The Gothique: Myriad Manifestations: -A Study of the Various Forms of the Gothic

By Aparajita Hazra

The Gothic has come a long way from the romantic quest for the imaginary. The gothic has proved to be an extremely enduing genre that has manifested itself in various forms in the cultural, literary, political, ecological and historical aspects of human existence. This anthology takes up various aspects of the Gothic ranging from ghost stories in literature and films to folklore and mythology to cultural horror, to showcase how Gothic is part of an omnipresent power structure that shapes the socio-cultural and psychological metanarrative that governs human ontology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Mar 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781543708998

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

ABHIRUP DHAR

Introduction

APARAJITA HAZRA

Aggressive Revenants in Swedish Folk Tradition

TOMMY KUUSELA

On Media and Vampires: at the Origins of a Gothic Myth

GIUSEPPE MAIELLO

The Gothic Shapeshifter: Man, Monster, Myth

JOHN B. KACHUBA

Gender, Famine and Fairylore in Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993)

CATHERINE COUSSENS

Folk Myths, Alternate Reality and Gothic Elements Chandrasekhar Kambar’s Jokumraswami

SHILPA SAPRE AND DINESH KUMAR

Mystifying Childhood in Literature: Supernatural Children in Magic Realism

EUGENIA KUZNETSOVA

Stolen Diamonds and Cursed Objects: Perceptions of Hinduism in Imperial Gothic Literature

BRIGID BURKE

The Politics of Gender in The Gothic: A Case Study of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

DEBDULAL BANERJEE

The Wizard of The North: The Supernatural in Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering

ANNA FANCETT

I think there’s a ghost in the TV: Britain’s Televisual Gothic

BRONTË SCHILTZ

A Budget Fairytale and its Gothic Overtones: a Reading of Badal Sircar’s Ballabhpurer Rupkatha

BY DEBADITYA MUKHOPADHYAY

Nehruvian Discourse and The Law-Abiding Ghost of Hindi Cinema

MERAJ AHMED MUBARKI

Uses of the Gothic in Covid-Era Apocalyptic Fiction: Pandemic Fears and Self-Development in Bethany Clift’s Last One at the Party (2021)

MARIACONCETTA COSTANTINI

Contributors

For Megha

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T his book would never have been possible without all of the wonderful contributors who wrote for it. Apart from their impressive repertoire of academic excellence that comes through in every essay in this book, the camaraderie and understanding they all showed in putting this volume together is very heartening. I need to thank my husband Subhasis and daughter Megha in putting up with the hours that I disappeared from their sights to work on this book. And then I must extend a thousand cuddles to my five dogs, Bobbo, Topsy, Simba, Miffy and Juddu for keeping me loving company every moment that I worked in my study on this book.

The world is full of lovely souls. That’s why dreams like this book come true.

FOREWORD

THE GOTHIC –

An Author’s Perspective

ABHIRUP DHAR

W hen I think of ‘Gothic’, the following comes to my mind –an old-world setting, strong atmospherics, haunted and secluded castles/ mansions, and the gradual manifestation of fear. However, when we talk about Gothic literature, it is rarely associated with India. While it originated in Britain in 1765 with Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story’ , the supernatural elements in the story led to a completely new genre which took off in Europe. In the mid-1800s, Edgar Allan Poe from America focused on it and his books were highly successful. A few of the most influential and popular 18 th -century Gothic writers were Horace Walpole ( The Castle of Otranto , 1765), Ann Radcliffe ( Mysteries of Udolpho , 1794), Matthew Lewis ( The Monk , 1796), and Charles Brockden Brown ( Wieland , 1798).

The genre continued to command a large readership well into the 19th century, first as Romantic authors such as Sir Walter Scott (‘The Tapestried Chamber’, 1829) adopted Gothic conventions, then later as Victorian writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson (‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’, 1886) and Bram Stoker (‘Dracula’, 1897) incorporated Gothic motifs in their stories of horror and suspense.

