Haunted Europe

Continental Connections in English-Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media

Evert Jan Van Leeuwen, Michael Newton, Evert Jan Van Leeuwen, Michael Newton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032240862
• eBook ISBN: 9781000228076
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

Haunted Europe offers the first comprehensive account of the British and Irish fascination with a Gothic vision of continental Europe, tracing its effect on British intellectual life from the birth of the Gothic novel, to the eve of Brexit, and the symbolic recalibration of the UK's relationship to mainland Europe.

By focusing on the development of the relationship between Britain and Ireland and continental Europe over more than two-hundred years, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to focus on a narrow time-period and have missed continuities and discontinuities in our ongoing relationship with the mainland.

1 Introduction

Michael Newton and Evert Jan van Leeuwen

From Frankenstein to Dracula, from Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ to Don’t Look Now, from The Mysteries of Udolpho to Thorold Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades, Europe has haunted the British and Irish – turning the experience of the continent into a rite for terror, for bewilderment, into an encounter with the uncanny and strange. The Europe found in these books and films is not merely a geographical region; it is a zone of various and contradictory ideas, aspirations, and, this book suggests, narratives: as Anthony Pagden (2002) declares, Europe is “a construction, an elaborate palimpsest of stories, images, resonances, collective memories, invented and carefully nurtured traditions” (33). If “Europe” is an imagined place, then it is striking how often Anglocentric writers have imagined it in terms framed by the Gothic—a literary mode in any case understood to emerge from sites within a specifically European terrain. A specter has, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels divined, been haunting Europe. In these terms, Europe has been hallucinated into a place of nightmare, but also of allurement, enchantment, and mystery. It has stood as an essential elsewhere, a realm beyond the seas, separate and distinct, and dreamed.

In order to explore these complex visions, this book offers a collection of diverse, but interconnected accounts of a specifically British and Irish gothic vision of continental Europe. It tracks the transformative effect of those visions on English-speaking intellectual life from the fall of the ancien régime to Brexit. By focusing on the development of the relationship between “the north-western archipelago” and continental Europe over more than two-hundred years, this collection marks an important departure from standard literary critical narratives, which have tended to focus on a narrow time-period and have missed continuities and discontinuities in the ongoing relationship with the mainland. This collection of essays shifts attention to the central place that Europe has occupied in the gothic imagination. It uncovers the diversity of forces that enabled and structured an engagement with a vision of Europe as a haunted locale. The book hones the usual normative, narrowly evaluative, account of the development of Gothic as enmeshed in purely local concerns through a broader inter-cultural approach that focuses on the meeting and merging of cultural traditions, and the germinative force of concepts and images concerning our European neighbors.

Moreover, this book exposes the ways in which British and Irish writers played a central role in portraying mainland Europe as a gothic landscape and a ghostly site, a place haunted in itself and also one that has actively haunted our imagination. Not only was study of German literature and the image of the Catholic south transformative for the development of Gothic, but writers have also used mainland Europe both to construct notions of a demonic double and to provide a beguiling image of other cultural, intellectual, and imaginative possibilities. This volume also addresses the question, explicitly in Robert Miles’s opening essay, how Europe came to see itself as “haunted,” and how it could begin to turn out representations of a dark “spectrality.”

Sense of place has proved central to Gothic, with its predilection for haunted precincts characterized by intrusion, intervention and the coming into correspondence of discrete times and spaces, of home and abroad, the past and present. Above all, Europe has long constituted different kinds of narrative space, a set of contradictory concepts, and an exemplary near-“other.”

