SOURCE: Baldick, Chris. “The End of the Line: The Family Curse in Shorter Gothic Fiction.” In Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, edited by Valeria Tinkler-Villani and Peter Davidson, pp. 147-57. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

[In the following essay, Baldick examines several short British Gothic tales of the nineteenth century, focusing on the theme of family degeneration in these works.]

My purpose in this article is to examine briefly the fate of shorter Gothic fiction in nineteenth-century Britain, with particular reference to the degree of coherence it manages to sustain by resort to the theme of dynastic extinction.

The shorter Gothic tale is a form little studied outside the works of Poe. There are some good reasons for this neglect, principally the fact that it is largely parasitic upon the more substantial and complex tradition of the Gothic novel or romance proper. Whereas the line of novels from Walpole to Maturin at least forms a recognizably coherent phase of generic development (even if the story becomes more complicated later on), no such distinct tradition of short stories stands out either as an episode or as a clearly recognized line of development in nineteenth-century British fiction. What can be reconstructed, at best, is a succession of attempts to adapt and sustain Gothic effects in the shorter form; a succession which does not impose itself upon the attention of literary history with the force of a self-sustaining tradition, so comparatively enfeebled and pallid is this lineage.

By contrast, the vitality of the Gothic tale, and indeed of the short story form in general, is more impressive in the United States from the time of Hawthorne and Poe onward. In what follows I am implicitly adopting Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a model of the Gothic tale fully achieved and concentrated, so that the hesitant career of shorter Gothic Britain can be conceived as a sequence of attempts to catch up with the more happily inaugurated American tradition.

The problem of reproducing the Gothic within the short story form can best be highlighted by recalling some of the notable features of the longer Gothic novel. The use of extended lingering suspense in the works of Radcliffe and Lewis is closely connected to the rambling exfoliation of subplots and digressive or diversionary narrative excursions, so that typically a leading character will be left under the tortures of the inquisition for several chapters while we follow the adventures of some other personage. More is involved than a simple tormenting of the reader's expectations, though. The formal asymmetries and meandering complications of the full-length Gothic novel provide at the level of structure an apt reduplication of the central symbolic setting: the labyrinthine building. Protagonist and reader alike, then, lose themselves in blind alleys and in obscure passages that lead nowhere; and in the most extravagant case of this narrative over-elaboration—Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer—the novelist himself appears to have got lost in his own digressive maze. The fully Gothic effect, then, would appear to be tied to modes of narrative extension and complication foreign to the disciplines of the short tale.

The early history—we may as well call it a prehistory—of shorter Gothic fiction offers no satisfactory answers to this difficulty. Instead we have two different intertextual strategies whereby some aspect of the Gothic novel may be recaptured and presented in shorter compass. The first is that of the Gothic “fragment”, a short-lived form which made its appearance in some of the magazines of the late eighteenth century, the best known and earliest example being Anna L. Aikin's “Sir Bertrand”. As its name suggests, the fragment presents itself as an inconclusive episode from some larger lost work. In its brief description of, say, a knight encountering a ghost and a distressed maiden in a castle, it can reproduce without preliminaries the intense atmosphere and familiar iconography of some exciting chapter in a Gothic novel, but without real narrative momentum or resolution. On the other hand, the second shorter form attempted in this early phase—the shilling shocker or bluebook tale—approaches the problem from the other side. The shilling shocker, which flourished in the popular market in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, was parasitic upon the Gothic novel in the more obvious mode of plagiarism. What one finds in these works (some of which have been reprinted in Peter Haining's The Shilling Shockers, 1978) are hastily summarized plots bearing close resemblances to those of Radcliffe and Lewis, but this time of course without the atmospheric development of setting or the lingering exploitation of suspense found in the full-length form; all that remains is a breakneck resumé of one sensational scene after another.

In these two abortive early forms of shorter Gothic, then, we have either atmosphere without plot, or plot without atmosphere. The breakthrough by which shorter Gothic fiction was to achieve any degree of formal coherence would need to combine narrative momentum with symbolic resonance, somehow focusing and centring the notoriously decentred and ramshackle constructions of the Gothic novel within the discipline of a new formula. And in the successful case of Poe, something like this was achieved: by a process of rigorously economical distillation, Poe purified from the disparate materials and effects of the inherited Gothic tradition a radically streamlined reformulation of its conventions. The dismantling of the cumbersome conventional machinery and its disorderly multiplication of incidents made way for a clarification and foregrounding of a narrative and thematic model hitherto lying dormant and imperfectly realized in Gothic writing (and in the surrounding culture of Romantic sensationalism): the decline and extinction of the old family line. The exemplary fiction of the House of Usher famously harmonizes the terminal involution of the Usher family with the physical crumbling of its mansion: of house as dynasty with house as habitation. In doing so it selects from the properties of earlier Gothic writing a characteristic symbolic location (the threatening old building), and derives from it a clear focus of narrative direction, the vanishing point being that of the old family's imminent extinction.

