Christmas
Eve is a time for telling ghost stories, so it is only fitting that last night, on Christmas Eve, I finished reading Richard Davenport-Hines' book Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. The 1998 study examines one of
my favorite genres of literature… and of drama.
While
most people trace the Gothic back to Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto, Davenport-Hines
considers the originator of the genre to be the 17th-century painter Salvator
Rosa. After the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in December of 1631, Rosa began
painting the devastated landscape around Naples. In the early 18th century,
Englishmen began collecting Rosa's images of rugged mountains, menacing banditti,
and witches' sabbaths, creating a vogue for such paintings in Britain.
One
of Rosa's prominent collectors was the Earl of Shaftesbury, who influenced
Alexander Pope. Though Pope was hardly a child of the Gothic, Davenport-Hines
notes the poet had a taste for "fragments of a ruined world, wrecked buildings
and withered trees." Pope's friend William Kent had an even greater
influence on the Gothic, both through his illustrations of books like Spencer's
The Faerie Queene and his architectural
designs for country estates like Henry Pelham's house at Esher.
The Neo-Gothic style inaugurated by Kent and his contemporaries had a political
motive as well as an aesthetic one. Aristocrats seeking to project their own
power in a world increasingly dominated by trade used the Gothic to re-enforce
ideas of antiquity, stability, and legitimacy, even as their actual power was
slowly undermined. This was particularly true in Ireland, where Robert Kingsborough
built the pretentious Mitchelstown Castle, which strove in vain to convince
locals of the family's importance. Mary Wollstonecraft, who was governess to
Kingsborough's daughters, wrote of the family:
The
topics of matrimony and dress take their turn – Not in a very sentimental style – alas, poor sentiment
it has no residence here – I almost wish the girls were novel readers and
romantic, I declare false refinement is better than none at all.
Refined
romanticism, might be false, but it could be self-consciously false, as was the
case with Horace Walpole. After acquiring a house in Twickenham on the
outskirts of London, Walpole named the place Strawberry Hill and began
renovating everything in a gothic style he knew to be ridiculous. Just as
absurd was his 1764 novel The Castle of
Otranto, subsequently adapted numerous times for the stage. Walpole's own
play The Mysterious Mother was intended
as a closet drama, perhaps because its plot was so outrageous the author couldn't
imagine it being performed.
Though
the Gothic preceded the French Revolution, the fall of the Bastille certainly
fired the Gothic imagination. Davenport-Hines stresses the importance of the
Revolution on other playwright-novelists, including the Marquis de Sade, Mathew
G. Lewis and Mary Shelley. The Revolution unleashed a hunger for blood, and
Davenport-Hines argues that what makes the monsters of this period so
terrifying is their "insatiable neediness." The twin representatives of
this unquenchable thirst for destruction are Frankenstein's monster and the
Goya painting titled (posthumously) "Saturn Devouring One of His Sons." (One of my friends absolutely hates this painting. Another friend recently quipped: "Well, I guess it's really a matter of taste.")
One
of the useful things Davenport-Hines does is recount the use of Gothic
aesthetics by scene designers. Giovanni Battista Piranesi studied architecture and
engineering, but became famous for designing scenery for the Venice opera house
with "endless flights of balustrade stairs and domes beyond domes." In
1740, Piranesi settled in Rome where he designed scenery for the Valeriani
brothers, among others. He ended up producing a series of prints, the Carceri, based on set designs, and these
prints ended up permanently altering the design of European stage sets.
One
British set designer influenced by Piranesi was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.
When he was young, Pugin built a model theatre in his family's home. He later
worked as a stage designer professionally, primarily at Covent Garden. He is
perhaps best known today for assisting Sir Charles Barry in building the new Houses
of Parliament at Westminster begun in 1840. Much of the building's Gothic
aesthetic is due to Pugin, particularly the interiors. Alas, Pugin came to a
rather Gothic end, going insane and dying in the Bedlam asylum in 1852.
Davenport-Hines
also includes a whole chapter on vampires, beginning with the legend that
suicides frequently became vampires, an ironic inversion of their desire for
self-destruction. The word "Vampyre" first appeared in English in 1732 in relation
to a man in Hungary, Arnold Paul, who supposedly tormented people after his
death, even taking the lives of four unfortunate souls. A full 40 days after his death,
locals dug up his body and found it free from corruption, but with blood about
his nose and mouth. When they drove a stake through his heart, the body
allegedly let forth "a horrid Groan," and they afterward burnt his body to ash
and cast it back into the grave.
Lord
Byron played a pivotal role in the popularizing of the vampire legend in
England. His 1813 poem The Giaour
contains the lines:
But
first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy
corse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then
ghastly haunt thy native place,
And
suck the blood of all thy race…
Byron
famously composed a tale of the undead during an 1816 ghost story competition
with the Shelleys at Villa Diodati. Byron's personal physician, John Polidori,
author of the unproduced dramas The Duke
of Athens and Count Orlando, wrote
his own tale based on the one Byron had told. An unscrupulous publisher named Henry
Colburn printed the story in 1819 as The Vampyre,
A Tale by Lord Byron. This novella became the basis of many subsequent vampire
plays, including James Planché’s 1820 melodrama The
Vampire, which was more immediately based on a French play, but reset
in Scotland (allegedly because the theatre already had a stock of kilts).
Dion
Boucicault wrote his play Vampire in
1852, and Davenport-Hines traces the influence of Polidori's tale even to Gilbert
and Sullivan's 1887 operetta Ruddigore,
or the Witch's Curse. The most famous vampire story is of course Bram
Stoker's novel Dracula, first
published in 1897. The novel inspired F.W. Murnau's silent film Nosferatu, as well as Tod Browning's
1931 Hollywood hit Dracula with Bela
Lugosi. Browning's movie was directly based on a 1927 stage adaptation by actor Hamilton Deane and hack writer John L. Balderston, and is less than faithful to
the novel.
Still,
Browning's Dracula was successful
enough to inspire Hollywood to make a slew of Gothic films, including James
Whale's Frankenstein in 1931, Karl
Freund's Mad Love in 1935, and Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein, also
released in 1935. With these films, Gothic drama, Gothic literature in general,
and indeed the entire Gothic aesthetic, reached even larger audiences, and as
Davenport-Hines makes clear, the Gothic remains very much alive (or perhaps we
should say undead) today.
