A vow rooted in the blood’s circulation causes the living and the dead to converge, empowering the dead by allowing the bleeding nun’s body to subvert eighteenth-century medical theory about the living body’s structure and functions. The binding line of the vow, ‘In my/thy veins while blood shall roll’, hinges on a qualification that separates (or should separate) Raymond’s living body from the bleeding nun’s dead one: active, living blood. The severed ‘silver cord’ described by Dr Anthony Fothergill in his A New Inquiry into the Suspension of Vital Action, in the Case of Drowning and Suffocation, represents a number of theories attempting to locate the transition from life to death that prompts the body’s decay. In Lewis’s Gothic, the body does decay, but the severance Fothergill describes does not occur, at least not to the point that vitality ceases and the body becomes a ‘motionless, inanimate corpse’. From the mid-eighteenth century, the Gothic has been populated by reanimated corpses; yet, as I will demonstrate, Lewis’s combination of this common trope with the Gothic trope of the blood prioritises the material agency of the body.

Acquiring his infamy early on, Lewis wrote The Monk at the age of nineteen and, in addition to several revised editions, became a prolific writer of drama, short stories, prose, and travel narrative, as well as a well-respected translator. The scandal of his first novel – a combination of religious blasphemy, sexual violence, and association with Parliament – cost him little in terms of audience, despite continued negative reviews and threats from censors, a pattern with which he grew comfortable. As one reviewer wrote in the Antijacobin Review of Lewis’s collection of poems, Tales of Wonder (1801), ‘His fancy appears to be chiefly attracted by, and absorbed in the terrible, the horrible, the hideous, and the impossible; nor can we conceive what has been his bent of education that has led him to so uncommon a track of study.’⁶ As far as biographers have written, he had no connection to medical expertise through education or close friendships, but Lewis repeatedly engages with issues of corporality that suggest the larger cultural influence of medical theories, particularly theories about life in the blood known as vitalism.

‘Monk’ Lewis’s reputation for gruesome and shocking storytelling is well earned through his depictions of undead bodies as complex gruesome configurations with anatomical potential. Throughout his literary career, Lewis faced accusations of plagiarism, undeniably borrowing from other authors or creatively translating German literature. In these renditions, however, the graphic play with mortal fluids is all his own. In Johann Karl August Musaus’s earlier version of this story, ‘The Elopement’ (1782–6), the character Fritz vows, ‘I have thee – I hold thee. Never shall I leave thee. Dear love, thou art mine – I am thine with body and soul’, and the bleeding nun is described as simply ‘a hideous skeleton’.⁷ In retelling the popular story of the bleeding nun from ‘The Elopement’, Lewis somewhat adheres to the basic plot and structure of the original, except for the vital line in the vow about veins, blood, and circulation. This addition points to an acknowledgement of the body’s functions and moving parts that seems antithetical to a scene about a supernatural spectre defying the laws of nature and medicine. As such, it acknowledges the known medical difference between life and death while also conceding to the lack of knowledge that vitalism celebrates.

The bleeding nun’s very name plays on an uncertainty about life and death that the Gothic interprets as possibility: narrative need not end at death. Bleeding for evermore is not a survivable state, yet the constant flow of blood is also not characteristic of a corpse. The Gothic imagination, then, produces a body ideal for study, beyond harm and yet functioning as if alive. Though her name indicates active blood, the vow does make a clear distinction between her visible blood and Raymond’s, indicated by references to the invisible, inner workings of his body: blood flowing and in constant motion through unseen veins, disseminating to different locations in the body and visually present by the sheer evidence of his body being alive. The active ‘[rolling]’ of the blood gives a sense of where it has been and where it will go: this body has a future as well as a past, sustained through this inner movement. The bleeding nun fixates on Raymond’s circulation because the memory of contained and circulating blood haunts her constantly emptying veins. This movement of blood towards blood propels what should be an inanimate body forward to continue existence in the narrative.

By emphasising a presumed difference between the living and dead bodies, the vow hits on the most pressing and debated medical questions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: what distinguishes a living from a dead body, and what is the source of that life? According to medical speculation and an amorphous theory called vitalism or the vital element, the line that separates the living and the dead can be found in the blood, but the blood as a Gothic trope does not exclude the dead. ‘Monk’ Lewis’s gory and graphic approach to the Gothic engages with the Romantic-era medical script of vitalist thought, illustrating and interrogating its anxieties and uncertainties about the boundary between life and death.

