Bloomsbury Literary Studies

The Greatest Literary Moustaches!

It’s Movember and we love a good literary moustache. So much so, we’ve put together a collection of our all-time favourites! From the Walrus to the Mexican, and the Handlebar to the Horseshoe, it seems there is no end to the amount of creative facial topiary in the literary world… Something tells me Shakespeare set a trend.

Mark Twain

‘There has been nothing as good since’ said Ernest Hemingway about Mark Twain’s legendary book Huckleberry Finn. But, he could just as well have been talking about Twain’s famous moustache.

Mark Twain wasn’t without opinion when it came to facial hair, directing the following vitriol towards the beard: ‘it performs no useful function; it is a nuisance and a discomfort; all nations hate it; all nations persecute it with the razor’. Must have been why he plumped for this rather impressive looking moustache. And with matching eyebrows too.

Read our Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair guide to Mark Twain. It reveals all sorts of fantastic facts about this intriguing writer... did you know that he started smoking at 7 and often smoked 40 cigars a day? Nope, me neither. Pretty impressive shocking.

Rudyard Kipling

‘Being kissed by a man who didn’t wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt’. We couldn't agree more Rudyard Kipling.

This 'tash is so impressive that we've opted for a side portrait shot so you can really see the full depth of this impressive literary bush. Look out for our new book on Rudyard Kipling and Japan - no other leading English literary figure of his day spent so long in that country or wrote so fully about it.

George Orwell

George Orwell said, in his famous 6 Rules for Writing, ‘Never use a long word where a short one will do’. It would seem he had the same approach to moustaches. I’m calling this one... modest yet confident.

George Orwell also wrote an essay in the Evening Standard in 1946 about his rules for drinking tea. Whilst not related in any way to moustaches, I still think it deserves a special mention. Orwell employed the essay as a tool to entertain, illuminate and provoke readers as well as help him fashion his distinctive 'literary' voice. George Orwell the Essayist by Peter Marks gives these compelling pieces the critical attention they merit.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What can we say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s moustache? It’s a wonder he had any time to write considering the hours he must have put in taming and trimming this sublime example of facial topiary.  I know what you must be thinking, ‘I WISH I could get my hands on some of his moustache trimmings’. Well, I’m afraid the opportunity has been and passed, with one moustache & ACD fan purchasing his moustache trimmings. They came neatly packaged up in the original envelope they were kept in for so many years with the following inscription: ‘My beloved moustache hairs’. I'm sure the new owner feels the same.

Walt Whitman

Is it a moustache or a beard? Are there side-burns in there? We can't quite figure it out. And that's what makes Walt Whitman's contributions to facial topiary so impressive.

In Whitman’s Queer Children, Catherine Davies looks at 'the anxious relationship between the homosexual and his American home'  in the work of four gay twentieth-century poets - Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill and John Ashbery. Dwelling on the nurturing adaptable heritage of Walt Whitman, she considers Whitman’s renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche sports the unique looking walrus-handlebar moustache. Otherwise known as the moustache that launched a thousand philosophical arguments (and its own facebook page). 

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche posits the Übermensch as a goal that humanity can set for itself. Did he set this goal for his own facial hair? There is one thing we can be sure of – he set the philosophical world alight with this revolutionary 'tash.

Still a bit confused? Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed will tell you everything you need to know.

Edgar Allen Poe

It's fair to say that EAP employed his moustache in a rather gothic manner. An article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1878 reveals that 'He wore a dark mustache, scrupulously kept, but not entirely concealing a slightly contracted expression of the mouth and an occasional twitching of the upper lip, resembling a sneer. This sneer, indeed, was easily excited — a motion of the lip, scarcely perceptible, and yet intensely expressive. There was in it nothing of ill-nature, but much of sarcasm … '

So impressive was his moustache that is spawned this imaginative looking t-shirt. If anyone could let me know where to buy it, I’d really appreciate it.

