The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

by Dorothy Scarborough

The Gothic novel relied largely for its impressiveness on emphasizing ghostly scenes by representing aspects of weather to harmonize with the emotions of the characters. This was overworked in terror fiction, and while it still possesses power it is a much less common method of technique than it used to be. Poe’s introductory paragraph in The Fall of the House of Usher is a notable example of skill in creating atmosphere of the supernatural by various details including phenomena of weather, and Hardy shows special power in harmonizing nature to the moods and purposes of his characters. Yet many a modern story produces a profound sense of awe, and purges the soul by means of terror with no reference at all to foreboding weather. However, the allusions now made are more skillful and show more selective power than of old.

Gothic fiction had much to say of melancholy birds that circled portentously over ancient castles filled with gloom and ghosts, but they were generic and not individual specimens. The fowl was always spoken of as “a bird of prey,” “a night bird,” “a bat,” “an owl,” or by some such vague term. Natural history has become more generally known since those times and writers of to-day introduce their ominous birds with more definiteness and appropriateness. The repulsive bat that clings to the window ledge in Bram Stoker’s novel is a vampire, a symbol of the whole horrible situation, as the kite that soars menacingly overhead in another of his novels is individualized and becomes a definite thing of terror. Poe’s raven is vastly more a bird of evil than any specimen in the Gothic aviary. Robert W. Chambers brings in a cormorant several times as a portent of ghostly disaster, particularly foreboding when it turns toward the land. “On the dark glistening cliffs, silhouetted against the glare of the sea, sat a cormorant, black, motionless, its horrible head raised toward heaven.” There is in recent fiction no bird more dreadful in import than the belled buzzard that Irvin Cobb makes the leading figure in his story by that name. This is an excellent example of the use of the natural to produce terror and awe, for the murderer sees in the bird a minister of fate, and the faint tinkle of its bell as it soars over the marsh where the body lies buried paralyzes him with horror. At last he can bear no more, and hearing it, as he thinks, close at hand, he shrieks out his confession,—only to find this time that it is not the belled buzzard at all that he hears, but only an old cowbell that a little negro child has picked up in the barnyard!

Robert W. Chambers in his early stories contrives to give varying supernatural effects by descriptions of shadows as symbolic of life and character. He speaks of shadows of spirits or of persons fated to disaster as white; again his supernatural shadows may be gray—gray is a favored shade for ghostly effect whether for witches or for phantoms—and sometimes they are perfectly black, to indicate differing conditions of destiny. Quiller-Couch has a strange little allegory, The Magic Shadow, and other writers have used similar methods to produce uncanny effects.

The Gothic romance made much use of portents of the supernatural, which later fiction does as well, but differently and with greater skill. The modern stories for the most part abandon the conventional portents, the dear old clock forever striking twelve or one—there was no Gothic castle so impoverished as to lack such ghostly horologue!—the abbey bell that tolls at touch of spirit hands or wizard winds, the statuesque nose-bleed, the fire that burns blue at approach of a specter, and so forth. The later story is more selective in its aids to ghostly effect, and adapts the means desired to each particular case, so that it hits the mark. For instance, the sardonic laughter that sounds as the burglars are cracking the gate of heaven to get in, and imagining what they will find, is prophetic of the emptiness, the nothingness, that meets their astounded gaze when they are within. Ambrose Bierce in some of his stories describes the repulsiveness of the fleshly corpse, reanimated by the spirit, perhaps not the spirit belonging to it, with a loathly effect more awful than any purely psychic phantom could produce, which reminds us somewhat of the corpse come to life in Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book.

