such as the cartoons by George Du Maurier that appeared in Punch magazine of which Wilde was sometimes the subject. In these, aesthetes were represented as self-seeking and narcissistic. They were not, according to one of the key criticisms, truly followers of Art. They merely enjoyed the attention they got by declaring that they were. In Patience, Bunthorne confides to the audience that he is an ‘aesthetic sham’. He does not like wearing the olive-green costume and imitating the manners of an aesthete. What he really enjoys is the admiration he gets when he does. This is reflected in the spoof Aesthetic poem of his that he recites, entitled ‘oh hollow, hollow, hollow!’

Behind such facetious mockery, however, were some serious objections to the movement and its manifestation in literature – that such shallow posturing was symptomatic of the moral degeneracy of the aesthete. This can be seen in the word ‘fleshly’ to describe Bunthorne.

Dante Gabriel RossettiRossetti, who was one of the main targets for Buchanan’s disapproval, has been cited as one of the possible models for Bunthorne. He certainly had all the characteristics of an aesthete in his preoccupation with art and his creation of a manifesto for its function. In 1848, he was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They were notorious for rebelling against the accepted methods of painting epitomised by the Royal Academy of Art, outlining their views in a periodical called The Germ. Rossetti was also a poet and sometimes inscribed his poetry onto his paintings. In 1862, some of his unpublished poems were buried with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. It was a decision he came to regret and in 1869, he arranged for her body to be exhumed and the manuscript of his poems retrieved. They were published the following year as a collection.

This is the volume under discussion in Buchanan’s article criticising Rossetti: he used his review of this book of poems to express his disapproval of Aestheticism. First, he highlighted the faults in Rossetti’s work. From these, he extrapolated the failings of Aestheticism itself. He achieved this by drawing attention to what he saw as one particular fault in Rossetti’s poetry – the focus on the physical. In this way, he was able to argue that poets such as Rossetti were not concerned about their poetry providing spiritual nourishment. Rather, they saw it as a means for the indulgence of physical desire.

Emphasising the PhysicalBuchanan began by focusing on the sonnet ‘Nuptial Sleep’, which describes a pair of lovers falling asleep after sex. He drew attention to the language of physical feeling in the poem, describing the mood Rossetti created as one of ‘mere animal sensation’. Buchanan then argued that this focus on the physical was typical of Rossetti’s poetry as a whole. Men and women in Rossetti’s poems, he wrote,

bite, scratch, scream, bubble, munch, sweat, writhe, twist, wriggle, foam.

This tendency of Rossetti’s to emphasis the physical, Buchanan called the ‘fleshly feeling’. This was a rather clever piece of lexical misdirection on his part. The term ‘fleshly’ deliberately creates in the reader’s mind an association with the bodily; but by following it with the word ‘feeling’ it links that with the voluptuous, even the erotic. Thus, Buchanan has presented Rossetti’s poem as being concerned with, not the spiritual nourishment of love, but the gratification of physical desires.

Buchanan argued that this ‘fleshly feeling’ in Rossetti’s poetry had been adopted by those who admired and imitated his style of poetry, such as Swinburne, William Morris (now best known for his contribution to the decorative arts) and Arthur O’Shaughnessy, composer of the well-known lines,

We are the music makersAnd we are the dreamers of dreams.

Buchanan likened their imitating of Rossetti’s poetry to a disease. According to Buchanan, any poet who aspired to Rossetti’s aesthetic style was doing the literary equivalent of catching an infection. Buchanan’s insistence on this analogy of Aestheticism with illness, reinforced his thesis that the aim of the aesthete was not to provide spiritual refreshment, but to indulge sensuous, physical desires. And the implication of venereal disease in the analogy equated the aesthetes with a concern for the fulfilment of a specific physical appetite, namely sexual desire.

The Accusation of ImmoralityThis argument that the aesthetes were preoccupied with carnal matters and not spiritual refreshment had a more significant implication. If these authors were not concerned with the spiritual, then they were not interested in the soul. At that time this was considered the aspect of being human that was most closely connected to God. If the aesthetes were not aiming at writing poetry that nourished the soul, then they were not creating literature that encouraged the contemplation of the divine in oneself.

In the late nineteenth-century, this was more than just misguided or improper. It was immoral. For critics of Aestheticism such as Buchanan, it followed that, if poets did not have a moral agenda in their work, and declared it should not be interpreted as such, then they must themselves be immoral. That this was a lasting view of literary Aestheticism can be seen in the reviews of Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. When it was published initially in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, it was greeted with a storm of outrage. Reviewers felt that Wilde had breached contemporary moral standards. The Daily Chronicle considered that, in its portrayal of Dorian’s descent into depravity, symbolised by the degenerating image of his portrait,

Wilde’s story epitomised ‘moral and spiritual putrefaction’.That the prevalent view of Aestheticism was as immoral is seen in the rapid demise of the movement after Wilde was arrested in 1895 and imprisoned for gross indecency. Wilde’s downfall was, for many critics, a proof that Aestheticism had not been about Beauty and spirituality; it was merely an excuse for immoral, anti-social activities. However, these attempts to stigmatise the movement were ultimately unsuccessful. Even Buchanan withdrew many of his arguments in later years. Yet the moral horror of the critics serves as a reminder that Aestheticism was about more than just Bunthorne walking around holding a poppy or a lily. It could incorporate the grotesque, just as the Decadent movement did at the turn of the twentieth century; and it would include the monstrous, like Aubrey Beardsley’s black and white illustration of a moon-faced Wilde in his Salome (1894). For all its emphasis on Beauty, whatever Aestheticism might have been, it was not pretty.

Article Written By: Rebekah Owens is a freelance writer with an M.A. from the Shakespeare Institute.

This article first appeared in emagazine 66, December 2014.

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The Yellow Wallpaper and other short stories

– Charlotte Perkins-Gilman

Speech and Silence in The Yellow WallpaperJudy Simons suggests that at the heart of this enigmatic and troubling novella is the powerful and disturbing voice of its 1st-person narrator - a woman resisting the (male) attempts to silence her.

A Refusal to be Silenced'I MUST say what I feel and think in some way - it is such a relief!' declares the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper almost half way through her story. Her pronouncement encapsulates one of the central themes of this short book, the primacy of self-expression. Isolated from human company - her husband is increasingly absent, her sister-in-law is occupied with managing the house, her baby has been taken away by Mary, presumably a nursemaid - the young wife whose story this is has no outlet for her feelings other than writing, something she has been expressly forbidden to do. Yet despite all attempts to silence her, her voice refuses to be suppressed, and without any individual in whom to confide, the act of writing acquires the status of speech. The story illustrates both the life-giving importance of being able to articulate ideas and the destructive power of frustration when communication is denied.

The Narrative VoiceYet whose is the voice that dominates this surreal narrative? Is it a voice of reason or of madness? Does the narrator describe an observed realistic environment or does she rather indulge in fantasy, allowing her imagination to take over and distort her perception of the external world so that perfectly ordinary household objects take on bizarre shapes and become invested with absurd meanings? Are her family caring individuals who only want the best for her or are they jailers out to crush her individuality? John, her physician husband, who in this story comes to represent the medical profession in general, is convinced that his wife is suffering from post-natal depression, which can only be cured by extreme rest. Although consistent with contemporary medical belief, in particular the misplaced theories of the eminent American neurologist, Silas Weir Mitchell, whose patient Gilman had been, his treatment serves only to exacerbate her condition and reduce her to a state of insanity.

Discovering a Powerful VoiceOr does it? It could equally be argued that it is only through the enforced regime of seclusion and idleness that the wife discovers her true voice, a voice which is surprising in its intensity. The persona that emerges towards the end of the story is markedly different from the passive young woman of the beginning, who obeys her husband's every word and conforms meekly to his wishes. Instead, the woman who creeps behind and ultimately materialises from the wallpaper is an unafraid, angry and energetic creature, who steps over her husband as he lies prone on the floor, having fainted away at the sight of his unruly wife. The positions of husband and wife are thus reversed.

So is it the case that she can only realise her identity through a descent into madness? Or is it rather that the voice that comes to dominate the narrative expresses the woman's real personality and that her original submissive mode echoes her vacuous, illusory existence that conceals her identity? These questions reflect the ambivalence at the heart of this troubling story, one of the reasons it has so intrigued readers and critics for over a hundred years.

Inviting Intimacy - a Conversational StyleWritten in the first person, The Yellow Wallpaper establishes doubts about the reliability of the narrative voice right from the start. 'And what can one do?', 'But what is one to do?' asks the

narrator, posing open questions that go unanswered, questions that carry extra resonance when uttered by an individual who is not allowed to 'do' anything at all. Note too how the voice, with the conversational 'And' and 'But', replicates speech patterns, as if the speaker is talking directly to an invisible confidante. With no introductory paragraphs to set the scene, the text plunges the reader directly into the middle of an on-going account. The tone is chatty, inviting intimacy, and the opening sentence,

It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer

is a line that could come from a letter to a friend. It assumes a pre-knowledge on the part of the reader, and stamps the character of the journal entry as informal and friendly.

Narrative Modes Held in TensionYet comments made in a reasonable manner about doctors or how her husband doesn't understand her are interspersed with overt allusions to fictional genres, fictions that are removed from the contemporary time and place in which the story is set. The use of archaic language in 'ancestral halls' recalls the medieval romance; 'a hereditary estate' suggests the mid 19th-century English country house novel; and the reference to the 'haunted house' immediately indicates that this might be a ghost story. The unanswered questions,

why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?

reinforce the sense of mystery, and help to create the psychological uncertainty which infuses the narrative. From the beginning then we find narrative modes in tension, the voice of a 'modern' late 19th-century woman competing with those more disturbing voices of literary fictions that hint at dangerous secrets.

A Structural Tension - Gendered OppositionsIn constructing a distinctively female consciousness as the narrative tool for the story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman also sets up conflicts that present the irreconcilable oppositions around which the tale is structured as highly gender specific. Masculine logic is set against feminine intuition; male articulacy is contrasted with female silence; the husband's liberty and action are thrown into sharp relief against the wife's imprisonment and immobility. Most significantly perhaps, man's reason and health rule over woman's irrationality and illness. In her book, The Female Malady (1985), the cultural historian, Elaine Showalter, argues that the history of psychiatric medicine in the 19th century reflects a history of power relations between men and women, as the male-dominated medical profession categorised as lunacy anything in women's behaviour that did not conform to their rational norm. In her essay, 'Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper' (1913), Charlotte Perkins Gilman gives weight to Showalter's theory as she describes her own response to the rest cure which brought her 'so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over'. Gilman's conclusion, that it is 'work', which in her case meant writing, 'without which one is a pauper and a parasite', is mirrored in The Yellow Wallpaper, where it is only through writing that the narrator recovers 'some measure of power'.

Finding Power in SilenceIn following the prescribed therapy, John tries to mould his wife according to a set of rigid principles that are designed to infantilise her. Like a child, she is confined to a nursery, which resembles a prison with its barred windows, rings on the walls and a bed nailed to the floor. She is fed on nursery food, carried around in her husband's arms, and addressed as a child, sometimes in the third person as if she were not present.

'Bless her little heart!' said he with a big hug, 'she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let's improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!'

He prevents her from moving, either out of the house or from her bed:

'What is it, little girl?' he said. 'Don't go walking about like that - you'll get cold.'

Reduced to the condition of a baby, the wife has the power of speech gradually removed from her. 'It's so hard to talk with John about my case', she complains, and when she attempts it, she becomes inarticulate and cries like a child. In contrast, his speech carries the power of authority, and the recurrent phrases, 'John says', 'he said' and 'said he', become increasingly sinister. Moreover, whenever she begins to speak about her feelings, he quietens her. Gradually she retreats into a silence of her own choosing so that when he observes for instance that she appears 'to be flourishing in spite of the wallpaper', she avoids responding directly:

I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intention of telling him it was BECAUSE of the wallpaper - he would make fun of me.

This reticence, however, is deceptive. In its progressive oppositions between day and night, passivity and action, silence and expression, The Yellow Wallpaper establishes an alternative existence for its central character. The narrative voice is private, revealing thoughts and emotions that must remain illicit and can't be spoken aloud. Yet, by internalising her frustration and the concomitant sense of outrage at her treatment, the protagonist finds a new energy, and as she does so, she gains the voice of conviction that was once her husband's privilege. In the closing stages of the story she is in control, the verbs are active instead of passive, and relate to movement rather than lethargy - 'lift', 'push', 'bit', 'peeled' 'jump', 'creep' etc. 'I must get to work,' she announces.

I am here and no person touches this paper but me - not ALIVE!

This authority is reflected in her return to speech as she instructs John what to do, and he becomes the impotent juvenile:

It's no use, young man, you can't open it!

to her new adult persona. Now he is the one who is 'silenced', while she is articulate:

I said it again, several times, very gently and slowly, and said it so often that he had to go and see.

When John obeys her directions, he discovers a wife changed into a form that is both challenging and powerful, with the result that he becomes incapable while she roams free in a new liberated identity.

Article Written By: Judy Simons is Emeritus Professor of English at De Montfort University, Leicester.This article first appeared in emagazine 63, February 2014.

A Woman’s Place - Topography and entrapment in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’Victoria Leslie explores the significance of place in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's disturbing fin de siècle short story.

