toward an organic theory of the gothic - conceptualizing horror

Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic: Conceptualizing Horror

JackMorgan

Here, in this supreme menace to the will, there approaches a redeeming, healing enchantress-art. She alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion at the horror and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life. (Nietzsche)

The somewhat dated usage “toward” is employed here to emphasize this essay’s exploratory nature and because so little ground has been laid in the area this article deals with, despite energized literary critical attention to horror fiction recently. There have been occasional books written on the aesthetics or theory of the Gothic-Aiken and Barbauld’s essay “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror” (1775) was an early one; H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature appeared in the late 1920s; David R. Saliba’s A Psychology of Fear (1980), Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981), Terry Heller’s The Delights of Terror (1987) and Noel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror (1990), are more recent ones. In addition, a number of untraditional studies like Julia Kristiva’s Powers of Horror, Terry Castle’s Masquerade and Civilization and Stallybrass and White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, have contributed valuable supplementary insights useful in the study of Horror fiction. Nevertheless, the genre has yet to be defined as clearly having its own raison d’etre and its own place in the theoretical, schematic landscape along with major forms like comedy and tragedy. This despite the macabre’s undeniable literary, film, and popular cultural appeal, one that hardly needs elucidation-the undiminished attraction of Poe’s work, the cult status of Lovecraft, the astonishing popularity of Stephen King, the rich film corpus from Phantom of the Opera, Nosferatu, and Frankenstein, to Rosemary S Baby, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, and The Shining.

But neither Northrope Frye, nor Suzanne Langer, for instance, took into account the literary significance of horror fiction in their theoretical work-even though Langer was intrepid enough to attempt a unified theory taking in painting, literature, music, drama and even film. It is

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perhaps unfortunate that she did not consider horror as a distinct literary type (Poe is mentioned only with regard to his poetic criticism), since hers is a theory of art that lends itself particularly well to an elucidation of the horror genre’s “feeling and form.”

Langer’s 1953 study by that name, carrying forward the thesis of her earlier Philosophy in a New Key, posited a fundamental unity underlying all of art’s various individual expressions-a complex argument running to 415 pages and ranging well beyond the scope of the present essay. I will instead focus on her treatment of comedy as a basis for this discussion of horror, it being my argument that horror-in a way entirely distinct from tragedy-represents the other side of the Comic coin, that it is the inverse of the comic spirit. In so arguing I follow up on the invitation implied in Langer’s introduction to Feeling and Form when she urges a seminal view of her work: “nothing in this book is exhaustively treated. Every subject in it demands further analysis, research, invention” (viii).

Criticism addressing the literature of horror is notoriously lacking in an established terminology. Recent work in the field, as S.T. Joshi points out, “has caused an irremediable confusion of terms such as horror, terror, the supernatural, fantasy, the fantastic, ghost story, Gothic fiction and others” (2). Chris Baldick, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, having noted that his anthology attempts to set forth “a rel- atively pure line of shorter Gothic fiction” adds the following caveat: “I am aware, however, that a broader definition of Gothic is possible and have at some points slackened the line to accommodate this view” (xxii). Noel Carroll writes that in terms of the theory propounded in his book, “most of Poe’s work does not fit into the genre of horror” (215). No attempt will be made here to sort out this vexatious taxonomy problem. For the purposes of this essay, I feel reasonably comfortable using the term “Gothic” in the generic sense which Joshi finds offensive (The Weird Tale 3)-i.e., to refer broadly to the horror genre as well as to its particular 18th century literary manifestations. When the terms “weird tales” (Lovecraft’s preference) or horror tales are used, they are meant to refer to something not fundamentally at odds with the designation “Gothic” and are used for variation rather than to draw a distinction. For the most part, examples will be drawn from the kind of literature that would fall within the framework of The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales.

Narrowly regarded, of course, the Gothic is an historical, Eurocentric literary genre owing to Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliff, and other 18th century pioneers of the form. But the more primitive sources that define it, its nightmare archetypes, its ventures into the realms of magic and taboo, are arguably as atavistic, sacramental, and folkloric as those which define the Comic. Traces of horror’s ritual origins often

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show through-for example, in the elaborately formalized, sacrificial murders in Gothic fiction. Robert Giddings has noted the ceremonial character of deaths in Poe, the painstakingly ritualized entombment of Fortunato in “Cask of Amontillado,” for instance, with its measured pro- gression, Masonic references, wine, and concluding “In Puce Requiescut” (Docherty 47-48). Camille Paglia remarks the Gothic’s “return to the ritualism and mysticism of medieval Catholicism, with its residual paganism .... Art withdraws into caverns, castles, prison-cells, tombs, coffins. Gothic is a style of claustrophobic sensuality. Its closed spaces are demonic wombs. The gothic novel is sexually archaic; it withdraws into chthonian darkness ...” (265).

“Chthonian” Paglia uses to mean from the bowels of the earth (5 ) . Stephen King likewise sees horror as atavistic: “it is looking for something ... that predates art...” (18). The 18th century marked not the appearance of horror ex nihilo, but rather its emergence from pagan antiquity through ritual and popular folklore (with marginal literary expression- the witches in Mucbeth and so forth) into novelistic expression, or, as Lovecraft put it, “the advent of the weird to formal literature” (Supernatural 23). In fact, he notes in the same essay, “it is ...g enuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth” (21-22).

It is arguable that a “horror sense of life” exists as a mode of our being as surely as does Miguel de Unamuno’s “tragic sense of life” or Langer’s “comic sense of life.” The horror tradition can be viewed as at bottom more importantly existential than historical, tracing back to rituaVreligious and ultimately to organic roots. The classic 18th century tales wherein “Gothic darkness and roughness oppose the Apollonian Enlightenment’s light contour and symmetry” (Paglia 265) exemplify, of course, a particularly vivid and significant historical expression of the generic tradition, a creative surge in its evolution. Lovecraft took note o f the organicism we are referring to in his long essay on horror in literature:

There is here involved psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage ... to lose potency over a very important minority of our species. (1 3)

Nevertheless, he did not pursue this biological insight much farther, and historicism and taxonomy have continued to preoccupy much of the critical energy so far devoted to the analysis of horror.


