Gothic Imagination: Gothic Bodies

This is the third in a series of talks I delivered as part of my undergraduate art history module Gothic Imagination. The script has been edited for publication here. As published, Gothic Imagination consists of five talks, accompanied by select presentation slides; slide images have been compressed and animations have been removed.

The talks were designed to be presented in the following sequence. Seminars, being unscripted and interactive, have been omitted.

1. Gothic Associations
   • Seminar—Heritage, Heresy and the Canon
2. Gothic Identities
   • Seminar—Politics, Terror and the Other
3. Gothic Bodies
   • Seminar—Science, Creation and the Unnatural
4. Gothic Landscapes
   • Seminar—Nature, Catastrophe and the Sublime
5. Gothic Visions
   • Seminar—Civilisation, Ruin and the Haunted

Gothic Imagination: Gothic Bodies

“Gothic Bodies” should, on the surface of it, be the most accessible of the five themes that serve as starting points for our discussions. Much more so than “Gothic Identities,” for instance, given that the definition of “identity”—who people or peoples are, they think they or are argued to be collectively, culturally and nationally—requires a great deal of historical contextualization.

And yet, beyond the body politic—the people of a nation, state, or society considered collectively—the human body, too, is political.

As I have aimed to demonstrate, the gothic, as a cultural phenomenon, is far from escapist. Works that may be meaningfully subsumed under the rubric “gothic” permit us to process crises in history—wars, revolutions, epidemics and environmental disasters—as well as crises in our personal lives. And the terrors of the day, as we have seen, are often personified, embodied, rendered concrete and horrible.

Works of visual culture in the gothic mode reflect changing attitudes toward identity and otherness, which is why they are frequently appropriated or activated for propagandist purposes, for identity politics and culture wars.

Almost all of the works we have been looking at—certainly the works I suggested for seminar discussion—show the human form either in full or in part.

It was the one work that does not show a human figure—that commemorates the loss of human life—that may have struck some of us as least “gothic.” And yet, the genre Gothic is peopled with no-bodies—with ghosts, spirits, phantoms, apparitions and spectres—with hauntings by any other name. Gothic fiction is also full of conjuring acts and visions—of disembodied voices, of seers, seances and trances, of nightmares, delusions and hallucinations.

Doris Salcedo’s Disremembered (2014), a gossamer shroud painstakingly made of silk and needles, may lie outside the gothic circle not because lacks an embodiment of the horror of which it so eloquently speaks but because the response that her absent bodies seek to elicit is understanding rather than dread, empathy rather than fear. Hovering, as the curators of Salcedo’s 2015 exhibition at the Guggenheim put it, on the “edge of visibility,” Disremembered is a commentary on violence—the toll guns take on families in the United States—that is evocative rather than being provocatively horrific. Disremembered, not dismembered. The distinction between “horror” and “terror” is as important to the study of genre Gothic fictions—in which both terror and horror can be operative—as it is to our readings of modally gothic objects of visual culture.

So, how much do the bodies and body parts we have encountered contribute to the gothic-ness of a work of art or object of visual culture? Are figurative works gothic because of the bodies they show? Or might their perceived gothic-ness rest in other qualities, in narrative elements or in a relationship between somebodies who, considered singly, are not gothic?

Who or what are the “gothic” bodies in this, the most famous example of visual gothic, The Nightmare (1781) by Johann Heinrich Füssli, or Fuseli (1741–1825)? Is it the Mara—the incubus—that gives this painting its title?

The word “nightmare” is rendered concrete through a pun by dragging a mare onto an intimate scene to which the painting gives us access. Rather too concrete for the narrator of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

The words “nightmare” and “mare”—as in female horse—are not etymologically related. In Buddhism, Mara is a demon that tried to seduce Buddha with visions of beautiful women. A Mara, then, is a zoomorphic representation of unwholesome bodily impulses that pose a threat to spiritual life.

Is the gothic body in this scenario the incubus (from the Latin incubare, “to lie upon”), a male demon who visits female sleepers to have sexual intercourse with them, gradually weakening and eventually killing them after repeat visitations?