Elements of Gothic fiction are prevalent in several of the acknowledged classics of 19th-century literature, including Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (1818), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The House of the Seven Gables’ (1851), Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Jane Eyre’ (1847), Victor Hugo’s ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ (1831 in French), and many of the tales written by Edgar Allan Poe such as ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’(1841) and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843).

Gothic literature is now replaced by ghost and horror stories, detective fiction, suspense and thriller novels, and other contemporary forms that emphasize on mystery, shock, and sensation. Twentieth-century contributors include Daphne du Maurier, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice and Toni Morrison. The question remains – What about the ‘Gothic’ in an Indian context? Not really. There have rarely been any books on The Gothic in India. Horror, yes. But few again. I’d still like to draw parallels between various books written here and The Gothic. Earlier the only writer who used to occasionally delve into horror was Ruskin Bond. While this stands true for English horror literature in the country, the situation was comparatively better in regional literature. There were many greats like Ratnakar Matkari, Narayan Dharap, Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, Leela Majumdar, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, Rajshekhar Basu to name a few who wrote horror. Rabindranath Tagore did it as well and mentioned his experience(s) in one of his works. But I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to Satyajit Ray who is never really acknowledged for his contribution to Indian horror. A visionary maverick director (the first Indian to bring home the honorary and coveted Oscar), the very versatile man was also a writer and storyteller of the highest order. He wrote some brilliant stories in very lucid language and created endearing characters who still linger in our memories; mostly his detective fiction Feluda series, two of which he himself adapted to screen (few others were later done by his son) and the scientist Professor Shonku, a film based on one of his adventures was released last year. But I won’t be writing about his movies here. Most of Ray’s ghost stories had the haunted house as a trope. In ‘Anath Babur Bhoy’ (Anath Babu’s Fear), the narrator meets Anath Babu, an expert on haunted houses who has toured many of them in the country. ‘Brown Shaheber Baari’ (Mr. Brown’s House)was set in a dilapidated house in Kalimpong where a bank employee and his friend spend a night to determine who Simon is, as mentioned in an old diary written by a man called Brown. Then, there were other stories like ‘Conway Castle er Pretatma’ (The Spirit of Conway Castle), ‘Dhumalgorer Hunting Lodge’ (The Hunting Lodge of Dhumalgar), etc. Some of these were told by a fictional character called Tarini Khuro, an aged bachelor probably in his late sixties, living in Beniatola Lane, College Street in the erstwhile Calcutta. He tells his stories to an audience of five children based on his varied experiences gathered throughout all his years of living in many cities across the country, not sticking to any job for more than a year. While ‘Monihara’ was the only movie in which Ray attempted horror, based on Tagore’s short story, there were many that he wrote on paper. Another story I recall reading is ‘Fritz’, in which a doll comes alive when a man who played with it during childhood visits a circuit house. It wants to play now! ‘Child’s Play’ and ‘Annabelle’ came much later just like Steven Spielberg’s ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ which was allegedly plagiarized from a script written by Ray. The other setting in his ghost stories was trains (and railway stations). In ‘First Class Kamra’ (First Class Compartment), the London-returned protagonist falls asleep while reading a detective novel in a railway compartment, wakes up to supposedly come face-to-face with Major Davenport’s ghost who is still stuck in the British era. In ‘Anath Babur Bhoy’ which I mentioned earlier, the narrator first meets Anath Babu in a train to Raghunathpur, where he is going to visit a haunted house. If I have to look at many of these stories now, I sense all the requisites of The Gothic – an old-world setting, strong atmospherics, haunted and secluded castles/ mansions, and the gradual manifestation of fear – albeit, not necessarily explicit. Ray’s stories (and films) were much ahead of their time but come to think of it, he told them with absolute simplicity even if the narratives were complex.

