All of the versions of this image, and there are zillions of them--painted rip-offs, etchings, cartoons, parodies--also show, between the bottom of the woman's breast and the cleft at the top of her legs, a lurid little squatting thing. Is it a ghoul? A dwarf? An incubus? They're not alone, this thing and her. Through the cleft of a curtain behind the bed is the head of a horse. The horse's mouth is open and its eyes are wide. Is it exhausted, panting from racing here, from bringing someone here? Can it chase the thing away and help this broken woman leave? Or is it here to watch or participate in whatever is going to happen to her? Who is she?
When Henry Fuseli exhibited The Nightmare in 1782, academicians were appalled. Painting was meant to be uplifting--heroic historical subjects, picturesque landscapes, flattering portraits of aristocracy. But Fuseli's painting suggested strange powers we can neither fully understand nor control. Fuseli, a professor of painting at the Royal Academy, had some strange powers himself. The brilliant feminist theorist Mary Wollstonecraft was once so in love with him she offered to be a celibate third if Fuseli would let her live with him and his wife in a ménage à trois. (Needless to say, this was before Wollstonecraft became a brilliant feminist.) Fuseli's Nightmare made visible notions of horror that English gothic revivalist architects and writers had been playing around with for decades. The aesthetics and world-view of this revival continue today in contemporary goth culture, and are the subject of Richard Davenport-Hines' rich, sprawling Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin. As a survey of English goth history this book is terrific, but it's weak on contemporary American developments.
The gothic revivalists of Fuseli's era took their name from the Germanic, Scandinavian, and Eastern European tribes that invaded the Roman Empire between the third and fifth centuries A.D. After these tribes sacked Rome in 410 A.D. and crushed the classical culture that had flourished there, Greek and Roman writers made the name "goth" synonymous with warlike barbarism.
Gothic art of the Middle Ages--the pointy arches and flying buttresses of 12th- through 16th-century cathedrals; the images of the excruciatingly bloody, bruised, plague-wracked bodies of Jesus and His martyrs--began in fear. God was a power that required propitiation. You prayed like hell that He'd be merciful, but you knew that He could be as mean and low as any barbaric tribe of rapers and pillagers. Just as real as God was the Devil. The Devil stood--squatted?--for whatever was against God's "natural order." The "inversion," a word Davenport-Hines uses frequently, of this natural order is the heart of goth sensibility.
The English gothic revival began with an Italian, the Neapolitan painter Salvator Rosa. Salvator was trained for the priesthood, but didn't believe in it. In 1631, when he was 16, a big earthquake wracked his hometown. He escaped to the hills and started sketching with burnt sticks. He painted wild, majestic, dangerous landscapes, places that looked like they were just waiting for or had just come through an earthquake. (If you saw the Thomas Moran exhibit at SAM or the Albert Bierstadts at Tacoma Art Museum, you were seeing American paintings influenced by Rosa.) In these huge, terrifying landscapes, the only buildings were ruins--there were puny, dead or partly dead trees, and puny, dead or partly dead people. These people were social outcasts: bandits, witches, hags, blind boys, veiled ladies with candles, skeletons. In Salvator's work, Nature was not a gift God gave to humans so we could tame it, but something to be afraid of. And the line between life and death was blurry.
Improvements in transportation in the 17th century allowed upper-class Englishmen to travel farther than they had before. In Europe they could see, for the first time, real mountains, towns flattened by earthquakes, and the paintings of Salvator Rosa, and they loved it.
Why did these rational, Age of Reason, upper-class Englishmen go so crazy for this eerie stuff? In his 1757 essay, "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful," Edmund Burke suggests, "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is the source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotions that the mind is capable of feeling...."
Danger makes us fear, therefore feel the most. The wording here is really interesting: "that the mind is capable of feeling." We usually think of the mind as thinking and the heart as feeling. Later Burke goes on to say, "When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible, but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we every day experience."
Early gothic revivalism was interesting to Englishmen who were comfortably distant from any real danger of earthquake, poverty, or losing their homes the way Salvator had. It became a style that arose from free time, boredom, the desire to create feeling with the mind.
