Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction

Toni Reed

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184708
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

The hero of the story is a demonic lover—dark, handsome, mysterious, and dangerously seductive. The heroine—beautiful, and innocent—willingly becomes his victim and is destroyed by him. This story of demon-lover and victim, always charged with passion, has been told over and over, from Greek mythology through contemporary fiction and films.

Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction is the first historical and structural exploration of the demon-lover motif, with emphasis on major works of British fiction from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; it will interest those concerned with gender role conflicts in literature and with the mutual influence of oral and written texts of folklore and formal literature.

ONE

Woman Wailing for Her Demon-Lover!

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
COLERIDGE,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The body of literature for any period of history reflects, in part, the fears, conflicts, and ethical concerns inherent in the culture which produces its novelists and poets. Although the literary works of any particular century tend to reflect the social mores of that period and are therefore tied to historical interpretation, certain themes in fiction transcend the cultural milieu in which the works were formed. Certain thematic patterns or motifs continue to appear in literature throughout time, patterns that may in fact be traced from the earliest Greek myths through the Bible and influential works of fiction to popular literature and contemporary films.

Works of literature, including the earliest known forms of orally transmitted folklore, tend to repeat a finite number of plots or stories which captivate audiences generation after generation. In the same way children enjoy hearing the same fairy tales told over and over again, most people respond to tales that resemble others they have heard or have read before; familiarity with stories fosters personal identification, and identification by audiences leads to repetition of the same basic plot formulas over time. This study concerns itself with one specific narrative scheme which has been repeated since the beginning of literary history, yet one that has been largely ignored by scholars and literary critics: the demon-lover motif.¹ Briefly, this motif conveys in an exaggerated fashion an aggressive man’s attempts to dominate and destroy a naive, impressionable woman and demonstrates also her lack of perception and foresight. The struggle takes on mythical proportions, in part because of the larger-than-life and often supernatural features of demon-lover figures, and in part because of the frequency with which the tale is told.

One of the earliest literary expressions of the demon-lover motif is found in “The Demon Lover,” a popular ballad sung in Scotland and England as early as the mid-seventeenth century. In the ballad, a spirit or a cloven-footed revenant lover destroys his former mistress through supernatural means as revenge for her unfaithfulnsss to him while he has been away. In literary works as well, authors typically attribute demon-lover figures with supernatural traits that distinguish them from other characters. In fiction, the supernatural quality of the demon-lover—the mysterious charm and the perverse, dangerous impulses—establishes a direct parallel to the earlier ballad. The women in these works are both repelled by and attracted to the supernatural character of their demon-lovers. Very often the dark figures are compared to Satan, a powerful supernatural being, or are said to possess demonic qualities, and their behavior seems excessively cruel, even diabolic at times.

Myths of course are stories which represent beliefs held by a group of people; in ancient Greek and Roman cultures, many myths explained natural phenomena which could not otherwise be explained. In such narratives, human dramas are enacted on a cosmic scale through the mythology of a cultural group, dramas which often capture elemental struggles between the sexes. Conflicts depicted by mythological figures—for example, conflicts between Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx, and Eros and Psyche—symbolize struggles between men and women. As narratives evolved from the early mythology to folktales, ballads, and other forms of folk literature, these conflicts continued to be expressed because they parallel human experience. It is no surprise that formal written literature frequently focuses on the recurring human conflicts between men and women. By identifying the characteristics of one particular type of conflict, the demon-lover conflict, we may explore both its mythological and psychological dimensions.

Northrop Frye believes that “the structural principles of literature are as closely related to mythology and comparative religion as those of painting are to geometry” (Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 134-35). He provides some critical tools for discussing the relationship between literature and myth. Frye classifies literature into four groups of what he calls “mythical movements”: romance, comedy, irony, and tragedy. Because works of fiction that express the demon-lover motif all conclude with personal disasters, they correspond most closely to what Frye calls “tragedy.” He also divides the universe of discourse (and by extension the universe itself) into two basic modes, the apocalyptic and the demonic. The underlying theme or “structure of imagery” in any literary work he calls dianoia (p. 140). This term is useful for discussing works that share a thematic structure—e.g., the victimization of a woman by a man—which clearly places the collection of works under discussion in this study in the realm of the demonic, according to Frye’s binary scheme. Moreover, Frye applies the term mythoi to mean “the generic narratives . . . which are these structures of imagery in movement” (p. 140). Mythoi, meaning plot, is useful in this study for identifying ballads and tales that share similar plot features, elements which tend to be repeated in works that may be grouped together as “demon-lover tales.”

By applying the Aristotelian concepts of dianoia and mythoi, Frye provides a means of distinguishing between content and method. The literature discussed in this book expresses through a fairly predictable structural design a particular view of the “demonic” impulse in human beings as depicted by fictional characters. A demonic world view, according to Frye, presents a “world of the nightmare and the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion” (p. 147)—a description which easily fits such works as “The Demon Lover” ballad, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Dracula, and many other works discussed in chapters 4 and 5.