I earlier mentioned about Ruskin Bond and his occasional horror outings. His horror writing, as well as much of the other genres he writes, draws inspiration from the place he stays in — the hills. The most striking aspect of his horror stories are the ghosts themselves — at times melancholic and lost, at times funny too and rarely scary. Quoting him – "Our hill stations have plenty of ghosts. Many of them left behind by the British in dak bungalows and colonial cottages. After some residents of hill stations had died, dramatic stories would emerge about them reappearing." It is very interesting to note that old bungalows of the British Raj in India also carry a Gothic feel. The sahibs, or Englishmen, who travelled across the plains and the hills of the Indian subcontinent often stayed at these dak bungalows and there are many stories related to them – some written, some told. Many writers of the Raj have made references to these bungalows, which also find a place in local folklore. This brings me to another aspect during the same British Raj – Tea Estates. The tea gardens form a world of their own, a world that is far away from the clamour and bustle of urban living. The sense of history, the legacy of the British Raj and its planters who introduced tea gardens and their way of life to India adds to the old-world charm. The last of the British planters left India in the 1970s, but their legacy and their customs are nurtured with pride. If you visit tea estates even now and stay there for a few days and converse with the local folks, you will hear many eerie tales, some urban legends too. The horror titles in my oeuvre have one book in particular which comes closest to the Gothic. Based on the interesting phenomena of astral projection, ‘The Belvoirbrooke Haunting: A Ghost Story in Darjeeling’ is set in a tea estate in Darjeeling where a couple are helped by a paranormal investigator as lines between the physical world and the other world are blurred. There are traces of the Gothic in ‘Ghost Hunter: Gaurav Tiwari’ and the ‘Hold That Breath’ series too as I’m deeply influenced by this sub-genre.

So, what spurs me on to write the Gothic and what are the aspects that I keep in mind while authoring horror? Let me quickly give you an insight on where it all began and draw your attention to the fact that it’s not been an easy time balancing a full-time profession, writing, exploring other avenues with respect to it and of course, personal life. I hail from a humble background, middle-class at best. My parents did get me the best possible basic education for which I will always be indebted to. But I was always lost in my own world. What I had was my imagination and I’d mostly write them down in the form of stories on my note book, a few went for the school magazine too but those were in Bengali. Circa 2015. My first book, ‘Once Again… With Love!’ was published and I, like an amateur, took time to learn the tropes of the writing industry. It took me a lot to understand it but two things remained intact – my passion and the positive vibes from many who have stood by me. It was not before my second book which was out in 2017 that things had begun looking good if I may say so. I consider ‘Stories Are Magical’ to be a huge risk I took. Some told me to continue with romance as an author should stick to one genre itself; it supposedly helps in creating an identity. But there I was with a celebration of storytelling with six different genres in one book. Honestly, there are hardly any traditional publishers who prefer that format for a book. But it happened. For the first two books, I took a few decisions. Some worked. Some didn’t. But I learnt. Both the titles have a separate set of readers and I did get feedbacks in the last few years that I should write other genres too. ‘Hold That Breath’ released in 2019 and with it, I delved into my favourite genre – horror. It was a risk again. Come on, horror doesn’t work in India, right? It’s neglected and the layman mostly likes to ridicule it. But I wanted to tell stories, ones which I believed in, ones that I enjoyed. If I don’t enjoy my own stories, why will others? The format was a first in Indian literature too – six horror stories with one of them connecting the others. The horror style was the one I personally prefer to read or watch – classic horror with strong atmospherics bordering more on the Gothic. The horror genre is wide and has a lot of scope; it can as well be a psychological state of mind that can be the base of a horror story. There is a thin line between a thriller and this delightfully charming genre at times from a storytelling point of view and trust the writer in me, nothing makes me happier than feeling I’ve done justice to what I’ve written. But the honest feedbacks that follow after a book release are of utmost importance too. This is where the ‘Hold That Breath’ (1 & 2)book series and ‘The Belvoirbrooke Haunting’ (A Ghost Story in Darjeeling) got an edge. Readers began enjoying a genre they were scared of. Horror can be fun and relatable too. This is exactly what my books have stood for. I delved into non-fiction with ‘Ghost Hunter: Gaurav Tiwari’ about the pioneer of paranormal investigation in India (soon being adapted on screen) and the sequel ‘Hauntings’ – trying to strike the right balance between it and fiction. I would want to continue to give my readers what they have accepted.

