Welsh Gothic

Jane Aaron

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780708326084, 9780708326077
• eBook ISBN: 9781783165599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Welsh Gothic, the first study of its kind, introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, telling us much about the changing ways in which Welsh people have historically seen themselves and been perceived by others. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who enter literature from folk lore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, c n Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches.

PART I

Haunted by History

1

Cambria Gothica (1780s–1820s)

In Ann of Swansea’s Cambrian Pictures (1810), the Honourable Captain Maitland, quartered with his regiment near Caernarvon, suffers a rough introduction to the terrors of wild Wales. While ostensibly courting Eliza Tudor, the heiress of Tudor Hall, his eye falls upon one of the household’s domestics, the pretty dairy-maid Gwinthlean, whose virtue he covertly assails ‘with all the united artillery of vows, promises and flattery’.¹ At length Gwinthlean promises to meet him at a red barn in the neighbourhood, but arrives there in a state of some affright; a suicide once hung himself from its rafters and since then local legend has it, she tells him, that the ‘tefil haunts the parn’.² Reluctantly, she allows him to draw her into the building, but

at the very moment the captain supposed himself on the verge of accomplishing his wishes, she burst from his arms with a loud shriek, and flew out of the barn. Captain Morland, astonished at this action, would have flown after her: but between him and the door stood a huge terrific black figure, with cloven feet, fiery eyes, and tremendous horns, which seized him in its strong grip, pinioned his hands behind him with an iron chain, threw him on his face, fastened his legs together in the same way, then swinging him across his shoulders, flew with him to the stables behind Tudor Hall, and stuck him up to his neck in a dunghill.³

Rescued from this predicament by Eliza and her father, ‘the disappointed captain exhibited a most deplorable spectacle of mud and terror’; he protests to all and sundry that ‘the devil himself in proper person’ had ‘caught him up and flew a long way with him in the air’ and insists that two men from his regiment watch over his bed each night ‘for fear of the devil paying him another visit’.⁴ But once he has recovered, Maitland is inveigled into attending a local wedding where to his mortification he witnesses ‘the rosy Gwinthlean’ married ‘to a tall, athletic fellow whom he had no doubt was the person who had performed the part of the devil at the red barn’.⁵ After the ceremony Gwinthlean makes it public that it was at her husband Hoel Watkin’s instigation that the assignment in the barn took place. ‘He would wrap himself up in the hide of an ox, and cure you of trying to ruin innocent country girls’, she tells the captain, who leaves Wales in some haste, and subsequently has to change regiments too, ‘the unfortunate story of the devil and the dunghill’ having ‘pursued him to the parade and the mess-room’.⁶

Wales’s reputation as a haunted land has in this fictional case served its inmates well by helping to rid them of an unscrupulous would-be exploiter. Encouraging the spread of local tales of terror in order to frighten away potentially threatening incomers was, apparently,in reality common practice in many areas of Wales at this time. Ghosts proliferated in particular in coastal spots frequented by smugglers or wreckers who had good reason to discourage strangers from lingering within sight of the coves and caves in which they operated. The Blue Lady of Dunraven and the ghost of the ‘wrecker lord’ Thomas Wyndham were both said to haunt Southerndown in Glamorgan, notorious as a wrecking village; the murdered Lady Stradling and the witch Mallt-y-nos inhabited nearby St Donat’s Castle from which the Stradling family reputedly operated a flourishing smuggling trade; a witch called ‘Old Moll’ haunted the pointedly named Brandy Cove near Caswell Bay on the Gower peninsula, and a tribe of witches protected Llanddona in Anglesey, another reputed haven for smugglers.⁷ In Wales as a whole, the abundance of folkloric tales of witches, devils, wizards, death portents, cursing wells, hell-hounds, haunted castles and the like suggests the possibility that what they represent may not simply be the superstition of the inhabitants, but their not necessarily conscious tendency to discourage possible exploiters from entering their territory by portraying it as steeped in supernatural horrors. However, if that was indeed the case, by the close of the eighteenth century the device had backfired; the rising popularity of the Gothic genre meant that the darker elements in Welsh folklore were by now more likely to attract visitors to the country than to repel them. This chapter on the representation of Wales in Gothic writing from the 1780s to the 1820s begins with a section on the ways in which Wales was depicted by its late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century visitors, before moving on to examine the manner in which Welsh authors, in their turn, made use of Gothic devices to explore their relation with the ruling state, as visitors to England and as partners in the Wales-England union. The texts discussed in these first three sections are primarily concerned with the Wales of their time, but in its final section the chapter closes with an account of Gothic historical fictions located in Wales and written during the Romantic period.

