The Influence of Gothic Literature on the Paranormal

---

Victorian Gothic themes such as science, life after death, and the uncanny, permeated all parts of society, and were intimately connected to the activities of early paranormal researchers. [1] Members of organisations such as the Ghost Club (1862) and the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in 1882, were undoubtedly influenced by the Gothic. One such researcher was Frederic Myers (1843-1901), a founder of the SPR, who was not only a paranormal investigator and pioneer of psychology, but also a successful writer. [2] Another, the philosopher, psychologist and paranormal commentator, William James (1842-1910), stated that ‘nature is everywhere Gothic.’ [3] Gothic literature was directly influenced by paranormal and occult themes, and, in turn, influenced them. Authors such as Mary Shelley (1797-1851), Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), wrote about concepts like the progress of science and the nature of human consciousness.

The diverse nature of the Gothic has proven difficult to fully define. [4] However, it is often regarded as synonymous with the notion of the ‘uncanny’, meaning ‘partaking of a supernatural character’, or ‘mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar’, and often references the ‘unknown’. [5] The ‘unknown’, or the ‘other world’, is supposedly accessible in dreams, hauntings, séances, or during altered states of consciousness. The uncanny challenges rationality and logic, including the notion of death, and so allows for the concept of a soul, as well as paranormal phenomena, making it relevant to both the Gothic and to early paranormal research. Some of the most important themes which were helpful in explaining paranormal phenomena were:

The social stability of nineteenth-century Britain slowly deteriorated in parallel with the rise of Gothic fiction, increasingly focussing on terror and shock. [6]This shift in mainstream culture allowed the established domains of science, religion, philosophy, and politics to be questioned more deeply by all classes of society. This possibly helped the growth of Spiritualism, which, from its earliest beginnings, had strong connections with those less privileged. [7] Most Spiritualist mediums were female and were now empowered to participate more fully within the predominantly male-dominated society. Their relative fame provided these women with a greater sense of autonomy, allowing them to bridge the gaps between the material and immaterial realms, as well as between the different layers of society. [8] Early Gothic notions of masculinity were linked with the idea of self-control, with femininity often portrayed as emotionally weak and hysterical. These outdated concepts of gender changed in two ways. Firstly, masculinity was more often portrayed as besieged and beleaguered, as in Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White (1860), and secondly, by the presentation of a new more powerful femininity, in controversial works such as Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1895). [9] As well as highlighting the rise and importance of feminism, these works helped to cement the links between femininity and the paranormal. [10]

The setting of Gothic stories within a domestic, and often urban context, by the likes of the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens, not only highlighted the real and routine as potentially nightmarish, but also helped to make the unconventional more mainstream. [11] In Dickens’ Great Expectations (1860), the main character, Pip, often uses an unusually Gothic and supernatural tone: ‘…I had made the monster…he haunted my existence…this avenging phantom…’ [12] In this manner, Dickens not only created an urban Gothic atmosphere, but also blurred the boundaries between the commonplace and the uncanny. Contrasting conventional daytime public lives with private perversity at night, Victorians are often regarded as inherently Gothic, even though they were more likely to consider themselves as civilised and enlightened. [13] The increase of the sensational aspects of the Gothic helped to encourage more independent and radical intellectual thinking. Whether questioning gender stereotypes, politics, scientific materialism, the physiological, psychological, or psychical nature of human consciousness, religion, esoteric spirituality, or notions of life after death, the old boundaries of what was considered acceptable or unacceptable to question and investigate, were deteriorating. This inherent destabilising effect made activities such as paranormal research more acceptable, particularly while employing scientific methodology. [14]

The Victorian period was characterised by ‘its elaborate cult of death and mourning, its fascination with ghosts, Spiritualism and the occult…’. [15] Gothic literature focussed on physical death and considered the survival of a non-physical inner being, something like a soul. [16] Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), a noted physicist and member of the SPR, saw the soul as being ‘that part of a man which is dissociated from the body at death.’ [17] Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), classicist and SPR founder, highlighted the cultural significance when he said that ‘the idea of apparitions after death has a wide and strong hold on the popular mind.’ [18] The numerous references to survival after bodily death are therefore particularly relevant to the paranormal field. Whether it is the early depiction of a self-aware soul in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) near the beginning of the century, or resurrection as an undead vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) at the end of it, the notion of some form of survival of consciousness after physical death was hugely important for early paranormal researchers and wider Victorian society. Such survival implied for some both the existence of a soul, or spirit form of an entity, as well as a spiritual realm, where the soul or spirit resides, and from where it could communicate. [19]

The most obvious expression of life after death within Victorian Gothic occurs via the large number of ghost stories. These were important to early psychical researchers such as Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), first president of the SPR, whose exploration of ghost stories was the beginning of his paranormal investigations while at Trinity College, Cambridge. [20] Many of these tales helped to shed light on the nature of the soul after death, presenting the supernatural and miraculous first as horrific, then increasingly, as phenomena which would eventually be explained by science. Catherine Crowe’s (1790-1872) collection of ghost stories, The Night Side of Nature (1848), foreshadowed the later field of parapsychology, as well as introducing the term ‘poltergeist’ into the English language. [21] The SPR’s collection of records of cases concerning ghostly events led to Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living (1886), the first compilation of paranormal cases catalogued and published by them. Myers devoted a whole chapter of his important Human Personality (1903) to ‘Phantasms of the Dead’, which dealt with the apparitions of ghosts as part of the validation for his famous theory of the ‘subliminal self’ to help explain paranormal phenomena. [22] Ghost stories allowed writers and paranormal researchers to explore the mystery of life after death without having to engage in religious discussion. [23]