Though Lewis integrates supernatural creatures that eschew science into his work, I argue in this chapter that his depictions of reanimated dead human bodies draw power from the theory of vitalism, which, even for an eighteenth-century medical theory, was already highly speculative. The discourse of vitalism admits a mystery within the living body, one that distinguishes living from non-living matter. The Gothic tropes of blood and reanimated corpses seeking revenge refashion the capabilities vitalism gives the body, subverting them from a life power to a death power, thereby extending the possibilities of the theory into the impossible. The Gothic in the context of vitalism has been well documented by scholars such as Sharon Ruston, Richard Sha, and Marilyn Butler, among others, but it has largely been restricted to discussions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1831). Written at the height of the 1814–19 controversy over interpretating earlier definitions of vitalism led by John Abernethy and William Lawrence, Frankenstein was clearly influenced by the cultural reach of the theory’s concepts. In contrast to these studies pairing medical theory and Frankenstein, this chapter considers the Gothic in the context of the earlier eighteenth-century theories of the vital element about which Abernethy and Lawrence disagreed.

Beginning with two foundational Gothic tropes, blood and reanimated corpses, in the context of vitalism history, I argue that Lewis’s hyper-stylised Gothic works subvert medical endeavours to rigidly define life and death by empowering the dead body with the material agency to enact its own revenge. Lewis’s work responds to the ambiguity of these theories that preserves the awe-inspiring quality of the ‘vital element’ by truly investing the body with the power vitalists celebrated in it. I call Lewis’s subversion of the vital element the ‘Gothic element’: a form of the animating force that provides anatomical agency and self-sufficiency to the dead in the same way that the vital element provides these powers to the living. Imbuing the familiar trope of the reanimated corpse with the medically theorised vital force of the blood, Lewis’s Gothic element uses the aesthetics and values of the Gothic – gore and revenge – to allow these non-normative bodies to thrive. By repurposing a medical principle of life into a Gothic principle of death, Lewis empowers bodies that have been murdered or otherwise wronged to regain the agency to protect themselves.

Inanimate objects that never lived, such as the statue of Alfonso, bleed (from the nose) in a way that causes alarm but not because of its connection to anything anatomical. In moments of fear, as when the bride-to-be’s father witnesses a skeletal spectre, blood is said to freeze in the veins, the closest acknowledgement of its anatomical context. Yet, even this blood is safely hidden from the reader’s view, more a figure of speech than a life-threatening condition. As Robert B. Hamm Jr points out in his comparison between The Castle of Otranto and one of its obvious source texts, Hamlet, ‘This proverbial metaphor for terror – blood freezing in one’s veins – indicates an interior response that cannot be measured or seen. Walpole’s use of it shifts the narrative away from the exterior, legible body and the familiar language of gesture and symptoms’ indicative of ‘an extreme and unsharable individual experience’.⁹ Thinking about this in Bakhtinian terms, the closed body is a safe body, making Walpole’s text a more conservative one than Lewis’s. It is the open, leaking body – the one visibly bleeding – that becomes threatening. Despite the constant death surrounding Otranto’s characters, natural and supernatural, references to blood are central to the formulation of the Gothic but are more often metaphorical than material.

All the characters killed in Walpole’s novel remain dead, their human bodies quickly and cleanly removed from the text’s visuals in favour of supernatural and impossible bodies stepping out of galleries or just stepping with giant disembodied feet. There is no shortage of reanimation, from the figure of Alfonso that quits the frame of his painting and walks around, to the giant foot and hand that appear to the servants. These are often referred to as ghosts, but the focus on individual body parts gives them at least the suggestion of the material. At the same time, there is no system of reanimation presented: we are to believe they move rather than speculate about how. They are bloodless corpses, devoid of decay and distant from the living characters in the story as well as its readers, who see nothing of themselves mirrored in their physical make-up.

Thus, in introducing the tropes of blood and the reanimated dead, Walpole carefully neglects to connect them to each other or to literal embodiment, sacrificing materiality for metaphor and associating wonder with resurrected history rather than mysterious medicine. Walpole’s well-mannered ghosts that jump out of paintings, David Punter explains, are ‘obviously not a use of the supernatural which is intended to terrify, but an ironic use which is meant to interest and amuse us by its self-conscious quaintness’.¹⁰ Jerrold E. Hogle’s foundational work on the ‘ghost of the counterfeit’ revolves around this concept of body-less hauntings without true origin, the ghosts that emerge from paintings originating in mere images, often false ones. He notes that ‘the principal hauntings in Otranto are by ghosts of representations rather than the shades of bodies’, ‘resymbolizations of what is already symbolic and thus more fake than real’.¹¹ In other words, at no point is a physical corpse involved, a concept I will expand on in Chapter 3. He identifies these same techniques in The Monk,¹² the most notable examples being the painting of Madonna/Matilda that Ambrosio admires and the magic mirror he uses to spy on Antonia, but both are unrelated to the reanimated dead. Physical death is prioritised over these empty counterfeits, moved to its own realm. It is not contained within hollowed representations but rather exposed and active in a world where it can enact change. Lewis, therefore, builds on the existing Gothic tropes of blood and the reanimated corpse, re-envisioning them into material horrors that will influence writers in the Gothic tradition after him.