The 'New Woman'The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the 'New Woman', women who wanted to work and take an active part in politics and social change. They felt that the role of women shouldn't be defined by marriage and childbirth. In fact, many New Women advocated 'free unions' whereby men and women could enter into monogamous relationships without the bonds of matrimony. The New Woman was seen as the equivalent of the decadent man, the dandy; a figure obsessed with aestheticism and excess. They were seen as dangerous and degenerate, challenging conventional ideas about gender. The fin de siècle, or the end of the century, witnessed a blurring of gender boundaries where masculinity and femininity were being radically redefined.

Challenging convention in life and literatureMuch of the literature of the 1890s focused on this new kind of heroine challenging her place in society, often addressing themes like marital discord, female sexuality and madness. But the fin de siècle also saw an increase in the women behind the fictionalisation, the writers themselves. Work by women writers flooded the market as they contributed to fashionable magazines and periodicals.These new writers opted for a relatively new genre as their weapon of choice to attack societal norms; the short story became an appropriate vehicle for women writers to expose the anxieties of the age and to highlight their concerns. The length of the short story allowed writers to express ideas concisely, symbolically and allegorically, whilst reaching a larger readership in publications such as The Savoy and The Yellow Book. What emerged from this fertile period were the seeds of feminism that would grow into a literature spanning generations to come.

A room of one's own'The Yellow Wallpaper' is about a woman suffering from some kind of mental or emotional breakdown, the causes of which are never fully explained. In order to alleviate her condition, her husband, a physician, decides to rent a property in the countryside as part of her Rest Cure Treatment. The story begins outside the house but the narrator voices her concerns in the first few lines noting, 'something queer' about the building. Gothic tropes are used to describe the building, first as a 'hereditary estate' then as a 'haunted house' to set the scene for supernatural possibilities and hint at something monstrous within. As if the reader is moving closer to the property, we are introduced to the garden, comprising of orderly 'box-bordered paths' and 'long-grape covered arbors' as well as 'hedges and walls and gates that lock', suggesting that the outdoors is cultivated and contained, whilst also introducing ideas of imprisonment and entrapment.

Protection or imprisonment?As the reader moves over the threshold and into the house, the narrator confides that she would have preferred to rent the room downstairs that opens up onto the garden. Her preference to be close to nature is all the more poignant when her husband insists they take the attic room at the top of the house. We learn that the room used to be a nursery and then a playroom. The bars on the windows, seemingly a protective measure, continue the semantic field of incarceration, as does the fact that the beds are strapped down.We learn that the narrator is not only imprisoned within the house but also in her marriage. Her

husband John does not believe his wife's assertions that she is seriously sick and diagnoses her as suffering from a 'temporary nervous depression - a hysterical tendency.' As part of her treatment she takes a variety of modern medicine cures from 'phosphates' and 'tonics' but she is absolutely prohibited from 'work.' Nineteenth-century attitudes to neurological conditions were very different to those of today. John seems to attribute his wife's hysterical tendencies to mental exertion, such as writing and socialising. His cure is essentially enforced seclusion.

Writing the rebellionThe narrator has a very different opinion about what would 'cure' her;

I believe congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.

Despite the rules imposed by her husband she does indeed write, albeit in secret. The narrative itself functions as a rebellion against her husband and society's demands. Gilman seems to suggest that female literary proficiency and creativity is dangerous to patriarchal values. The story can therefore be interpreted as a woman's struggle for artistic as well as physical freedom and independence.

Madwoman in the atticThe attic is a significant physical space as it is far removed from the hub of the home and the outside world, being a location where more extreme possibilities can take place. In Gothic texts, the attic is often where the supernatural finds fruition and arguably there is a haunting of sorts in 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. If we consider a building as a person, the attic is the 'head space' symbolising the psyche. Considering the bars on the windows and the strapped down beds, it could well be that the building was once an asylum. In the text, the narrator's confinement to her attic room is the catalyst that drives the story, developing into a focus on her mental health as it deteriorates.

The woman in the wallpaperAll the while the narrator is confined, her obsession with the room's yellow wallpaper grows. At first it is a dislike of its 'unclean' and 'repellent' colour and then its irregular patterns and 'lame uncertain curves.' The design is not governed by 'symmetry' or 'repetition' but is a random arrangement of shapes. The design of the wallpaper is even described as 'committing suicide' as the angels 'plunge off at outrageous angles,' foreshadowing a possible reading of the narrator's fate.As the narrator spends more time in the room, she becomes convinced the wallpaper conceals something. First she recognises a 'sub-pattern', then a shape, before finally discerning the figure of a woman. The woman is 'stooped down and creeping around' indicating that she is subservient. In the day the pattern 'keeps her still' but by moonlight the design transforms to prison bars and the woman behind the paper is trapped. It is then that she becomes more active, shaking the pattern in an attempt to get out and the narrator's initial fear of the figure is replaced by a desire to set her free. The narrator cannot determine whether it is one woman or many, possibly suggesting that all women 'creep' submissively behind various social patterns and expectations.As for the narrator herself, the wallpaper represents her autonomous self lurking behind the pretence that is her marriage and her social role. Like a princess in a tower she can see the world below that she is forbidden to enter because the attic prison commands a good view of the surrounding countryside. It has four windows, with very different views from each. One looks out onto the garden below, the first topographical space mentioned perhaps due to its proximity to the house. Although a contained and cultivated landscape initially, it is described later as being 'riotous' and 'mysterious'. Garden spaces are significant as they function as a midway point between the wider world and the home. Though they still belong to the domestic realm, they can also be untamed and wild. As such, the narrator takes solace in the garden but does not venture further than its borders. Other windows command a view of the bay, gateway to the sea, and a view of the road, both offering the possibility of travel. A fourth window looks out onto the countryside itself, a wild space consisting of 'velvet meadows' representing freedom. The windows symbolise different opportunities that the narrator could take, should she be able to find a way out.

The windows also emphasise the significance of perspective. Although the first person perspective naturally encourages us to empathise, it is clear that her experiences are the product of a severely depressed state of mind. As her delusions become more manifest, the narrative viewpoint becomes increasingly unreliable and readers are left to interpret the story's ambiguous ending for themselves. The story culminates with her husband attempting to break down the door of the attic room as he is excluded from what is now a feminine space; only with her permission is he able to gain entry into her insular world. What he finds there is very much up to the reader.

The death of the Angel ...The house was traditionally seen as a feminine space where 'angels' resided over domestic affairs, selfless in their devotion to their husband and children. Indeed Coventry Patmore established the idea of the 'Angel of the House' in his poem of the same name. In 'The Yellow Wallpaper' Gilman explores the importance of the family home and questions not only what it represents but what it conceals. She also considers the consequences of women rebelling against the feminine ideal. However, due to the mental health of the narrator, Gilman forces the reader to make their own minds up about the fate of the heroine. The narrator's final words spoken aloud; 'I've got out at last and you can't put me back!' are purposefully ambiguous. It could be seen that the narrator's obsession with the wallpaper has led to madness, so much so that she has assumed the identity of the woman in the paper. Alternatively she could have in fact committed suicide, especially considering she mentions the temptation to 'jump out the window' moments before, literally becoming the ghostly figure that once haunted her. Gilman wrote a short essay 'The Extinct Angel' as a reaction to Patmore's ideal of femininity, in which she proposes that the Angel of the House is dead, possibly suggesting that Gilman had a similar intention for her protagonist here. If Gilman does indeed kill off the narrator, she could be implying that the concept of the submissive woman is obsolete. On the other hand, she could be suggesting that the only way for women to escape the pattern of their lives is through death.

... or forward to freedom?Personally, I favour a more optimistic reading, in which the text champions female solidarity, women working together to escape their man-made prisons. The narrator's final lines merely indicate that she has realised that all women are one and the same, trapped behind social conventions, her final lines a rallying call to a generation of New Women. Recognising the bonds that constrain you is the first step to freedom.Further readingElaine Showalter: Sexual AnarchyRita Felski: The Gender of Modernity

Article Written By: Victoria Leslie is an English teacher at South Downs College.This article first published in emagazine 48 (April 2010)

A Culture of Madness – the ‘Madwoman’ in FictionEmma Kirby asks what connection the representation of female ‘madness’ in literature has to language, the telling of stories – and their reception as characters in the real world.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre presents us with one of literature’s most famous mad women; Rochester’s estranged wife, Bertha. This woman’s back-story is barely included, with Rochester disclosing only the thinnest account of her history: 

Bertha Mason is mad...she came of a mad family…

Brontë presents us with a writhing beast that is literally locked up. Critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar produced a groundbreaking essay back in the late 1970s which claimed that Bertha was Jane Eyre’s double, still further, Brontë’s double. This feminist perspective contended that the madness Brontë depicts was a metaphor for the author’s suppressed ‘anxiety and rage’. This pioneering analysis does more than spotlight nineteenth-century society’s repression of women evidenced in women’s writing, but suggests that madness is essentially cultural, a venting of all that is socially unacceptable. Crucially, these critics drew a distinct link between madness and women. Historical evidence seems to support this. Even nineteenth-century notions of madness confirmed that the reality of the situation was highly gendered. Women who had children out of wedlock or were adulterers could be considered ‘dangerous’ and ‘mad’. In other words, the diagnosis of madness was implemented to control and prevent women from subverting the bounds of expected femininity.More than just a metaphor for imposed social limits on women, madness was quite literally used to restrain those who threatened to transgress these limits. Bertha certainly transgresses the expectations of a stereotypical nineteenth-century wife. She is a ‘maniac’ with ‘grizzled hair’ – a ‘clothed hyena’. Just as Rochester binds Bertha’s hands to a chair to prevent her from literally escaping, his claim that she is a ‘mad…maniac’ envelops her in terms that debase and restrict her. For Brontë, perhaps Bertha was a vehicle to explore these limits on her own sex, a ‘wild animal’ symbolic of female expression, shackled by patriarchal expectation. Although it might assume too much to suggest that Brontë did this deliberately, even subconsciously, as modern readers we may well read Bertha’s character as such. As Jane herself puts it, 

they [women] suffer from too rigid a restraint.

However, as Bertha’s case testifies, if ‘they’ attempt to break away from such restraint, that way ‘madness’ lies. 

Madwomen in AtticsIncarcerating women suspected of insanity was not uncommon in the nineteenth century and often it was the woman’s husband who prompted this. One such example in literature is the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, where the narrator is shut up in a room in the country by her husband who insists she needs a ‘rest cure’. The ‘rest cure’ was a treatment designed specifically for women who were believed to be over stretching their brain capacity, a ‘treatment’ Gilman had experienced herself. 

Shut up in the house, the unnamed narrator’s husband, John, breaks down the door only to faint at what he sees. The sight is never described. Instead, the narrator screams that she’s ‘got out at last…in spite of you and Jane…’. No Jane has been mentioned thus far, so who is this character that the narrator refers to that never appears? The name could be a reference to herself – the narrator remains anonymous throughout. Some critics contend that it is an allusion to Jane Eyre, a novel Gilman would have been familiar with. By this logic, the narrator aligns herself with Bertha, another madwoman in the attic. Arguably, both claims share the same implications. References

either to Brontë’s heroine or herself suggest that the narrator has ‘escaped’ the restrictions imposed upon her by her husband (she has been forbidden to read, write or leave the house), but she is now able to ‘creep over him’ and finally leave her prison. No longer the young bride and mother he recognises, what John sees is sufficient to make him faint; Gilman presents a neat gender reversal where the superficiality of the passive ‘female’ is gone, exposing the equally superficial nature of the stalwart ‘man’. 

Gilman leaves us with the picture of a couple in social collapse, unable or unwilling to play their parts as the stable man and wife any longer; it is a scene of domestic insanity. But, troubling as this may have been to a nineteenth-century readership with its firm belief in the importance of a happy marriage, Gilman’s story asks still more troubling questions about madness itself, particularly to a contemporary readership more accustomed to, and accepting of, marriage breakdowns. We are left questioning: is the narrator simply insane or has she just stopped playing the role expected of her, that of the contented wife? 

The Restraint of Madness and the Madness of RestraintIf sanity is dependent on fitting in and adhering to the social roles expected of us, then it is impossible to overlook the fact that the roles that have been available to women in the past have been limiting. One of the most famous novels to explore the dangerous relationship between social expectations of women and female identity per se is Sylvia’s Plath’s The Bell Jar. During the American 50s when the novel is set, social control was intensified by a widespread fear of McCarthyism and consequently social conformity was demanded. Plath’s protagonist Esther struggles with this from the outset. Having won a writing competition and come to New York, Esther feels at odds with her environment. Knowing she should feel inspired by her surroundings, she cannot help but perceive her world as ‘mirage-gray’ and details how

the hot streets wavered in the sun… and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.

Plath creates a hot, alien landscape littered with images of dryness, evoking an environment that is sterile and acrid. Despite finding some small, early success as a writer, Esther cannot let go of the feeling that she should take a more conventional route by marrying. For her and many women in 1950s America, working and having a family were seen as mutually exclusive. It is these limitations that precipitate Esther’s mental breakdown, enshrined in the metaphor of the fig tree as Esther imagines picking one fruit only to watch the others wither; to choose one role inevitably signals the death of the other. For Esther, New York is ‘a stage backcloth’, – not a backdrop for creativity but for stagnant, derivative performances. 

