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Overview
‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was a bestselling, versatile and prolific author of gothic, crime, adventure, romantic and comic fiction. This book, the first on Marsh, establishes his credentials as a significant agent within the fin de siècle gothic revival. Marsh’s work spans a range of gothic modes, including the canonical fin de siècle subgenres of urban and imperial gothic and gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as the comic gothic and the occult romance. His greatest success came in 1897 when he published his bestselling invasion narrative The Beetle: A Mystery, a novel that articulated many of the key themes of fin de siècle urban gothic and outsold its close rival, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, well into the twentieth century. The present work extends studies of Marsh’s literary production beyond The Beetle, contending that, in addition to his undoubted interest in non-normative gender and ethnic identities, Marsh was a writer with an acute sense of spatiality, whose fiction can be read productively through the lens of spatial theory.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783163410 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2015 |
| Series: | Gothic Authors: Critical Revisions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 841 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Richard Marsh
By Minna Vuohelainen
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2015 Minna VuohelainenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-341-0
CHAPTER 1
'Exactly Where I Was I Could not Tell': Panopticism, Imageability and the Gothic City
* * *
Urban Gothic and panopticism
At the beginning of Richard Marsh's 1897 bestseller The Beetle: A Mystery, the novel's first narrator Robert Holt seeks a night's shelter at the casual ward of Hammersmith Workhouse in suburban west London. Unemployed and starving, Holt turns to the last resort of the Victorian destitute, an institution reviled by many nineteenth-century social commentators as dehumanising in its prison-like routine. Yet, as Holt soon finds out, even the workhouse will not accommodate him: the door is slammed in his face, he flees an ensuing altercation, takes the first turning and soon loses himself in the suburban wilderness sprouting up around Hammersmith until, stumbling through a mist that represents a mixture of rain and fog, he finally feels that he has left the civilised world behind him. Somewhere in the environs of Walham Green, an expanding lower-middle-class suburb south of Hammersmith, Holt pauses for a moment's rest, spies the inviting open window of a detached villa and enters burglariously, falling into the clutches of the novel's eponymous foreign monster under whose watchful eyes he will soon tramp around London at astounding speed, never losing his way, until finally expiring in a squalid East End lodging house.
The Beetle is the best known of Marsh's series of urban Gothic novels, all produced at the very turn of the century. Like The Goddess: A Demon (1900) and The Joss: A Reversion (1901), it is a reverse-colonisation or 'invasion Gothic' narrative in which a monstrous foreign presence invades contemporary London, a city increasingly unknowable due to its size and diversity, and attacks or entraps vulnerable and economically marginal British characters representative of urban modernity. In The Beetle, Holt's narrative is followed by an attack on the politician Paul Lessingham, who has in his youth offended the forces of Isis in Cairo. An avenger from the cult, whose appearance shifts between an old man, a young woman and a monstrous beetle, abducts Lessingham's fiancée, the outspoken New Woman Marjorie Lindon, who is destined for human sacrifice. Lessingham, the gentleman-inventor Sydney Atherton and the aristocratic private detective Augustus Champnell chase the monster through London until a fatal train crash, discussed in the next chapter, apparently destroys it. In The Goddess, the narrator John Ferguson dreams that his friend Edwin Lawrence is attacked by a laughing female fiend, only to wake up to find a beautiful, mysterious and amnesiac woman covered in blood stepping into his room through the window. The following morning, a torn and mutilated corpse is discovered in Lawrence's rooms. The mentally unstable Lawrence has fallen under the influence of the 'Goddess', an Indian sacrificial idol, who has cajoled him into committing a series of crimes, including the murder of his moralising brother, Philip. The novel concludes with Lawrence's suicide at the hands of the Goddess and Ferguson's marriage to his nocturnal visitor. The Joss, finally, recounts how the impecunious shopgirls Pollie Blyth and Emily Purvis are unfairly dismissed by their employer and only saved from homelessness by the unexpected news that Pollie has inherited a house and an annuity from her long-lost uncle, Benjamin Batters. The strongly fortified but rat-infested house contains its secrets, however, and is besieged by bloodthirsty Chinese characters. Batters is in fact in hiding inside the house, attempting to escape a Chinese tribe who have mutilated him into a joss, an Oriental idol, and showered him with riches, also concealed within the house. The novel concludes with the death of the monstrous Joss. While Batters's mutilated body appears grotesque and hardly human, the 'reversion' of the novel's title ironically comments on the Joss's 'backsliding' from a god to a mere Englishman.
