Gothic Invasions

Imperialism, War and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction

Ailise Bulfin

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786832115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria gótica, romántica y de terror

What do tales of stalking vampires, restless Egyptian mummies, foreign master criminals, barbarian Eastern hordes and stomping Prussian soldiers have in common? As Gothic Invasions explains, they may all be seen as instances of invasion fiction, a paranoid fin-de-siècle popular literary phenomenon that responded to prevalent societal fears of the invasion of Britain by an array of hostile foreign forces in the period before the First World War. Gothic Invasions traces the roots of invasion anxiety to concerns about the downside of Britain's continuing imperial expansion: fears of growing inter-European rivalry and colonial wars and rebellion. It explores how these fears circulated across the British empire and were expressed in fictional narratives drawing strongly upon and reciprocally transforming the conventions and themes of gothic writing. Gothic Invasions enhances our understanding of the interchange between popular culture and politics at this crucial historical juncture, and demonstrates the instrumentality of the ever-versatile and politically-charged gothic mode in this process.

Part I

Gothic Fictions of Empire

1

Gothic Invasions from the East and West Indies: Vampires, Mesmerists and Demons

Perhaps two thousand years hence…some black Governor-General of England will be marching through [England’s] southern provinces, and will go and look at some ruins, and doubt whether London ever was a large town, and will feed some white-looking skeletons, and say what distress the poor creatures must be in.¹

In the late 1830s Emily Eden toured parts of northern India with her brother George, the recently appointed British Governor-General of India, at a time of severe famine which she described in letters later published as a travelogue. In the excerpt cited as epigraph to this chapter, Eden extrapolates from the immediate scenes of Indian devastation to a far-distant future of death and ruin in England in which the imperial roles have been reversed. As Pablo Mukherjee has observed, what is particularly noteworthy in Eden’s apocalyptic vision is not just the image of ruined England,² or even of its Indian ruler, but the presence of ‘white-looking skeletons’ – India’s putative starving English subjects.³ This signals the proximity between Eden’s exposure to the unconscionable realities of existence for Indians under British rule and her fantasy of imperial inversion. It foreshadows a link that would persistently manifest itself in the gothic fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as European imperialism entered its most aggressive phase: that between an author’s experience of colonial life and his/her representations of conflict, invasion and imperial inversion. As the Introduction sets out, authors who had been born or spent formative periods of time in Britain’s colonies had a personal familiarity with the inequities of colonial life and a corollary fear, or even experience, of anti-colonial retaliation which seems to have fundamentally informed their subsequent fictions of threats to the existing imperial order.⁴ As Kim Wagner observes, commenting on the lasting legacy of the widespread rebellion in India in 1857, a ‘sense of vulnerability…was an intrinsic aspect of the colonial experience’.⁵ Accordingly, Eden’s travelogue is shot through with references to the British military presence on which the colonial regime in India was based. Despite or perhaps because of its focus on depicting the minutiae of Anglo-Indian daily life, it recurrently invokes the officers, troops and regiments that formed the line of defence between the civilian residents and the so-called ‘natives’. It does so in a way that resonates very precisely with Rudyard Kipling’s famous Indian works from later in the century, its recurrent usage of ‘red coats’ to refer to the soldiery evoking the long-standing conception of the British army as the ‘thin red line’ of imperial defence, memorably deployed by Kipling in his Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).⁶ As Kipling puts it in a tale of colonial barracks life, in India ‘the army is not a red thing that walks down the street to be looked at, but a living tramping reality that may be needed at the shortest notice’.⁷