The slower development of shorter Gothic fiction in Britain, as I want to show, follows a faltering trajectory in the same direction, shifting from the accumulation of sensational scenes of arbitrary persecution, imprisonment, and cruelty to a more selective and pronounced interest in processes of degeneration, so that the centre of interest is less the claustrophobia of incarceration within the old house as building than the claustrophobia of heredity within the old house as dynasty. As an awesomely poetical subject, the extinction of the family line has of course respectable precedents in both ancient and early modern tragedy, the full tragic effect being accomplished by the destruction not of the protagonist alone, but of the wider family group, innocent and guilty alike: some families may be cursed over several generations, like the house of Atreus in Greek legend, while others may be torn apart by brief outbreaks of hubris, as with the royal houses of Macbeth, Lear, and Hamlet. Tragic nemesis is a blaster of whole houses rather than of individual miscreants: a point well understood by the pioneers of British Gothic fiction and embodied in the pseudotragic ambitions of their works. Walpole's Castle of Otranto notably concerns the efforts of a usurper, Manfred, to continue his family line, against the evident wishes (as in Hamlet and Macbeth) of the rightful owner's restless ghost; and the accepted pattern of tragic self-destruction dictates that these efforts should ironically only bring about the premature end of his dynasty, here through the inadvertent murder of his own daughter Matilda. Likewise, although through a sensationalist twist rather than by strict tragic logic, Ambrosio in The Monk succeeds in eliminating the womenfolk of the family he had not realized he still had.

As a theme, however, or as a self-sustaining narrative pattern, this catastrophic implosion of the old family line never separated itself out from the surrounding mayhem of horrors and cruelties until the discipline of the shorter form summoned it forth as the most promising dominant or foregrounded element in later nineteenth-century Gothic: overnight in the case of Poe, but by a more tentative and hesitant process in the British short-story tradition, to which we may now turn.

In this context it will be profitable to review four more or less Gothic works: the anonymous tale “The Astrologer's Prediction; or The Maniac's Fate”, published in London in 1826 in a shilling-shocker collection entitled Legends of Terror, and recently reprinted in two modern anthologies; Elizabeth Gaskell's tale “The Old Nurse's Story”, published in the Christmas number of Dickens's Household Words in 1852, and since reprinted in many modern ghost-story collections; Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, which appeared in February 1892 in the Strand magazine before being collected the same year in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; and finally, slightly out of chronological order, a longer short story by Robert Louis Stevenson entitled “Olalla”, first published in 1885 and collected in The Merry Men (1887). Oddly, this last story, the most intriguing and most subtly crafted of the four, is rarely reprinted in modern selections of Stevenson's fiction.

“The Astrologer's Prediction; or The Maniac's Fate” is a clumsily over-excited production, remarkable at least for springing upon its readers the motif of the hereditary curse within its first two sentences:

Reginald, sole heir of the illustrious family of Di Venoni, was remarkable, from his earliest infancy, for a wild enthusiastic disposition. His father, it was currently reported, had died of an hereditary insanity; and his friends, when they marked the wild mysterious intelligency of his eye, and the determined energy of his aspect, would often assert that the dreadful malady still lingered in the veins of young Reginald.¹

The fall of the young Reginald and of his family is both predicted and hastened by a wizened old astrologer who takes up residence in a ruined tower near to the Venoni family seat in the Black Forest. Pointing out the star of Reginald's nativity in the heavens, he forecasts that when it begins to plummet like a meteor, Reginald will commit a deed of blood in this very tower. Thrown into a nervous fever by this prediction, Reginald is sent by his mother to Italy to recover his spirits. In Venice, he falls in love with and marries the Doge's daughter Marcelia, but a few months later is called back to attend the deathbed of his mother. Her death plunges him into melancholy delirium, and he proposes a suicide pact with his wife, so that they may join her. His mother's ghost appears to him in a dream, encouraging him to pursue this plan. Marcelia, to calm his spirits, takes Reginald (now described by the narrator simply as “the maniac”) for a restorative walk—unfortunately in the direction of the fateful ruined tower; at the sight of which he drags Marcelia to the top and, after noticing the now “sickly lustre” of his star in the sky, strangles her. A moment of rational calm intervenes before he finally hurls himself, with a fiend-like laugh, from the summit of the tower.