Langer’s thesis arguably comes out of Romantic literary and philo- sophical theory-Jane Harrison by way of Cassirer, Whitehead, and Bergson. But a not dissimilar view regarding the well-springs of the comic imagination was set forth by Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s when he argued that the Rabelaisian comic image-whether reflected in folk- festival or literature-is grounded in the physical body: “the leading themes in these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brim- ming over abundance” (19). C. L. Barber, for another, has argued-relat- ing Shakespearean comedy to annual folk celebration-that a traditional festival like the May Game, growing out of the rhythms of a seasonal/ agricultural calendar, involved “the composition of experience in ways which literature and drama could [later] take over” (1 8). In a similar vein, Jessie Weston remarked the biological sources of Romance, arguing that the roots of the grail legend lay in fertility ritual and ramified later, enhanced through folk and Christian traditions, to literature: “the pre-existence of these symbols in a popular ritual setting would admit, indeed would invite, later accretion alike from folk belief and ecclesias- tical legend” (69). It is in this context, and in terms of a similar ancestry, that horror literature should be viewed.

Langer, too, emphasizes fertility patterns that were first articulated in ritual, arguing that the essence of the comic artifice lies in images reflecting the energetic patterns of our biological being. Presented with images of this energetic “fundamental form of consciousness,” we experience a delightful recognition, “a celebrative sense of the mysterious vitality that begets and sustains us” (326-29). Thus, bawdy, for instance, the ribald jokes and double-entendre of Shakespeare’s comedies, like the considerably more obscene humor of Rabelais, does not stem from the author’s deference to the tastes of contemporary audiences, but rather is an integral part of the comic imagination, tracing back to the genre’s earthy origins of which the Greek Comus was but one expression. “...The Comus was a fertility rite, and the god it celebrated a fertility god ...” (Langer 331). Even familiar everyday jokes like the following are informed by this biological dynamic.

A traveling salesman is driving along back roads through the Dakotas in the dead of winter and meets with a major winter storm-howling winds and blind- ing snow. There is no shelter in sight and near zero visibility. His heater gives out and soon after the car rolls to a halt, unable to proceed through the many feet of snow. Recognizing he will freeze to death in the car-he is already numb-he sets out through the storm, wearing only his business suit and dress shoes, on the slim chance he may find a homestead. After hours of aimless trekking, snow blinded and all but frozen to death, he miraculously stumbles right up against the door of a farmhouse.


The owner hears the thud and opens the door. The frostbitten salesman, unable to speak, slumps against the doorframe. The farmer, appalled at the man’s condition and anxious to help, says to him: “My friend, I can see you are in need of help-1’11 be glad to give you a change of clothes, some hot cider, a warm bed for the night and a hot farm breakfast in the morning. But I think it only fair to make clear that my wife and teenage daughter are gone to my mother-in-law’s in Sioux Falls for a week. There are no women here nor will there be during your stay.” With a trembling hand, the traveling salesman wipes away some of the ice that has frozen his lips shut and says to the farmer, “Well, is there another farmhouse near here?”

This is deeply comic whether or not it is “funny.” On one level it is a cultural artifact-a good part of the joke’s character derives from the fact that it is a variation upon a familiar formula. It depends on audience awareness of that formula-the perhaps hundreds of American obscene jokes whose plot involves a traveling salesman being given a room at a farmhouse for the night and then having some kind of sexual misadven- ture involving the farmer’s daughter. But, on a deeper level, the joke is existential, provoking the kind of “surge of vital feeling” which is the essence of comic energy and, Langer maintains, the source of laughter (340). The joke goes to our recognition in it of the survival of Eros, the delightful resurgence of that fertile life spirit against all odds, against the darkest winter-where, for instance, death threatens if our body temper- ature should fall very far short of a critical 98.6 degrees. The joke is what C. L. Barber called, speaking of comedic drama, “an expression of the going-on power of life” (1 18). This sense of life, Langer argues, “at once religious and ribald, knowing and defiant, social and freakishly individual,” is the driving force of Comedy (331). The organism maintains its equilibrium by adjustment, by adaptation, by hook or by crook, despite the stresses it undergoes moment by moment. Its equilibrium dis- turbed-by infection for example-the body normally recovers and reestablishes its well-being. It does so again and again; and it is this flex- ibility, this pattern of lost and recovered organic balance and vigor, “the image of human vitality holding its own in the world” that is the essential comic image. But, significantly, the spunky elan of living things celebrated by comedy-notably human “brainy opportunism’’-is dis- played in the context of “an essentially dreadful universe” (Langer 33 1).

It is this dreadful universe that the horror mythos addresses, and the waning of organic energy in the face of it. Horror is the obverse against which the comic expresses itself, as abundant harvest is relished against the foil of deficiency and drought. Tales of terror turn upon threats to the body’s coherence, the failure of physiological adjustment and adaptation,


the all too possible victory of morbid forces. That the organic focus of fertility ritual held forth dark as well as comic possibilities for later literary development, is evident, for instance, in that perhaps darkest of modern poems “The Waste Land,” whose debt to Jessie Weston’s elucidation of the Grail legend-particularly the “Fisher King” motif-Eliot’s notes acknowledged.