Its female counterpart is the succubus, a female demon visiting sleeping men. An incubus may pursue sexual relations with a woman in order to father a child, as in the legend of Merlin.

How about the reclining female figure? Is she having the nightmare? Is she experiencing bodily pleasure? As Fuseli declared in one of his aphorisms on art: “The forms of virtue are erect, the forms of pleasure undulate.” Is she not being virtuous and thus punished for experiencing pleasure?

Or is she unconscious, as the bottle on the nightstand suggests. Does it contain a sleeping draught? Laudanum, perhaps, which was once a widely used, opium-based drug prescribed to women for pain, sleeplessness, and the relief of menstrual cramps.

So, who is having this dream? Whose nightmare is it?

The reclining figure may be Anna Landolt, the niece of Fuseli’s friend, the famous physiologist and poet Johann Caspar Lavater, a young woman Fuseli desired but could not possess. In that case, the incubus may be Fuseli himself.

And that incubus is placed atop her body not unlike the entire composition, which rests on a portrait, believed to be of Landolt, on the back of this canvas.

Clearly, we need to distinguish between bodies and embodiments, between figures and the figurative (meaning the metaphorical), between characters that are part of a narrative—whether constructed in words or visuals or a combination thereof—and the bodies that these characters inhabit.

A character in a story may be having a gothic experience without having a body we would label “gothic” even if that character were a figure removed from the story or scene.

The visual gothic may certainly tell stories, even in a single image. But one of the challenges that visual storytellers face is to suggest even when viewers demand that they show or render concrete what is terrifying. It is easier to produce momentary horror— disgust—than lasting terror. Fuseli acknowledged this himself, and he aimed at instilling terror. As he advised artists in one of his lectures on painting: “All minute detail tends to destroy terrour.”

Night of the Demon, a horror movie I screened as part of Treacherous Territories a few years ago struggles to straddle the boundaries between showing and suggesting. The film’s visualisation of the “demon” resulted in creative differences between the producer and members of the cast and crew.   The producer determined that movie audiences needed to be given something to look at, whereas the writer, director and male lead of the movie argued that the film should merely suggest a haunting presence.

A balance between showing and suggesting is struck for much of the film—which has an evocative sound design and atmospheric sets—something to which we shall return when we explore Gothic landscapes. But ultimately, the “demon” materializes, looking more like a dragon than a demon, and resembling the Japanese movie monster Godzilla.

When we try to prove something, we “demonstrate” it. How do you demon-strate something that is a matter of belief rather than fact? That balancing act between showing and suggesting is performed by the makers of The Uninvited, a film I screened as part of Uneasy Threshold, a ghost story in which a spirit makes its presence felt but materialised only briefly to become nebulously visible.

Both films are adapted from literature; but neither of them is based on genre Gothic fiction. As I said from the start, in our exploration of the modally gothic, we are not limited to the Gothic as a genre—the Gothic novel and the visual culture it inspired. We do not have to narrow down our search for gothic bodies by consulting book illustrations for—or film adaptations of—genre Gothic fiction.

A look at the usual suspects of genre Gothic fiction may nonetheless tell us something about the characteristics of “gothic” bodies. There are plenty of hideous bodies in horror films. But their presence does not make those horror films Gothic. I suggest that the qualities that make stories like Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula “gothic” are the hybridity, multiplicity, mutability of the bodies their title characters temporarily inhabit.

Let us start with the chronologically first of these bodies of genre Gothic fiction: Frankenstein, first published in 1818. The body of Frankenstein’s creature is hybrid. It is constructed out of parts of dead bodies. It is inanimate flesh reanimated.

In an early book illustration by Theodor von Holst (1819–1844), which served as the frontispiece for the 1831 revised edition of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, the body of the creature is not as grotesque as it often appears in horror films.

Now, there are scores of film adaptation of Frankenstein, but there is as yet no rival to the iconic status achieved by make-up artist Jack P. Pierce’s Hollywood 1931 interpretation of Frankenstein’s creature. That said, the Frankenstein myth does not survive because of the hideousness of the creature. It is alive because of our fascination with its creation. That act of creative transgression, of fashioning a composite body from dead bodies, is what makes the creature—and its creator, Victor Frankenstein—Gothic.