Keeping up AppearancesAnother famous character who is caught between her innermost ‘desires’ and how she feels she must appear to others is Tennessee Williams’ character in A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois. Desperate to keep her sexual past and desires hidden, Blanche dresses in white and indulges in romantic stories about her past in an attempt to be perceived as a chaste, traditional Southern Belle. However, her performance is systematically broken down by her brutish brother in-law, Stanley. From the outset, Stanley attempts to destroy Blanche’s carefully constructed persona. He tears at her ‘costume jewelry,’ snatches her love letters ‘yellowing with antiquity’, unveils her promiscuous past until finally raping her in scene ten, resulting in Blanche being committed to a mental institution while Stanley goes unpunished. Like Esther, Blanche attempts to ‘put on’ a façade, dressing in a ‘white satin evening gown’ and ‘silver slippers’. However, the gown is ‘crumpled’, the slippers ‘scuffed’, symbolising the fragile nature of her performance. Where Blanche takes refuge in costume in the hope it will lend her performance authenticity, Esther acts otherwise, throwing her expensive clothes off the roof. By such an act, she tries to purge society’s codifications which work by designating particular roles. She discards the very thing Blanche clings to, metaphorically rejecting the gendered roles available to her. However, rather than liberating her, Esther finds herself unable to act any more, retreating to her room and eventually under her bed. Both protagonists find themselves bereft of performance and as such, their very sanity seems to be under threat; the only role left available for them to play is that of the mad woman in need of psychiatric help. 

A Failure of LanguageOn the brink of breakdown, Blanche, Esther and Gilman’s unnamed narrator all turn to language to express what is happening to them. However, each character struggles with this in different ways. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is banned from keeping her journal and is therefore denied the self-expression and liberty she craves. In Streetcar, Blanche takes refuge in words. Indeed, much of the dialogue is dominated by her long, whimsical speeches which contrast sharply with Stanley’s blunt, brusque prose. Her sanity becomes dependent on sustaining her stories but Stanley’s physical power overpowers her speech until she can no longer utter coherent words and ‘inhuman noises’ fill the stage. Similarly, Esther, a character clearly in control of language having won a writing competition, fails to articulate her personal experiences. In an attempt to write how she really feels, words fail her so she is left making ‘big, jerky’ letters she cannot recognise. Whilst she turns to words as her potential salvation, they fail to serve her. Indeed, how can language, by its very nature a logical, shared system, be used to express an experience so unique and ineffable? Moreover, the fact that all the protagonists who struggle to express their experiences and be heard are female cannot be overlooked. Arguably, the ‘madness’ of these women is indicative of something greater than individual instability – they point to the lack of stories that have been available to women, to a world of literature dominated by patriarchal discourse. Perhaps Esther’s writing fails her not simply because she is on the brink of madness but because she is a woman on the verge of breakdown and a system inscribed with patriarchal meaning simply cannot communicate what she feels. Arguably female writers have always had to contend with this dilemma. Just as Bertha is never given a voice in Jane Eyre and Gilman’s narrator is denied her right to write, so too in the past, women’s writing found few places in the literary canon. In Streetcar, Blanche’s sister, Stella, chooses to disbelieve the truth about Blanche’s rape, admitting: 

I couldn’t believe her [Blanche’s] story and go on living with Stanley.

Once again, a patriarchal story triumphs. All four texts imply that sanity may be dependent on telling a story, the right story that those around us want to hear and are willing to verify. Esther may be ‘cured’, with a ‘baby’ at her side, once again an upstanding citizen, but only because she has followed a conventional script she once questioned. If sanity is telling the right story, Esther can be considered sane in a way Blanche, Bertha and Gilman’s narrator cannot. Their stories fail to be heard or believed by those around them. However, as readers we are privy to the experiences of these women and invited to listen where possible and decide whether or not they are in fact mad, or victims of a make-believe world of patriarchal design. As Blanche so aptly puts it, ‘it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed me…’. Article Written By: Emma Kirby is an English teacher at The Portsmouth Grammar School.

This article first appeared in emagazine 66, December 2014.

The Bloody Chamber (and other short

stories)

- Angela Carter

Wolves, Chokers and Cloaks - Symbolism in Angela Carter’s The Bloody ChamberRobert Stevenson Brown discusses how Angela Carter has dissolved the traditional fairy-tale in order to reflect the social order of today.Oscar Wilde said:

all art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

The word 'peril' in relation to the study of symbols is aptly used by Wilde because by analysing a symbol the reader may reveal more to themselves about the forces at work in their own unconscious than they do about the intentions of the author. Symbols were important to Angela Carter; she expressed a wish to return to a pre-literate world, the world of the medieval miracle play, where symbolism was a useful shorthand for communicating efficiently with the audience. In the light of this it seems that the A Level literature student must place themselves in peril, plunging beneath the obvious meanings of the short stories that form The Bloody Chamber and following the symbols wherever they may lead them.

At times it can be difficult to distinguish between metaphors and symbols. David Lodge offers a useful differentiation by saying that metaphors are comparative and symbols are suggestive. A symbol may function comparatively at one level, but it is likely to have many possible meanings and the reader's cultural and literary knowledge - and even their desires - affect the way they 'read' a symbol.

The Roots of Fairytale SymbolismIn medieval texts such as the miracle plays, characters were made overtly symbolic by giving them names of human virtues such as 'Good Deeds' and 'Wits'. This meant that the actions of the personified characters could communicate an explicit moral message to an audience who were literate in the signs and symbols of the church and folk tales but could not read. Fairy-tales can be seen as a development of the miracle play genre. They are highly symbolic; particular characters represent general human characteristics and particular events enlighten us about the human passage through life. The tale of Red Riding Hood can be seen as an analogy for the dangers faced by adolescent girls as they embark upon an independent adult life. The protagonist, Red Riding Hood, becomes like the Everyman character of the medieval miracle plays who we are supposed to identify with and accompany through the tale. The wolf, who tricks her and wants to consume her, symbolises the male sexual threat she may encounter, his wish to 'see her' more clearly suggesting the voyeuristic male gaze. The wood itself, which is the setting for the tale, is even more symbolically suggestive, playing on the primeval fear of the forest as well as linking to the dense dark wood of the fairy tale and the Gothic novel where bad things happen. In Freudian terms it can be seen as representing the unconscious; the darker, wilder realm of the mind over which we have little control.

The Grimm VersionsCarter believed that the oral narratives that had become known as folk tales or fairy-tales had been hijacked by patriarchal society so that their moral message encouraged women to take on a traditional, subservient role within a male-led society. The brothers Grimm, who produced one of the first collections of European fairy-tales, changed their source texts so that they extolled the values of the German middle class of which they were part. Crucially they removed any sexual reference which they found. In Jungian terms fairy-tales are archetypal narratives and the symbols

within them form part of the collective unconscious of European culture. Whoever edits these tales wields a certain kind of power over the society of which they are part.

Accentuating the Symbolism and the GothicCarter's own collection of fairy-tales reverses this process; she exaggerates the sexual content of the tales and uses her female characters not to tell girls what they shouldn't do but to instruct female readers in how to behave if they find themselves in situations which threaten their integrity.

In many ways, both the humour and subversive moral message in Carter's The Bloody Chamber rely upon the reader knowing traditional fairy-tales. Gothic literature and fairy-tales both use symbols as a way of imbuing the narrative with a moral message for the reader, warning them not to transgress the accepted social norms of the day. But in both genres the symbols also link to unconscious fears and desires which could be socially destructive, forming part of a subtext over which the author has little control.

Carter's aim of returning to a world before the printing press, that of the oral narrative, ties in well with her re-writing of fairy-tales, accentuating their Gothic elements. But Carter went further than this, making The Bloody Chamber a truly postmodern reworking of the fairy-tale genre by using her tales to attack the ideologies and institutions of her day, and unsettling her readers by undermining their expectations of the symbols. What Carter does is bring the symbolism, the unconscious elements of the tales, to the fore, emphasising the subtext and using it to undermine the original moral message. Carter is indulging in what Roland Barthes called the mythologising of myth, which he saw as the best way to reveal to the reader the system of signs which operates below the surface of many texts.

'The Werewolf'In Carter's version of Little Red Riding Hood, 'The Werewolf', everything is different. We can tell something is not right when the wolf comes off worst in the encounter with the young girl, losing a paw. If in the original tale the wolf can be seen to symbolise the sexual threat of the human world, Carter makes this link explicit using the concept of a werewolf. But typically Carter subverts the symbolism here because the werewolf is in fact the girl's grandmother. Importantly, Carter strips both female characters of their innocence with the result that the reader is no longer sure who to sympathise with. In fact, Carter seems to imply that the werewolf grandmother is the victim of a narrow- minded and superstitious society whose members stone her to death at the end of the story, believing her to be a witch. Carter even makes the traditional heroine, Red Riding Hood, a villain because she is complicit in the lynching of her own grandmother.

Meddling with ColourCarter also meddles with the symbolism of colour. In the original story the red cloak represents both the literal danger of the wolf and the more general danger of becoming independent and encountering strangers. In Carter's narrative the girl's cloak is only red because she has rubbed on it the blood of the wolf she has maimed. The foregrounding of blood serves as a reminder that this tale can be read as an allegory for a pubescent girl developing the ability to menstruate. Her cloak comes to symbolise experience not innocence, proficiency not vulnerability.

Carter's subversion of the symbolic order allows us to position her within the literary context of postmodernism as a post-structuralist. Post-structuralism moved away from the humanist ideal of the individual and towards the idea that our subjective conception of ourselves and the world around us is determined by the culture in which we live, the discourse we take part in and the symbolic order that we have imbibed through the texts we have read. The major difference here is that whilst humanists would view all knowledge as good, post-structuralists are concerned that the knowledge we gain from books and elsewhere may be culturally biased, prejudiced and incomplete. By changing how the 'symbolic order' works within her tales, Carter makes the reader aware of the unconscious effect that texts may be having on them.

'The Bloody Chamber'In 'The Bloody Chamber', the title story of the collection, Carter uses symbols to show that the female narrator is in serious trouble. She has married a man who she describes as 'the richest man in France', who has had several wives, all of whom have died young, and some mysteriously. The future does not look bright for the protagonist. Her husband is 'much older than [her]' and in this case age seems to signify lechery, as he regards her as if 'inspecting cuts [of meat] on a slab'. She compares him to a lily, with all the symbolic associations that it has with funerals and death. Even his gifts are sinister; the choker that he buys her as a wedding gift is made of crimson rubies 'like an extraordinarily precious slit throat', harking back to 'the terror' of the beheadings of the French Revolution as well as the more traditional associations of the colour red with danger and passion. The Marquis' desire to carry his wife off to a remote 'faery' castle, separated from reality, is symbolic of the danger of masculine possessiveness. Like the Wolf in the Red Riding Hood tale, he wants to possess and consume the female, destroying her individuality.

In Carter's source text Bluebeard, the female character must be rescued from her marriage with a murderous male by her brothers; in this tale there are bad male characters and good male characters but only weak female characters. Significantly, in 'The Bloody Chamber' it is the protagonist's mother who shoots her husband dead as he stands ready to decapitate her. Carter has created a female character who succeeds in escaping her entrapment in a way that 'neither family nor myth has authored for her.'

After The Bloody Chamber, the symbolic order of the fairy-tale will never be the same again; women can wear red and get away with it, they can single-handedly wreak revenge on the possessive lover, they can take pleasure in sex and not be punished. Carter has succeeded in updating the symbolic order so that it reflects the modern social order.

Article Written By: Robert Stevenson Brown teaches A Level English at the Mirfield Free Grammar and Sixth Form.This article first appeared in emagazine 55, February 2012.

From The Bloody Chamber to CinderellaInspired by Angela Carter's Gothic fairy-tales in The Bloody Chamber, Harry Whitehead's creative writing on Cinderella is dark and disturbing. His commentary follows the tale.Once in a dirty and unpleasant house, there lived three sisters. Two were beautiful and wore dresses of the finest red silk when walking about town, so that all the young men would see them and desire what they could not have. The third was ugly as sin and despised her sisters for their beauty; she nursed her jealousy sourly, and her mother gave her clothes of grey cloth, ashamed to have a daughter so irredeemably without charm or grace. Cinderella she was called. She was humiliated in that family and worked tirelessly around the house so as to try to earn some love. Her hands were red and raw from scrubbing and one day they cracked open and bled onto her sister's sheets. When her mother saw this she shouted at her for sullying the white bedclothes.One day news reached the filthy little house of a magnificent ball, held by the prince. The beautiful sisters were invited, of course, and they made themselves utterly immaculate, with dresses of a pallor that matched their skin. Cinderella also heard of this. She had heard too, of the handsome prince and wished to have him. But she knew that dressed as she was, and repulsive as she was, she would never even be allowed into the ball. So she prayed to be made beautiful and that night her fairy godmother came; she was immaterial and drifted on air. She thrust her wand through, in darting movements and Cinderella was transformed. Her lips reddened, her hair became a sultry black and a circlet of white dropped around her waist. But the godmother made one condition, that she must not think impure thoughts or the disguise would fall away. Then she conjured a carriage, bejewelled with many rubies and diamonds, Cinderella climbed in and it sped away, gliding down the town's alleys on ebony wheels.When she reached the palace the door to the carriage opened and she seemed to float down the steps, and as she approached the crenellated gates she seemed so exquisite to the people watching that the shadows fled before her and moved in a black cloak behind. Once inside, everything was a whirl of dancers and music, and she moved through the crowd searching for her prince. The candlelight pealed down on the ballroom, and glittered off the masks of the guests, as they spun like dervishes through the steps of the dance. Then he was there, standing with his back to a giant mirror, his hair curled over his shoulders. His coat was lined with a delicate fur and his eyes shone amber and gold in the candlelight.But then he turned, swiftly and his gaze fixed on some point behind Cinderella. He moved towards her and swept past, leaving a trail of musky scent; he had seen one of her sisters. He took her by the hand and led her in a strange, prowling dance. The other guests stopped to watch as they twirled and leapt. But as they moved, faster and faster, a pinprick of jealous lust pierced Cinderella's mind and sank through her. The dress drained of its colour leaving a grey washed out rag, her lips faded, shadows crept under her eyes, and she seemed to hunch. She ran from the ballroom and into the night, the moon's bright light mocking her as she left. The last thing she saw of that glimmering place was her sister, being led up the stairs by the panting Prince to his bedroom.The morning came and Cinderella rose, the sister that had gone with the prince had not returned, and her twin was beset with worry and fear. Then the news arrived, 'The prince is coming! The prince is coming!' Her mother ordered Cinderella to clean and polish the house, as he would arrive in just an hour. He came without warning, suddenly standing on the doorstep with a sharp grin. He swept into the house and asked to see her sister, in a low growl; Cinderella stammered that she was getting ready, staring at the floor all the while.