An inescapable black pit, an innocent buried alive, and the deranged hallucinations of a murderer all haunt Tales of Mystery and Imagination - a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's most celebrated chilling stories.

Ernest Hemingway

All hail Ernest Hemingway's contribution to the moustache world! We know that he loved hunting in Africa, bullfighting in Spain, deep-sea fishing in Florida and this is the perfect moustache to match. Hemingway married four times, often falling for one woman while still married to another. With this dashing moustache I think we can see why he was so irresistible to women.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez once characterised common European perceptions of Latin America as ‘a man with a moustache and a guitar and a revolver’. He might have kept the moustache, but he certainly broke other pre-existing stereotypes by putting Latin American writing on the literary map.

If a moustache could ever be described as ‘friendly’ then this is certainly it. You can find out more about this compelling man by reading our biography by Gerald Martin and literary guide to Love in the Time of Cholera by Tom Fahy.

Stefan Zweig

Born in Vienna in 1881, Stefan Zweig was one of the most respected authors of his time. And not just for his epic looking moustache. The Economist hailed him as a 'Secret Superstar' and the New Yorker called him an 'Escape Artist' earlier this year.

Foreseeing Nazi Germany's domination of Europe, Zweig and his wife left Austria in 1933. Despairing at Europe's future and feeling increasingly isolated, they committed suicide together in 1942. As Zweig's correspondence all but ceased with the outbreak of World War II, little is known about his final years. Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters, edited by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall, reproduces personal letters written by the couple during this time and creates a fascinating picture of the last years of this famed author, cast adrift by the rise of Nazism and enforced exile.

Joseph Conrad

Some critics have commented that Joseph Conrad was known for his pessimistic writing style and stark presentation of the human condition. I don’t think he helped matters with this harsh looking moustache. There is one thing that the critics certainly agree upon - Heart of Darkness is a landmark text of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day. We certainly love it. One of our latest books, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Contemporary Thought by Nidesh Lawtoo brings this book into philosophical dialogue and includes the first publication in English of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad's novel, one of the best ever written'.

That's it for our literary moustache round up! Of course we couldn't include everyone - Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Gustave Flaubert... the list could go on and on. It would also be impossible to choose a favourite. But we want to hear from you -  who would get your vote for the most impressive literary moustache? Who can't you believe that we have left out? Is there any obscure Russian writer with a more impressive offering than Nietzsche (probably)?  Let us know so we can add it to our literary moustache hall of fame.

In the meantime, good luck to anyone still plugging away at their Movember efforts. The crowd above would be very proud.

Jenny Tighe

Dracula in Criticism

Dracula has attracted the attention of a remarkable breadth of critical and theoretical approaches over the past 50 years. These range from the most orthodox of 1970s Freudian interpretations to the acerbic historicist rejections of psychoanalysis characteristic of the 1990s, and encompass the intellectual shifts that have blurred the boundaries between feminism and gender studies, and between literary criticism and cultural studies. As a practice, Dracula criticism is intensely self-referential. It is arguably as preoccupied with earlier critical commentary upon the novel as it is with the actual content of Dracula itself. There is no linear pattern of evolution or development in criticism of Stoker’s novel, where, for example, cultural materialism might be seen to succeed psychoanalysis, or feminism to yield to a broader approach through gender studies. Like the vampire, Dracula criticism defies time and chronology: it is simultaneously anachronistic and contemporary, in the sense that new interpretations of Stoker’s novel tend to explicitly parallel, supplement or commentate upon their predecessors while never enforcing a satisfactory closure upon the influence of those earlier critics.