When I think about it now, every aspect of the Gothic has been the base for my books – be it an old-world setting, strong atmospherics, haunted and secluded castles/ mansions, and the gradual manifestation of fear, which doesn’t mean it has to be only related to anything supernatural. Horror also comprises of other sub-genres like slasher, splatterpunk, body horror, sci fi horror, found footage, zombie and the Gothic, which I personally relish the most when it comes to reading or watching. Needless to say, it had to be my biggest inspiration when I decided to focus on authoring horror books. Having said that, I feel we have barely been able to scratch the surface of the Gothic in India – neither in literature nor in cinema, though there have been influences. I feel the genre can do wonders if both these mediums go hand-in-hand. To cite a small example, Henry James’s ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898) has been adapted numerous times on the screen (both movies and web series) and on stage (as on opera). It continues to inspire both writers and filmmakers till today and the influence is unmistakable. Stephen King’s books which have often been adapted on screen are in the limelight always obviously due to his writing but also because his stories are watched. For any work or story and especially for a niche genre like horror, it needs to be accessible to people. This would be the key to reaching out well and let’s not forget we live in a country where there are fewer readers. While at it, a writer needs to focus on the basics while paying a tribute to the Gothic – the story and the writing. These are the aspects I look at while weaving a tale and penning it while making the characters as relatable as possible and it is immensely difficult for a genre which isn’t relatable itself unless the reader has had a paranormal experience.

On that note, I would like to wish Dr. Aparajita Hazra all the very best for ‘The Gothique: Myriad Manifestations’ and her palpable passion for bringing the Gothic to the forefront in Indian literature.

INTRODUCTION

APARAJITA HAZRA

‘T he oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear…’ (1927, 255) as Lovecraft says. Fear has always had a love-hate relationship with the ontology of humans. The Gothic is a genre that has seldom perhaps made it to the high pedestal of the canon. But the Gothic is probably the only genre that has never ever been completely out of literary circulation. Ever since its formal entry into literaria through the works of Horace Walpole, the Gothic has played a playful hide-and-seek with the literary trends that have been vogue. The world keeps saying that Horace Walpole was the first person to bring the Gothic into the world of literature. But if we look deeper and farther beyond, we will find traces—significant amounts of it—in stories, anecdotes, ballads, and plays right from the days of the English literature of yore—beginning with the monsters of Beowulf to the Renaissance dramaturges. The likes of Shakespeare, Webster, Marlowe and Kyd too found the sweet calling of horror irresistible. The Gothic is in truth, a flowing genre in that, it is still evolving, still developing and still spreading its inquisitive tentacles into almost all facets of life. The Gothic is the genre that deals with this fear, plumbs it, creates it, analyses it to find out the rubric of psycho-social conditioning that has an interface with fear. Erstwhile Gothic understood just a bizarre set of ghosts and ghouls as Gothic. But fear can have more layers than that. Gone are the days when the Gothic found itself in eerie noises, dark dungeons, spooky secret passages and grotesque ghouls waiting to scare at every corner. Today the Gothic sneaks into the very psyche of human beings. The Uncanny, the ‘ Unheimlich’ (1919, 218), as Freud says, has always had the human mind in a stranglehold. The Abject, the Ab-human as the ‘Other’ beyond the borders of meaning, has always fascinated, as well as repelled.

Thus, the Gothic is one genre that has never really gone out of vogue. There have been times when the Gothic—whether we agree to call it a genre or we prefer to call it a style—has ebbed out of the collective readers’ interest several times, only to bound back again with a bang. The Gothic has seen its fair share of dips and rises.

The Gothic has forever played upon the secret fears lurking in the innermost dark labyrinthine corners of the human psyche. The Gothic has terrified human minds by invading the realm of the domestic through the oft-iterated trope of haunted houses. Through its use of the uncanny, it leaves us feeling as if we’re merely reacquainting ourselves with threats already known. In his 1919 essay on The Uncanny Sigmund Freud describes the Unheimlich as that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.(1919, 217) That which is completely unknown is not as frightening as that which recedes to the perplexity of defamiliarisation from being a familiar and known phenomenon.