From the perspective of this study, Eden’s incongruous imperial famine fantasy can be read as a gothic disruption of the travelogue form, a tendency confirmed in Roger Luckhurst’s observation of ‘this structural principle: wherever there is imperial occupation, there is a reserve of supernaturalism, an occult supplement to an allegedly enlightened rule that becomes a currency for acknowledging and even negotiating the consequences of this colonial violence’.⁸ As the Introduction sets out, the gothic fiction of the fin de siècle provided a discursive space for the problematisation of empire and may be viewed as a prominent element of Luckhurst’s occult supplement. Within this socio-cultural negotiation, the fear of invasion as a violent consequence of imperial occupation coalesced around the figure of the gothic invader, typically a malevolent supernatural figure from some imperial or quasi-imperial locus whose agency threatened the smooth operation of the British Empire, endangering its capital and disrupting its important colonies. The most famous fin-de-siècle gothic invader is undoubtedly the Transylvanian vampire Count of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), but the extent to which the trope pervaded the genre has not been fully explored. It recurs persistently in a variety of gothic figures, including demons and mesmerists as well as vampires, and in the work of numerous authors with colonial connections – from some of Kipling’s well-known supernatural Indian tales to Arthur Conan Doyle’s somewhat neglected gothic tales to even more obscure texts by Florence Marryat and Grant Allen. These texts have not been previously grouped together, but viewing them through the lens of invasion anxiety allows significant commonalities between them to be revealed. As well as containing their familiar, conspicuous gothic monsters, these texts, like Eden’s travelogue and Kipling’s ballads, are also pervaded by military figures and references to imperial quandaries and conflicts which seem to originate in the authors’ personal knowledge of the reliance of colonial life on military force. This little-remarked military aspect to the gothic tales highlights their thematic similarity to the explicit fictions of military invasion discussed in chapter 5, both arising out of the same sets of imperial concerns about anti-colonial resistance and inter-European imperial rivalry. While it would be reductive to see the fin-de-siècle gothic as solely or even predominantly concerned with invasion – it was, of course, a veritable index of contemporary preoccupations, variously theorised as both creating and containing anxieties and desires – it is necessary to reveal the extent of the genre’s reciprocal relationship with contemporary invasion anxiety in order to highlight a crucial but overlooked influence on and effect of the genre.⁹

Given the vampire’s long association with invasion, the chapter opens with a brief reappraisal of Dracula’s documented relationship with notable Irish and Eastern European quandaries facing Britain, offering a fresh reading of the text in relation to military invasion fears. However, the chapter’s focus is a set of comparable fictions arising out of the British imperial encounter with two other significant locations: India, then Britain’s most important colony, and the superseded West Indies, star colonies of the eighteenth century. Negotiating the decline of the once-prized West Indian colonies are two tales of West Indian interlopers: Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), with its inadvertent but deadly psychic leech, and Doyle’s The Parasite (1894), with its baleful mesmerist. Strongly comparable to these are several tales by Doyle, Allen, L. T. Meade and Richard Marsh depicting malevolent Indian agency in the form of cults, mesmerists and demons, which are read in conclusion against some of Kipling’s lesser-known tales of gothic India from the short story collection Many Inventions (1893). Firstly, given the chapter’s insistence on the causative relationship between the practice of imperialism and the circulation of invasion anxiety as expressed in the form of the gothic marauder, some brief account of the main imperial territories and issues being addressed in the fiction makes a necessary starting point.

Imperial quandaries and gothic colonies: India and the West Indies

Of all Britain’s colonies in the nineteenth century, India was the jewel in the imperial crown, to borrow the well-worn phrase; and of all the events that challenged the mid-Victorian sense of imperial security and superiority, the 1857–8 Indian Rebellion, or so-called ‘Mutiny’, was the most significant, producing lasting socio-political consequences. As is well documented, the severe shock imparted by the unexpected scale and ferocity of the conflict in India shattered the illusion of the civilising mission and fundamentally disturbed and disrupted Britain’s understanding of its imperial endeavour.¹⁰ When the Indian regiments in the British Indian Army turned against their commanders, it ‘seemed to be a hellish inversion of the cosmic order’ – The Times commenting that its ‘peculiar aggravation’ was ‘that the deed was done by a subject race – by black men who dared to shed the blood of their masters’.¹¹ Colonial subjects, rather than being grateful for Britain’s tutelage as imperialist discourse suggested they should, were in fact revealed to be forcefully opposed to it. The brutality of the Indian rebels at the end of the notorious siege of Cawnpore (Kanpur), when surrendering British troops were slaughtered and British women and child hostages massacred, sent shockwaves around the imperial world and spawned many other atrocity stories, often unsubstantiated, but consumed with equal horror in the capital.¹² Indeed the violent nature of the Indian opposition was so insistently exaggerated and cast as treacherous barbarism as to produce what may be termed a master narrative of native brutality, which justified the extreme severity with which the Rebellion was quelled and the subsequent transfer of power in India from the East India Company entirely to the British Crown.