Although this tale manages to summon a more satisfying Gothic “atmosphere” of doom and foreboding than many shilling-shocker works, it suffers from severe confusion in its presentation of causality. Reginald's fatal star is seen to dim at the story's end, as the astrologer has foretold, but its predicted meteoric fall never occurs. Instead it is the maniac, as he then is, who himself plummets deathward—a catastrophe caused either by his hereditary insanity, or by the star, or by the astrologer (whose instruction to bury him after his death Reginald has ignored), or by his mother's ghost, or by his own unwillingness to be divided from his dead mother. Any one of these elements could be read as the symbol or portent indicating any one of the others as prime cause, but which is which cannot be determined amid the hectic overproduction of motivations for the maniac's fall. This typically Gothic overloading of the tale pays a certain price in clarity of effect, but it retains the distinction of having adopted, some years before Poe, the snuffing of the family line as the “vanishing point” at which its multiple lines of causality converge. 1826, the year of this tale's publication, was, incidentally, something of a bumper year for racial and dynastic extinctions, being the year also of Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, John Galt's Last of the Lairds, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. Two years after Byron's death, the god Terminus was in the ascendant.

Elizabeth Gaskell's “The Old Nurse's Story” represents, at least within the terms of the teleology I am adopting here, something of a relapse: a dilution of Gothic possibilities under the conventional pressures of the moralizing Christmas ghost story, for which Dickens had provided the most popular model, with its cheery sentimentalities of familial forgiveness.² The first thing we learn in the tale is the reassuring fact that the line of the story's family is not extinct, since the narratees are evidently a group of bonny children listening to their aged nurse's account of an episode of their mother's infancy which leads to events three and four generations behind them. The mother, Rosamond, orphaned at the age of five, is accompanied by the then teenage nurse, Hester, to Furnivall Manor, once the ancestral home of her mother's family but long abandoned by the Furnivall clan, with the exception of an ancient great-aunt, Miss Grace Furnivall. The manor house has a dilapidated and apparently uninhabited east wing and, in the great hall, a broken-down organ which nevertheless emits strange musical sounds when stormy weather impends. As Hester eventually learns from the other servants (who include the almost obligatory Radcliffean Dorothy), the phantom organist is deemed to be the restless ghost of the old Lord Furnivall, Miss Grace's father. After an alarm in which little Rosamond is summoned out into a blizzard by a ghostly child and almost dies of exposure, the full story is revealed: in her youth Miss Grace had been the rival of her sister Maude for the love of a foreign music teacher, by whom the more favoured Maude had secretly had a child. Eventually discovering her sister's secret, Miss Grace had betrayed it to their angry father and joined him in driving Maude and the child from the house in a snow-storm which killed them both.

The story's climax comes on a stormy night when the door to the east wing crashes open to admit a ghostly ensemble in choreographed formation: the old lord, the two young ladies, and the spirit-child are all gathered there to re-enact in the form of a tableau or charade the family trauma of Maude's expulsion. The old Miss Grace now looks on in horror as her father strikes his repudiated grandchild with his crutch, and she pleads unavailingly for the child to be spared; but the ghostly image of her younger self is revealed as callously abetting the cruel deed. Miss Grace is carried to her deathbed that night, muttering “Alas! alas! what is done in youth can never be undone in age!” And there the story ends, wrapped up with an evident warning against acts of hard-heartedness that we will later come to regret. It has its evident strengths as a crafted tale, in its handling of narrative voice and of setting, but we do not have here the fully achieved Gothic impetus of the family curse at work. At least one branch of the family, of course, survives in little Rosamond, for her children to hear the tale. More importantly, the true subject of “The Old Nurse's Story” is not a family's terminal degeneration but the exposure of a concealed family crime. In this it shows itself to belong with the classic ghost story, in which typically a single ancestral misdeed awaits expiation, rather than with the Gothic tale proper with its far more grimly deterministic logic of inherited and vertiginous decay.

Of Conan Doyle's shorter Sherlock Holmes stories, there are several which glisten with a slight Gothic colouring: “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”, for instance, with its use of the incarcerated daughter; or “The Five Orange Pips”, with its pattern of vengeance inflicted on succeeding generations of a family. The topos of the family curse, however, is displayed more openly in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, in which a flamboyantly wicked stepfather, Dr Grimesby Roylott of Stoke Moran, attempts to kill both of his stepdaughters rather than allow their deceased mother's fortune to pass to them as it must as soon as they marry. The first stepdaughter, upon becoming betrothed, has already died in mysterious circumstances, in her locked bedchamber adjacent to Dr Roylott's, when the second, Helen Stoner, is obliged, after contracting an engagement of marriage, to move into the same room. Wisely, she consults Holmes, who discovers that Roylott has been slipping a poisonous viper into the room through a ventilator. Given a sound thrashing by the hermit of Baker Street, the viper wriggles back through the ventilator and bites its evil master, who dies within a few seconds.