Science was used throughout Victorian Gothic, very often expressed using the field of medicine. In Frankenstein, for example, the title character is a medical doctor, albeit somewhat of an eccentric. Dr Frankenstein describes his mental turmoil soon after the first awakening of his creature, expressing the paradox of trying to advance science for the common good but with detrimental consequences. [24] This conflict at the boundary of good and evil reflected similar struggles between the acceptable and unacceptable, progress and tradition, faith and reason, and normal and paranormal in wider society. Two other novels which also contain medical doctors are Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In Jekyll and Hyde, Dr Jekyll again communicates the difficulties experienced by those who operate at the boundaries between the acceptable and the unacceptable. [25] In Dracula, Abraham Van Helsing is a medical doctor, but also has an impressive number of other doctorates. [26] He is regarded by most of the other characters in the novel as having unquestionable intellect, but it is the breadth of his academic expertise, including philosophical and mystical, which has a parallel with the real-world polymaths of the late-nineteenth century, such as Sidgwick, Myers and Gurney, all of whom undertook paranormal research.

The progression of science is often represented within Gothic literature in threatening terms, perhaps reflecting the prevalent social anxieties of the time. In Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), which has certain similarities to H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), the peril is posed by the Vril-ya, a subterranean race who possess advanced technology. They are depicted as monstrous, both through the potential for destruction using this technology and due to their terrifying physical appearance. This advanced technological power is achieved using an all-permeating fluid, Vril, something similar to a combination of the mesmerist’s animal magnetism, electricity, and the Victorian scientist’s notion of ether. As well as being used to heal, change or destroy all that exists, other associated abilities include telepathy, levitation, and trance induction, which are the very same phenomena investigated by paranormal researchers. The fluid also shaped the Vril-ya’s religious and cosmological considerations, with life regarded as permanent, never destroyed, but merely changing form. [27] As well as being analogous to the law of the conservation of energy within mainstream physics, it is similar to the familiar notion of a soul, surviving after physical death and residing in some type of spirit realm, or other form of consciousness, ideas clearly important to paranormal researchers. [28]

The Gothic was intimately connected to the late-Victorian interest in hypnosis and trance states, [29] which was influential both to the field of psychology and to paranormal research. Victorian Gothic also considered unusual examples of human identity provided by experimental psychology, such as dream states, irrationality, insanity, hysteria, delusions, and mental breakdown. [30] Of the numerous examples of hypnotism found throughout Victorian Gothic two notable examples are George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), and Stoker’s culturally rich Dracula. In Trilby, we are introduced to the character of Svengali, whose predatory motivations have tragic consequences. His hypnotic hold over Trilby is described as ‘… a wave of his hand, or with one look of his eye, or just one word, he could make her do whatever he liked.’ [31] In Dracula, hypnosis is used by both Van Helsing and Dracula, with the doctor using it for honourable purposes, but the vampire using his skill to ‘seduce and debauch’, [32] rather like Svengali does to Trilby. There are clear similarities between Van Helsing’s process of inducing a hypnotic trance in Mina and that of Svengali: ‘Looking fixedly at her, he commenced to make passes in front of her, from over the top of her head downward, with each hand in turn.’ [33] The telepathic links created or accessed via hypnosis paralleled phenomena observed in investigations on hypnosis and trance states undertaken by paranormal researchers such as Gurney. Such a trance state represented for him and Myers an alternative form of existence which not only allowed for spirit communication between the living and the dead, but also implied that there was existence after bodily death. [34]

These different layers of consciousness appear very often throughout Victorian Gothic literature. They are what some early psychologists regarded as multiple personalities with pathological causes, and by some paranormal researchers as subliminal layers of consciousness allowing higher mental paranormal faculties to manifest, such as telepathy and clairvoyance. A key work which explores the notion of a hidden stream of consciousness, in this case provoked to show itself by the drinking of a chemical concoction, is Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. [35] As well as the general cultural impact of stories such as these, there are clear parallels here between some of the specific psychological ideas expressed within them and the research undertaken by professional psychologists and paranormal researchers. The inherent double nature of the human being, split between the immaterial and the material, as in the mind-body problem, was a central concept in early paranormal research. [36] Further, there was personal communication between Stevenson and Myers, specifically discussing the psychological aspects of Jekyll and Hyde , which is direct evidence of the intellectual interplay between their different, but overlapping, domains. [37] Myers wrote about Stevenson’s dreams and his habit of experimenting with self-suggestion immediately before sleep to induce strikingly intense dream imagery, and the impact on his story writing. He also mentions Stevenson’s ‘little people’, the voices he was in communication with while dreaming, and who he claimed also had a hand in his writing. Myers uses this communication, possible via a different layer of consciousness, as evidence not of a nervous malady, as claimed by contemporary anthropologists, but of higher mental paranormal faculties of communication. [38] Other early psychologists with an interest in paranormal research, such as William James, Théodore Flournoy, and Carl Jung, had links to the earlier Romantic and later Gothic writers. [39]