In the longer term, the master narrative of native brutality functioned as a lens through which to view all subsequent imperial conflict, potential and actual, colouring responses to ongoing imperial developments around the world. Winston Churchill described the Rebellion as the defining event of empire, arguing that the paranoia it engendered underpinned the massive territorial expansion that ensued in the late nineteenth century.¹³ The concern that Russia might invade British India across its vulnerable north-west frontier – a major driver of nineteenth-century British foreign policy – was intensified by the apprehension that this would immediately provoke a second Indian rebellion.¹⁴ Indeed the outbreak of a second rebellion was an ever-present possibility to those concerned with the administration of India. Though, as Wagner points out, British rule in India was never under serious threat until 1919, after 1857 it was always undermined by ‘Mutiny’ paranoia: ‘Perceived threats were invariably taken more seriously than the actual circumstances warranted and thus affected colonial policies in profound ways.’¹⁵ For instance, the misinterpretation in 1894 of a transient local practice in northern India kicked off a small-scale second ‘Mutiny’ scare that received considerable press coverage in England. An alarmist article in The Spectator (a right-wing paper which helped instigate ‘yellow peril’ fears in Britain as chapter 4 discusses) insisted that very imminently, ‘something against…the intruding white man…is about to be attempted’.¹⁶ The issue gained sufficient traction to incur debate in the House of Commons and it is plausible that the spectre of impending Rebellion-scale colonial violence, in conjunction with the European geopolitical and literary-market factors outlined in the Introduction, contributed to the 1890s boom in invasion fiction. Certainly, the master narrative of native brutality underpinned the recurrent scenarios of atrocity and mass death in this body of fiction.

The 1890s also saw a spate of ‘Mutiny’ novels, as Gautam Chakravarty has shown, and fiction dealing with contemporary Indian settings bore frequent reference to the conflict, as this chapter discusses in relation to gothic tales.¹⁷ Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes tale, The Sign of Four, is highly representative, turning upon crimes that occurred in India during the Rebellion rebounding on the descendants of those involved in 1880s London. Written in 1890, more than thirty years after the conflict, Doyle’s text still smarts with outrage at the perceived betrayal: ‘One month India lay as still and peaceful to all appearance, as Surrey or Kent; the next there were two hundred thousand black devils let loose, and the country was a perfect hell.’¹⁸ The comparison with the home counties is particularly significant, echoing Eden’s famine fantasy in its juxtaposition of unthinkable Indian events and England’s heartland. Also significant is Doyle’s account of the conflict as a numbers game, ‘a fight of the millions against the hundreds’, which, if taken to its ultimate conclusion, the British could not win.¹⁹ Ultimately, the paranoid response to the Rebellion reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of imperialism, a dissonance discernible in its typically triumphalist discourse between confidence and paranoia, expansion and collapse, jingoism and invasion, a phenomenon that this chapter will bring into clearer relief. The same response is evident in disproportionate late-century worries about Egypt and the terrible consequences of losing access to the Suez Canal (as discussed in chapter 2), and in relation to China, which was increasingly cast as a locus of peril at the same time that European imperialism made steady inroads upon it (as discussed in chapter 4).

Forming a companion set to the gothic tales that deployed India as a source of peril are tales of threat from the ‘far west’ – from the British West Indies. After centuries of European colonisation these islands had developed a repressive tripartite social structure of European planters, African slaves, and an intermediary mixed-race group born largely out of the iniquitous practice of concubinage. While the sugar-producing West Indies had been Britain’s prize imperial possession in the eighteenth century, the development of other colonial sources of sugar and the emancipation of all slaves in British colonies in the 1830s had left them in a state of severe economic decline by the mid-nineteenth century.²⁰ From a metropolitan perspective, they were seen as a shocking site of degeneration and disorder: as Piers Brendon observes, ‘once sugar had been dethroned, they [the West Indies] became, in Joseph Chamberlain’s phrase, “the Empire’s darkest slum”’, poised to ‘“fall into anarchy and ruin”’.²¹ Journalist Lafcadio Hearn’s account of an 1888 Caribbean tour documents ‘tropical ruin’ in Grenada in luxurious prose, deeming it exemplary of Caribbean ‘depression’ in the ‘decay of...