The subtitle of Shelley’s novel is “The Modern Prometheus.” Prometheus, in Greek mythology, was a Titan who defied the gods. He created humans out of mud. He stole fire from the gods and brought it to earth for the benefit of humanity, an act of defiance for which he was punished by Zeus and subjected to physical tortured. Prometheus was much admired by the Romantics for his challenging of a supposedly ordained order of the universe and his subversion of absolute rule.

Unlike most film version, the creature in the novel gets to tell its own story. By entering into the creature’s mind, we are experiencing the moral ugliness, the injustices, that the Frankenstein’s creation encounters. Nothing is inherently other. It takes others to other us. In Frankenstein, the transgressive parent—a father without the aid of a female—is the first to reject his creation. As the narrator, Victor Frankenstein, recalls, he meant to create a “beautiful” body. In this passage from the novel, he recounts the moment when he realizes his apparent failure:

“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.  Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”

At that point, “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

As horror film expert David J. Skal points out, Frankenstein’s creature—as a movie monster—is “an amalgam of conventional bodies torn apart and reassembled according to new, logical-angular, electromechanical principles […].” Skal traced some of the body parts of which the creature in 1930s film adaptations was composed.

Jack Pierse’s make-up, with its prominent bolt sticking out of the creature’s neck, is representative of what Skal refers to as “the culmination of the machine aesthetic” of the modern age. It is as incongruous as the streamlined gargoyles on the slick, glistening Chrysler Building, a Manhattan skyscraper that was completed in 1930 and constituted the latest in architectural style.

In architecture, gargoyles are decorative waterspouts that preserve stonework by diverting the flow of rainwater away from buildings. The word, gargoyle, derives from the French gargouille, or throat, from which the verb, to gargle, also originates.

When such fanciful figures do not serve a practical purpose and are strictly ornamental or decorative, they are referred to as grotesques. The term grotesque has wider applications beyond architecture. “When we encounter the grotesque, we are caught off guard,” Wilson Yates declares in “An Introduction to the Grotesque.” Beyond the initial surprise, it “evokes a range of feelings, feelings of uneasiness, fear, repulsion, delight, amusement, often horror and dread, and through its evocative power it appears to us in paradoxical responses.”

Not that these are the only points of reference for creators of the Frankensteinian movie monster. There is the ghost of Goya in the creature as well.

What, then, is the difference between the ugly and the grotesque? “While the etymological heritage of the grotesque combines both the comic and the horrific,” Denise Gigante posits in “Facing the Ugly: The Case of ‘Frankenstein’” (2000), “the ugly lacks comic effect.” Might “gothic” be a term that can accommodate both the comic and the horrific?

As I said, Frankenstein’s creature is almost human—but not quite. This doll by Hans Bellmer is also “not quite human.” Its hybridity is disturbing, as is its replication of a seductive pose. Our response, if indeed we feel this unease, is provoked by what Freud termed the “Unheimliche”—the Uncanny.

“[The subject of the ‘uncanny,'” Freud wrote in 1919, “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror.” He argued it to be “equally certain[…] that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread […].”

As Freud put it, “One is curious to know what this peculiar quality is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things within the boundaries of what is ‘fearful.’’ Might the term “gothic” prove useful because it allows us to explore such relationships? Or does it unnecessarily blur those boundaries further?

The gait of Frankenstein’s creature, as reimagined in Hollywood, is significant as well. Like a cyborg, the creature is almost human, but not quite. It possesses superhuman strength but strikes us as less than human, machine-like or clumsily robotic. “Robot” is a term invented in 1921 by the writer Karel Capek whose most famous play, R.U.R. [“Rossum’s Universal Robots”], is about the rise of the machine against mankind. The creature’s movement contributes to our sense of estrangement and add an element of the “uncanny.”

The uncanny occupies a liminal space. We experience it when we become estranged from what we thought of as familiar. Our feeling estrangement from the familiar increases when humanoid objects are in motion. A machine, doll or kinetic sculpture performing an imperfect imitation of human movement is more disturbing than a doll that is sitting or standing still.