As evidence for this, one need only consider two statements made almost 40 years apart, by Maurice Richardson in ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’ (1959) and Robert Mighall in ‘Sex, History and the Vampire’ (1998), respectively. Writing at the very beginning of Dracula criticism, Richardson contends that the novel must be read ‘From a Freudian standpoint’ because ‘from no other does the story make any sense’. The vampire, and thus the novel, in other words, represent nothing more than the coded expression of a repressed, unspeakable sexuality. Mighall, no doubt mindful of rhetorical closures such as this, is fully prepared to concede that ‘Modern criticism’ insists upon the presence of ‘some “deeper” sexual secret’ behind the ‘supernatural phenomena’ of Dracula. That ‘“deeper” sexual secret’, though, is for Mighall not Victorian but wholly twentieth century: the preoccupations of post-Freudian criticism, in other words, are being read in the place of anything that the vampire might have meant to a Victorian reader. Perversely, while it seeks to dispel the currency of psychoanalytical or sexual interpretations of Dracula, Mighall’s own rhetoric perpetuates their influence. Simply by naming critics committed to exposing the alleged, coded sexuality vested in the Count, Mighall ironically lends them a semblance of authority, intruding their supposedly anachronistic presence into his critical present, and perpetuating their place in the canon of Dracula criticism. Arguably, a reader in the twenty-first century is as likely to find Richardson and his psychoanalytical successors within a recent critical study of Dracula as he or she is to encounter Mighall and his contemporaries.

The enduring intensity of this critical cross-referencing is largely a consequence of the manner in which the early criticism of Dracula deployed the novel’s incidents and components. More recent critics are for the most part careful to locate Dracula within historical, cultural, generic or documented biographical contexts. The earliest critics of the novel, however, frequently took its incidents and perceived symbolism almost in isolation, reading them often simplistically as, for the most part, timeless, self-sufficient and obvious signifiers of a repressed sexuality. The result was an undue reliance not merely upon sexuality as the apparent ‘key’ to Dracula, but also a critical concentration upon a relatively limited number of evocative scenes within the novel. These scenes – and, often, the sexual interpretations and the critics first associated with them – have subsequently come to be deployed as evidence even where sexuality is not the critical focus.

To recall but one, very obvious, example, the evocative substance that is blood in Dracula has attracted a phenomenal range of symbolic interpretations. Many of these, of course, are avowedly sexual. Maurice Richardson, for example, is an orthodox Freudian in his suggestion that blood is an unconscious symbolic substitute for semen in Dracula, where Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle’s suggestion, in The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978), that the fluid subliminally recalls menstrual discharge may be seen as a logical development from the phallocentrism of early psychoanalysis. The influence of Richardson is, not surprisingly, evident in C. F. Bentley’s influential 1972 study ‘The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, even though that work’s theoretical orientation veers away from the psychoanalytical dogmatism of ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’. However, even where the literal – rather than symbolic – implications of blood form the focus of analysis, sexual symbolism and critics of sexuality appear to be necessarily invoked as a reference point. In a 1989 article otherwise concerned with the physiological processes of blood transfusion, for example, David Hume Flood seems compelled to acknowledge Bentley. Again, in Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (2000), William Hughes acknowledges the sexual interpretations advanced by several other critics in a reading of how blood may function as a signifier of linage, family and race. Neither of these works is preoccupied with sexuality. Thus, as Christopher Craft observes, ‘Modern critical accounts of Dracula . . . almost universally agree that vampirism both expresses and distorts an originally sexual energy’, so that, in the words of Jennifer Wicke, ‘It is not possible to write about Dracula without raising the sexual issue.’