The horrors of invisibility in modern fiction avail to give a ghastly chill to the soul that visible apparitions rarely impart. Likewise the effect of mystery, of the incalculable element, in giving an impression of supernaturalism is a recognized method of technique in many stories, as the minister’s black veil in Hawthorne’s symbolic story. The unspeakable revolting suggestion in Edith Wharton’s The Eyes, where a man is haunted by two hideous eyes that “have the physical effect of a bad smell, whose look left a smear like a snail,” is built up with uncommon art. We do not realize how much is due to insanity and how much to the supernatural, when, after telling the story of his obsession, his fears that as a climax he will become like those Eyes, the man suddenly sees his reflection in the mirror and meets their dreadful gaze. “He and the image confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate!” Mention might be made of an incident in a recently published literary drama, where a man seeks over the world for the unknown woman with whom he has fallen in love, and on his calling aloud in question as to who she is, “the grave, with nettle-bearded lips replied, ‘It is I, Death!’” These are only suggestions of numberless instances that might be given of a modern technique of supernaturalism that surpasses anything in Gothic fiction.

The effectiveness of modern ghostly stories is aided by the suggestiveness of the unearthly given by the use of “sensitives,” animals or persons that are peculiarly alert to the occult impressions. We see in many stories that children perceive the supernatural presences more quickly than adults, as in Mrs. Oliphant’s story of the ghost returning to right a wrong, trying strenuously to make herself known to the grown person and realized only by a little child. In Belasco’s play the little boy is the first and for a long time the only one to sense the return of Peter Grimm. In Maeterlinck’s The Blind, the baby in arms is aware of the unearthly presences better than the men and women. Sometimes the sensitive is a blind person, as the old grandfather in another of Maeterlinck’s short plays, who is conscious of the approaching Death before any of the others, or blind Anna in D’Annunzio’s drama, The Dead City.

Animals are quick to perceive supernatural manifestations. Cats in fiction are shown as being at ease in the presence of ghosts perhaps because of their uncanny alliance with witches, while dogs and horses go wild with fear. This is noticed in many stories, as in Bulwer-Lytton’s story of the haunted house where the dog dies of terror in the face of the ghostly phenomena. The Psychic Doctor told of in Blackwood’s uncanny stories, who goes to a house possessed by evil spirits, takes with him a cat and a dog which by their difference of action reveal to him the presence of the spirits long before they are visualized for him.

In general, there is more power of suggestion in the later ghostly stories than in the earlier. The art is more subtle, the technique more skillfully studied, more artfully accidental.

There is in modern fiction, notably the work of Poe, and that of many recent writers, Russian, French, and German as well as English, a type of supernaturalism that is closely associated with insanity. One may not tell just where the line is drawn, just how much of the element of the uncanny is the result of the broodings of an unbalanced brain, and how much is real ghostliness. Poe’s studies of madness verge on the unearthly, as do Maupassant’s, Hoffmann’s, and others. Josephine Daskam Bacon illustrates this genre in a recent volume of stories, The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchion, the plots centering round instances of paranoia occurring in the practice of a famous alienist,—yet they are not paranoia alone! One instance is of a young girl who is haunted by the ghost of a nurse who has died because given the wrong medicine by mistake. She is on the border-line of insanity when her lover cries aloud that he would take the curse on himself for her if he could, which, by some unknown psychic law, does effect a transference which frees her and obsesses him. Another is that of a man in the insane asylum, who recognizes in a mysterious housekeeper the spirit of his wife, who comes from the grave to keep him company and vanishes on the day of his death. These are curious analyses of the idée fixe in its effect on the human mind, of insanity as a cause or effect of the supernatural. Barry Pain’s Celestial Grocery is a recent example, a story of a man whose madness carries him to another planet, showing him inverted aspects of life, where emotions are the only real things, all else but shadows. Du Maurier’s pathetic novel portraying the passion and anguish and joy of Peter Ibbetson that touches the thin line between sanity and madness, showing in his dream-metempsychosis a power to relive the past and even to live someone else’s life, is a striking example. One interesting aspect of that story is the point where the spirit of Mary changes from the dream-lover of twenty-eight to the ghost of the woman of fifty-two, since she has died and can no more come to her lover as she once did, but must come as her own phantom. There are extraordinary effects of insanity associated with the supernatural in the work of Ambrose Bierce, of Arthur Machen and others of the modern school. Italian literature shows some significant instances in Fogazzaro’s The Woman and D’Annunzio’s Sogno d’un Mattino di Primavera. As Lord Dunsany says of it, “Who can say of insanity,—whether it be divine or of the Pit?”