In the case of Europe as a location for British and Irish gothic texts, the question of national identity is particularly acute and centers on a number of potentially creative paradoxes. While understanding that they too were part of Europe, British gothic writers imagined themselves in distinction from continental cultures. This duality of not belonging and belonging is typical of the European experience, as Luisa Passerini (2002) has written: “most peoples have experienced and continue to experience Europe as something to which they belong, but where they also feel they represent something separate” (205). At the same time, writers have reconstructed and reimagined continental cultural identities, though always ones in the service of an understanding of the home territories. In Britain, the long-standing relation to Europe through the lens of Gothic has intertwined with contemporary politics and the impact of historical events. In this way, gothic texts trace a history of relations to the continent. In this volume, many of the essays demonstrate how the ever-present past of Gothic—of Europe—has become simultaneously a British past. It is the presence of history—of the persisting foregone—that renders the European scene so Gothic, in a literary and cinematic form anyway dedicated to the survival of the past, in the ghost, the undead, the uncanny traces of past cultures.

The political crisis of the French Revolution, the advent of Napoleon, the era of reaction, the years of revolution, the two World Wars, the rise of continental fascism, and the new post-war development of a European community—all invoked reactions and debates in Britain. Haunted Europe mirrored, negated, or transformed domestic agendas and disputes. Almost invariably, continental Europe, already burdened by its own considerable ideological considerations, was interpreted through the prism of issues and debates at home in Ireland or Britain. The continent was thereby constrained to serve competing aesthetic and social agendas, which, when taken together, call into question the possibility of a single or even dominant mode of reception. The extent to which such agendas shaped and even distorted our understanding of an entire continent is vital for the understanding our present cultural moment.

Where Is Europe?

Tracing Britain’s relationship with continental Europe inevitably entails considering just what ground is covered by the word “Europe” and who is, or is not, a European. Even the question of where Europe is may turn out to have provisional and ambiguous answers. Is Britain part of Europe? Where is the heart of the continent? What are its limits and borders?

Over the last centuries, “Europe” is a word whose meaning has shifted and still shifts, counting for different things depending on the intentions of the speaker. Among the grander impact of politics and alliances, the British traveler and the tourist fostered a self-consciousness about “Europe” as a place, a distinct culture, a complex fabric of landscapes, histories, and identities. Such travelers were not simply visiting Europe; they were encountering its various nations and locales, places as distinct as Paris and Berlin, the Alps and the Aegean islands, diverse in custom, climate, and language. Yet some sense that these disparate settings constituted a greater whole persisted. According to the OED, it was only in 1714 that the word “European” was first used in distinction to “English,” so that (in the example quoted) plants might be one or the other. The word “European,” in use in English from the sixteenth century onward, was often used in order to designate an identity to be contrasted with the “barbarian,” whether the African or Asian or American; as such the word took on a specific intensity of demarcation in an Imperial context, becoming synonymous with “whiteness,” where “natives” elsewhere and “Europeans” here stood in opposition. In this sense, the British and Irish felt themselves to be certainly European. Some marked changes in the use of the word appear at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, as coinages such as “Europeanised” (1786), “Europeanity” (1805), “Europeanise” (1821), “Europeanism” (1824), “Europeanly” (1831), and “Europeanisation” (1845) caught on, expressing both a sense of some set of qualities deemed specifically European, and also the possibility that these qualities might (or might not) be inscribed onto the people of borderline zones and colonial territories. The idea of Europe signaled modernity, Enlightenment, a belonging to a dynamic civilization at the center of power; later, as the term “Eurocentric” (1927) arrived, it meant also a place, self-regarding and rapacious, an imagined center-point offering a perspective on the world that belittled or marginalized other perspectives. Usually equally negative, since the 1970s in British minds “Europe” has come to stand for that part of Europe (by no means the whole) identifiable with the institutions and the project of the European Union, a specific “community” of nations to which we might or might not want to belong.