All of these critical studies, to a greater or lesser degree, deploy a common range of incidents as evidence, as indeed do many others less concerned with the symbolics of blood. There is a tendency in Dracula criticism, in other words, to reinterpret the same material from the novel rather than to develop new focuses for criticism – and Dracula criticism will be richer when critics consider at length and without prejudice the minor characters and less-explored scenarios of Stoker’s work. For the moment, the only satisfactory way to adequately demonstrate the variety and breadth of critical commentary upon Dracula is to take the scenes customarily regarded as being central to criticism and view them in all their critical plurality. These central scenes are, in order of their appearance in the novel: the depiction of face of Count Dracula, as observed by Jonathan Harker (chapter 2); the attempted ‘seduction’ of Harker by the three female vampires (chapter 3); the staking and ‘death’ of Lucy Westenra (chapter 16); the Count’s attack upon Mina Harker (chapter 21); and – more disparate, in that it is scattered across the extent of the novel – the cohesion of the coalition against Count Dracula. Though often cited and quoted, these scenes do not exist in isolation. Rather, in criticism they have become the central reference points for other events intimately related to their implications, perceived symbolism and narrative consequences. Thus, Jonathan Harker’s account of Count Dracula’s face is intimate to Mina Harker’s ‘scientific’ reading of the vampire’s character in chapter 25, just as Lucy’s trance existence, before and after her conversion to vampirism, is relevant to the Count’s attack upon Mina. These four specific scenes, and the concept of the alliance against the vampire, are, as it were, the staples of Dracula’s critical repertoire – and the pre-existing foundations upon which new interpretations have so often been raised.

- The extract above was taken from our Reader's Guide to Bram Stoker's Dracula by William Hughes. As it's Bram Stoker's 165th birthday today we've made the entire book available to read online (for free) for one day only! You can read it by clicking on this link. We are also going to be giving away a copy via our twitter account - follow us to take part.

Jenny Tighe

Zombie London in 28 Days Later

Happy Halloween! Since Monday we have been posting up various bits and pieces from some of our spookiest books including Ian Rankin and Val McDermid talking about crime writing, Angela Carter's Gothic Bride, the history of Halloween fancy dress and Clive Bloom on that most enduring gothic monster, the Vampire. Today we bring you an extract from our London Gothic book, in which the authors talk about the literary depiction of Zombie London in 28 Days Later as well as some other key literary works....

A patient awakes, naked, in an empty hospital twenty-eight days after a deadly virus has been released from a medical test facility. The city outside is also deserted. An old newspaper headline in close-up tells of the city’s evacuation. He wanders, a solitary figure amid familiar London sights: the Houses of Parliament, and Whitehall; Horseguards, Horseguards Parade, and the Guards Memorial; Pall Mall and the Mall; Mansion House, the City and Piccadilly with its statue of Eros; St Paul’s and the London Eye. The journey offers a tour of historical and heritage locations, places of tourism and entertainment, centres of government and commercial power, and sites of regal and martial tradition.

The opening scenes of 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) replay fictional (literary-cinematic) apocalyptic scenarios of modern urban devastation. Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Richard Jeffries laid out a pattern of modern urban apocalypse subsequently developed in genre fictions and further elaborated on film. The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona, 1964), with its ‘vampires’ (that move like zombies), is set in an evacuated modern Rome. The same story (Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend) becomes The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971), with a lonely survivor bunkered in a Los Angeles house and harassed by radioactive mutants and, ultimately, I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007) where New York hosts a fast-moving swarm of zombie-vamps. 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007) acknowledge their trash zombie horror apocalyptic forebears: Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), with its besieged farmhouse; Dawn of the Dead (1978), with its consumerism; Day of the Dead (1985), with its military presence; Land of the Dead (2005) with its corporate tower. The virus theme, too, comes from the TV series Survivors (BBC, 1975–1977), and Resident Evil’s (Paul Anderson, 2002) genetic experimentation and fast-moving zombie-mutants. The reflexive awareness of 28 Days Later’s citations of its zombie horror apocalypse precursors are given a wider frame of reference in its very striking and recognisably unfamiliar opening scenes.