A Chucky doll that moves, for example, is creepier to us than an inanimate version of it. A motionless corpse is less creepy than an animated corpse or Zombie. This is referred to as the “uncanny valley.” The walking dead dwell there.

But what is perhaps even more terrifying than those living dead bodies is the realization that we can become estranged from ourselves. That we are multiple, and that our other selves, which hide like Mr. Hyde, may come and seek us out.

Multiplicity is often expressed in terms of duality. Duality is associated with duplicity, with falsehood. The alter ego, dead ringer, the impostor. Identical twins may turn out to be as different as night and day, such as the sisters in The Dark Mirror, which I screened as part of Significant Othering. The doubled body, the body double, the doppelganger whose encounter with which means death is a common trope in gothic, neo-gothic and modally gothic narratives.

But what constitutes the true self in Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Multiplicity may mean multiple personalities. Multiplicity may mean bodies possessed by spirits, or minds and hearts battling with inner demons. It may mean the suppressed other in ourselves, the uncivilised, the uncultured other of human nature.

“Evil […] had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay.” That is is how Dr. Jekyll describes his realisation that he is also Mr Hyde. “And yet,” he adds, “when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance […]. This, too, was myself.  It seemed natural and human.”

“In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit […] than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been […] accustomed to call mine.” What Dr Jekyll discovers is not a double but his own multiplicity.

Monster (1995) and Monster Reborn (2002) by the 1996 Turner Prize winner Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) offer another take on the Jekyll-and-Hyde dynamic. Gordon suggests how close the so-called normal is to the perceived opposite, the monstrous. How easy it is for us to be or become other. After all, it is just a bit of adhesive tape that turns Gordon’s face into a grotesque version of himself.

In another work, titled A Divided Self (1996), Gordon grapples with his sense, our sense, of duality. That we are not either good or evil, civilized or uncivilized. But that we may be both. Again, it is the simplicity of Gordon’s work—a shaved arm wrestling a hairy arm—that drives this point home so forcefully. Mutability, meaning, the tendency to change, the ability to transform.

What makes Dracula gothic is not that he is hideous. Actually, he manages to lure his victims by being seductive. He attracts them with his body. Dracula, in his human shape, is not ugly. What makes him gothic is his fluidity, his changeability and adaptability. He is a foreigner from Transylvania on British soil. He has the capacity to shift shape, to penetrate private spaces by turning into a bat, and to infiltrate the human organism, corrupting human bodies, contaminating human blood, and turning others into the living dead. Dracula’s mutability corrupts the lives of others.

Contamination was on the mind of the author Anne Rice when she created what would grow into the Vampire Chronicles. While she worked on Interview with a Vampire, Rice was mourning the death of her four-year-old daughter to leukemia—a cancer of the body’s blood-forming tissues. Rice’s child died about two years later. It is no coincidence that Rice’s Vampire Chronicles—and a return of Dracula to the big screen in 1992—coincided with the AIDS crisis, or that the AIDS epidemic coincided with the rise of the gothic in the 1990s.

As Jeffrey A. Weinstock remarked in “Virus Culture” (1997), “vampirism is portrayed as a deadly ‘infection’ that spreads via sexually-charged penetration of the body and the exchange of bodily fluids.” Weinstock argued that ‘[m]ovies like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Interview With the Vampire […] reflect and reinforce the pervasive fear of contamination by blood and, by equating infection with monstrosity, contribute to the marginalization of and direction of blame toward stigmatized group.”

At the same time, disease narrative also gave voice to our fears at a time when discourse about AIDS was silenced, when a refusal by lawmakers to address the crisis was killing millions of people worldwide. The artist Kiki Smith lost her younger sister Beatrice to AIDS in 1988. During the 1990s, Smith continued to explore blood, bodily fluids and disease in works such as Tale (1992) and Untitled [Blood Noise] (1993). The latter includes statements written by Beatrice, describing the symptoms of her illness in its final stage. The texts hang like streamers from a quilt-like, painted collage of lithographs that form an intimate portrait, as well as a biographical narrative of disease.