'Ha! Then I shall prepare myself too I suppose. I shall require your bathroom my dear.'

She watched him stride into the bathroom and sprang to the door as soon as it closed to watch him through a crack in the wood. As she watched he reached into his mouth and pulled something long and gossamer from his teeth: her sister's hair. He smiled, and dropped it to the floor. She fled downstairs to the basement and fell on her knees. She prayed to be made beautiful again, but this time not because of a ball, but to avenge the consummation of her sister.

She entered the room where her sister and the prince were seated, perfect and dressed in flowing crimson. 'I had heard that there existed a twin to the one I met last night who was equally lovely and so I decided I must have her too, and you are certainly she, look! Even her shoe fits you.' As Cinderella entered the prince turned towards her, 'But I did not hear there was a third'. Cinderella smiled and walked towards the prince. As she did the dress's colour began to seep away, and dripped onto the floor in scarlet pools.

CommentaryAngela Carter has several overriding hallmarks in her stories and the most predominant of these is the ability to take and twist a story so that its subtext becomes brutally obvious. The Gothic genre is perfect for this as it allows for the grotesque and graphic to pass for normal. This is exemplified in 'The Company of Wolves', as the Gothic setting helps the seduction of a wolf by a young girl seem far less absurd than it would if it was written in realist style, for example. I have tried to use this in Cinderella; the original story is about how outside appearance determines inside character: the ugly sisters are nasty; Cinderella is pure and beautiful; and the Prince is handsome and noble. This says a lot about the society of the time (and indeed about ours) as we are taught that how people look is the ultimate judge of who they are. If you are ugly, you will fail, is the message; it is also women who are presented like this, rather predictably.

To emphasise Carter's other main preoccupation, feminism, I decided to make the connection between looks and character as obvious as possible by keeping them close together in the text and empowering Cinderella to be something other than what she is by appearing different. The inherently shallow nature of the story's original message which may seem acceptable even to the modern reader is extrapolated to whole new levels as Cinderella's thoughts themselves change her form. Like all fairy-tales Cinderella is a story that comes with a lot of morality attached; in the original text Cinderella is held up to be virginal and pure. She is forced to be such by the ideals of the society of the time. I tried to take that further by causing a small amount of 'lust' instantly to mark her out as impure.

I have also attempted to imitate Carter's overblown Gothic language. All her stories contain some element of this exaggerated expression, for example in 'Wolf-Alice' eyes are described as 'huge, inconsolable, rapacious', three separate adjectives with completely different meanings that would seem superfluous outside the Gothic style. Like Carter I have used colours extensively to try and convey her inherently Gothic imagery, for example 'bled onto her sister's sheets' symbolises the loss of innocence that is in practically all of Carter's tales.

This is seen again in the voluptuous sister's dresses of the 'finest red silk', that were inspired by the 'red ribbon' and 'red rubies' in 'The Bloody Chamber', red being a typical Gothic symbol, synonymous with lust, sexuality and danger. Carter also uses language to make her scenes far more vivid such as a description of a room in 'The Tiger's Bride' that includes the 'tintinnabulation of glass-cut chandeliers'. This blending of visual and aural imagery creates strong pictures and I have endeavoured to recreate this, for example with: 'The candlelight pealed down on the ballroom'.

Cinderella is a tale concerned with putting women in their (for the time) correct place, subservient to the men. This is the norm for fairy-tales and can be seen in the originals of many stories that Carter adapted, but Carter empowers her female characters to be stronger than their male counterparts and ultimately defeat them. This occurs in 'The Bloody Chamber' and 'The Company of Wolves', the characters achieving this by, respectively, embracing their sexuality and by refusing to allow men physical dominance. In keeping with Carter's style I had Cinderella do both; by taking on the lustful red she is able to fool the wolfish Prince and defeat him, thereby saving her sister.

Article Written By: Harry Whitehead is a student at Wells Cathedral School.This article was first published in emagazine 54, December 2011

The Kingdom of the Unimaginable - Gothic Writing in Dracula and The Bloody ChamberKieran O'Kelly argues that a 19th-century vampire novel and a 20th-century collection of short stories both exploit Gothic conventions to raise challenging ideas about identity.

Bram Stoker's Dracula and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber both seem to be concerned with taking their readers out of their comfort zone by challenging them to think the unthinkable about who we are and how we should behave. Both texts encourage readers to question certainties, and have at their core an exploration of the liminal, inviting the reader to cross the threshold between the homely and familiar and the fantastical and strange (a feeling often referred to using the German terms heimlich and unheimlich); the conscious and the unconscious, and enter into what Carter's female protagonist in The Bloody Chamber calls, the kingdom of the unimaginable. But apart from setting out to shock us, both writers also address fundamental questions that men and women have always agonized about, summed up for us in Harker's cry in Dracula of:

What does it all mean?

Change and ExplorationOne particularly resonant theme that both writers focus on is how we might face up to change. The texts challenge us to cross the boundaries of orthodoxy and struggle with feelings and thoughts we may have within us which may conflict with accepted, traditional, conventional thinking. Particularly perhaps for the young person on the cusp of adulthood it focuses on an experience which dares us to recognize and embrace what the female protagonist in The Bloody Chamber describes when she talks about 'the exhilaration of the explorer'. We are invited then, as readers, to embark on an adventure into foreign lands where, to quote Van Helsing in Dracula:

we have to keep an open mind as we do not know what to trust, even the evidence of our own senses

This supports the idea that as readers we should be as willing as the characters ultimately are, to accept Nature's eccentricities and possible impossibilities and believe in things that you cannot prove and where ultimately there may be no comforting answers.

Challenging OrthodoxiesThese texts speak to us about the feelings and thoughts we have which conflict with the accepted orthodoxies of our time. This need to be true to ourselves and at the same time conform to society's expectations provides the tension in the texts and explains the hold they have over the reader. The texts then present us with the paradox of what it is to be human. How do we resolve the very human dilemma that Aidan Day sees as being revealed in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chambe,r of 'the two competing desires for freedom and engulfment'?

Gothic ProtagonistsBoth Stoker and Carter present us with characters who dare to be different: overreachers who rebel against accepted mind-sets, hierarchies, political systems and moral beliefs that have traditionally been set up to instruct us how to behave. They are sceptics, iconoclasts, anarchists and barbarians challenging the world influenced by rules and conventional expectations; it is through them we can explore and question received 'wisdom'. The vicarious thrill readers experience when encountering questioning protagonists is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the Gothic's enduring popularity.

Exposing the Shocking TruthStoker and Carter want, of course, to sell their wares by causing controversy, so readers will read their texts but this focus on the wild, sensational, shocking and extreme, is not their sole aim. As Day points out, with regard to Carter's work:

the spirit of The Bloody Chamber, is not escapist, but ironic and critical

In other words the value of the Gothic, as a genre, is that by its very nature it encourages us to examine ourselves for the damaging tendencies within us - whether they be too egotistical, or too passive. As Day says:

In the collection The Bloody Chamber Carter points out that, passivity is not an intrinsically virtuous state, even - in fact especially not - in women

The female protagonist in The Bloody Chamber points out:

Who can say what I deserve or no? ... I've done nothing; but that may be sufficient reason for condemning me

Thus Day argues:

A rational and ethical self is central to Carter's strategy in The Bloody Chamber collection, and it cannot sustain itself by evasion and repression.

Day believes:

The idea of springing forward from recoil... seems to touch the heart of Carter's strategy in The Bloody Chamber.

Female Roles and BehaviourHow women are presented in the two texts encourages us to examine our society's power structures. This is particularly so for Angela Carter who Aidan Day claims:

is concerned not simply to point out what is wrong with conventional representations of gender; (but) she is concerned at once to offer different representations, different models.

An example of this is her presentation of the female protagonist's mother in 'The Bloody Chamber' who provides her daughter's inspiration in deliberate contrast to the traditional male heroes who usually come to the rescue:

My mother's spirit drove me into that dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst

The last five words sum up a message that is echoed in Dracula, where admitting to whatever lies within us is repeatedly stated. As Mina points out:

There must be no more concealment ... Alas we have had too much already.

Carter's protagonist in The Bloody Chamber at the end of her tale echoes similar sentiments:

No paint or powder, no matter how thick or white, can mask that red mark on my forehead.

Dracula: Lucy and MinaIn Dracula, Stoker seems to present two sharply contrasting female characters, Lucy and Mina. The former conforms to the submissive disposition women were expected to adopt. She goes to her death blissfully unaware of the part played by the men close to her, in allowing the Count to attack and kill her:

How good they are all to me! I quite love that Dr Van Helsing... I shall not mind any flapping outside the window.

To begin with Mina shows a similar acceptance of how a woman should behave and think, but she also shows a willingness to think for herself and eventually shows the courage to act contrary to male expectations:meanwhile they have told me to go to bed and sleep; as if a woman can sleep when those around her she loves are in danger - I felt in my heart an icy cold, but it did not occur to me to go back ...

'As for me', she said, 'I have no fear'.

She also becomes more proactive:

I have an idea - I shall get the maps and look over them... I am more than sure I am right

and like some of the female characters in Carter's stories, she ultimately helps to effect her own victory and escape.

Sexual HonestyHonestly facing up to who and what we are is important for the characters in these texts. In The Bloody Chamber the female protagonist says:

I was aghast to feel myself stirring... No, I was not afraid of him; but of myself... I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance

while in Dracula, both Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing (and even Mina) admit feelings of sexual attraction they never normally would countenance:

I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation.

Tested by the SettingThe settings provide a context in which the characters are forced to face truths about themselves, as Harker's anguished cry emphasizes in Dracula:

What shall I do? What can I do? How can I escape from this dreadful thrall of night and gloom and fear?

For as Van Helsing points out:

It is a wild adventure we are on... We seem to be drifting into unknown places and unknown ways; into a whole world of dark and dreadful things.

It is a world where:

There are caverns and fissures that reach none know whither.

Day points out that in The Bloody Chamber Carter:

uses the forms and fantasy of fairy tales... s

to exile her female protagonist from all the paraphernalia of the everyday world. The settings externalise the inner demons of the characters. The way in which Carter's characters face up to the temptations determines their mettle and the measure of their character:

It was imperative that I find him, should know him; I feel no fear... no intimation of dread

Van Helsing in Dracula expresses a similar fearless determination:

come, we must act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same.

Optimism and BeliefDracula and to an even greater degree The Bloody Chamber end with a degree of confidence; it is difficult to disagree with Helen Simpson's view in her introduction that:

The stories in The Bloody Chamber are fired by the conviction that human nature is not immutable/fixed irretrievably, that human beings are capable of change... and that Carter's voice is the voice of self-assertion.

This is emphasised by what Simpson sees as an optimistic vision of the possibility of a balanced and mutually fulfilling relationship between the sexes.

The Grotesque and AbsurdIf the Gothic aims to shock and unsettle, then it is perhaps not too surprising that dark humour, grim irony and an evocation of the grotesque and the ridiculous are an important means by which these aims are achieved. The Gothic deals with the extreme, uncanny, supernatural and therefore often teeters on the edge of the absurd - but then this is entirely appropriate for a genre in which nothing is held sacred.

The use of black humour to reinforce Gothic themes is also seen in the disillusionment and ironic realisation of characters who have sought to achieve their desires at any cost, only to see them turn to dust. A wry appreciation of the futility of battling against the odds and a recognition of the grotesque ironies of life is evident in the most perceptive of characters in the Gothic. In some small way, this attitude is shown to help them to cope. Van Helsing points this out at some length in Dracula:

it is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries and woes and troubles and yet when King Laugh come he makes them all dance to the tune he play... he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be.

His response to Lucy's death makes the moment all the more poignant:

Oh it was the grim irony of it all - that this so lovely lady garlanded with flowers were truly dead

Stoker in Dracula could be poking fun at some of the Victorian era's most cherished beliefs, such as the importance of men keeping a stiff upper lip at all times. There is an hilarious moment when Lord Godalming, no less, breaks down in Mina's arms and we are told:

in spite of being a true gentleman he grew quite hysterical.

Dracula, particularly when read from the modern reader's perspective, is full of moments of grotesque incongruity when the prim, stuffy, pedantic, meticulous adherence to standards of behaviour are juxtaposed against such extreme situations:

When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demonic fury, and he suddenly made a grab for my throat... It was very annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave

This concern with the trivial at the expense of the serious is not just funny in itself but helps the writer to point up the importance of seeing clearly the true nature of men and women.

Similarly, Carter's young female protagonist does this when, in a typical Gothic moment, she confesses:

perhaps, I had seen his face without its mask

The latent tendencies in all of us that we would rather not admit to are revealed:

I saw myself suddenly as he saw me. And for the first time in my innocent, confined life, I sensed in myself a personality for corruption that took my breath away.