From antiquity, Europe existed in opposition to that which it was not, differentiated from the Asia to the East, and the Africa to the south. From the early modern period, it was balanced too against the Americas to the west. Beginning with Montesquieu, moving into the writing of the later eighteenth-century French philosophes, such as Condorcet or Turgot, Europe stood for reason, progress, and dynamism, contrasted especially with the supposed superstition and stultification of Asia. This sense was in some regards a long-standing one—as far back as Periclean Athens, luxurious, tyrannical Asia (embodied in Persia) opposed democratic Europe (identical to Greece) (Hay 1968, 3). The place of liberty faced the kingdom of despotisms. Yet in Guillaume Raynal and Denis Diderot’s Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies (Histoire des deux Indes) (1780), Europe comes into existence precisely through its barbaric invasion and oppression of people living in territories oceans away; for Raynal and Diderot, the idea of Europe emerges not from reason and science, but from conquest (Pocock 2002, 64–65).

Gothic locates perplexity in the porous boundary; its borderline states are precisely marked as such because they are prone to invasion, and the rational mind, the physical world, the nation all find themselves penetrated or plagued by forces from outside. Étienne Balibar (2004) has argued that under contemporary conditions the border has moved from the outer edge of territories and is now dispersed everywhere, locatable in interactions within the cosmopolitan city. For over two centuries, Gothic has preemptively sketched this transferal. The stories in this book unveil the ways in which Gothic has long been preoccupied by tourists, travelers, and journeying researchers. David Punter (2016) has described the Gothic as a literature of “the in-between” (3)—it is precisely this that underlies the relation to Europe, an elsewhere that is a here, an over-there that comes to us, an ancestry, a place for desire.

In a reversal of things, it is the visiting Briton who crosses the border, journeying from a space that is both within Europe and outside it, an island adjunct to and immersed within a culture. In contrast to Ireland, writers in Britain imagine themselves as both fully European and possessing a liminal kingdom beyond the meanings inscribed into the continent. Yet, in 1796, Edmund Burke, that great standard-bearer of tradition and common law, declared that “No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe” (quoted in Hay 1968, 123), asserting a belonging to a community that transcends national borders. The traveler enters into the heart of another locale, one in which he or she might be thought to share (in the traditions and histories of “Christendom”) and yet that is simultaneously a foreign “elsewhere.” Here the spirits and supernatural presences, the elementals and horrors, are also just as much autochthonous and local, though the locality is strange to its temporary visitor.

The Europe that formed the locale for the gothic fictions scrutinized in this book was at once a home to a set of languages, a set of nations, and a variously (and ideologically) understood set of concepts and traditions, with religious underpinnings and ideas of law and government that were both shared and distinct (Emerson 1998). But it is also, of course, a real, if loosely defined place, a geographical space delimited by watersheds, rivers, and the sea—a region that Winston Churchill was angry to hear demystified as the western “peninsula of the Asiatic land-mass” (Hay 1968, xvii). Its borders were pervious and uncertain. It incorporated democracies, tyrannies, monarchies, Empires. Over the last two-hundred-and-thirty years covered by this book, there were various attempts to consolidate European difference by conquest into a kind of Empire (by Napoleon, by Hitler); the land-mass too experienced the presence of actual empires (such as the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman). Yet a sense of the disparate and incompatible characterized these political unions. Europe was at once secular, Christian (though divided between the Protestant, Catholic, and the variously Orthodox), and, in the southeast, Islamic. Did the “Orient” begin in White Russia or at Moscow, or even within Vienna (as Metternich had declared, “Asia begins at the Landstrasse”). The position of Russia was especially bewildering, a country so vast as to seem in two places at once; Catherine the Great could affirm that “Russia is a European power,” but from the Don, or the Volga, or the Urals (the boundary shimmered evanescently around those permanent features), it went deep into Asia (Pagden 2002, 46–47). The southeastern borders of Europe were just as smudged, with the Balkans, Albania, Turkey, and the Eastern Mediterranean seeming, depending on your perspective, either inside or outside the fold. In this volume, Tuğçe Bıçakçı Syed’s essay on the Turks in vampire narratives investigates some of the products of this particular blurring. Otherwise, further west, in the eyes of some a cultured north faced an alien and indolent south, with Africa reputedly starting at the Pyrenees (Stock 2010, 10). Internal boundaries and borders rendered this mappable space of Europe even more nebulous. It proved impossible to say where Europe’s limits lie. To take only one example, Greece was understood to be a center of European culture and indeed the root of it, yet at the start of our period the country was under Ottoman control, and its culture had anyway been mediated for seven hundred years or so through Muslim scholars. As a place, Greece was both marginal and central, and in this it shared much with other locales gathered under the name of Europe. Similarly, as Evert Jan van Leeuwen addresses in his essay in this volume, the Jewish peoples of Europe represented for some writers an anomalous case, both emphatically and to some, like Dennis Wheatley, suspiciously European, while seeming, in the writings of anti-Semites, “Asiatic” and extraneous. Even the Bible, that basis of the image of Europe as “Christendom” came from a liminal zone, centrally British, centrally European, and yet hailing from an “alien” Middle Eastern domain.