Romantic tourists in Gothic Wales

Their taste fashioned by the prevailing vogues of the era, travellers to Wales at the close of the eighteenth century enjoyed the sublimity of its mountain scenery, the eerie majesty of its ancient ruins, and the picturesqueness of its unsophisticated inhabitants who according to their visitors still adhered to pagan superstitions. In The Abbey of St Asaph (1795) by the Anglo-Scottish writer Isabella Kelly (1758–1857), Lady Douglas, on a month’s tour of Wales, informs her children as the Cambrian mountains rise ‘with bold magnificence’ into view striking the mind ‘with pleasing awe’ that these are the ‘reputed regions of inspiration’. Formerly, she says, they were inhabited by druids who

studying nature, and the effects of plants and herbs, completed many surprising cures; which in that darkened age were imputed miracles; in the more remote countries, the people still retain a large portion of their ancient superstition, attributing to certain springs very miraculous influence.⁸

The Abbey of St Asaph is a contemporary novel – Lady Douglas is the widow of an army officer who fought for Britain in the American War of Independence, but lost his life in a subsequent military campaign in the East Indies – but the superstitiousness of the Welsh peasantry is integral to the plot of this full-blooded Gothic fiction. The abbey, ‘a Gothic, noble piece of architecture’, fronting not only ‘stupendous mountains’ covered with forests of ‘wild magnificence’ but also the ruins of a castle ‘tottering in superb decay’, is reputedly haunted by at least two troubled ancestors of its proprietors, the Trevallion family. In former days when the castle yet stood ‘strong’ and ‘fortified’,

Owen of Trevallion, the first of the race, and invested with it by one of the princes of Glendower, returning from a signal victory, found his wife Bertha folded in the arms of a lovely youth; and in a transport of jealousy plunged his sword in her bosom, and completed his vengeance by the death of the stranger, who with his parting breath exclaimed, ‘I am her brother!’⁹

In bitter remorse, Sir Owen is said to haunt the scene of his fatal error, accompanied by his much later descendant Sir Eldred Trevallion, the brother of Sir Hugh, the present owner. Sir Eldred had reportedly committed suicide by ‘dashing himself with fury’ from one of the windows of his ‘ancient pile’ when his wife perished in his arms, two days after his return from an East Indian campaign in which he was mistakenly reported killed: his wife, prostrated by grief at the supposed loss, was too weak to endure the shock of his sudden return.

Though she is warned by the abbey’s domestics and tenantry that its ruins echo to the ‘groans and moans’ of undead Trevallions, the novel’s heroine Jennett takes pleasure at nightfall in wandering through the ‘solitary mouldering’ castle. Jennett is in service at the abbey as a companion to Sir Hugh’s daughter, but – not entirely surprisingly – it is eventually disclosed that she is in fact Sir Eldred’s long-lost daughter, Rodolpha Trevallion, the true heiress of St Asaph. On one of her moonlit rambles, ‘enrapt by the sublimity of the scene’, she loses herself in contemplation of the abbey’s past. ‘These are the haunts of meditation,’ she thinks:

these the scenes where ancient Bards the inspiring breath extatic felt; and from this world retired, conversed with Angels, and immortal forms on gracious errands bent, to save the fall of virtue struggling on the brink of vice, – to wake in whispers, and repeated dreams, – to hint pure thoughts, – and warn the favored [sic] soul, for future trials fated to prepare.–¹⁰

It is well that Jennett is thus warned and prepared for at this point her musings are interrupted by the sudden appearance, as if sprung from the earth in front of her, of a male figure whose ‘features appeared distorted by internal agony’ and who cries out in torment, ‘“Guilt! – guilt! – oh, guilt!”’ Staggered, Jennet falls on ‘the still agitated earth’ which immediately opens wide before her and an apparition ascends from it ‘to a stupendous height, – the extended arms lengthened in proportion, and forming a circle totally enclosed her’. On the front of its head ‘something like a countenance appeared but horrible beyond imagination; the eyes seemed globes of fire; and the gaping jaws emitted sulphurous flames’ while ‘a vesture which floated loosely around the spectre, represented by pale gleams of light, the forms of every noxious reptile’. The apparition hails her:

Rash, obtruding daughter of mortality, wherefore com’st thou to these unfrequented paths, and blood distain’d retreats? . . . learn, that nightly escaping from the burning seas of purifying fire, my anguished spirit troubles this sequestered spot, and mourns the murderous deeds that close the gates of everlasting peace and mercy . . . until the ocean renders up its long forgotten dead, and yawning graves give up their sleeping charge; and the bright morn of resurrection dawns, never shall the once famed Owen of Trevallion find repose.¹¹

But Jennett, for whom ‘darkness had no horrors’ for ‘she knew the all pervading eye of heaven, powerful in the deepest gloom as in the mid-day light’, is not long daunted. Soon, she is exploring the castle’s dungeons once more, and this time she has the happiness to discover entombed within them not another spectre but a living prisoner, Sir Eldred Trevallion, soon to be revealed to be her father, who has been held captive in the ruins for nineteen years. His wicked brother Sir Hugh had plotted his death in order to inherit St Asaph, but the doctor commissioned to do the deed had scruples and imprisoned Sir Eldred in the dungeons instead. It was the doctor who with great ingenuity, through his knowledge of the underground passages with which the abbey grounds are riddled, had for years impersonated the ghost of Owain of Trevallion. He confesses that he has ‘artfully encouraged the tale of the ignorant, respecting unquiet spirits disturbing the Abbey, till at length they became a general tradition, which staggered even the enlightened, and at the same time effected my purpose’, that is, of keeping prying eyes away from Sir Eldred’s prison.¹²

With its spirited heroine, Isabella Kelly’s novel reads entertainingly, but already, though a comparatively early instance of the Gothic, it is riddled with clichés. The sudden startling appearance of violent and apparently inexplicable supernatural phenomena, along with the idea of the past as exerting a fatal influence on the present, had been central to the genre since its conception with the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764. But The Abbey of St Asaph, unlike Walpole’s novel, includes within the text rational explanations accounting for all its supernatural phenomena. For example, during her dungeon wanderings Jennett encountered a skeleton which seemed to bow towards her, then to throw its own skull down at her feet with piercing shrieks, but she discovers later that all she had in fact disturbed was a large rat which had made its nest in the skull and accounted for its shrill agitations.¹³ This device of first thrilling the reader with supernatural horrors before providing natural reasons for the apparitions is also borrowed, from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, published to great popular success in 1794; Radcliffe makes a point of providing rational explanations for all of the apparently supernatural manifestations in her novel. In this way Gothic writers – and their readers – could both enjoy the illicit thrill of supernatural horror and condemn it virtuously as superstition at the same time. The Abbey of St Asaph follows Radcliffe’s innovations closely; in its second volume, Jennett delivers a lengthy tirade against Gothic superstition, telling her supposed family (that is, the Welsh peasants who found her and gave her a home when she was left by her wicked uncle and his henchman, the doctor, as an abandoned infant on the mountainside),

let not your judgement be perverted by such ridiculous superstition; we scarce ever hear of an ancient Abbey or Castle, but what is reputedly haunted by some discontented spirit; we frequently hear of horrible figures, and unnatural sights, but they exist only in a gloomy or disordered imagination . . . As for noises I admit them, but they are perfectly innocent and natural. The interior of our Gothic structures being generally very lofty and vaulted, causes an echo, so that a single pin falling in one part will reverberate the sound thro’ the whole building; and striking the listening ear, busy fancy, ever fond of the marvellous, and perhaps tainted with superstition, magnifies the harmless echo to deep and horrid groans . . . The tale is related, made a standing topic, gathers strength from each repeating voice, till the tinkling pin is exalted to a shriek more terrific than a peal of thunder: and thus the silly tradition becomes established.¹⁴

Even parents dismayed by their offspring’s enthusiasm for the new fashion in horror fiction could but approve of such a speech.

Isabella Kelly, then, shows herself to be an author very aware of contemporary developments in popular fiction and the type of literary device likely to appeal to her readers. I have dwelt on her book in some detail here because it serves as a characteristic example of early Gothic novels set in Welsh locations and written from the point of view of visitors to the country. In one sense it is atypical, however, in that its heroine’s infant years were spent amongst the local peasantry; in most of these novels little interest is shown in the locals except as stereotypically superstitious domestics or as ghosts from Wales’s dark past. But Jennett is also to some degree a visitor to Wales: as a child she had attracted the a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: ‘A Long Terror’
• Part I: Haunted by History
• Part II: ‘Things That go Bump in the Celtic Twilight’
• Epilogue: Post-devolution Gothic
• Notes
• Select Bibliography