Seeing oneself as others see us is a quality many writers celebrate and stress the importance of. It complements both the importance of self-knowledge and the acceptance of change from innocence to experience that Gothic writing deals with. That interest in the mysterious, the inexplicable and the willingness to understand the 'other' is something we find interesting, as the rebel or overreacher sets out to challenge and conquer his or her world's unsatisfying ideologies.

Furthermore we are encouraged to sympathize with the 'monster' - for that 'monster' only dramatizes to an extreme degree our own incipient desires. In The Bloody Chamber Carter is concerned not just with the female objects of male desire or the male gaze and how they should 'start to live for themselves', but also the nature of male sexuality and 'The atrocious loneliness of the monster'.

The Passive and the ActiveIn both texts there is a tension between the passive and the active state; entrapment and freedom; the pursued and the pursuers. Caged birds, an obvious image of human confinement, occur in Carter's tale of 'The Lady in the House of Love', as Day points out:with its Lady Vampire and man as virgin victim (it) asks the question of whether sadists are trapped within their nature: 'can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?'

At the heart of the texts lies a conflict between the temptation of succumbing to, or remaining in, a comforting paralysis, and its opposite perhaps equally dangerous state of raging egotism. Their analysis of the human psyche's constant war between these two outlooks explains, at least in part, the popularity of these texts. In Dracula, Mina, who becomes more and more active as the novel goes on, urges her male companions not to see their task of killing the 'monster' as a work of hate:

That poor soul who wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all ... You must be pitiful to him to ... some day... I may need such pity too.

Both Stoker and Angela Carter liberate their readers by revealing that hidden world of our inner selves in which we debate where to draw the line between transgressing moral and social codes of behaviour and conforming to the expectations of others.

Article Written By: Kieran O'Kelly teaches English at Xaverian Sixth Form College in ManchesterThis article first appeared in emagazine 51, February 2011.

Learning a new song - The Bloody Chamber and the GothicAngela Carter expert Merja Makinen explores whether these stories could be called Gothic, the relationship between the Gothic and fairy-tale genres and Carter's re-writing of gender in these strange and powerful hybrid tales.In the 1960s Angela Carter argued vigorously against being a Gothic novelist, 'all owls and ivy and mad passions and Byronic heroes who were probably damned'. However, a writer can always change their mind and she did, writing a deliberately Gothic novel Heroes and Villains (1969) that did have all the four elements mentioned. But does The Bloody Chamber? Indeed, is this a good description of the Gothic anyway?

Gothic texts written during the late 18th and early 19th centuries share a number of typical features: they have gloomy, imprisoning castles, they are set in a past, 'medieval' time when superstition reigned, they have some fearsome monster or ghost that is threatening an innocent, virginal young woman and the atmosphere oozes threat and fear and even horror. They employ a twilight world where things are glimpsed, only vaguely discerned, until the final dreadful moment. And they abound with the colours of extreme - black for villainy, white for innocence and lashings of red for blood. Morals seem pretty straightforward: one is the evil predator, the other the virginal prey. Critics sometimes divide the Gothic into texts where the fear is experienced internally and we experience the young female character's worries as she tries to unravel the mystery; and texts where the horror is external with bloody corpses and bones strewn around. Both, however, revel in the irrational themes of nightmare, madness, taboo and forbidden sexualities.

The Bloody Chamber and external horrorClearly at least two of the stories in Carter's collection easily fit these descriptions: 'The Bloody Chamber' can be read as an 'external' horror story, 'The Erl-King' fits the more internalised narrative of fear. Each explores the young female narrator's fears of imprisonment and extinction by her monstrous partner. 'The Bloody Chamber' has its castle, 'contravening materiality' between land and sea. Though set in the late 19th century, with trains, cars and known artists (Redon and Puvis de Chavannes), the entrance to the bloodstained room is pure ancient horror, with its flickering tapers and worm-holed wooden door 'barred with black iron', as too are the instruments of torture. The colours of Gothic are prominent in the narrative, her white skin, the white shift that convey her innocence; the red jewels, the 'unlucky' fire opal and the necklace of rubies, 'like an extraordinarily precious slit throat', both disturbing and prescient in their representations. The events happen mostly at night or the twilight of dusk or dawn, and the depths of the chamber hold the 'illimitable darkness'. The sexually depraved Marquis is unnaturally white and waxy, like the funereal lilies, conveying the mask of his social demeanour, powerful, rich, but with eyes that convey 'absolute absence of light' implying the darkness of his soul, the 'atrocious loneliness of the monster'. The sadism of his bedding his bride and the corpses of his other wives in the torture chamber fits the taboos and forbidden sexualities, and the terrors of the nightmare are incorporated in the frantic scrubbing of the fateful key from which the blood cannot be erased. Finally the entrapped maiden accepts she has 'Lost, as the victim loses to the executioner' and obeys his demand to put her head on the block.

The Erl-King - internalised fear'The Erl-King' has fewer external horrors; indeed it is hard at times to visualise the scenes, so firmly is the reader embedded within the narrator's confused sensibility. Here, the monster is supernatural, a wood-goblin who entraps young girls with his magic whistle and turns them into

caged birds. The wood is darkening and decaying and dying with the onset of winter, but scarlet with 'goblin' berries and white with 'Devil's spit' or cold moonlight.

The representation of the woods holds a nightmarish quality of labyrinthine enclosure and the narrator uses the metaphors of losing herself, and of being swallowed up, both key elements of this 'internal Gothic' story. The narrative too, shifts inexplicably between third (she), second (you) and first (I) person, and between past and present tense, giving a further experience of internal conflict. The Erl-King's magic draws the girl to him so that she both desires to be with him and fears being entrapped in his cage, and it is this ambivalence of wanting and fearing that the story explores. The reader is confused, because so is she: 'His touch both consoles and devastates me'. Some aspects of the goblin are attractive - his naturalness, his kinship with the wild animals and the fact he is skilled in nature's lore, but the plants the text dwells on are the disturbing fungi, growing 'in lightless places and thrive on dead things' and he is sharp-toothed, green-eyed and 'cruel'. Much like the Marquis, his love-making is represented as torture: 'a tender butcher' who will 'skin the rabbit', and her descriptions of herself as 'thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden' points to the inhuman unnaturalness of her lover and the nightmarish fear his gaze engenders.

Your green eye is a reducing chamber...I will diminish to a point and vanish.

In entrapping her as a bird, she will lose her sense of self and so, metaphorically, he would indeed be 'the death' of her.

Re-writing the passive womanAngela Carter is most famous for her challenges to the way female characters had previously been represented, particularly when it comes to feminine desire. While writing these stories she was also researching how women who fit into the cultural expectation to be passive, obsessed with their appearance and their 'virtue', assume the position of victim. Instead she was interested in exploring how young female characters can be active, embrace their emerging sexual desires, not expect a man to be the sole answer to their lives, and still be attractive as characters. To leave my reading of Carter's Gothic as her endorsing the way women were presented as virginal victims, constructed as good heroines because they were sexually-innocent and passive, would be to belie her stories because, of course, Carter gives the Gothic a different spin when it comes to gender. The two virgins in 'The Bloody Chamber' and 'The Erl-King' do not fear rape; while inexperienced, they are not fearful of sex, just their sexual partner's designs on them. When they realise what these are, both try to entice the men into bed in order to strangle them. The latter succeeds; the former does not, but her pistol-toting mother rides to the rescue. At the close, it is women who become active and saviours, not the men.

Lady of the House of LoveThe wonderful 'Lady of the House of Love' twists the gender expectations even further, when it comes to the Gothic, since here the woman is the supernatural monster, the 'predatory' vampire, and the young virgin 'prey' is male. This narrative too has all the required atmosphere of a brooding ruined mansion, evil ancestors, white-skinned Lady dressed in white lace, red blood and moth-eaten velvet draperies, and black-draped rooms. The catafalque and funerary urns repeat the objects in 'The Bloody Chamber'. But, even while it invokes the earlier story, this one re-writes it. The Marquis cannot change his script, must enact the predator, with his 'stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly' that makes the young girl pity him. The Lady asks the question he never could: 'Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?'. Must she fit into the expectations laid down for her by past generations or can she learn to behave differently? She is apparently the young girl dressed in her mother's clothes, standing beside a birdcage, entrapped by her vampire heredity. However, the spell of cultural expectations is broken with the shattering of the dark glasses and 'improvisation' between the two characters becomes possible, turning the predatory mouth-on-blood into a more nurturing, loving act. There is no happy ending - the vampire dies and the youth goes off to war - but this gender reconfiguration argues that no one is condemned to enact the past. As Carter herself argued, the 'social fiction of my 'femininity' was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing.' In these stories she re-writes the nature and behaviour of the female heroines into something we are more familiar

with in the late 20th and 21st centuries. As she herself said, she loved putting 'new wine' (modern views) in 'old bottles' (traditional genres) and watching the resulting stories 'explode'.

Fairy-tale or Gothic?Critics have often disagreed about whether The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a rewriting of the Gothic with fairy-tale elements or a rewriting of the fairy-tale with Gothic elements. What is perhaps worth noting in this debate is the similarity between the two genres. Fairy-tales also come out of a medieval period, an oral folktale culture. Fairy-tales often (not always) figure a dangerous, supernatural creature who threatens a young girl but they also have a powerfully transformative element, where the beast is transformed into a human or a poor girl into a princess. Something in the narrative changes a fundamental aspect of the tale to allow the conclusion. The oral tales were often sexually explicit (Sleeping Beauty is impregnated by the Prince as she sleeps and awakes to give birth to a whole bevy of babies) and the women were more active and self-reliant. In the oral Little Red Riding Hood, the young girl tricks the werewolf to let her out of the bed and into the garden, claiming she needs to shit, and then runs off home. It is only when men began to write the stories down in the late 18th and 19th centuries, that the female characters become more passive and chastity becomes important, since these were valued cultural expectations at the time and the writers were trying to teach young readers. Carter had just finished translating Perrault's fairy-tales before she wrote her own versions of the Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Beauty and the Beast stories. Perrault's Red Riding Hood is vain and is eaten by the wolf. The Brothers Grimm's Red Cap doesn't get into bed but is eaten nevertheless, and then rescued by a woodman who cuts open the wolf. Carter, in her own Gothic version of the tale, 'The Company of Wolves', includes lines from the oral original ('What shall I do with my shawl?' 'Throw it on the fire, you won't need it again') but then also has the girl take the wolf's clothes off and throw them into the fire too. By refusing to be passive and frightened the girl refuses the victim role and so can improvise a new resourceful role, like the original folk tale where the girl saves herself. Here girls can be equally interested in sexual desire - it is no longer taboo - and refuse the predator/prey dichotomy, 'she knew she was nobody's meat', to allow a happy conclusion where the wolf is made 'tender'. Her actions can transform him in a way the Marquis was unable to contemplate. Like the Lady, the wolf and the girl can 'learn a new song' and become new gendered characterisations different from the past but appropriate for the 1970s and beyond.

Article Written By: Merja Makinen is a lecturer at Middlesex University. You can find her writing on The Bloody Chamber in New Casebooks: Angela Carter, ed Alison Easton (2000).This article first appeared in emagazine 45, September 2009.

Different Routes, One Destination – Reading The Bloody Chamber as a Story CycleRose Page suggests that to understand this work it needs to be read as a whole, rather than as isolated stories. She argues that criticism often ignores the way the stories reflect on each other, providing different angles and perspectives that add up to a complex exploration of female roles.I remember how, that night, I lay awake [...] the pounding of my heart mimicking that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mother’s apartment, into the unguessable country of marriage.

So begins the first (and title) story of Carter’s collection, a whirlwind of sensual, subverted fairy tales that seem to both overlap and, at times, contradict each other. From the outset, then, the extended metaphor of a journey is established. Emblematised in this opening quotation by the ‘great pistons’ of the rather phallic train, Carter’s narrative transports both its characters and readers from a world of innocence and naivety to a dangerous realm of experience and truth. Clearly, we are being removed from our comfort-zone – the parallelism in her repetition of ‘away’ creates a litany of all the securities that must be left behind. Yet, if we read the sequence as a unified whole, as this article will assert we must, there is a new sense of discovery and resolution that makes this journey worthwhile. 

Many RoutesCarter is reluctant to assign an obvious moral to each individual story; we must read the whole collection to work out just what lessons we are meant to learn. She is wary of the sway of the author and, as Aidan Day remarks, her re-telling of fairy tales is 

designed to help kill giants in the everyday world.

Consequently, the sequence format of competing stories is uniquely suited to Carter’s purpose; she offers just one final destination, but creates a variety of paths to reach it. Male predation, such as in ‘The Company of Wolves’, is met with its female counterpart in ‘The Lady in the House of Love’. ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ adopts a gentle, somewhat archaic narrative of the female redeemer saving the beastly male, while its successor, ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, does the reverse.

The Two ‘Beast’ StoriesIf we look closely at the two ‘beast’ stories, we can observe how well their motifs complement each other. Even within their titles, the former implies female action (she is the ‘courter’) while the latter’s pointed possessive reduces the female protagonist to an owned ‘bride’. Highly personal accounts separate the two monsters: Mr Lyon is described with a ‘sadness in his agate eyes’ which ‘moved her heart’, while ‘The Tiger’s Bride’s’ narrator states that ‘nothing about him reminded me of humanity’. The eye of the beholder is therefore all that separates man from beast, as the delicate, emotive language in ‘Courtship’ is set against the emphatic curses of ‘The Tiger’s Bride’. Even the narrative voice alludes to the distinctions between the tales. ‘Courtship’ favours a technique known as free indirect speech, where although our protagonist is referred to in the third person we can clearly hear her thoughts and views:

Yet she stayed, and smiled, because her father wanted her to do so.