To paraphrase an observation of Langer’s regarding the comic: the ultimate source of horror is physiological. The horror imagination is informed, to quote Lovecraft again, by “our innermost biological heritage.” If in comedy the “livingness of the human world is abstracted and presented to us” (Langer 348), in horror the “dieingness,” as it were, of the human world is imaged forth, ritually recapitulated. The comic mask’s antithesis is not only the tragic mask but the repellent mask in molded rubber sold in K-Mart in November: a face deathly white, shad- ing to green, a face crumpled and hollow eyed, suggestive of decay and the grave. As opposed to simple death, repugnant, agonized dying is sug- gested. Underscoring our the body’s vulnerability, the Gothic heightens our sense of physical peril. It is no accident that the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho-a scene wherein a naked body, the quintessential image of our carnal vulnerability, is materialized, violated and radically unmade-occupies a primary place in contemporary popular cultural memory. Thus the familiar, often-expressed perception that Gothic horror reflects basic human fears, while sketchy, is not erroneous, though “visceral human dreads” would perhaps put it more exactly. Almost at random in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, for example, one finds passages like the following from Patrick McGrath’s story “Blood Disease” in which an anthropologist in an equatorial rainforest is bitten by a mosquito:

From the thorny tip of her mouthparts she unsheathed a slender stylus, and having sliced through Bill’s skin tissue, pierced a tiny blood vessel. Bill noticed nothing. Two powerful pumps of the insect’s head began to draw off blood while simultaneously hundreds of tiny parasites were discharged into his bloodstream. Within half-an-hour, when the mosquito had long since returned to the water, the parasites were safely established in his liver. For six days they multi- plied, asexually, and then on the morning of the seventh they burst out and invaded the red blood cells. (502)

The fertility narrative is inverted here. When this formerly “vigorous young man” returns to England: “He was haggard and thin now, and forced to walk with a stick. His flesh was discolored, and his fingers trembled constantly. He looked ... like a man who was dying.” We note


this physiological concern, this focus upon the sickening of the organism, consistently underlying the traditional Gothic literary conventions-this preoccupation with vitality lost, the bloodstream invaded and hopelessly compromised. As Carrol Smith-Rosenburg observes, “the body’s physical integrity constitutes as significant a material vehicle for symbolic representation as the body’s evocative sensuality” (161). It finds that symbolic representation in horror literature. The organism has its own intelligence and its own stock of pre-rational aversion responses-triggered, for example, by exposure to the dormant revela- tions under large, flat rocks and heavy boards, or glimpses of infestation, mold, and decay. As John E. Mack, M.D., notes in Nightmares and Human Conflict, “the potentiality for.. .fear responses is innately present in the organism and requires only the appropriate releasing stimulus.. .” (42). Horror arises from our proprioceptive awareness of our physical being, our embededness in a vast organic matrix. But rather than on fertility, the Gothic focuses upon withering; rather than on growth, it focuses on morbid deterioration; rather than on an intrepid human vitality, it focuses upon the human body eminently assailable.

Compare the same basic issue in Poe’s “House of Usher” where the Usher bloodline has become enfeebled and stagnant, or H.P. Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmuth” where alien blood has entered and corrupted a town’s and the narrator’s circulation. In the early 19th century Gothic classic Melmoth the Wanderer, Stanton is locked in an asylum and trying unsuccessfully to maintain his physical and mental integrity against the incursion of abjection and dissipation:

He had at first risen early ... and availed himself of every opportunity of being in the open air. He took the strictest care of his person in point of cleanliness ... and all these efforts were even pleasant .... But now he began to relax them all. He passed half the day in his wretched bed ... declined shaving or changing his linen, and, when the sun shone into his cell, turned from it .... (40)

Stanton’s disintegration is traced in terms of his turning from nature, his becoming “squalid, listless, torpid, and disgusting in his appearance.”

As opposed to the comic sense of life or tragedy’s dignified sense of death, horror embodies a sense of anti-life or unlife; it takes note of the demarcation between the wholesome and the unwholesome, the healthy and the monstrous-a clarity essential to organic life. “We love and need the concept of monstrosity,” Stephen King writes, “because it is a reaffir- mation of the order we all crave as human beings” (50). That is the fundamental sense underlying horror’s various traditional tropes and conventions. In this genre the healthy mind reconnoiters the regions of the


unhealthy. Noel Carroll correctly notes that horror creatures-and this would apply to the genre more broadly-provoke not just fear, but loathing. The reaction of characters in tales of terror is more than a matter of fear, he argues, rather the “threat is compounded with revul- sion, nausea and disgust” (22). When the narrator of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” views the fishy, frog-like parade approaching in search of him along the Rowley road, he thinks not only of his own safety but, more to the point here, of the “irredeemable pollution of that space” the creatures occupy (1 73).

This sense of loathsomeness grows out of our inherent organic aesthetic, the fact that certain notes and images within our organic reality repel us-snakes being an obvious example. Lovecraft’s hiding observer’s gaze notes the same slimy motif on which Seamus Heaney’s poem “Death of a Naturalist” concludes. In the poem, the gaze is a young boy’s:

Then one day when fields were rank With cow dung in the grass the angry frogs invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges To a coarse croaking that I had not heard Before.. .. Right down the dam the gross-bellied frogs were cocked Their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats .... I sickened, turned and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it. (15-16)

*** As the comic imagination apparently traces back through drama to

carnival, to fertility ritual, the horror imagination would seem to issue from implicit physiological fear responses finding imaginative embodiment in the darker aspects of fertility cults (human sacrifice, for instance) and to trace through witchcraft and walpurgisnacht kinds of later traditions (the pagan Irish festival of Samhain, for example, or the Mexican Day of the Dead), finally inhabiting the neo-feudal, labyrinthine corridors of 18th century literature like The Castle of Otranto. So elegant was this conjunction that we often find it hard to imagine horror literature apart from its traditional, specifically Gothic expression. But recent literature in which the Gothic antiquarian framework is absent or vestigial makes the point that the essential elements of horror, as mentioned earlier, are by no means solely historical, nor satis-


factorily accounted for as a post-Enlightenment reaction, for example, any more than Romanticism can be confined to the historical Romantic movement. New England and Southern antiquarianism have often replaced the medieval in modem American works of horror, as after Poe the short story form replaced the novel as the genre’s primary vehicle, and other conventions will in time replace them. (Ann Rice and Stephen King would seem even now to be returning Gothic literature to its novelistic tradition for instance.) What is necessary is the derelict, deteriorat- ing setting which the Gothic so well embodied. It is noteworthy that the modem and contemporary neo-Gothic perception seems to find a prop- erly failing, decadent setting in which to express itself. The Southern Gothic has thrived on this decadence, and H.P. Lovecraft, it might be noted, had the good fortune to be born in a time and place conducive to the macabre imagination-in a milieu of decline, the New England “Gothic” circumstance which Van Wyck Brooks described as follows:

The Yankee sun had shone over the world. It was time for the moon to have its say .... There were colonies of savages near Lenox, queer, degenerate clans that lived “on the mountain,” the descendants of prosperous farmers. There were old poisoners in lonely houses. There were Lizzie Bordens of the village, heroines in reverse who served the devil. There were Draculas in the northern hills and witch-women who lived in sheds, lunatics in attics and men whose coffins hung with their bodies from rafters, who had thought they could escape the grass that waited ... to catch them when the old barn fell. (363)

In Melville’s dark tale “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the classic Gothic conventions are subtly handled; the story doesn’t wear its Gothicism on its sleeve. But significantly, it is a drama of the human body, and thereby the human spirit, under siege. It is a veritable catalog of assaults mounted against the eyes, the back, the digestive and nervous systems; against life and against nature, by modem civilization epitomized in The Office, whose occupants are “walled up” as surely as Fortunato. Turkey, like Roderick Usher or Benito Cereno, is manic, hyperactive and unpre- dictable: “There was a strange inflamed, flurried, flighty recklessness of activity about him” (Melville 41). Nippers is sallow, plagued with indi- gestion and nagging back trouble: “If, for the sake o f his back, he brought the table at a sharp angle up to his chin ... then he declared that it stopped the circulation in his arms” (43). All the copyists suffer from the especially punishing effects of their work upon their eyes, and perhaps of junk food-ginger cookies-upon their stomachs. They have become grotesque commercial artifacts-the analogy these days would be to those artificially raised chickens that are force-fed and whose feet never


touch real ground. The scrivener’s carry out their debilitating paperwork in a setting devoid of natural light (a Gothic set piece), devoid in fact of any intercourse with the outside, natural world at all. The lawyer/nma- tor’s “chambers”-a word of Gothic resonance-look out upon a shaft at one end and at the other command “an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade ...” (Melville 41). Indeed the very concept “life” has become the jargon of a few artistes. The narrator concedes that the view from his chambers might be considered deficient in, not life, but “what landscape painters call ‘life”’ (my italics). Bartleby himself, in his unspeakable dejection, is the epitome of enervation and bio-entropy ; he is quintessentially “run-down.”

The location of the horror tale’s ancestry in the Grail or similar traditions is arguably evident here. Bartleby is the figure of failed vitality; his malady embodies the greater malady of the commonweal-of the city, or the street as it were. While Bartleby is the title character, the subtitle foregrounds the setting: “A Tale of Wall St.” The scrivener’s work is “a dull, wearisome and lethargic affair” carried out in an environment given over largely to paper-that epitome of dryness. Bartleby sends out for cookies occasionally, but there is no mention of his drinking anything. In the grail tradition the enfeebled or maimed Fisher King embodies the enfeeblement of the culture, the kingdom, the land. The task of the hero is the restoration of the king’s health and thereby the vegetative health of the land which is implicit in the King’s situation (Weston 23). The would-be hero here is the narrator, who tries earnestly, within his limited powers, to heal Bartleby. The ancient pattern is that of the infirm host visited by a sympathetic guest who must restore the host to health. While Bartleby is initially the visitor or guest, in that the office is the lawyer’s, the roles, significantly enough, are later reversed-Bartleby taking on the role of proprietor-bringing things into accord with the mythic tradition. The narrator goes to his chambers one Sunday morning only to dis- cover that his key will not open the door:

When to my consternation the key was turned from within ... and holding the door ajar, the apparition of Bartleby appeared, in his shirt sleeves ... saying qui- etly that he was sorry, but he was deeply engaged just then ... and preferred not admitting me at present. (53-54)

A similar sense of the organism’s vulnerability is evident in the following passage from John Cheever’s dark tale “The Five-Forty-Eight.’’ A businessman exits the elevator in his office building and finds he is being followed by a woman, a former employee-her facial expression one of “loathing and purpose.” When he proceeds outside, it is raining,


and after walking a ways he stops and looks in a store window. Reflected in the window is the woman, standing behind him:

She might be meaning to do him harm she might be meaning to kill him. The suddenness with which he moved when he saw the reflection of her face tipped the water out of his hatbrim in such a way that some of it ran down his neck .... The cold water falling into his face and onto his bare hands, the rancid smell of the wet gutters and pavings, the knowledge that his feet were beginning to get wet and that he might catch cold-all the common discomforts of walking in the rain-seemed to heighten the menace of his pursuer and to give him a morbid sense of his own physicalness and of the ease with which he could be hurt. (Moffett 383)

This is very close to the situation in Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado,” where the primeval pattern of hunter following prey obtains again. As here the woman follows the man through the wet, cavernous city streets, Montressor follows Fortunato through the likewise wet and cavernous catacombs. In the first story, the “rancid smell of the wet gutters” is remarked, in the second, the “foulness of the air.” In the first the (pre- sumptive) victim’s fear of catching cold is noted whereas in the Poe story the victim-to-be already suffers from a severe cold, coughing help- lessly as moisture trickles down the walls. The significance of the cough is emphasized by Poe’s extraordinarily extended representation of it:

ugh! ugh! ugh!” (Poetry & Tales 850). While each author has his own devices for heightening and ironizing

the horror in his tale-Poe’s use of costumes, for instance, the victim grotesquely arrayed in harlequin clothes-each tale fundamentally goes to human bodily aversions. The primeval fear of being preyed upon, the dread of dampness made worse by a cold, the dread of rancidity, and so on; these things arouse, to paraphrase Cheever, our sense of our own physicalness and the ease with which we can be hurt, the essential, chill- provoking, element of Gothic literature.