Prominent amongst the shots of London is a sequence in which the wandering survivor crosses a rubbish-strewn Westminster Bridge. The camera pans across the river to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament warmly illuminated against a gentle sky as the city sun sets. More than a provision of a distinctive location scene for a global cinema audience, crossing the bridge in an empty city recalls Wordsworth’s sonnet, ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’, in which London is majestic and beautiful in the morning sun, sublimely touching the Romantic (urban) wanderer’s soul with its stillness, its absence of crowds, smoke and noise. At this moment the city becomes admissible to nature, rather than at odds with its rhythms. As a singular ‘mighty heart’ lying still, the urban body is unusually peaceful and unified, thereby containable in a single imaginative vision. The mighty heart, however, suggests another London, a sleeping giant ready to awake and beat faster. The other city is more apparent in Wordsworth’s poetry. In The Prelude, London is reduced to the chaos of Bartholomew Fair, a ‘city with a City’ that exceeds and threatens Romantic visionary unity, as a messy multiplicity of disorganized sights, sounds, sensations, not properly humane or natural, a ‘parliament of monsters’ (Hertz 77–80). Overwhelming individual consciousness with an excess of spectacle, the city is seen as a place of subjective and physical otherness in which sense and self-assurance loses itself to the pressures of other egos: ‘the sublime renewal of our consciousness and desire for self-presence’ both ‘frees us’ and returns us to a ‘world of circumstances beyond our control’ (Ferguson 7). The price, it seems, paid by Romantic consciousness to overcome the sublime threat of the monstrous urban spectacle is utter devastation, a destruction and evacuation of all other bodies, signs, and symbols pressing upon and competing with a singular poetic vision. It is an apocalyptic tendency played out in various Romantic guises, Byron’s ‘Darkness’ notably. For Percy Shelley, in ‘Peter Bell III’, ‘hell is a city like London’, a ‘crepuscular demi-world’ of commerce and politics in which ruination forms the prelude for nature to reclaim urban space (Wolfreys 77–79). For Mary Shelley in The Last Man, the scale of devastation is global and destructive: a worldwide plague – a monstrous force of nature – wipes out humanity and its centres of civilization (London, Paris, Rome) until ‘everything was desert’ (Last Man 242).

28 Days Later’s opening prepares the film’s Romantic trajectory, skipping over the more prevalent features of the darkly modern city as charted by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Poe’s story, ‘The Man of the Crowd’, provides one of the key aesthetic figures of modernity, and outlines another London, frightening, dark and ruined, and associated with crime and debauchery: the other side of prosperous Victorian modernity. Poe’s crowd is multiple, but its effects draw out a sense of a danger and contagion, a place of poverty and crime in which the city itself ‘becomes almost a drunken mob’ (Highmore 30). The cinematic tradition in which the film locates itself, however, is very much bound up with modernity. Zombies, despite their colonial origins, are figures of industrial production and mechanical reproduction. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) provides a stark and Gothicized vision of urban life and labour in its shots of the city, of the slow-moving and homogeneous mass of workers marched to and from their dark, subterranean habitations, reduced to a state of automation, ‘depersonalized, faceless, dressed identically’ (Tulloch 41). The ‘Gothic modernism’ of Metropolis stresses the darkness of factory labour and urban society, and links it to monstrous and oppressive technological innovations (the scientist Rotwang and the robot double, Maria) which turn workers into a mass of ‘dehumanized mechanical actions’ (Gunning 55).

28 Days Later’s allusions acknowledge and transform the cinematic history of zombification and urban modernity. From the start, and the evacuation of the city, the film plots a Romantic arc to the Lake District. The emptying of London and of the institutions of urban modernity, serves as the basis for imagining the reconstitution of human, even humane, social relations based on assured individuality in the context of an imaginary family unity and a post-Blairite masculinity. The modern city is double, a dupli-city, both legible and illegible and, textual and more than readable like the modern Romantic apocalypse, calling for and confounding the limits of representation.

- the extract above is taken from London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination, edited by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard. You can read the whole chapter, for free, online by clicking here.