This example highlights too, of course, the passivity associated with this narrative voice – the soft, sibilant sounds of the line belie the protagonist’s true feelings. It is as if the first-person assertive ‘I’ is buried beneath this detached third-person voice, desperately trying to make herself heard. In contrast, ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ unapologetically favours a first-person narrative from the outset, when the protagonist bitterly declares ‘my father lost me to the beast at cards’. The irony here is that despite the power implied by this voice, what is actually being said shows the speaker to be no more than a disposable possession. 

Recurring MotifsStill, the two tales are clearly linked to each other – the two protagonists, different as they may be, are sisters-in-arms, united by their experience. Throughout all of the stories, various recurring motifs are used to illustrate this connection and one particularly potent technique is the use of the seasons. Almost every tale takes place in winter, perhaps metamorphosing into spring upon the protagonists’ collective sexual awakening. A period associated in Carter with sterility, cruelty and disguise, it heightens the subversive nature of the tales. In ‘The Erl-king’, winter is a

lancinating cold […] that grips hold of your belly and squeezes it tight

a personified oppressor just as violent, just as malevolent as the sinister Erl-king himself. In ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, synaesthesia is used to depict a ‘dark, bitter city’ where the icy cold is an assault on all of the senses. Winter, it seems, is a state of mind in the short stories. ‘The treacherous south’ the tiger’s bride bemoans, is a place where 

you think there is no winter but forget you take it with you. 

A Critical ErrorCarter’s most vocal critics explore these tales as self-contained narratives then make the error of declaring moral outrage and citing female victimisation. Who can forget Patricia Duncker’s scandalised summation of the title story:

All we are watching, beautifully packaged, is the ritual disrobing of the willing victim of pornography.

Yet Duncker declines to note the shifting gaze throughout the short story sequence, from male to female, aggressor to victim interchangeably. The domineering gaze of the wolves is not met by a passive prey but a laughing girl who ‘knew she was nobody’s meat’. 

Perhaps there is a danger in beginning the sequence with the most archetypal ‘fairy tale’, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, which plays on the Bluebeard legend. Critics can dwell upon this archetypal, murdering villain, whose favourite poetry aligns sex to torture, and the innocent female with a self-confessed ‘potentiality for corruption that took my breath away’. She constantly refers to 

The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.

These lugubrious flowers (followed by a ruby choker and her final slit-throat mutilation) are the first of many unwelcome ‘gifts’ that are in fact her burdens – or her scars. It is far too easy to continue with this same, ready-branded heroine, merely placing her in each different role in the later stories. Yet an essential skill in reading feminist discourse is ‘active engagement’; accepting that meanings we believe we have gathered may change at any moment. Roses in ‘The Lady in the House of Love’ are a motif with just as much sense of foreboding as the lilies, as their thorns menace the young, male visitor to the female vampire’s abode. Perhaps they are even more sexually explicit, but crucially, they are also essentially feminine:

Thickets bristling with thorns…their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications.

Thus in this twist, it is female sexuality that becomes the threat. 

Complexity of Female RolesThe fact that each protagonist’s actions and attitudes differ so greatly is simply testament to the multiple roles Carter believes a women can embody; each personality shift becomes a marker of the sequence’s progress. Some of the stories do seem to conflict with each other even when read as intended, but to conflict is not to cancel out. Perhaps the difference can be described using Carter’s own symbols. An overly simplistic reading of the collection would be to compare it to the hall of mirrors in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, where

A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides.

This implies that, really, the 10 short stories are in fact just one story repeated – or mirrored – 10 times over in various distorted versions. Rather, it seems more fruitful to compare the collection to the ‘Chinese boxes’ of ‘The Tiger’s Bride’ – open up one and the next is exposed, nestled inside that is the next, and so on, gradually revealing everything that is hidden within their ‘infinite complexity’.

A Uniquely Female SequenceWe may even go as far as to view the sequence form itself as uniquely female; gone is the novelistic quest plot, replaced by, as the first story’s heroine terms it, the ‘excitement of the explorer’. Carter’s stories do have a sting to them when read alone, but together they gain a valuable lyrical momentum, moving towards a single destination that manages to encapsulate multiple destinies. We ultimately discover something far more satisfying than the closure of a single story; the very open-endedness allows us to transcend boundaries, to select a protagonist we can identify with, and most of all, to gain the privilege of a chance to start again.

Article Written By: Rose Page has an MA in English and teaches at Woking College.This article was first published in emagazine 71, February 2016.

‘The Snow Child’ from Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.Ray Cluley discusses Angela Carter's enigmatic and disturbing short story.It may be the shortest story of The Bloody Chamber, but Angela Carter manages to pack a lot into 'The Snow Child'. It takes the theme of jealousy from its fairy tale origins, 'Snow White', and uses a Freudian focus to explore aspects of male power and desire and how these dictate female behaviour and appearance. Going back further than the widely accepted version which 'leaves the oedipal entanglements to our imagination rather than forcing them on our conscious mind', according to Bruno Bettleheim, Carter goes back to where the oedipal desires of a father and the jealousy of the mother 'are much more clearly stated...than in more common versions'.

Once Upon A Time...It begins in the present tense, an immediate departure from the 'once upon a time' tradition of fairy tales that shows Carter subverting the genre norm. It is, though, a technique typical of an oral narrative, which is how such tales were originally told, and it provides a sense of immediacy. 'The Snow Child' also retains the linear plot typical of the genre as well and uses the omniscient narrative voice that we expect of a fairy tale, revealing a great deal as early as the first line. 'Midwinter' prepares us for a story that will be cold, and as the story develops we see that this is more than a physical coldness, whilst the following 'invincible' identifies the thematic importance of power and 'immaculate' suggests purity. Each can be seen to represent one of the three characters in the tale, Countess, Count, and Snow Child respectively, whilst its brevity adds to its impact. Not bad for a minor sentence of just three words.

The Count'The Count and his wife' is as revealing as the first line. The man is referred to respectfully via his title whilst the possessive pronoun 'his' identifies the woman as his possession. The syntax, too, highlights his importance in comparison by introducing him first. We are told directly of his thoughts and desires via his sequence of wishes, a feature typical of fairy tales, and to emphasise them Carter uses the formulaic device of repeating 'I wish I had a girl' three times. His is the first voice we hear in the tale, and any wishes the wife may have remain unexpressed. Indeed, to begin with she is little more than a physical description, marking her as an object, something to be appreciated visually. Unsurprising, perhaps, when her husband's desires focus on the visual appeal of colours.The Countess

This doesn't mean we are without clues to his wife's character. She wears 'pelts of black foxes', an association which suggests that she has a predatory and cunning nature. She also wears 'scarlet heels, and spurs' and it may be that the colour of the heels comes from the actions of the spurs, which adds to this idea of violence. Carter uses the appearance of the child to prove these ideas of cunning predatory violence are accurate. Replaced in the Count's affections, 'his wife' becomes more of an individual, 'the Countess', something Carter emphasises by finally allowing the woman thoughts and feelings. We are told the Countess 'hated' the girl and we are granted direct insight into her character with the thought 'how shall I be rid of her?' establishing a focus on jealousy that will drive the rest of the narrative.

The Snow ChildTraditionally it's the woman who wishes for the child in this story, so again Carter sees to be subverting the genre here. With a woman we'd assume a maternal desire, as even Carter 'could never imagine Cinderella in bed with the Fairy Godmother', according to Duncker, but with a man

we are forced to consider whether his desires are paternal or sexual. Either way, it seems to point to some dissatisfaction with his wife and what she is unable to provide.

This is especially noticeable in the use of colours. These are more typical of the fairy tale origin. The girl has 'white skin, red mouth, black hair'. The first colour represents her virginal purity, and in appearing 'stark naked' she seems all the more vulnerable and innocent. It may be that she's naked because the Count did not express anything about clothes in his wishes, or because female nudity is such an obvious part of male fantasy that it didn't need to be mentioned during the wishing process, but there is an obvious eroticism to her lack of clothing. Erotic or pure (or both), she is an obvious contrast to the Countess who was described primarily via her clothing. What's more, the Countess's clothing is red and black and not white, denoting a lack of purity, and whilst the Countess wears some of the colours of the Count's desire, the girl has them all naturally, unadorned.The 'red as blood' suggests danger and in this respect it foreshadows the girl's doomed fate. To further prepare us for this, Carter uses the black of a raven's feather, a bird so often associated with death. The red can also be seen to represent the girl's sexual maturity, though, and rather than allowing either representation, Carter draws on both to link sex with death, giving the story a shocking climax (so to speak).

Three's A CrowdThe girl's death is due, in part, to the Countess's jealousy and in this respect Carter has created a typical evil step mother. She attempts to command the girl but the Count dismisses her instructions, showing his power whilst denying the Countess any of her own, and the more she fights against the Count the more she finds herself out of favour. Each attempt to be rid of the girl results in the girl becoming more clothed at the Countess's expense; the clothing comes directly from her own body, emphasising how one woman replaces the other.The girl is excluded from any active part in this struggle and remains without a voice of her own, little more than a plot device. The married couple, however, are united in having dialogue. Rather than follow the standard rules of dialogue attribution, Carter has the Count and Countess share the same paragraph to present them as a single unit. It's a relationship that, as far as the Countess is concerned, needs no third party and she does her utmost to be rid of the girl.The Count is not without feelings for the Countess. When he sees her new nakedness he 'felt sorry for his wife' and her final command of the girl is allowed to go undisputed. She wants a rose, symbolic of romance and a common feature of the fairy tale. Interestingly, whereas previously we were told of the Countess's intentions regarding her instructions, this time the simple imperative 'pick me one' is voiced without any explanation regarding motive. The girl 'picks a rose; pricks her finger on the thorn; bleeds; screams; falls' all in one fast paced sentence, her death isolated as a paragraph on its own and told in the present tense for extra impact.

...Happily Ever After?The girl's death marks a sudden and surprising turn of events in which the mood shifts from one of typical fairy tale surrealism to one which is sexually explicit and disturbing. Soman Chainani claims 'The Snow Child' is an attempt to 'deconstruct fairy-tale and pornographic archetypes simultaneously by tracing their origin to the same source', and though there is a lack of erotic detail here (the Count is 'soon finished') his actions meet the 'morally offensive' criteria of pornography in that he 'unfastened his breeches and thrust his virile member into the dead girl' (my italics). It's all the more upsetting because the third person narrative voice distances the reader and makes them a helpless witness, powerless to stop what is happening. But Carter's intentions go beyond the money making motivations and titillations of pornography to reveal the potentially incestuous desires of a father figure, and to illustrate that a passive woman will find herself victimised.Not that the more aggressively active woman, the Countess, doesn't suffer. She loses her clothing and husband to the girl, albeit momentarily, and even though she's successful in causing the girl's death she still has to watch her husband's intercourse with her. He may be 'weeping' as he uses the girl, but it's more likely for his own loss than for the girl's sake, and the Countess watches his actions 'narrowly'. The adverb reveals a distaste that seems more like anger than jealousy now that a compromise of sorts has been reached, with neither Count nor Countess entirely satisfied. It seems a certain amount of tolerance is needed for a relationship to work

'It bites!'The girl is pricked by the rose and the bleeding represents of the loss of virginity; she dies before the Count can 'prick' her and make her bleed himself, which may explain his upset. But how much is the rose to blame? The girl melts immediately after sex, the Count having no use for her anymore, and there's nothing to suggest this wouldn't have happened without the rose. All that remains is a feather and bloodstain, reminders of the components that inspired her creation. The simile 'like the trace of a fox's kill' links the bloodstain to the Countess via her earlier association with the animal and marks her as responsible for the girl's death.With competition for the Count's affections out of the way, the Countess becomes 'his wife' once again and to reaffirm this he hands her the rose, but 'It bites!' This deceptively simple exclamation adds a level of complexity to the story's conclusion. In fact, the rose itself is a rather complicated symbol here. It's a flower with thorns, beautiful and dangerous, and as such it represents the Countess and the threat she poses to the girl. As a representation of the Count's love, the rose is not the girl's to take or to give and she is destroyed by it. The Count is able to handle it freely but the Countess cannot receive it unscathed. She either accepts it and is hurt or discards it before it can do any further damage; the text makes no claim either way and Carter leaves it for the reader to decide.But who is this reader? Much has been said about Carter writing feminist fiction, a woman writing for women, but this story uses a fairy tale which makes it more accessible and gives it a wider audience. Much has also been said about the presentation of gender in The Bloody Chamber stories, but simply dividing 'The Snow Child' into what it says about men and women is far from satisfactory or conclusive. For example, the girl remains voiceless throughout the entire text, but should we really assume this means a passive woman is part of male fantasy? It could simply be the girl's a plot device to illustrate another woman's jealousy, in which case Makinen's claim that 'it is the critics who can't see beyond the sexist binary opposition' seems well founded. Gender roles are clearly important, but there's more to 'The Snow Child' than looking at representations of men and women, or how men represent women, or even how fairy tales represent men and women. Indeed, you can get into such a tangle here that you fail to appreciate 'The Snow Child' for what it is: a story. Carter says of her stories in The Bloody Chamber that allegory is intended, but also that she keeps 'an entertaining surface', that 'you don't have to read them as a system of signification if you don't want to'. The heroine of 'The Lady of the House of Love' wonders 'can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song?' and it seems to be something that concerns Carter, too. She says 'I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode' and in creating 'The Snow Child' she has produced something that is less a version of 'Snow White' than a new song all by itself. One that bites.