Even the costumes in “Cask of Amontillado,” lending a bizarre, operatic quality to the terror as they do, are arguably not unrelated to the story’s organicism. The tale occurs at the juncture of the comic and horror modes. It begins in festival, in the dream-like ambivalence of the masquerade-the festival being the traditional vehicle carrying the folk- aesthetic, body principle Bakhtin calls “grotesque realism.” In all its vulgar energy, the carnival is a comic ritual-“During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom .... It is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and

“Ugh! ugh! ugh!-ugh! ugh! ugh!-ugh! ugh! ugh!-ugh! ugh! ugh!-

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renewal ...” (Bakhtin 7). Montressor is a figure antithetical to such a spirit of revival and renewal; he is not a participant in the festival (which he characterizes as “madness”). He is stranded in his resentments, obsessed with his revenge agenda, and from the sphere of the carnivalesque Poe’s tale moves underground, to the dank realm of the Romantic grotesque, to an ironic parody of the comic energy wherein the only laughter is sadistic and mocking. (A comparison might be drawn here to films like Blowout, Carnival of Souls, Tightrope, and so on, where horror runs concurrently with festival and the phantasmagoric, potentially sinister, licence of masquerade--further suggesting the dark tale’s relationship to the carnivalesque.) The festive and the horrific are likewise con- flated in “Masque of the Red Death,” and in Hawthorne’s hallucinatory “My Kinsman Major Molineaux.” An observation of Bakhtin’s relative to popular-festive celebration may be relevant here-that “in the atmosphere of Mardi Gras, reveling, dancing, music were all closely combined with slaughter, dismemberment, bowels, excrement.. .” (223-24).

In “Blood Disease,” as mentioned above, a formerly “vigorous” young man returns to England “haggard and thin.” When the narrator of “Fall of the House of Usher” encounters Roderick Usher for the first time in years, he cannot believe his eyes. “Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher. It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me ...” (Baldick 88). The weird tale focuses upon this “terrible alteration,” upon things coming apart or crumbling-bodies, minds, families, human structures, civic order, and so on. (Yeats’ “The Second Coming” is in this sense a horror poem turning on the terrible disestablishment of order.) The Gothic underscores the multifold miasmas, poi- sons, fungi, plagues, viruses, that are out there and able to destroy our individual or collective systemic order. “It is not the physical or mental aberration in itself that horrifies us,” Stephen King writes, “but rather the lack of order these aberrations seem to imply” (50). Horror focuses upon the terror of that which is bio-antithetical, bio-illogical, a fear as viable today as it was in the middle-ages or in the imagined middle ages of 18th century Gothic literature.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” a classic example of the theory so far set forth, has as its central concern Usher’s “disease,” his “acute bodily illness”; it is a tale of possession by disease, a morbid tale played out in a morbid atmosphere. And here again vestiges of fertility legends would seem evident. Here, as in “Bartleby,” is the figure of the infirm host, his own health and by extension that of his house, family, and lands, failing terribly. Again, the sympathetic visitor who is would-be healer seeks to fathom the nature of the host’s malady. The pattern is that

Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic 71

found in the Adonis cults, the European Spring Festivals, the Mumming plays of the British Isles, in all of which, as Jessie Weston noted, the salient point is that “the representative of the Spirit of Vegetation is considered dead, and the object ... is to restore him to life” ( 1 19). The Waste Land motif is clear in lines like these: “I looked upon the scene before me-upon ... the bleak walls-upon the vacant, eye-like windows-upon a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with an utter depression of soul ...” (Baldick 85).

The narrator realizes as he approaches the malevolent Usher man- sion, and during his first experiences within, that all the mental capacity he commands is proving inadequate. Man is inordinately proud of and dependent upon hidher rational powers. “Mental adroitness,” Langer notes, “is humanity’s chief asset in confronting” its “vastly involved and extended” symbolic world (330). David R. Salina, referring to the narrator in Poe’s stories generally, notes “his incessant rationalizing and his confusing version of the facts ...” (67). Indeed our symbolic, intellectual powers, once doubted and neutralized, generate phantasms themselves and are of doubtful trustworthiness. We begin to suspect, as the narrator does, that our own imagination, our own thought, is implicated in the very fear we would wish to overcome. Indeed because man is so dependent upon his virtuaVsymbolic world, he is easily victimized by it, and, as Langer points out in a sentence that becomes all the more resonant in a horror context, “Even the dead may still play into his life” (330).

One of the most familiar motifs of Gothic horror is relevant here. RationaVintellectual prying into the seamless organic mystery and pre- sumptuous attempts to gain control over it are doomed-and horribly so. Rappachini’s daughter’s body ends up so poisoned that what should be a healthful restorative kills her. Captain Obed’s crosspecies experiment in Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmuth” results in a loathsome, misbe- gotten breed. And it is noteworthy that it is the unnatural gait of these creatures which particularly horrifies the narrator, i.e., the discrepancy between their bodily movements and those of normal human beings: “Their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent.” He describes their flopping march in the moonlight as a “malignant sara- band” (175) i.e., a distorted similitude of courtly dance. In a likewise chilling scene in the 1995 film version of Frankenstein, the science- besotted doctor joins in a dance with the experimentally ravaged body of his beloved. Their waltz is a ghastly antidance, a gruesome semblance of natural dance’s celebration of the body’s graceful potentials. (Cf. the chilling pavilion dance of the dead in the cult film Carnival of Souls.) And because of “certain obtrusive and eager enquiries” on their part, Usher suspects the doctors whose medical knowledge has been stumped


by the nature of his sister’s malady, may, in their overweening post- mortem curiosity, violate her grave and her body. This body-sacrilege theme, pervasive in the Gothic literature corpus, is one more expression of the genre’s physiological inspiration.