Jenny Tighe

“Isn’t it Every Girl’s Dream to be Married in White?” - Angela Carter’s Gothic Bride

Angela Carter made her opinion of the traditional white wedding dress quite clear in an essay published in 1967, ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style’, in which she theorizes fashion as a complex sign system. She argues that while we may ‘think our dress expresses ourselves . . . in fact it expresses our environment . . . almost at a subliminal, emotionally charged, instinctual, non-intellectual level’. Thus, the romantic glamour surrounding the ‘tulle and taffeta bride in her crackling virginal carapace, clasping numinous lilies’ only disguises her real function, which is as ‘the supreme icon of woman as a sexual thing and nothing else whatever’. It was a view she enlarged upon in an interview she gave in 1977, where she opined that ‘A wedding dress is like a gift -wrapped girl. It’s as though the wearer is only existing in transition. It’s the greatest day of her life, and she’s gift -wrapped for it, and she’s passing from her father to her husband, and only at the moment of passage is she allowed any being at all, in this completely artificial manner.’

Carter went on to trace back the prevalence of wedding dresses in her fiction to a fascination with the figure of the jilted bride Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, whom she summarizes as an ‘awful image of the condition of women’.  Deserted by her prospective husband at the altar, Miss Havisham refuses to adopt any alternative identity other than that of a bride, freezing both time and herself at the moment of her abortive marriage. Angela Carter’s reference to such a figure is meaningful within any discussion of her portrayal of the wedding dress in her fiction, since it gives us the key to understanding the way in which it works as a specifically Gothic trope.

The first notable appearance of a wedding dress in Carter’s writing is in her 1967 novel The Magic Toyshop. Its main protagonist, Melanie, is a fifteen year old girl who, in the midst of puberty, is just beginning to see herself as a potentially desirable sexual object, future bride to ‘a phantom bridegroom’. She and her siblings are left at home for the summer while her father, who is a successful writer, goes on a lecture tour to the United States and takes her mother with him. In their absence, Melanie explores their bedroom and pores over her parents’ wedding photograph, fascinated by the elaborate nature of the display. Full of burgeoning sexual curiosity as she is, Melanie is not wholly seduced by superficial appearances. In fact, caught up as she is in a pubescent preoccupation with sexuality, she is only too well aware of the nature of the contract that is being celebrated. She reflects, while engaged in a close examination of the wedding dress, that ‘It seemed a strange way to dress up just in order to lose your virginity’.

Melanie comes very close here to identifying a paradox central to any reading of the wedding dress as Gothic. Insofar as the white dress signifies the sexual purity of the bride, it acquires meaning only in the context of its imminent defilement, thus becoming emblematic of endings rather than beginnings:

“Symbolic and virtuous white. White satin shows every mark, white tulle crumples at the touch of a finger, white roses shower petals at a breath. Virtue is fragile. It was a marvellous wedding dress. Did she, Melanie wondered for a moment, wear it on the wedding night?”

Viewed from this perspective, the wedding dress carries strong intimations of mortality, which are foregrounded by the wedding photograph, which, in its very attempt to freeze-frame ‘this fragment of her mother’s happy time’, can only capture it in the act of its passing away. The photograph may hint at immortality, but it is actually a coffin containing a corpse preserved for permanent display, an analogy Carter drives home with brutal, forensic directness: ‘Her smiling and youthful mother was as if stabbed through the middle by the camera and caught forever, under glass, like a butterfly in an exhibition case’.

The association between death and display – seductive veiling and sinister shrouding – is preserved in the transition from the photographic image to the real thing. Melanie feels ‘wicked, like a grave-robber’ for disinterring her mother’s bridal outfit from the trunk in which it has been carefully preserved. When she lifts the creaking lid, it is as if she has disturbed a phantom when a ‘great deal of loose tissue paper packed in the top rose up . . . and hovered a few inches in the air, momentarily levitated, an emanation’. And the mass of fabric contained in this coffin-like space possesses sinister characteristics too – the extravagant veil appears bent on stifling Melanie, ‘blinding her eyes and filling her nostrils’, and when she puts on the dress ‘It slithered over her, cold as a slow hosing with ice-water’.