Article Written By: Ray CluleyThis article first appeared in emagplus 45, September 2009.

Angela Carter and the AbhumanGothic literature often explores the very definition of humanity, questioning what it means to be human, and what happens when the boundaries of human, animal and monster are destabilised. In this article, Charlotte Unsworth-Hughes considers ways in which Carter presents the concept of the abhuman in The Bloody Chamber.

Introducing the AbhumanThe abhuman subject is a not-quite-human subject, characterised by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not-itself, becoming other.Hurley, 2004

According to Freud (1919) 

the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.

Gothic literature is immersed in such uncanny experiences – at once familiar and unfamiliar – perhaps no more so than in its presentations of the abhuman. It presents a world in which boundaries dissolve and definitions mutate, a world of vampires, werewolves, speaking animals, doubles, and automata – ‘not-quite-human’ subjects – and the uncanny ‘other’. 

Carter’s collection of tales, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), is full of such abhumanity and related tropes. Skin and fur appear interchangeable in two lycanthropy-focused werewolf tales, ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ and ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, the latter of which also features a disconcerting automaton maid. ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ considers the blurring of boundaries between humans and monsters, and questions of identity through self-reflection and concealment are explored throughout the collection through Carter’s oft-used mirror and mask motifs. Drawing on clusters of symbols and motifs found in earlier Gothic literature, Carter explores issues concerning human identity – and what happens when humanity is no longer distinguishable from animal or monster. 

Human Animals‘He will lick the skin off me!’‘The Tiger’s Bride’

In the mid-19th century, Darwin published his theories of evolution, and, in the eyes of Victorian society, the boundary between the animal and human became increasingly unstable. This sparked fear of regression for the Victorians, and the idea of the dormant ‘animal within’ reflected the anxieties of the time period, as demonstrated in such 19th-century Gothic texts as Stoker’s Dracula (1897), featuring characters who are able to turn into wolves and bats.

This uncanny blend of animal and human is enthusiastically embraced by Carter, who chooses to include animals in no less than half of the titles in her collection. In the ending of ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’, the lion (‘Lyon’) in the tale is ‘transformed’ into a man upon Beauty’s tears falling on the ‘Beast’s’ face and her kissing his ‘meat-hook claws’: 

And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man with an unkempt mane of hair…

Do we have here a human with an animalistic side, or an animal with a human side? Does this tale show the taming of man’s bestial nature, or acceptance of the beast within? Or is this animal/human dichotomy too simplistic an interpretation altogether?

This trope is also seen in the description of the girl sleeping ‘between the paws of the tender wolf’ in the ending of ‘The Company of Wolves’, and ‘Wolf-Alice’ recognising herself as a human girl. Perhaps most intriguing of all is the blending of human and animal presented in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, in which the narrator’s skin is licked away to reveal fur: 

And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs.

Here, rigid bounds of humanity dissolve into something simultaneously human and animal – this is a story of revelation rather than transformation. In ‘revealing’ herself, there is obviously something sexually charged, with the focus on the licking, tongue and skin. Surrendering to desire is not something that Carter necessarily cautions against; here in fact, it is presented as something to celebrate, and the presentation of the human animal shown here embraces something natural, instinctive and primal.

Monsters‘How can she bear the pain of becoming human?’ ‘The Lady of the House of Love’

In many cases in earlier Gothic literature, such as Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), humanity’s primal, animalistic elements demonstrate something unrestrained and often dangerous – monstrous, even. Carter draws upon the convention of the Gothic ‘monster’ in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ through the figure of the vampire, echoing not only Dracula but also the earlier Carmilla (1871) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. 

In Carter’s tale, the beautiful vampiric Countess is, predictably, described as a predator on the hunt for prey: 

Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. Delicious crunch of the fragile bones [...] All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges.

However, as ever, Carter subverts this trope and strays from the expected narrative. What is unusual here is the Countess’s ‘horrible reluctance for the role’ and that she ‘would like to be human’. She shares the reader’s view of herself as grotesque, and weeps over her incessant consumption of men.

However, upon the arrival of a young army officer, with whom she evidently falls in love, she finds herself unable to maintain her ritual of consuming her prey, and ends up dying herself – as a human girl. This calls into question her apparent ‘soullessness’ and suggests that just as humans have an animalistic side, so-called ‘monsters’ have a human side; they are not separate entities.

Mirrors, Masks and Doubles‘Mirrors on all the walls’ ‘The Bloody Chamber’

The Gothic ‘monster’ does not always appear as such. In fact, the truly monstrous figure can often appear as quite the reverse, such as in the case of Mr Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – outwardly beautiful, but ugly and corrupt inside – or in the case of respectable Dr Jekyll’s violent alter-ego, Mr Hyde (1886). The idea of a ‘double’ to reflect the truth of human nature, and as an outlet for indulging in conscious or unconscious desire, is a common element of Gothic abhumanity. 

Again, we are encouraged to consider the monster within and the idea that surface appearance is just a simulation of humanity. Carter, along with other Gothic authors, shows how the monstrous ‘other’ is part of the human ‘self’, and therefore disturbingly suggests that humanity contains something monstrous. She does this, in part, through her symbolic use of masks, such as in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, where the Marquis is said to be concealing his true self: 

The face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world [...] lay underneath this mask.

Later in the tale, upon the narrator exploring her surroundings, she comes across a book in which she sees the sadistic image of 

a man in a black mask [who] fingered with his free hand his prick

whilst inflicting pain on a young girl. Masks are used here as a symbol for indulging in taboo pleasures in the same way as doubles were used in 19th-century Gothic literature. Similarly, Carter uses a mirror motif to suggest reflection of concealed desire, and it is through viewing herself in a mirror that the narrator realises in herself a ‘potentiality for corruption’. Doubles, mirrors and masks generate a false sense of reality, which, when stripped away, often reveal something primal, corrupt and desire-driven – but this, she suggests, is also something human.

Automata‘Nothing human lives here.’ ‘The Tiger’s Bride’

Finally, in the context of abhumanity, having considered animals, monsters and doubles, it is interesting to consider something which appears human but may not even be alive. Jentsch (1906) explains that 

one of the most reliable artistic devices for producing uncanny effects easily is to leave the reader in uncertainty as to whether he has a human person or rather an automaton before him. 

The Gothic trope of the automaton presents a moving mechanical device imitating a human, and can be found described in E. T. A Hoffman’s The Sandman (1815), Poe’s essay ‘Maelzel’s Chess Player’ (1836), and, later, Daphne du Maurier’s The Doll (c.1937). Advances made during the Industrial Revolution provoked unease about the capabilities of, and increased reliance upon, machinery, but this fear is perhaps amplified even further for today’s readers.

Consider the maid in Carter’s tale ‘The Tiger’s Bride’. She is an automaton – a ‘marvelous machine’ with a ‘metal heart’ and a wind-up ‘key’. She has no life whatsoever in her – not animal, human, monster – she is empty. And this is perhaps the uncanniest existence of all. As the narrator’s ‘clockwork twin’, the automated maid serves to show the terrifying consequence of the complete removal of the self, and seems therefore to suggest that to embrace humanity – all elements of humanity, including dark, animalistic, monstrous elements – is at least to be real. Whilst the Gothic trope of the monster or animal within was a deeply disturbing concept for the Victorian reader in the time of Darwin, for today’s reader, in the context of artificial intelligence, robots, and science fiction turned reality, the prospect of having nothing within is perhaps even more unsettling.

ConclusionFor Carter, the ‘singular moral function’ of the Gothic is to ‘provoke unease’. In her uncanny descriptions of the abhuman, she certainly achieves this. In her presentations of human characters, monsters and animals, she shows that they are not separate entities, but, to a greater or lesser extent, are one and the same. Clear-cut definitions do not belong in Gothic literature, and certainly not in Carter’s tales. Boundaries blur, definitions dissolve, and readers are presented with the destabilisation of human identity; the tales act as lenses through which we can view, and reveal, ourselves. The narrator notes in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, 

it is not natural for humankind to go naked, not since first we hid our loins with fig leaves.

But what the Gothic, and Carter in particular, does so successfully and unsettlingly, is uncover the realities of human nature, and therefore of the self, even if that reality is something monstrous.

Article Written By: Charlotte Unsworth-Hughes teaches A Level English at City of London Freemen’s School, having previously taught at the University of Sydney.This article first appeared in emagplus for emagazine 83, February 2019.

The Uncanny in Literature – Eeriness and UneaseDr Anna Powell explains the idea of the uncanny and its roots in Freud’s theories of the unconscious before exploring how it operates in two texts – Wuthering Heights and The Bloody Chamber.

The uncanny is a difficult term to explain. Derived from the Scots word ‘canny’, which means ‘knowing’, one meaning is obviously ‘the unknown’, what Otto Jentsch called ‘intellectual uncertainty’. The uncanny reflects changing historical and cultural contexts and has influenced critical, literary, philosophical and political thinking from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Nicholas Royle recently applied it to contemporary critical concerns as 

an experience of the threshold, liminality, meanings, borders, frontiers.

Freud and the UncannyFreud’s 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ is a major influence on later interpretations. In German unheimlich derives from heimlich, an ambivalent adjective which means homely and familiar as well as concealed and secret. Freud also references English meanings of ‘uneasy, gloomy, dismal, ghastly’ (applicable to a haunted house). He reads the prefix ‘un’ as a ‘token of repression’ of 

everything that ought to have remained hidden and secret but has become visible.

For Freud, the primal fantasy is a return to the womb, at once feared and desired. The original ‘haunted house’ of psychoanalysis is thus the mother’s body, our first ‘home’, and the uncanny is ambivalent, 

that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.

Freud claims that the ‘peculiarly violent and obscure emotion’ of Hoffmann’s eerie Gothic tale The Sandman stems from castration anxiety. The uncanny further includes the splitting of the ego as doubles, masks and hybrids, as well as physical repulsiveness and death. It might also deploy humour and irony that evoke laughter as well as fear. In other words, the uncanny provokes feelings of discomfort and unease because of its disturbing presentation of reality as both familiar and strangely unfamiliar.

The Bloody Chamber (1979)Angela Carter’s short stories evoke a postmodernist and intertextual uncanny. Interestingly, Freud denies that ‘genuine fairy tales’ are actually uncanny because the effect works only if ‘the setting is one of physical reality’ – as in the realist elements of Wuthering Heights. ‘Arbitrary and unrealistic’ settings reduce the uncanny quality because rather than making the familiar seem disturbingly unfamiliar they are simply fantastical. Yet, Carter, with her magic mirrors, vampires and werewolves, eschews ‘genuine’ fairy tales for feminist-informed fantasies. The elegant camp of her literary pastiche requires detailed awareness of historical forms and affects as she distorts and reflects (on) them in an ‘eldritch half-light’. For Royle, Carter’s magical realism uses the uncanny for ‘normalising and neutralising itself’. In other words, Royle suggests that her playful pastiche is too self-consciously camp for the genuine uncanny. Carter uses the actual term in ‘The Tiger’s Bride’, with the Tiger’s perfect mask of

a beautiful face; but one with too much formal symmetry of feature to be entirely human: one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uncanny.

Here she clearly alludes to Freud’s use of doubles.

Unconscious automata, a common feature in uncanny texts, are also set in motion when the narrator mimics her own ‘clockwork twin’ as Freud’s ‘automatic, mechanical processes are at work'.

The clockwork serving maid has a ‘musical box where her heart should be’ and 

from a split seam at the side of her bodice protrudes the handle of a key.

Carter uses this ‘marvellous machine’ to reflect on the doll-like and men-pleasing attitudes inculcated in women. The narrator thus ‘meditated’ on how she had also ‘been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand’ and had thus been allotted ‘only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her’. Yet, Carter’s tales usually have a ‘happy ending’ in which the female protagonist gains self-realisation or autonomy.

Female werewolves and other uncanny hybrids repudiate patriarchal repression to release their beasts within. The narrator embraces her feline catalyst, who 

ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, 

thus magically becoming a tiger herself. Her 'earrings turned back to water and trickled down' her shoulders then she 'shrugged the drops off [her] beautiful fur'.

Carter self-consciously uses her considerable knowledge of literary Gothic to rework generic tropes. Her familiarity with the vampire genre is displayed in ‘The Lady of the House of Love’. She mimics the mode’s conventions with zest as ‘the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes’. She also highlights the limitations of Gothic gender types, the melancholy femme fatale being as stymied as a ‘haunted house’ herself because ‘the beastly forebears on the walls condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions’. Stuck in the 

timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has always been and will be

the Lady is condemned to be only ‘a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit’. Wit and reason can refute the uncanny, but ironically, the English cyclist, fearless of vampires, ‘will learn to shudder in the trenches’ entering the actual horrors of history. Rather than Austen’s parody of the Gothic ‘original’ in Northanger Abbey (1818), Carter’s pastiche subverts such clear-cut originality in its mixture of genres, registers and moods that both relishes the uncanny and deconstructs it.

ConclusionFreud suggests that 

there are many more ways of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.

Rather than being completely explicable by psychoanalysis, the literary uncanny ‘calls for an aesthetic valuation’ of form and style. As theorist Harold Bloom suggests, powerful literature can produce an ‘uncanny startlement’. Literary analysis itself works at a further level to make texts even more uncanny.