This most famous of Poe’s tales concerns disintegration and decline-a single, organic dissipation taking in family line, the contemporary Ushers, the house and grounds. Life is flow, dynamic movement, constant refreshment, elasticity; thus, we are repulsed by what is stagnant, stale, desiccated, musty-we recognize all the latter as anti-life, entropic, unwholesome. Poe uses image upon image throughout his tale to evoke an atmosphere of pervasive enervation. The atmosphere is devoid of natural air and light-those mainstays of life; it is an atmosphere which has “reeked up from the decayed trees ... and the silent tam, in the form of an inelastic vapor or gas-dull , sluggish ... leaden hued” (Baldick 87). There is reference to woodwork “rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air” (87). The prevailing images are of things cut off like Lovecraft’s Innsmuth “badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks,” or the Bates Motel in Psycho left behind by interstate highway construction. Usher himself, like Faulkner’s Emily and so many other characters in Gothic literature, has not left the house for years-every- thing, including the family tree, is biologically static, unrefreshed, spent. Madeline lingers in “a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away” (90). The failure of vitality is the tale’s predominate note. The narrator remarks that the books and musical instruments in Usher’s quarters, for example, “failed to give any vitality to the scene” (88).

Usher’s entire vision in fact expresses an infirm, distorted organicism-a demented version of the comic festive perception c. L. Barber describes as “an experience of the relationship between vitality in people and nature” (19). Usher sees the ancestral estate, its grounds and “natural” environs as (cf. again the Fisher King motif) radically continuous with his own decrepit organism which is itself the contemporary expression of the Usher family line. He is convinced of the “sentience of all vegetable things” and so on. What in the comic-festive tradition is a robust and exhilarating perception-the recognition, for example, of “all living things stirring together” (Barber 21), becomes for Usher a horrid undifferentiation, a terrifying trespass “upon the kingdom of inorganiza- tion.” At root the horror tale exploits the materialistic, presenting a reductio ad absurdum of the materialist world view.

This is why the scientific 17th-18th century world view described by Whitehead in Science and the Modern World-material on the one hand, mind on the other-was conducive to exploitation by the Gothic authors.


With its “simply located bits of material” (Whitehead 58), this devital- ized cosmology was ill-suited to accommodate organicism; organic material in the materialist model being itself simply located, decontextu- alized, de trup as Sartre puts it in Nausea. S. T. Joshi writes that “Lovecraft is correct in maintaining that weird fiction as such can only be a product of an age that has ceased to believe in the existence of the supernatural ...” (Lovecraft: A Life 28). But it might be better put that Horror writers are either, like Lovecraft, irresistibly “mechanistic materi- alists” (qtd. in Joshi, Weird Tale 171) or they embrace that stance-what Whitehead would call the requisite abstractions-temporarily for the sake of their art, in order to explore the dead-end implications of the mechanistic cosmology. The spirits in the Gothic are not religious, tran- scendent entities, but rather disconnected, drifting indictments haunting materialism. Works in the horror genre presuppose a suspension of belief as well as disbelief on the reader’s part-there must be no exit.

***

All human expression, Langer argues, bespeaks our physiological nature; the human environment is throughout informed by it. “Therefore any building that can create the illusion of ... a ‘place’ articulated by the imprint of human life, must seem organic, like a living form” (99). A house, like a ship or, for that matter, a Gothic tale itself, is biogenic. Langer refers to the obvious, rationalized examples of this principal in the works of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. But the same architectural insight-the organic nature of the house, its identification with its inhabitants and the landscape-emerges in a darker, horrific embodiment in “The Fall of the House of Usher” wherein the house is distressingly and radically on a continuum with its living, breathing inhabitants. Again, the ecological continuity of living things, a joy in the comic/carnivalesque context, is an overwhelming, sickening concept to the hyperintellectualized Usher.

Already eluded to have been the remote vicinities within the dwellings in Gothic tale-cellars, attics, chambers long closed off, and so on. From what are they closed off? Essentially from life-air, sun- light, human presence and care. They are repulsive in that they bespeak abandonment and unlife. A house is a human nest. Areas that are squalid-dust covered, moldy, cobwebbed-reflect malaise and irresolu- tion, an absence of biologically sound human functioning. Only a sick, neurotic animal allows its nest to become befouled. Maintenance-of its own body, its offspring, its place of habitation and so forth, is an unmis- takable signal of a sound, viable organism. Areas shut off and not kept up suggest morbidity and locales where things sinister and repulsive may


take place-a smell emanates from Emily Grierson’s house; a marker of her growing peculiarity, her unsoundness.

The derelict, unmaintained ship, to take another example, is a recur- rent image in Gothic tales and a vivid symbolic expression of broken organic system. The sailing ship in its ordered elegance, able to grace- fully ply the most treacherous seas, epitomized optimum human design capabilities for centuries-the most finely coordinated and precisely applied methodology and technology wedded to the realities of sea, sky, weather, and so forth. The floundering ship iconography that occurs in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, in Dracula, in “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” and in “Benito Cereno,” works off that trim ship ideal. “Benito Cereno” is in many ways “The House of Usher Goes to Sea.” As in Poe’s earlier story, a visitor approaches a crumbling house (here ship) which is enveloped in an eerie haze. The narrator specifically stresses the house-ship analogy, noting the particular “enchantment” effect of the latter upon a stranger (242). As in “Usher,” the visitor senses something profoundly wrong but tries to account for it by compulsive rationalizing set against the forebodings he takes to be the troubling manifestations of his own over-active imagination: “Trying to break one charm,” he discovers later aboard the grim ship, “he was but becharmed anew. Though upon the wide sea, he seemed in some far inland country; prisoner in some deserted chateau ...” (269). The visitor encounters an enigmatic, distraught “host” the nature of whose malady he tries unsuccessfully to figure out. In both stories, the bewildered narrator is disturbingly obtuse, and so forth.

Captain Amassa Delano’s 1817 nonfiction Voyages and Travels, “Benito Cereno” ’s documentary base, has been available since its repub- lication in PMLA in 1928. Comparing that text with Melville’s story per- mits us to see clearly how Melville recognized and drew out the inherent Gothic possibilities in the original narrative as well as the way in which he overlaid a Poesque, Gothic atmosphere upon it. One might expect space from a sea tale, for instance-fresh breezes, light, color, bracing salt air. But refreshment there is none, quite the contrary.