Carter’s use of the wedding dress trope reaches the height of audacity in her 1977 novel The Passion of New Eve. Zero performs a savagely satirical marriage ceremony uniting Eve and Tristessa, in which Eve (a woman who was once a man) is the groom and Tristessa (a man who wishes with all his heart he were a woman) the bride. In spite of the fact that this is the most brutal of shotgun marriages, Tristessa is nevertheless seduced by the image of femininity he assumes in his role as bride – for after all, his ultimate ambition is to fulfil all the criteria required of the ‘perfect’ woman:

“He leaned forward and scrutinized the romantic apparition in the mirror with eyes filled with an obscure distress and also a luminous pride.

‘Isn’t it every girl’s dream to be married in white?’ the virgin bride demanded rhetorically of the company in her heroic irony.”

Clearly, we are not meant to agree with Tristessa here: marriage is not every girl’s dream, nor, more importantly, can it be his. Not only does Eve recall Tristessa’s role as Catherine in Wuthering Heights, but also an unnamed film in which Tristessa plays the part of a nurse in a leper colony who becomes infected herself. Consequently, ‘the missionary she loved . . . married her as soon as it was too late. She wore a veil thick enough to hide the ravages of the disease at the ceremony, but they could not touch, of course. So she died and he was sorry'. As in The Magic Toyshop and Heroes and Villains, the body of the bride is also the body of a corpse: the wedding dress is worn both at the altar and in the coffin. What the veil – and the wedding dress – disguise is a Gothic horror: not the virginal modesty of the blushing bride, but the leprous signs of infection, or the face of madness and delusion.

Carter’s manipulation of the trope of veiling is very important in her literature. Although veiling hints at the concept of depth – at something ‘underneath’ – Carter’s wedding dresses accumulate their meanings on the surface, thus making subjectivity itself, in the words of Judith Halberstam, ‘a surface effect’. In Carter’s fiction, therefore, every veiling is a Gothic act in that it is also simultaneously an enshrouding, signalling a terrifying descent into ‘nothingness’ for the female subject. Miss Havisham, whose life effectively comes to an end at the moment she dons her wedding dress, is indeed – to reiterate Carter’s words – ‘an awful image of the condition of women’, because she suggests that, for women for whom marriage is the ultimate life ambition, the wedding dress really is the garment in which they will both live and die.

- the above edited extract is taken from Angela Carter: New Critical Readings edited by Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips. You can find out more about this book by visiting our website! Our Bloomsbury friends in the trade division publish the excellent A Card from Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp (Angela Carter's literary executor) - through the medium of her postcards, Susannah evokes Carter's anarchic intelligence, fierce politics, the richness of her language.. her fact, all her brilliance and contribution to the literary world.

Read our other Halloween inspired blog posts from yesterday: we talk about one of the most enduring gothic figures: the Vampire, and Ian Rankin discusses how he became a crime writer.

Jenny Tighe

The Vampire: the most enduring of all gothic monsters

Our second Halloween inspired blog post of the day comes from Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present by Clive Bloom. Taking you on a journey of gothic awakening, Clive Bloom leads the reader through every aspect of this horror genre – from the haunted landscapes of the Romantics through to Frankenstein and Dracula, and the drug-induced monsters of the mind to the very different worlds of Hannibal Lecter, Goth culture and Twilight. Below he looks at that classic gothic figure: the vampire. From its literary depiction, through to its place in Goth culture and beyond.

'It is the vampire who has proved the most enduring of all gothic monsters mutating and developing with each generation of writers. The change was started by Anne Rice who in the gay vampire Lestat not only created a back story for vampirism which proved highly effective and extremely contagious, but also set the narrative in the New World, and in doing so rewrote the vampire myth in terms of American modernity and cultural hegemony.

Since 2000, there has been a virtual deluge of vampire-inspired novels. This has been particularly noticeable in the area of women's romance, especially in the Love Spell Book Club which promotes writers such as Lynsay Sands, C. J. Barry, Colleen Thompson (the slyly named), Nina Bangs, Kate MacAlister and Marjorie Liu, 'bringing a little magic' in the life of their readers. The love bites hardly stop there and other publishers such as Piatkus are in on the act with their own writers such as Maryjanice Davidson...