All three novels are set in a contemporary London that could be seen as a central character in itself. A number of critics agree that the modern city was perhaps the most typical locus of fin-de-siècle Gothic, replacing, as Fred Botting notes, the medieval, Mediterranean settings of earlier Gothic by bringing together 'the natural and architectural components of Gothic grandeur and wildness, its dark, labyrinthine streets suggesting the violence and menace of Gothic castle and forest'. Glennis Byron similarly observes that London 'was the key site of 1890s Gothic monstrosity', 'exud[ing] a sinister sense of ... desolation and menace', and for Kelly Hurley, 'London – both the labyrinthine city itself and its anonymous-seeming suburbs – is envisioned as a dark, threatening mystery' in modernist Gothic. Notably, the city streets take on the function of the Gothic labyrinth, 'a site of darkness, horror and desire' that is 'associated with fear, confusion and alienation'.
Fin-de-siècle Gothic shares a discursive context with a national debate over the perception of London as a divided city. This debate centred on 'Outcast London' – London's poor, alienated and often criminal slums, particularly the East End – and addressed questions related to abject poverty, slum housing, sexual health and morality, mass immigration into already overcrowded quarters, and the perceived linkage between urban poverty, crime and social disorder in the aftermath of the 1887 Trafalgar Square riots and the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders. At the same time, as Judith Walkowitz notes, the cityscape of the wealthy West End of London was undergoing 'considerable renovation' as 'a modern landscape ... of office buildings, shops, department stores, museums, opera, concert halls, music halls, restaurants, and hotels' was created to serve the changing needs of emergent figures such as female white-collar workers and consumers increasingly visible within this 'new commercial landscape'. Surrounding London on all sides, suburbia was rapidly devouring the countryside and altering the topography of the city.
As Walkowitz posits, fin-de-siècle London was portrayed in contemporary writings, both fictional and factual, as 'a city of contrasts, a class and geographically divided metropolis' 'whose social boundaries were regularly transgressed by illicit acts of sex and crime'. Raymond Williams notes that the notion of the divided city 'became generally available as an interpretative image' at the fin-de-siècle, when London's social and geographical faultlines 'deepened and became more inescapably visible' and the trope of Darkest London, an '"unknown" and "unexplored"' East End, 'became quite central in literature and social thought'. Walkowitz importantly reminds us that this 'imaginary urban landscape' of 'the metropolis as a dark, powerful, and seductive labyrinth' was a literary and cultural construct that was 'conveyed to many reading publics through high and low literary forms' and has subsequently informed the literary and historical imagination. In the aftermath of the Ripper murders, the East End district of Whitechapel acquired unprecedented notoriety as 'an immoral landscape of light and darkness, a nether region of illicit sex and crime, both exciting and dangerous'. As Seth Koven notes, the district became something of a tourist attraction so that '[b]y the 1890s, London guidebooks such as Baedeker's not only directed visitors to shops, theatres, monuments, and churches, but also mapped excursions to ... notorious slum districts such as Whitechapel and Shoreditch'. A two-way relationship exists between this imaginary landscaping and the Gothic mode: the construct of the East End as a dangerous but seductive labyrinth is essentially Gothic, while the sensational appeal of outcast London seeped through to the cityscapes of the urban Gothic fictions of the period.
Some of this flux was articulated by the late-Victorian social explorers – investigative journalists, early sociologists, socialist reformers and Christian missionaries who followed the established literary tradition of gentlemanly ventures into the slums of the East End for purposes of reportage, reform and the less reputable, voyeuristic practice of 'slumming'. The work of such writers as George Sims, Arthur Osborne Jay, William Booth and Jack London attempted to locate, describe and categorise London's pockets of poverty, vice and foreign influences in a strikingly vivid vocabulary. For them, the city was sharply divided into a wealthy but ignorant west, slumbering in its own complacency and unaware of the threat posed by a labyrinthine, unknowable and alien east, best characterised as a hell or an underworld, a whirlpool or a vortex. Yet the most visual of these representations, Charles Booth's multi-volume study Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1902), challenged the sharp geographical division of London into a wealthy west and a poor east by supporting a sociological analysis of London's class structure with a set of colour-coded maps that painstakingly measured the perceived relative wealth of each street. Booth's maps provided a strikingly visual account of the geographic positioning of poverty and potential crime in London, but also challenged the focus of many of his contemporaries on the East End by showing an alarming proximity between wealth, represented by sunny golden yellow, and squalor, conveyed in racially charged black, throughout the imperial metropolis. By turning a corner in a wealthy area, one could enter a street of the worst kind.