The initial atmospheric note struck in the story is static: “The sea seemed fixed ... like waved lead that had cooled and set,” pervaded by “troubled gray vapors.” Melville’s effort from the beginning is to render the scene, despite its outdoor character, claustrophobic-there is essentially no outdoors in the horror tale; contra naturam is its bent-even the sea is rendered in the lethargic mode of Coleridge’s “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.” Harold Beaver writes of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, that even here, “where Poe seems his most boyish and exuberant ... turning to the open sea, he is still trapped ... in the holds of


ships ... the runaway is also the stowaway ... inevitably on the edge of nightmare” (9). The state-cabin’s lights on Cereno’s ship, “for all the mild weather, [are] hermetically sealed and caulked” (241). Delano, as mentioned previously, not unlike Poe’s narrator coming upon the House of Usher, perceives the strange ship with “some uneasiness” with “mis- givings,” uncertain of what he sees. The ghostly ship’s odd movements, Delano reasons, “might have been but a deception of the vapors” (240). His whaleboat nears the ship which lies in the still water “shreds of fog here and there raggedly furring her.” Traditional Gothic semblances intrude upon Delano’s perceptions-“fitfully revealed through the open portholes ... dark moving figures were dimly descried, as of Black Friars pacing the cloisters” (240). Disarray, neglect, lethargy are evident every- where. “Battered and mouldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turret long ago taken by assault and left to decay” (241). The ship’s name, San Dominick, appears set in gilt on its side “each letter streakingly corroded with tricklings of copper-spike rust ... sea-grass simi- larly swept to and fro over her name” (241-42). The ship’s pallid, aristo- cratic master, like the master of the Usher House, is in “ill-health’’ evi- dencing “sleepless cares and disquietudes.” He is described as “prey to settled dejection ... a distempered spirit ... lodged in a distempered frame ... his voice like that of one with lungs half gone” (245). Delano, “wonted to the quiet orderliness of the sealer’s comfortable family of a crew,” on boarding the San Dominic, comes upon the Waste Land or, to paraphrase Poe in “The House of Usher,” upon the “kingdom of inorga- nization.”’ In a remark that would well apply to “Benito Cereno,” Stephen King notes that terror, a sense of loathing, “often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking” (22).

Melville’s overlay, his gothicizing of Delano’s narrative, is largely a matter of sounding again and again these disturbing notes of dysfunc- tion, lethargy, disrepair, debris, corrosion, mold, rust, slime and so forth. (Contemporary bio-chemistry tells us that the oxidation implicated in our organic decline is not a different process from the one involved in the rust and decay of external inorganic things-metals, for example- pointing up what the Gothic has long recognized, the fact that our disintegration is not different in kind from that of the things around us.) This repulsive sense of decline and dissipation pervades Melville’s tale and is then overlaid with a conventionally antiquariadheraldic Gothic iconography:

... These tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal. But the principal relic of faded grandeur was the ample oval of the shield-


like stern-piece, intricately carved with the arms of Castile and Leon, medal- lioned about by groups of mythological or symbolic devices; uppermost and central of which was a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked. (241)

The Gothic tale is itself a closed system, “hermetically sealed and caulked” like the San Dominick’s cabin lights. Hence the genre’s fre- quent vagueness as to time and place. Melville in “Benito Cereno,” having used an actual historical document, created an anomalous Gothic tale in that historical and moral issues related to slavery intrude. Babo and the other African slaves in “Benito Cereno,” whatever the author’s intent, work in the service of the tale’s primary and horrific illusion-the world upside down; in fact they are at the center of it.* Babo, a classic vise figure in the tradition of Iago, Shylock or Edmund in Lear, rides Cereno like an incubus, a cloying and sinister presence insinuating itself at every turn. (We have here again the predator-prey horror pattern mentioned previously.) The hatchet polishers with their chant and their ludi- crous-as if there were not more pressing maintenance duties evident given the ship’s general condition-attention to cleaning and maintaining their hatchets are part of the general disturbing masquerade the San Dominick presents to the visiting Captain Delano and address, clearly, the dread of alien takeover, misrule, and cultural decline, or, to use Stephen King’s term again, of “disestablishment.”

Critics have tried to explain away the problem involved here through recourse to Melville’s ironic portrayal of Delano, as if the malig- nancy of Babo and his people were to be read as a commentary on Delano’s narrow New England racism and so forth. In fact, I would argue, Babo and company become bound up in the story’s horror dynamic, in the tale’s closed off, ahistorical and virtual reality. The tale outruns its author and his presumably more liberal perspective. The problem with “Benito Cereno” is real and generic-it is a nightmarish Gothic story and as such resists the intrusion of historical and morally complex light of day. It is because the horror tale is so closed off that it accommodates moral theme uncomfortably. The “my heart grew sick” element at the end of “Cask of Amontillado,” if foregrounded as a moralkautionary expression, could work to the detriment of the tale’s stark horror dynamic. The loss of all bearings, the absence of moral-ethi- cal-rational compass, is an integral part of the horror illusion. The same holds true of “Bartleby” where issues of obligation to one’s fellow man and even overtly Christian notes make up a thematic level in the story that is perhaps not satisfactorily wedded to its nihilistic Gothicism. In a real sense, the Gothic author works with an amoral design. Like the nar-

Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic 77

rator of “Ligeia,” s h e is engaged in a study the nature of which is “more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outside world ...” (Poetry & Tales 262).

In their introduction to the Necronomican Press edition of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” Joshi and Schultz speculate, probably correctly, that the specific name Gloucester, Massachusetts, was removed by the author from later drafts of the story because Lovecraft “did not wish to make too obvious a tip of the hat to the real location of his imaginary town” (14). The genre in fact resists too much truck with real location period-physical or moral, favoring instead the specialized consciousness of dream.