Article Written By: Dr Anna Powell has recently retired as a Reader in English and Film to become a Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University.First published in emagazine 67, February 2015.

Angela Carter’s ‘The Werewolf’ - Ambiguity and AmbivalenceTony Cavender argues that Carter's remoulding of the classic fairy tale challenges and mocks the reader.'Little Red Riding Hood' is a fairy-tale that has been re-told many times, sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes subversively. Its fascination can, perhaps, be put down to the fact that the story is a way of addressing some important issues to do with sex, sexuality and the balance of power between men and women. Writers have used the story in many different ways, adding and subtracting elements to convey different perspectives on it. Charles Perrault points out the meaning of his tale in a 'moral':

Children, especially attractive, well-bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers; for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf.

Little Red Riding Hood is an innocent who fails to heed warnings. The wolf unequivocally represents male sexual power and threat. Roald Dahl's verse re-telling features a Little Red Riding Hood whose readiness to deal with the wolf surprises and delights the reader (with Dahl s use of that naughty word, 'knickers'):

The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.She whips a pistol from her knickers.She aims it at the creature's headAnd bang bang bang, she shoots him dead.

Things are not so straightforward in Carter's 'The Werewolf', one of three versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story in The Bloody Chamber collection of short stories.

Beginning, Middle and EndThe structure of the story is unusual. The opening scene-setting description takes up nearly half of the 'story'. There are only two actual events: the encounter with the wolf and the discovery and killing of the witch-grandmother. The ending is very brief: 'Now the child lived in her grandmother's house; she prospered.' When I've given students the whole story on a single side of A4, many have turned the page over when they've got to the end to see if there's any more. Clearly it's not an ending that satisfies and it sends the reader back into the tale to find out why.

Where's Willy?It's difficult to find a male character in this story. There's a reference to the Devil and the description of the wolf suggests a male ('It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops') - though Carter refers to the wolf as 'it', leaving its gender ambiguous. Otherwise, the tale features witches, old women, a mother, a grandmother and a 'child' referred to as 'she'. There is a significant male absence, that of the 'child's father. What has happened to him is not made clear; what is, is that he is not needed to perform the traditional male role as protector of the female. The child has her father's hunting knife and she 'know[s] how to use it'. The knife is, of course, a phallic symbol, a symbol of male power. However, what it represents here is not male sexual power but power pure and simple.

'Where wolf?' or a Tense EncounterIn Mel Brooks' horror film spoof Young Frankenstein Dr Frankenstein ('it's pronounced Fronkensteen') hears the howl of a wolf and enquires of Igor, 'Werewolf?' Igor replies, 'Where wolf?' and points, 'There wolf!' In Carter's story the 'child' points the finger at her grandmother. But on what evidence? The wolf's paw is no longer a wolf's paw but a human hand, 'a hand toughened with work and freckled with old age'. If the villagers were to visit the scene of the child's encounter with the wolf they would find no trace of the event

Soon it came on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured.

The implications of that choice of tense, the conditional 'might have been', are easily overlooked on a first reading. 'Might have been' suggests the possibility of 'might not have been', of no attack and no wolf at all.

'Them and us'Initially the narrative voice seems to be external third person, working hard to create that frisson of terror associated with the Gothic: 'Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest'. But suddenly there's a first person narrator and one who makes a link between himself (herself? - again, the gender is not clear) and the reader: 'To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I'. The voice encourages an alliance, a feeling of shared knowledge and attitudes and beliefs. It encourages the reader to feel superior to the people in the story with their primitive, superstitious and brutal lives. However, is it a voice the reader can trust? Isn't there something tongue-in-cheek about the remark 'Anyone will tell you that' and the exclamatory comment, followed by the italics 'Oh, sinister! - follows her about all the time'? Who's being mocked here - the superstitious people of the story, or the reader who has been seduced by the Gothic atmospherics into believing in this world? How is the reader meant to take the comment, 'Wolves are less brave than they seem' and the description of the wolf 'lolloping off disconsolately between the tree as well as it could on three legs'? There's a mockingly humorous edge to the narrative voice here that disconcerts the reader and sits rather uneasily with the serious tone of the opening paragraphs and with the echoes of the fairy-tale with which we are so familiar.

And the Moral of the Story is...?The most significant detail that Carter changes from the fairy-tale is that of the garment worn by the protagonist. Carter's 'child' has no red riding-hood but instead 'a scabby coat of sheepskin'. This is not merely a change made to be more in keeping with the setting Carter creates: it is a change on which the whole meaning of the story could be seen to rest. The title of the story, the echoes of the fairy-tale and the drive of the plot suggest a reading in which the 'child' is some kind of feminist heroine, facing up to the dangers of the symbolic forest and wolf and winning through with courage and resilience (and no need for help from any male). However, the 'child''s cloak evokes the idea of a 'wolf in sheep's clothing' and she is not childish or child-like in her behaviour and character. The interpretation suggested by this is that the 'child', not the grandmother, is the werewolf of the title and that she uses the beliefs and superstitions of her people to get rid of her grandmother and grab her property. The 'child' is empowered by the possession of her father's hunting-knife but to what ends does she put this power? She moves away from the domestic role performed by her mother but what does she become? The story thus has some interesting and ambiguous things to say about the relationship between women and power. Is the child's ruthlessness a male characteristic she's acquired along with her father's hunting-knife? The reader certainly feels uneasy and ambivalent about the outcome of the story.

Article Written By: Tony Cavender teaches English Literature at South Downs College.This article first appeared in emagazine 61, September 2013.

Transgressing the Boundaries - An introduction to the GothicRobert Kidd highlights the temptations and dangers of the Gothic's journey into the unknown, for both protagonist and reader.Girls share the pleasures of the text in Twilight, boys secretly tune into the bloody excesses of True Blood - the fiction of fear feasts on a new generation. Since the sensation of Walpole's The Castle of Otranto Gothic literature has engendered a taste for the tasteless and an appetite for the pleasures of the flesh.

What is the Gothic?What is meant by the term 'Gothic'? Where does it come from and what exactly does it encompass? Any question on genre is going to require a definition of terms and I hope this introduction will put the texts you are reading into some sort of a historical and literary framework. Bear in mind that for many of the specs, whether for exam or coursework, examiners are going to require you to talk in significant detail about a range of texts and at the same time talk about these texts with reference to what they share in terms of style, narrative structure, themes, imagery and characterisation. Often the language used in the Gothic tends to be passionate and excessive; sensational and unrestrained by taste or moderation. The construction of the plot and the depiction of character - particularly in the early texts - are often crude and fantastical. There is little that is refined, rational or tasteful in the pages of these self-consciously lurid stories.

Transgressing normalityGothic texts tend to be about transgression, overstepping boundaries and entering a realm of the unknown. In this realm the ordinary is displaced by the extraordinary, the normal becomes the paranormal and the unconscious is as vivid, vital and valid as the conscious.

In this environment it becomes difficult to orientate one's self: it is often a dark world where winding passages lead deeper and deeper into an uncanny and uncertain world. Forests, wildernesses, extremes of nature predominate. The rational world is left far behind, reason no longer rules. The improbable is entirely possible and the impossible becomes ever more probable. Often the protagonist is presented with a baffling series of choices with no clear sense of what the right one might be.

It is similarly difficult to navigate the morality of this new state. The certainty of the normal world is rendered void once the borders of the Gothic have been breached and a further frisson is provided by the fact that this voyage into the Gothic has been taken voluntarily and perhaps against one's better judgement. The Gothic has somehow seduced the reader so that he or she is complicit in engaging with whatever he or she might encounter. Part of the thrill lies in this sense that the reader shares this act of transgression - the reader is tasting forbidden fruit, opening dangerous boxes in the hope of enjoying the illicit pleasures made available to the protagonist.

Journeying into the unknownSo, the narrative of the text often involves journeys into the unknown and this is a metaphorical enactment of the act of 'reading' text itself. The texts themselves are often forbidden; beyond the bounds of acceptable literature and the very act of reading them is, in itself, a flouting of the authority of the legitimate canon of 'worthy texts'. Gothic texts were, in many ways, a reaction against the rational discourse that marked the literature and philosophy of The Age of Reason. Instead of Reason and Rationality the Imagination was set free. The boundaries of logic and sense were breached and, instead, the sensational and the sensual were celebrated. Gothic texts

allowed readers to think the unthinkable; to sublimate their innermost desires within the pages of books that were in their very existence an affront to the intellectual establishment. As such they became a way of subverting the establishment. Novels that were concerned with outsiders and whose protagonists flouted the natural order became the obvious vehicle for attacking the safe, central values of a society that smugly turned its back on those who were not born into the comfort of money, education and power. The power and passion of Gothic literature seemed eminently suited to the iconoclasts who wished to challenge the status quo (Walpole, Lewis, Godwin, Shelley...). Often the repressive regime is represented by an ancient order that resists change and any challenge to its autocratic rule. The heroes are those who seek to overturn this authority and establish the freedom to develop their individuality. In this sense the Gothic can echo the early ideals of the Romantic movement which sought to revolutionise society (Wordsworth, Coleridge). The ancien regime is exemplified in old buildings - castles, abbeys, towers and so on. These features have become a sort of Gothic shorthand that signifies dominance, barbarity and the dead hand of authority. These buildings are peopled by autocratic fathers, uncles, counts and kings.

The consequences of transgressionParadoxically, Gothic literature also lent itself to those who wished to warn society against the effects of breaking with the natural order: the protagonists who strayed off the path of reason, order or decorum often came face-to-face with the consequences of their actions rendered all the more terrible in the lurid world of the Gothic text. Darkly attractive strangers who tempt the innocent and naive are transformed into demonic villains who are only just defeated by some force of righteousness, a personification of conventional morality, and the weeping victim is led back to safety a wiser and better person. The consequences of transgression are clearly delineated and the boundaries between order and chaos are endorsed and reinforced in the resurrection of an acceptable moral order (Radcliffe, Burney, Austen...).

The 'foreign' mindGothic texts are set in foreign locations. At first these locations were literally exotic and far away - Italy, Spain, Arabia, Middle Europe but fairly quickly sublime landscapes closer to home were explored - Yorkshire, Scotland, Ireland, the Lake District. The fact that the 'foreign' could exist in the reader's own neighbourhood made it all the more frightening. The logical conclusion of this movement comes with the exploration of consciousness itself. The landscape of the mind becomes the ultimate other world where the self is lost in a welter of barely suppressed urges and desires.

Again the process of reading/viewing the Gothic becomes a reflexive metaphor: it describes itself. The viewer/reader is reading an externalised representation of his/her fascination with the unknowable - selfhood itself. Writers such as Stevenson and Poe anticipate the works of Freud in their exploration of the Unconscious.

Safe in the fictive world of Gothic literature the reader/viewer can vicariously experience the trials of those who have transgressed the boundaries of society, morality or sanity. They can overstep the margins of reasonable behaviour secure in the knowledge that they retain the power to shut the book, close the text and return to the rational world. Ironically, of course, the creatures created within many of these texts refuse to remain trapped within their pages. Dracula rises again every few years, Frankenstein's creature lurches into vision with similar regularity and each of them has spawned a host of progeny from Freddy to Jason. The modern has become the postmodern 'screaming' at us from one 'knowing' last summer to the next.

Over the thresholdIn each of these texts there is a clearly defined threshold over which the protagonist and the reader must step. It may be represented as a physical boundary - the dividing line between the civilised and the natural world as in Wuthering Heights. It might be a social line - the girl breaks free from the constraints of her family's expectations and rushes into the arms of some dubious stranger with an altogether 'other' agenda as in so many of Radcliffe's novels. It might be a moral line where the protagonist breaks a moral law - perhaps he has the temerity to imitate his Maker and breathe life into the inanimate.

ViolationAt the heart of the Gothic text is the tension provided by the possible violation of innocence - the concept of 'virtue in distress'. In the first flowering of the Gothic as a genre the innocent victim was almost exclusively female. Her chastity was the object of the villain's desire and the novel's landscapes and imagery often provided an obvious objective correlative for this sexual threat. Swords were raised, arrows let loose, doors forced and defences breached. Victims found themselves pursued down tortuous passages with no clear sight of an escape route: they were trapped in impossible situations - and, as the genre developed, these were often of their own making. Sometimes their situation was made worse by the fact that their violation seemed to be legitimised by the laws of the land - the idea of the droit du seigneur Angela Carter memorably pastiches the latter in The Bloody Chamber.

Temptation and transgression are the central motifs of the Gothic. The idea of forbidden fruit, the locked casket, room or house is the clichéd catalyst that still drives the majority of Gothic narratives. Either the protagonist actively oversteps the mark or he/she invites the danger into their own, previously safe environment. And, as said earlier, it is curiosity that allows the reader to identify with the protagonists of the texts. At the heart of these stories of temptation there is a moral paradox. Surely, it can be argued, the pursuit of knowledge is a positive aspect of human endeavour - it is a fundamental aspect of the human condition and humanity refuses to be denied the answers to any question it might ask no matter how terrible the answer might be. Pushing the limits of knowledge and the consequences of such a search has become part and parcel of the scientific age and, again, this has easily been assimilated into the Gothic model.

The reader has elected to open the box, has invited the terrible, the horror into the sanctity of his or her own domain. Darkened cinemas are visited, films are brought home, books are opened. Perhaps the darkness within each of us craves what these damned and damning texts contain.

Article Written By: Robert Kidd is Head of English at Leicester Grammar School and was previously a coursework moderator for OCR.This article was first published in emagazine 47 (February 2010)