The Gothic Body

Abstract

Readers familiar with Dracula and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde may not know that dozens of equally remarkable Gothic texts were written in Great Britain at the end of the nineteenth-century. This book accounts for the resurgence of Gothic, and its immense popularity, during the British fin de siècle. Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative 'abhuman' identity in its place. She shows that such representations of Gothic bodies are strongly indebted to those found in nineteenth-century biology and social medicine, evolutionism, criminal anthropology, and degeneration theory. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, standing in opportunistic relation to nineteenth-century scientific and social theories.

Carceral horror: Punishment and control in Silent Hill

“…Silent Hill taps into this anxiety by subjecting the player to forms of control that do not seem to apply to others, particularly monstrous creatures. As horror/Gothic texts "negotiate the anxieties that accompany social and epistemological transformations and crises" (Hurley, 1996: 5, as cited in Taylor, 2009, it is perhaps unsurprising that Silent Hill incorporates such punitive and carceral elements in a time blemished by crises of control.…”

‘The unknown region that lies beyond the Gray’s Inn Road’: Evolutionary Anxiety in the Country and the City in Arthur Machen's <i>The Green Round</i>

“…Their primitive features render them grotesque, occasioning instinctual repulsion in humans who encounter them; they are, to use Hurley's term, abhuman, presenting human features in a state of flux and throwing the potential inhumanness of the human into sharp relief. 60 Hillyer's shadow clearly presents similar traits. When the being is first seen by his fellow guests at the Porth hotel, it is believed to be the 'Ty Captain murderer' , the killer of a local woman whose body has been found 'shamefully torn and mutilated' in the countryside.…”

“…15 Degeneration theory, which 'reversed the narrative of progress, proposing a negative telos of abhumanness and cultural disarray' , was, Hurley explains, 'a crucial imaginative and narrative source for the fin-de-siècle Gothic' . 16 Machen (1863-1947) was no exception to this preoccupation. The figure of the pre-human survival, in the form of the malign Little People of the 'Novel of the Black Seal' (1895, originally published as part of the episodic novel The Three Impostors), 'The Shining Pyramid' (1895) and others, and the spectacle of degeneration through physical dissolution into primordial slime, are recurring themes in Machen's fiction.…”

“…It was thought that evolution had, perhaps, peaked; that urban living exposed humans to pernicious, morally and physically degenerative influences, and that 'Western civilization, contaminated by the very fruits of its own progress, was sliding into a fatal decline, into senility, dementia, and death' . 38 From this perspective, it appeared that civilised societies were becoming enervated, exhausted and prone to vice, and that the degeneration resulting from their indulgences would reduce subsequent generations to atavism. Machen hints at this variety of evolutionary anxiety in an earlier Little People tale, 'The Red Hand' (1895), when he has his protagonist, Dyson, mention that certain faces among the London crowds remind him irresistibly of 'primitive man' .…”

Bram Stoker's Gothic and the Resources of Science

“…As Kelly Hurley observes, while criminal anthropology was engaged in theorising the abhuman, its main interest was nevertheless in 'reconstituting what Darwinism had undone, the stability and integrity of the human species'. 13 And this desire to stabilise the 'fully human' can be said to be acted out at the end of The Lair of the White Worm when, as if in recognition of the body's refusal to conform to and confirm conventional categories and distinctions, the evidence is literally blown up by Adam's dynamite. After two extended and violent eruptions in which an unpleasant mass of blood and slime and flesh erupts from the 'noxious orifice' that is the well-hole, including both parts of 'the thin form of Lady Arabella … and what looked as if it had been the entrails of a monster torn into shreds' (184), all is eventually masked and obliterated.…”