Disease narratives were prominent in the 1990s. These narratives are profoundly intimate. But they also implicated the audience by confronting them with truths that society did not adequately address.

Strange Fruit (1992–1997) is a tribute to David Wojnarowicz by the queer US American artist Zoe Leonard (b. 1961), which we have looked at briefly in our Gothic Identities seminar. For this installation, Leonard sewed together empty fruit skins; the organic process of change and decay unfolds in public view. This work was made before any effective treatments for HIV were developed and available. By 1997, more than sixty thousand New Yorkers had died of HIV/AIDS.

“Fruit” is a derogatory word for homosexual men. But the title of this work also references “Strange Fruit,” a song first recorded by the African-American singer Billie Holiday in 1939. The lyrics allude to the lynching of African-Americans. It is a problematic allusion, and a questionable analogy, but it squarely puts the blame on those in power. It reminds us of the politics of AIDS, a disease that was closely associated with a queer minority but that affected a diverse range of individuals across the spectrum, in the West and throughout the world.

Perhaps, what we dread most of all is mutability. When I was in my teens, I developed breast tissue. My fellow students called me the battle of the sexes and I became anxious about my sexual identity. I would tie my t-shirts under my scrotum to flatten my breasts. I was terrified about having to go to swimming lessons and be seen in public. Just a few years later, I would become terrified about blood while I was working in a hospital when anxieties about HIV infections were rising. I hardly recognise myself in old photographs of myself—Retroactive Selfies, as I call them in one of my projects—which is terrifying as well.

Our personal traumas often remain unresolved. They are addressed indirectly, and metaphorically. Werewolves, for instance, can be a metaphor for puberty—a time when hair begins to grow in unexpected places. The genre Gothic and modally gothic alike might help us to come to terms with our sense of otherness by offering us fictional versions of ourselves. Shifting shapes, being multiple and mutable can be superheroically empowering, even though our body journeys are not entirely within our control.

We know that the journey must end but we do not quite know how, in what shape, we will get through it. We cannot stop our bodies from aging and falling apart. And I am saying this while experiencing hearing loss, hair loss, and more aches and pains than I feel at ease to recount.  That we are at once living and dying is the most dreadful realization of all.

In her study The Gothic Imagination (1982), Linda Bayer-Berenbaum argues that the “Gothic fascination with death and decay involves an admiration for power at the expense of beauty.” This “admiration for power” is an alternative aesthetic to beauty. It is the sublime. So is “being in awe of forces beyond our control,” forces that result in our own “death and decay.”

We will see more manifestations of the sublime in our discussion of “Gothic Landscapes.” But how, in 1757, a few years before the Gothic emerged as a literary genre, Edmund Burke defined the Sublime is useful to our approach to the “gothic” body as well.  “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror,” Burke argued, “is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion [. . .] the mind is capable of feeling.”

Like the uncanny, the sublime challenges our systems of classifications, binaries such as beauty and ugliness. The sublime can be both awe-inspiring or awful, just as power—powers beyond our control —can affect us positively and negatively, just as danger may terrify and excite us at the same time. And what terrifies us most may be the other in ourselves, or the othering to which we are subjected by others.

It is rather too simplistic to see the Gothic body as the opposite of the Classical body. The binary opposites of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, sane and insane—opposites which are often rendered with a simple prefix such as un- or in- do not get us to the core of the tension that is at the heart of the experience we may call “gothic.” When it comes to those simplistic opposites, the one word that does not fit this dichotomy is “dead.” You cannot turn dead into its opposite by adding a prefix negating it. You end up with “undead.” Not with “alive.”

Living organisms are not stable. Forms transform. Figures transfigure. And, of all changes that are inevitable and beyond our control, nothing freaks us out more than our own mutability and the impermanence of our existence. As much as we may try to plan ahead, we cannot predict or anticipate our future selves. Ultimately, prefixes such as super- and trans- get us closer to the spirit of the gothic.

The modally gothic may give us a language with which to articulate our anxieties. The question remains whether “gothic” is the word for that language and the label for works of visual culture that attempt such articulations.

This series continues with Gothic Landscapes.