But how to explain what Aiken and Barbald in 1775 noted: “the apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror, where our moral feelings are not in the least involved, and no passion seems to be excited but the depressing one of fear...?” (qtd. in Heller vii). How is it that horror, as Emily Dickinson said of Hawthorne’s work, at once “appalls and entices?” How to account for the popularity of horror in its literary expressions-a highly unlikely popularity it would seem given the theory advanced here that the genre turns on our organic apprehen- s ions-our fear of infirmity, pollution, and physical degradation?

It is first perhaps necessary to note the obvious fact that there is no pleasure to be gained from confronting the morbid and repulsive in real life; a ritual hunt-dance is not to be confused with the hunt per se. Ours is of course an aesthetic interrogation; it goes to the experience of the virtual morbid in the virtual spacehime of literary art. The process is in part intellectual, but the experience of horror, like that of comedy, is cen- tered in a bodily registration, a body-informed imagination. Kant noted likewise of laughter that it may begin with the intellectual perception of incongruity, but “the enjoyment of it is not due to the understanding but is caused by the influence of the representation upon the body with only a reflex effect on the mind” (Swabey 13).

An hypothesis might be advanced here in keeping with the generally physiological nature of the thesis so far discussed. A small quantity of morbid material-smallpox vaccine for instance-provokes the body’s healthy energies to muster themselves, and tones them. Small doses of arsenic and like substances, according to homeopathic theory, can have the effect of invigorating the body’s immune responses, awakening listless organic functions.

Brought to a kind of analog confrontation with the horrid through the Gothic tale, readers are likewise reminded of the nature of their own participation in a biotic harmony and well-being. The virtual claustrophobic heightens our awareness of space in actuality; of good, well-oxy-

78 Journal of Populur Culture

genated air in actuality; of our freedom in actuality. The demarkation between the healthy and the morbid is brought to consciousness and viv- ified. Our bodies take pleasure in the fact that we are not locked in some Gothic crypt nor on the dismal, thirsty decks of the San Dominic, or walled-up hopelessly in the catacombs beneath an Italian city. In “The Premature Burial,” embedded in Poe’s chilling description of burial alive-“the unendurable oppression of the lungs” and so on-is a note of horror’s opposite, the wholesome: “thoughts of the air and grass above,” our normal, healthy condition which often goes unnoticed (Poetry & Tales 672). Through its negations, the macabre-canceling out its own morbidity-brings us round to a biological affirmation as comedy does, to an energized sense of our being-in-the-world. Stephen King recalls the effect 1950s horror films had on him: “There was that magic moment of reintegration and safety at the end .... I believe it’s this feeling of reintegration, arising from a field specializing in death, fear and monstrosity that makes the danse macabre so rewarding and magi- cal” (27). The comic and horror genres are thus rooted in the same bodily principal and the same reintegrative folk aesthetic-hence their constantly renewed popular cultural expressions.

It might be noted finally in this regard that Langer makes brief mention of “gallows humor,” the lift of which she ascribes to “a flash of self- assertion” (341). It may well be that this, too, points to an element of the horror literature therapeutics, something not there in real world horrors, obviously. As in gallows humor-though at much greater length and depth-we boldly venture up to the borders of what as living creatures we dread, relishing all the while the fact that part of the mind knows we are one-up on the story. “We have taken horror in hand,” as King notes, “and used it to destroy itself’ (27). As readers, we are willing partici- pants in the tale’s reenactment and can, if we choose, close the book on the terrors of the Gothic world.

... Or, on the other hand, can we? We may ask ourselves-perhaps even with a trace of paradoxical delight-whether that insistent, sinister imagination can be so easily put to rest, whether we will not in fact again and again be drawn irresistibly back to the strange, alluring spell of those dark narratives.

Notes

’In both “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” the revivification imperative found in the Fisher King tradition is evident. In both, the would-be restorative meal is offered by the visiting agent-in “Bartleby” the iawyer pays


the grub man at the prison to bring Bartleby “the best dinner you can get” (Norton 2257). And in “Benito Cereno,” Captain Delano brings baskets of fish, bread, water, and cider to the failing Cereno. Cf. Jessie Weston (Chapter IX) regarding the mystic meal, especially the sacramental fish meal, in the Fisher king legend.

2See Terry Castle’s discussion of the “world upside down” theme and of elements of the sinister in the Masquerade topos (Masquerade and Civilization, Chapter 8).

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Baldick, Chris, ed. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales. New York: Oxford UP,

1992. Barber, C. L. Shakepeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its

Relation to Social Custom. New York: Meridian, 1959. Baym, Nina. Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed., Vol 1.

New York: Norton, 1994. Carroll, Noell. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New

York: Routledge, 1990. Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Camivalesque in Eighteenth-

Century English Culture and Fiction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986. Cheever, John. “The Five-Fort-Eight.’’ Points of View: An Anthology of Short

Stories. Ed. James Moffett and Kenneth McElheny. New York: New American, 1966.

Docherty, Brian, ed. American Horror Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s, 1990. Heaney, Seamus. Death o fa Naturalist. New York: Oxford UP, 1966. Heller, Terry. The Delights of Terror: An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror.

Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft: A Life. West Warwick, RI: Necronomicon P, 1996. -. The Weird Tale. Austin: Texas UP, 1990. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 198 1. Langer , Suzanne. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art . New York:

Lovecraft, H. P. The Lurking Fear and Other Stories. New York: Ballantine,

-. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Abramson, 1945. Mack, John E., M.D. Nightmares and Human Conflict. Boston: Houghton,

Maturin, Charles Robert. Melmoth the Wanderer. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1961. Melville, Herman. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Ed. Warner

Urbana: Illinois UP, 1987.

Scribners, 1953.

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Berthoff. New York: Harper, 1969.


Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily

Poe, Edgar Allen. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Ed.

Saliba, David R. The Psychology of Fear. Boston: UP of America, 1980. Scarry, Elaine, ed. Literature and the Body. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,

Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance. Garden City: Doubleday, 1957.

Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Harold Beaver. New York: Penguin, 1982.

1988.

Jack Morgan teaches American Literature at the University of Missouri-Rolla. Co-editor with Louis A. Renza, of The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (Southern Illinios University, Carbondale Press, 1996).

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