Demon-lover tales all involve a struggle of wills, deception, and human destruction, and embody a recognizable plot formula. Certain works of literature, written centuries apart by authors who may or may not have known about similar works that preceded their own, may be grouped together according to theme and structure. Works that share a theme as well as a basic formulaic structure—for example, works identified as demon-lover tales—exist because they invoke universal human responses. Why the same stories are retold throughout literary history and how the germinal idea is disseminated are intriguing questions that will be addressed in the following chapters.

Richard Chase believes that myths represent primeval reality and that human beings repeat mythical thought patterns as a result of authentic aesthetic experience (Quest for Myth, p. vii), although he fails to account for the fact that several authors may independently share mythical images or patterns. Referring to Freud’s theory of “the pleasure principle” and its relation to what he called the “repetition compulsion,” Chase states: “He [Freud] believed that the repetition compulsion was a device employed by the organism to guard against psychic trauma, a device to set up a tension of modified fear . . . so as to prepare the psyche to meet sudden onslaughts of fright” (p. 101).

To Freud, according to Chase, the repetition of motifs, such as the one found in demon-lover stories, serves a practical psychological purpose: to help us brace ourselves against the possibility of painful emotional assault. Chase goes on to describe in greater detail the relationship between the myth-maker and the myth, reinforcing the idea that myths are indeed useful for anticipating trauma: “The act of projecting inner emotions into the outer world (i.e., the first act of myth-making) is a self-protective measure. The finished myth may perhaps be considered, as Freud considers the painful kind of dream, a device for sending small and controllable armies of stimuli against the individual psyche as a repeated warning . . . ” (pp. 101-2).

Chase seems to concur with Freud that as a repetitive dream often warns us of some danger, a recurring myth functions to protect us from some vague, imminent threat. The repetition of the myth provides a way for the mythmaker and for those who experience the myth over and over to achieve psychic equilibrium.

Contrasting the positions of Freud and Jung regarding the function of myth, Eric Gould writes: “He [Jung] suggests a radical departure from Freudian orthodoxy in his explanation of what the human mind does as it creates fictions, largely through his theory of the archetype. Freud used mythological tales as the expression of repressed instinctual drives in the unconscious. He treated these narratives as sources of dream material which derive from the infantile psychological life of man. Jung, on the other hand, finds in myth a mature psychological life, and isolates there certain primordial images: the shadow, the anima and animus, the wise old man, and so on” (Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature, pp. 15-16).

Whereas Freud attributes the human mythmaking consciousness to infantile urges, Jung asserts that myths comprise the fundamental structure of the unconscious mind. Jung explains the tendency for mythical thought patterns to reappear throughout literary history by suggesting that human beings share a “collective unconscious,” psychic memories stored in the deepest recesses of our minds. The collective unconscious, Jung suggests, contains archetypes that were present from the beginning of time. According to Jung, the archetypes in literature stir us because they communicate essential truths via psychic images. In the following passage Jung defines his often-misused term “archetype”: “The primordial image, or archetype, is a figure—be it a daemon, a human being, or a process—that constantly recurs in the course of history and appears wherever creative fantasy is freely expressed. Essentially, therefore, it is a mythological figure. When we examine these images more closely, we find that they give form to countless typical experiences of our ancestors. They are, so to speak, the psychic residue of innumerable experiences of the same type. They present a picture of psychic life in the average, divided up and projected into the manifold figures of the mythological pantheon” (The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, pp. 16-17). Viewed in Jungian terms, the demon-lover of both the folk and literary texts may be seen as an archetypal figure, a primordial image repeated throughout history because it resides in the human psyche and from time to time emerges in the form of concrete songs and tales.

Derived from Jung’s theory of archetypes, archetypal criticism has played an important role in scholarly studies for many years. Frye, for example, attributes the basis of his own theory of archetypes to Jung. Pointing out the ease with which archetypes lend themselves to repetition throughout history, Frye states: “The fact that the archetype is primarily a communicable symbol largely accounts for the ease with which ballads and folk tales and mimes travel though the world, like so many of their heroes, over all barriers of language and culture” (p. 107). As a literary figure, the demon-lover circulated by way of Scottish and British folklore before being adapted by poets and writers. Frye’s conception of archetypes as communicable symbols helps to explain why audiences identify with certain stories that are told and retold across the generations.

Maud Bodkin, one of the earliest literary critics to recognize the importance of Jung’s work on archetypes for the study of literature, contends that poets communicate their visions of human experience, their interpretations of the world around them, through archetypal images which correspond to the emotional realities of their communities. “When a great poet uses the stories that have taken shape in the fantasy of the community,” Bodkin remarks, “it is not his individual sensibility alone that he objectifies” (Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, p. 8).