The Gothic has also fished conveniently in troubled waters. The Gothic has erupted like an effervescent volcano every time the world has seen troubled times. Horace Walpole came up with the bright idea of producing his story from his gothicised castle on Strawberry Hill just at the time when the world was reeling under turmoil that resulted in a slew of revolutions and movements. The American Revolution happened from 1754 to 1763. A little later, the French Revolution happened in 1789. The Reign of Terror ran a rampage from 1793 to 1794. The Industrial Revolution made itself felt around 1760 and continued into the 1830s.

The Gothic has always been about far more than its clichéd paraphernalia of heroines in white nightgowns, the archetypal damsel trapped in labyrinthine castles, foreboding ancestral homes, reeking of the past and the eerie spine-tingling thrill of the supernatural. The Gothic has most of the time reflected the anxieties of the age. It has mirrored the uncertainties and insecurities of the mind—traits that are more often than not, fallout of tortuous power dynamics. The Gothic has talked of boundaries all the time and of transgressing them in ab-human abjection. The Gothic has gleefully revelled in disorder and duality, and in disease.

The Gothic is a genre the deals with terror and horror—fear in a word—and thus has a very intimate relationship with the human mind and emotions. And as the world is trudging through its modern, postmodern and post structuralist phases, the significations of the Gothic are changing with amazing alacrity. If fear is what is central to the Gothic, then the Gothic arises as much as when one gets startled at a slight noise in a shadowy, dark room as when a woman looks back over her shoulders at the noise of unfamiliar footsteps on a lonely night fearing assault and rape at some forgotten corner of street life. The Gothic returns to haunt the mind when the there has been trauma in the past too. The Gothic has always had a very umbilical relationship with the mind and its terrors—terrors and horrors birthed by a past that has seen distress and trauma and fear—be it from the ravages of war or a holocaust that dehumanizes or a relationship that hollows one out from within. The past returns in the Gothic to create the unheimlich and is often epitomized as the revenant and the undead.

The gothic is a genre or a style—if we choose to call it so—that pivots on fear and terror and horror for its ultimate objective. Sometimes it is the horror that repulses us in real life in the variegated manifestation of human cruelty and natural predicaments. Noel Carroll would call that ‘natural horror’. Again, there is horror that rises from the depiction of the grotesque, the bizarre, the fearsome in literature, films, paintings or music. Carroll would call it ‘art horror’. Carroll in his book The Philosophy of Horror, talks of Natural Horror and Art Horror at some length. According to Carroll, Natural Horror connotes the feeling of being horrified by what appalls us in real life. Like being horrified by the war—or the onslaught of the Coronavirus Pandemic. On the other hand, Art Horror, is what we feel when we empathise with the characters who find themselves threatened by the monstrous. Noel Carroll says, Assuming that I-as-audience-member am in an analogous emotional state to that which fictional characters beset by monsters are described to be in, then: I am occurrently art-horrified by some monster X. (1990,27) Horror can be purely aimed at playing around with the collective psyche of the intended reader or it can be diegetic and interwoven architectonically into the matrix of the work of art in question.

But one thing is for sure. Horror, and by extension, the Gothic, has always had a covert coevalness with religious nuances. Especially, when the Gothic swivels around horror that rises from possessions and exorcism there is often a coevalness with religious feelings as opposed to the ‘materialistic sophistication’of the scientific temper.

The involved religious iconography reinforces the conviction that there are things in heaven and earth beyond the comprehension of the materialistic sophisticated. It brings forth a restoration of intuition and primal instincts that draw upon, and thereby, stoke our atavistic instincts that are residues of primitive animism and totemism.

Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy says that religion has what he refers to as the ‘Numen’ and thus results in the ‘numinous experience’. According to Otto, the Numen is best described as the ‘mysterium tremendum fascinans et augustum’(1923,12) . The object of religious experience—like God —is tremendous (tremendum), causing fear, a sense of being overpowered, of being dependent, of being nothing, of being worthless, helpless, puny. On the other hand, it excites homage out of fear and awe (augustum). Thus the Numen is ‘awe-ful’, mysterious, and the Other that has a nonrational element which reaches out beyond the sphere