Although the story is set in the very recent past—April 1883, to be precise—Doyle is at pains to establish the archaic quality of Roylott's patriarchal malevolence. This he attempts by sketching a family history behind the villain's murderous character. As Helen Stoner explains upon her arrival at Baker Street:

I am living with my stepfather, who is the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England, the Roylotts of Stoke Moran, on the western border of Surrey. … The family was at one time among the richest in England, and the estate extended over the borders into Berkshire in the north, and Hampshire in the west. In the last century, however, four successive heirs were of a dissolute and wasteful disposition, and the family ruin was eventually completed by a gambler, in the days of the Regency. Nothing was left save a few acres of ground and the two-hundred-year-old house, which is itself crushed under a heavy mortgage. The last squire dragged out his existence there, living the horrible life of an aristocratic pauper. …³

This man's son, Grimesby, the last of the Roylotts, has sought his fortune as a doctor in India, where he married a rich military widow, Mrs Stoner. But having beaten his native butler to death in a fit of anger, and served a term of imprisonment for the offence, he has returned to England. Following his wife's death in a railway accident, he has established himself in the half-ruined and lichen-blotched ancestral mansion, only one wing of which is still habitable. Helen Stoner continues her account to Holmes:

Instead of making friends and exchanging visits with our neighbours, who had at first been overjoyed to see a Roylott of Stoke Moran back in the old family seat, he shut himself up in his house, and seldom came out save to indulge in ferocious quarrels with whoever might cross his path. Violence of temper approaching to mania has been hereditary in the men of the family, and in my stepfather's case it had, I believe, been intensified by his long residence in the tropics.

(160)

Roylott's dangerous disposition, then, is presented as the culmination of a prolonged degeneration of the family's character, his forebears having passed down to him their lack of self-control. Under the midday sun of India, he has become an English mad dog; and the exotic animals with which he surrounds himself—a cheetah, a baboon, and the fatal snake—serve as emblems of this terminal decline into sub-human ferocity. His temporary status as a member of Dr Watson's own respectable profession has been only a failed effort to avoid his inevitable reversion to type, the type itself being quite clearly the Gothic figure of the Manfredian aristocrat, for whom barbarity and lust of conquest are in the blood. In this tale the family curse runs its full Gothic course, the lucky survivor being of course not a blood relative but a victim of misalliance between the healthy professional and administrative classes favoured in the Sherlock Holmes cycle (doctors, soldiers, stenographers, clerks, and the like) and the doomed predators of the feudal past.

Stevenson's “Olalla” employs a somewhat similar Gothic contrast between a modern professional (in this case a British officer convalescing from injury in the Peninsular War in Spain) and the last generation of a declining aristocratic family. The unnamed officer, who narrates the tale, is advised by his doctor that he needs the pure air of the sierra to complete his recovery, and is given this account of an impoverished noble family willing to accommodate him in their isolated mountain home:

The mother was the last representative of a princely stock, degenerate both in parts and fortune. Her father was not only poor, he was mad: and the girl ran wild about the residencia till his death. Then, much of the fortune having died with him, and the family being quite extinct, the girl ran wilder than ever, until at last she married, Heaven knows whom; a muleteer some say, others a smuggler; while there are some who upheld there was no marriage at all, and that Felipe and Olalla are bastards.⁴

Of these dubious adolescent children, it is Felipe whom the narrator first encounters: he is a strong but lazily idiotic lad with a streak of furtive cruelty but with an evident reverential obedience to his mysterious sister. The mother, clearly degenerate in the imbecilic blankness of her expression, lolls and basks in the sun in sensual slothfulness all day. Having seen a two-hundred-year-old portrait of one of his hostess's beautiful ancestors, and ominously understood “that to love such a woman were to sign and seal one's own sentence of degeneration” (69), the narrator sums up his impressions of the family's decline:

The family blood had been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a common error among the proud and the exclusive. No decline, indeed, was to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in shapeliness and strength. … But the intelligence (that more precious heirloom) was degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had required the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain contrabandista to raise, what approached hebetude in the mother, into the active oddity of the son.