The social explorers' calls for the mapping of London's unknown spaces bear a close resemblance to Michel Foucault's analysis of the 'disciplinary mechanism' that ensures that 'each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed' in social space in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), his classic study of surveillance and social control in modern society. While Foucault's most powerful example of such a mechanism is Jeremy Bentham's model prison the Panopticon, an 'enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised' by 'an omnipresent and omniscient power', he also gives 'the utopia of the perfectly governed city' as an example of the 'panoptic mechanism', 'visible and unverifiable', in action. Foucault argues that the disciplinary institutions of the nineteenth century – 'the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital' – treated social deviants – 'beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly' – by branding and classifying on the one hand, by spatial exclusion and containment on the other. Perfect visibility is essential to the 'disciplinary society' because 'a state of conscious and permanent visibility ... assures the automatic functioning of power', the problematically anonymous, sinister social forces that in Foucault's scheme attempt to control the individual through self-regulation. The panoptic mechanism, Foucault argues, is 'an anti-nomadic technique' because 'discipline fixes' and 'arrests or regulates movements'. 'Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance', Foucault concludes.
As Robert T. Tally notes, literary cartography often combines examples of 'the real places of the geographical globe and the imaginary places of [the author's] own fictional universe'. Marsh's urban Gothic novels are set within a recognisably contemporary, partly mappable London. Yet the novels' cityscapes are also uncannily strange and disorientating so that characters (and readers) soon lose their way and find themselves unable to identify their bearings with confidence. This tension between what Kevin Lynch calls an 'imageable' city – an urban environment easy to navigate – and a Gothic city that resists exact mapping and panoptic control is characteristic not only of Marsh's urban Gothic but also of other contemporary discourses sited in the troubled space of fin-de-siècle London, such as the writings of the urban explorers who attempted to locate London's pockets of poverty and crime. In the three novels, the '"real" material world' of fin-de-siècle London meets Marsh's '"imagined" representations of spatiality', merging into what Edward Soja characterises as a fuzzy, disorientating 'real-and-imagined' cityscape. The spaces of the city resist the investigative efforts of the novels' protagonists, detective figures and reader-geographers, while suggesting that only the novels' eponymous monsters, inhabiting the liminal 'real-and-imagined' space, are able to master the city. Marsh's urban Gothic thus functions as a counter-narrative to modernity's attempts to control and police the troubled space of the imperial metropolis with its deviant inhabitants.
'Some sort of acquaintance': the imageable city
The work of the urban geographer Kevin Lynch offers one way of reading the pedestrian's navigation of the cityscape. In The Image of the City (1960), Lynch's focus was on 'the apparent clarity or "legibility" of the cityscape', 'the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern', and he argues that 'a legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern'. For Lynch, 'a distinctive and legible environment' contributes to a positive urban experience by promoting feelings of 'security' and 'individual growth'. Urban planners attempting to create successful cities should therefore pay attention to the question of legibility or, as Lynch also terms it, 'imageability: that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image ... that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environment'.
Lynch studied the ways in which people find their way around a city, noting that 'way-finding', the ability to ' [s]tructur[e] and identif[y] the environment', is a 'vital ability' and that pedestrians resort to 'a consistent use and organization of definite sensory cues from the external environment'. He identifies five organising principles or 'image elements' used by pedestrians to master their environment: 'path, landmark, edge, node, and district'. Of these, paths, 'channels along which the observer ... moves', are 'the predominant city elements', for '[p]eople observe the city while moving through it'. Landmarks are a 'type of point-reference' such as 'building, sign, store, or mountain' that must be visible. Edges denote 'boundaries between two phases, linear breaks in continuity: shores, railroad cuts, edges of development, walls', and distinguish between districts, 'medium-to-large sections of the city ... recognizable as having some common, identifying character'. Finally, nodes are 'strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter' such as 'junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one structure to another' or, alternatively, 'concentrations' such as 'a street-corner hangout or an enclosed square'. Lynch argues that a high concentration of these strategic elements results in 'an imageable landscape: visible, coherent, and clear', in which the pedestrian feels more comfortable than in a less imageable city. Imageability makes way-finding, the pedestrian's navigation of the city space, possible: a city lacking in imageable elements that facilitate way-finding is an unpleasant, confusing and even frightening environment.
Lynch's analysis of city space suggests that pedestrians 'read' a city by registering and mastering the images it offers, that navigating the city space is an interpretative activity akin to reading. Conversely, Robert T. Tally argues that 'a map may also constitute itself in words' so that a story or a genre could be seen as a map of a particular kind of environment. For Raymond Williams, novels could be interpreted as 'knowable communities' containing characters, settings and values that the reader can expect to recognise. It could, then, be argued that the reader can expect to find familiar loci in fictional landscapes pertaining to particular genres. Like Boston, Lynch's example of an imageable city, London, the central locus of fin-de-siècle Gothic, 'is a city of very distinctive districts and of crooked, confusing paths'. By the end of the nineteenth century, London was both a tourist destination with which many readers would be personally acquainted and a city familiar from previous literary encounters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Richard Marsh by Minna Vuohelainen. Copyright © 2015 Minna Vuohelainen. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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