When they returned home from the continent, they made their own versions of Salvator's landscapes. William Kent built "follies" or fake ruins on country estates. In the gardens of Kensington Palace, he planted dead trees. Horace Walpole, the son of a prime minister, built Strawberry Hill, a pseudo-gothic castle where he lived and ran his own printing press. There, in 1764, he published his novel The Castle of Otranto, claiming it was printed in Naples in 1529 from an ancient Italian manuscript. The fictional Otranto, like the real Strawberry Hill, was a huge edifice full of hidden rooms and squeaking doors. The novel tells a story of secret shame, perverse passion, treachery, lust, and so on.
Though well-traveled upper-class men started the genre of gothic romance, it was middle-class women who really got it going. Not only did they buy most of the copies, but one of their own--Ann Radcliffe, a journalist's wife--wrote some of the most successful books at home when her husband was out at work. Her most well-known book is The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Like The Castle of Otranto, like a lot of gothic romance, it features a huge edifice, creaking stairs, secret shame, perverse passion, etc. Recent feminist scholars have re-examined Radcliffe's work with an eye to the femaleness of the settings of damp, inner chambers and deep, mysterious caves, and how foreign and frightening these places are to "natural" men. Radcliffe had a bloody, gutsy, sexy imagination, but her exterior life was so uneventful that Christina Rossetti abandoned an attempt to write Radcliffe's biography due to lack of material. Radcliffe is similar to many readers of gothic romance today, who read to imagine exciting escapes from their dreary lives.
These gothic settings carry through today in the dungeons, underground cells, and rusticated stonework of video games. The gothic character that carries through most directly to contemporary goth culture is the vampire. The most famous vampire is the title character of Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula. Stoker took the name from the 15th-century Wallachian Vlad Dracul, who impaled the heads of his enemies on sticks. But it was Dracul's distant relative, Elizabeth Bathory, who had the idea of drinking blood. In 1610 she was arrested for killing hundreds of girls who had been brought to her castle so she could pierce them, spread their blood over her skin, drink their blood, and kill them.
Twenty-five years before Stoker's book about a male vampire, Sheridan Le Fanu wrote Carmilla, the love story of a pair of female vampires. The narrator, Laura, remembers this about Carmilla: "She used to place her pretty arms around my neck, draw me to her, and lay her cheek to mine, murmur with her lips near my ear, 'Dearest, your little heart is wounded, think me not cruel because I obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness... I live in your warm life, and you shall die--sweetly die--into mine. I cannot help it...."
If this scene is not about lesbianism, I am the man in the fucking moon.
Which brings us to Davenport-Hines' omissions. Throughout this wide-ranging book, he refers to goth as an "inversion" of the natural order. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, homosexuals were called "inverts." Yet Davenport-Hines does not duly credit this population for the goth "inversion" of the natural/social order. Queer, particularly lesbian, goth has done anything but die in the centuries since Elizabeth Bathory drank girls' blood and Carmilla seduced Laura. In the 1980s, Firebrand published Jewell Gomez's The Gilda Letters, about generations of African American lesbian vampires. Last year Dodie Bellamy's fiction in the voice of Mina Harker, the heroine of Stoker's Dracula, was published by Hard Candy. Cleis, whose slogan is "queer books for smart people," has published four anthologies of queer vampire tales. As some earlier goth thinkers tried to suggest a blurring between fixed notions of life and death, so modern queer goths suggest a blurring of the separation of male and female.
Gothic revivalism may have started in England as an aesthetic style, but part of it developed--through the work of artists as various as Hawthorne, the Marquis de Sade, Ed Wood, Gomez, Bellamy, and other folks who are and are not discussed in this book--into an ongoing critique of what is "natural" and "unnatural." As Fuseli's painting The Nightmare suggests, our own minds can be as dark and mysterious as any exotic, earthquake-busted landscape. And the identity of that writhing woman on the bed--the one who doesn't know what's happened to her, what's going to happen, or whether or not she wants it--isn't someone from long ago: It's you.