As suggested already, the archipelago of Britain and Ireland and the other islands might mark a space beyond the continental zone, or could, contrariwise, be included within its cultural and political frame. The United Kingdom could feel itself unique in not having to worry about borders (being an island and therefore happily independent and non-contingent), though the relations between England and Scotland, England and Wales, and the inclusion or exclusion of all or part of Ireland—given an internal border, in 1922—would rather complicate that assertion (Stock 2010, 22). Indeed, Britain was as riven with contradiction and complexity as the continent it faced, the idea of the nation as fractured as that of Europe. Britain itself is not a single thing but is rather a divided place with histories that are counter, controversial, and as much marked by disharmony as continuity—as most recently the Brexit vote and the surrounding debates have reminded us. Moreover, despite the fact that they formed one political unit for more than a century, the complex, fraught relation between Britain and Ireland similarly brings up the provisional status, the unstable meanings, and the interwoven ambiguities of the cultures and countries in question.

The query as to who was a European was complicated by the rise of Nationalism and the nation state. Beginning with Herder, a fascination with localism and folk roots spread across the internal borders of Europe. Professors of folklore found that those deep roots of place had analogies in other nations’ traditions. Beside the tribal basis of identity, there were other forces at work, transnationalism and transcultural exchanges. Regarding the relation between Britain and continental Europe, Gerard Delanty (2018) has explored the idea of entanglement, stressing not separateness, but reciprocal involvement, thereby understanding national traditions (including literary ones) in transnational context. At its heart, Gothic itself was transnational, a movement understood to be of Germanic heritage that found itself in Britain, Ireland, the United States, France, and pretty much everywhere. This fact of the transnational, the transcultural, in diverse ways informs all the essays in this volume.

Haunted Europe and the Gothic Field

A sense of place and the construction of national and cultural identities are themes that have received increasing attention within Gothic Studies of late. Catherine Spooner’s and Emma McEvoy’s Routledge Companion to the Gothic (2007), Marie Mulvey-Roberts’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Seeing Ghosts: The Dark Side of the Enlightenment
• 3 “Such strains as speak no mortal means”: Melusine Voices in Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Landon’s “The Fairy of the Fountains”
• 4 Slavery as a National Crime: Defining Britishness in Encounters with the Flying Dutchman
• 5 Strange Exhibitions: M. R. James, Europe, and the Phantom Museum
• 6 Haunted Hotels and Murder Inns: Travelers’ Tales from Europe and the Gothic Short Story from the 1820s to the 1940s
• 7 Daphne du Maurier: Sex and Death the Italian Way
• 8 Dennis Wheatley’s Satanic Continent
• 9 Robert Aickman and the English Abroad
• 10 “Look into the Dark”: A Ghost Story for Christmas on the Continent: An Interview with Leslie Megahey, Director of Schalcken the Painter
• 11 A Tale of Two Carmillas: The Representation of Styria in Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” and Its Web Series Adaptation
• 12 Civilization versus “the Barbarian Turk”: Imperial Gothic and Western Self-Definition in Dracula Narratives from Fin-de-Siècle to the Post-9/11 World
• 13 Acephalous Times: The Severed Head in Contemporary Fiction and Film
• Index