(76)

When the mountain wind starts to blow fiercely, the officer is kept awake at nights by the blood-curdling yells, apparently of some lunatic or tortured animal. Not having yet met the daughter of the house, he guesses that she must be insane, and possibly mistreated as well. But when he stumbles upon Olalla's room in her absence, he finds books of religious devotion in Latin, and even pious poems written in her hand. She would appear to be a saintly ascetic, quite at odds with the sensuality of her family. Only half way through the tale does he come face to face with Olalla herself, and the two instantly fall in love at first sight, although they cannot bring themselves to speak for several days. The officer cannot understand why, after their first embrace, Olalla flees and leaves him a letter imploring him to go away and forget her. But the same day, he accidentally cuts his wrist and appeals to Olalla's mother for first aid. Instead she stares strangely at the wound and bites it to the bone, in an uncontrollable animal frenzy only subdued when Felipe drags her away.

The word “vampire” is never used in the tale, and indeed the conventional trappings of vampire lore are carefully avoided by Stevenson. His interest here is in heredity alone, unaccompanied by supernatural effects or suggestions, and his cleverly misleading sunlit location precludes the use of more familiar northern Gothic machinery. It is not the precise nature of the mother's affliction that matters, but only the gravity of its bestiality and therefore of Olalla's now evident predicament: she is a pure soul trapped within a beautiful but (we must assume) secretly blighted body which will in time betray her to the curse of her mother's blood. As the officer goes through a second convalescence, this time tended by Olalla herself, he realizes that his love for her has still not been dispelled by the revelation of the family curse. Against his continued pleadings, she now unfolds her understanding of her fate, and her resolve in facing it:

The race exists; it is old, it is very young, it carries its eternal destiny in its bosom; upon it, like waves upon the sea, individual succeeds to individual, mocked with a semblance of self-control, but they are nothing. We speak of the soul, but the soul is in the race … you have seen for yourself how the wheel has gone backward with my doomed race. I stand, as it were, upon a little rising ground in this desperate descent, and see both before and behind, both what we have lost and to what we are condemned, to go farther downward. And shall I—I that dwell apart in the house of the dead, my body, loathing its ways—shall I repeat the spell? Shall I bind another spirit, reluctant as my own, into this bewitched and tempest-broken tenement that I now suffer in? Shall I hand down this cursed vessel of humanity, charge it with fresh life as with fresh poison, and dash it, like a fire, in the faces of posterity? But my vow has been given; the race shall cease from off the earth.

(97-99)

Olalla finally sends the reluctant officer away through the neighbouring village, where the peasants cross themselves at his approach.

This story by Stevenson deserves to be more widely recognized as the most impressive of shorter British Gothic tales in the nineteenth century, and certainly as the “purest” type of the family curse fiction, emancipated as it is both from ghost-lore and from the accumulated trappings of graveyard sensationalism. We have passed beyond the confused multicausality of “The Astrologer's Prediction” to a monocausal narrative logic founded on genetic determinism; and we can see this tale to be unencumbered likewise with the distracting supernaturalism and moralizing alike of Gaskell's “Old Nurse's Story”, just as it is free of the minutiae of deductive ingenuity that push the Gothic family curse into a subordinate position in Doyle's “The Speckled Band”.

Far from being serenely at ease with itself, though, Stevenson's tale is of course seething with powerful undercurrents of anxiety and dread, among them a Calvinist fear of the body, a more general Protestant suspicion of Catholics, a northern revulsion at southern sensuality, and of course a scarcely concealed chivalrous misogyny which frames female sexuality as witchcraft. The surprise of this story is how successfully all this phobic tumult is subdued into a consistent tone of melancholy resignation, far from the hysterical pitch of Poe's tales. It is likely that the disciplined unity of effect in “Olalla” owes something to the example of Poe's “House of Usher”; but it would be misleading to suggest that after a delay of forty years the Gothic short story in Britain had arrived at the same point as its earlier American counterpart. For the meanings of heredity, degeneration and atavism had in the meantime acquired a new resonance with the impact of Darwin's work upon the intellectual and imaginative world of the later nineteenth century: a fact evident in the longer Gothic works of Stevenson's contemporaries, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray being a case in point. With “Olalla”, then, Stevenson may be said to have stabilized in convincing form the unstable materials of Gothic, but around a governing principle antithetical to that employed by Poe. Whereas Poe had distilled an essentially psychological form of Gothic, claiming in the language of Romantic idealism that his terrors were those of “the soul”, Stevenson, in bringing the British Gothic tale to its maturity, announces through the doomed family of Olalla the defeat of the soul, which is now powerless to overcome the advancing tide of tainted blood.

Notes

1. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, ed. Chris Baldick, Oxford, 1992, 63.

2. Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, ed. Angus Easson, Oxford, 1981.

3. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Penguin, 1981, 168.

4. R. L. Stevenson, The Supernatural Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. M. Hayes, London, 1976, 64.