Myth or archetypal criticism was firmly established by 1957 when Frye published Anatomy of Criticism, in which he states that archetypes are “associative clusters” or “communicable units” connecting one poem with another. Archetypal criticism, Frye proposes, is primarily concerned with literature as a mode of communication regarding social experience. By concentrating on conventions and genres, the archetypal critic attempts to integrate poems into the greater body of literature while discerning specific motifs, patterns relating to dianoia or mythoi, which characterize works of literature. By extension, archetypes connect one novel or piece of short fiction with another. By recognizing the demon-lover conflict as a pervasive leitmotiv in British fiction, we may better comprehend volatile gender relationships, interpreted by writers over the past four hundred years through archetypal characterizations.

The prototypical lover and victim were introduced by Samuel Richardson when Clarissa was first published in 1748. Other works—for example, Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles in the nineteenth century and D.H. Lawrence’s “The Princess” and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” in the twentieth century—repeat the basic aggression motif. The demon-lover figures that appear in these works share certain characteristics with the medieval concept of Satan, an observation which supports the idea that these works are thematically related. In all of these works the demon-lovers are dark, deceptive, obsessed men who possess or destroy their victims at night, much in the way Satan is said to behave toward his victims.

Chapter 2 traces the development of the concept of Satan, focusing on Satan and demons in general as “lovers” who seduce and destroy women, and establishes the similarity between the victimization experienced by “witches” and the women in the demon-lover tales. The ballad and the fiction on which the present study is based represent a demonic interaction between victimizer and victim. John J. White has remarked on the psychological effect that archetypal literature has on its readers because of historical or mythological associations: “A work of fiction prefigured by a myth is read in such a way that our reactions to character and plot are transformed by an awareness of the mythological precedent; it is a relation whose importance lies primarily in what it brings to bear on the act of reading and interpreting, not in any determining function it may have in respect of the actual plot. Prefigurations arouse expectations in the reader which may or may not be fulfilled, and in any case will probably be satisfied in unexpected ways” (“Mythological Fiction and the Reading Process,” p. 77).

The mythological figure on which the demon-lover is based is clearly Satan. Recognizing the recurrence of the Devil figure in literature, Bodkin remarks: “If we attempt to define the devil in psychological terms, regarding him as an archetype, a persistent or recurrent mode of apprehension, we may say that the devil is our tendency to represent in personal form the forces within and without us that threaten our supreme values” (p. 223). Works of fiction based on the myth of Satan (or on the reality of the Devil for those who believe in the existence of personified evil) force us to examine our own potential for evil and confront us with our own vulnerability. Satan and women accused of witchcraft as recently as two hundred and fifty years ago represent the historical precedent for the demon-lover conflict. Stories related by women persecuted as “witches” by English magistrates (all men) are remarkably similar to the underlying plot structure found in the ballad: a demonic figure tempts, seduces, betrays, and victimizes women. As history, ancient mythology, the ballad, and the literary works reveal, women have been victimized since the beginning of human society.

Feminists today have much to say about the collective victimization of women by patriarchal societies as well as the victimization of individuals in the form of rape, spousal abuse, and spiritual and psychological oppression. But few feminists have commented upon the victimization depicted in works of literature considered exemplary by our culture. Schoolchildren, both boys and girls, have read Wuthering Heights (for example) for generations and have been intrigued by the unnamable passion they feel; as a result of their reading they have formed deep and lasting associations between passion and love: to love, in other words, means to suffer intensely, as Heathcliff and Catherine suffer as a result of their violent interactions. Thus, violence, passion, and love become fused in a drama of oppression. Literature depicting the oppression of females encourages the belief that “strong-willed men” must conquer women, while “weak-willed women” eventually succumb to the uncontestable power of men obsessed with possessing them. One possible explanation for the faithful perpetuation of the demon-lover motif is that historically men have had power over women and have protected that power by willfully subjugating women and, more, by possessing them. Perhaps the demon-lover conflict expresses the collective oppression of women, and as a body of literature represents a collective warning to women not to deviate from male-defined roles, for those who do are punished.

Feminist critics often write seething critical exposés about the damage done by patriarchal critics who have, over the years, consistently misunderstood, misrepresented, or dismissed the woman’s point of view. Some feminist critics reinterpret literature; others attempt to undo misapplied critical theory; still others provide new paradigms for the study of literature that serve to equalize past critical practice. To a large extent feminist criticism has involved a search for myths that explain the social, psychological, emotional, and psychic experiences of women that would otherwise go unexplained.

In 1979, a time when women critics were still attempting to define feminist criticism and its mission, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar took the literary world by storm by tracing fictional images of enclosure, represented primarily by Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason, “the madwoman in the attic.” By giving poor Bertha, the silenced...