In the twenty-first century, the Gothic has become a ubiquitous and invasive generic form, both parasitic and reinvigorating. Take for instance the 2009 bestseller, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which combines violent horror and Regency gentility in a 'mashup' or 'recombination' spoof of both genres. The books that have spanned juvenile and adult reading, however, are those that have reinvented the figure of the vampire, now, by far, the major Gothic character. Indeed, vampires and Gothic settings dominate a large section of the adult and predominantly female romance market where they are figures of both male domination and of female empowerment. Vampires seem to have a versatility other monsters do not have and their protean nature allows them to appear in bars and nightclubs as well as high schools. No longer is the vampire confined to novels as a character, rather now they act as a type of narrative trope, differing as to the fictional context within which that trope is used.

How could we talk about vampires and not mention THE series that has bridged the gap between juvenile and adult reading and between the Gothic and the Romance, creating fictional scenarios that appeal as much to young adult women as to teenage girls. The 'Twilight' series which began with the publication of Twilight on 5 October 2005 by author Stephenie Meyer tells the story of teenager Isabella 'Bella' Swan who falls for the charms of Edward Cullen, a vampire. The tale mixes fantasies of high-school adventure, gang culture, teenage eroticism and ideas of the superhero and is, perhaps, a fitting series for post-feminist womanhood who still crave heterosexual desire and danger, the theme of blood being a simple metaphor for sublimated adolescent male lust and budding female sexuality. The world of the vampire has finally caught up with that of Romeo and Juliet. Vampires are now dash and cool.

Alongside the reinvention of European gothicism by American authors, there is also the creation of new gothic spaces that are indigenously American. This trend had begun with Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ambrose Bierce, but it has taken root not in the 'crumbling' spaces of New England, but rather in the swamps or backwoods shacks of the south or the Texas/Mexico border, a mixture of latter-day cowboy weirdness, drug-store banality and small-town isolation. In recent years this has come to surpass all other forms of Hollywood horror with teenagers being regularly butchered on lonely back roads, in teen camp or on hikes in the woods and its literary importance may be seen in the critical praise heaped upon Cormac McCarthy, whose pioneering style and offbeat tales of degenerate life styles have caught the imagination of cultured readers who would not normally bother with horror titles.

“Here the walls with their soft looking convolutions, slavered over as they were with wet and blood red mud, had an organic look to them, like the innards of some great beast. Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.” Child of God

In the twenty-first century, it is the world of computer gaming that has most successfully revived the landscape of the Universal films and the vampire myth. Games such as Resident Evil, Diablo, Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness and Doom allow players the excitement of participating in worlds full of demons and vampires amid ruins and gothic chaos. So vivid can these games become that some of their creators try to build in the sort of mental confusion in their players that might be expected in real life encounters with monsters in order to enhance the imaginative and dream-like quality of play.

And conviviality is what the players of Live Action Role Play (LARP) are seeking when they put on the costume and assume the persona of their favourite character of the night. LARPing was born out of the role playing games and Dungeons and Dragons encounters of the 1980s and consists of collective improvisational theatre played out by those who take their narrative themes from gothic fiction or Tolkienesque fantasy. Narratives often represent the battles about authority and legitimacy and have recently become standardized with rules of action provided by the game Vampires: The Masquerade or White Wolf in which 'clans' of vampires 'descended' from the biblical Cain, battle for supremacy. It is an escape into fiction and play rather than an escape from reality.

Yet there are those who seek to go farther into their fantasy world and live as the characters that they have created. The craze for living as a vampire which is now popular across the globe is one such instance of the gothic invading reality. Nevertheless, many vampire life stylists consider themselves quite different from current goth culture. Watching vampire movies, dressing in vampire outfits, finding like-minded friends is what appeals to living vampires: it's all there - alluring, powerful and seductive. That's what being a vampire is all about'

Gothic Histories: The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present by Clive Bloom is available to buy (and quite irresistible I think with that eerie cover). Visit our website for more details.

Jenny Tighe