Fabric of Folklore
Folktales can be strange, mystical, macabre and intriguing. Join us as we explore the stories, culture and people behind the folklore. We go beyond retelling the legends, myths and fairy tales of old. We look at the story behind the lore, behind the songs and traditions to understand more about what they mean, and their importance. These stories, many originating as oral histories, inform us of what it means to be human; what it means to be an integral part of this Earth. Stories of magic and wonder bind us. They connect us through invisible strands, like the gossamer fibers of a spiders web. Folktales have the power to demonstrate how, although we live in drastically different locals, our hearts and minds beat as one human race. We are weaving the fabrics of our past and present stories, to help us better understand ourselves and to awaken us to a more compassionate and caring world community. As we explore the meaning of existence through folklore we hope to inspire future generations to lead with love and understanding.
Fabric of Folklore
Ep 64: Gothic Roots: Exploring the Origins of Dark Literature with Gothic Librarian Julia O'Connell
What works come to mind when you think of Gothic literature? This dark and macabre genre features many authors who might surprise you, including Shakespeare. In episode 64, Julia O'Connell, author of the Gothic Library blog, joins us to discuss the roots of Gothic literature and its evolution into various genres.
We explore defining characteristics, its origins, and influential works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula. The conversation delves into significant Gothic tropes, including the monstrous man and the vulnerable woman. Additionally, we examine folk horror and weird fiction through the lens of authors like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, as well as the contributions of overlooked women authors in the field. It's a fascinating and entertaining listen that you won't want to miss!
Links:
Twitter
The Gothic Library Blog
#AScareADay challenge
Backlog of video lectures hosted by Romancing the Gothic, which you can find here (There's quite a few involving folklore!)
Handheld Press Scroll to the bottom, you'll find a list of the "Ten Weirds to rule them all"--the 10 anthologies of weird fiction they've published.
The first Gothic novel: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
Librivox (website/app for free public domain audiobooks):
Timeline
📚 Defining Gothic Literature (09:32 - 20:08)
Gothic literature characteristics ;Common tropes: ; Origins: Late 18th century, reaction against Enlightenment; Horace Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto' (1764) considered first Gothic novel;
🏰 Gothic Elements and Cultural Context (20:09 - 31:21)
Gothic literature coincides with French Revolution, Industrial Revolution; Gothic architecture influences literature (e.g., crumbling abbeys as settings); Goth subculture connection
👻 Gothic Tropes and Folklore (31:22 - 42:55)
Bluebeard folktale influential in Gothic literature; Jane Eyre and Rebecca as examples of Bluebeard influence;
🌿 Folk Horror and Modern Gothic (42:55 - 51:40)
Folk horror defined as horror drawing on regional folklore, folk religion, customs;
🌀 Weird Fiction (51:41 - 01:01:38)
Subgenre of speculative fiction, often blending horror and science fiction; Flourished in late 1800s to mid-1900s; H.P. Lovecraft
📖 Short Stories and New Weird (01:01:38 - 01:10:46)
Importance of short stories in Gothic and weird fiction; New Weird: bringing weird fiction into 21st century
🕯️ Exploring Gothic and Weird Fiction (01:10:46 - 01:22:42)
Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to weird fiction;
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Fabric of Folklore website
Vanessa Rogers: 00:00
Welcome, welcome folksy folks. Welcome to Fabric of Folklore. I am Vanessa White Rogers, your hostess and this is the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. This is a show about exploring our stories, our how humans relate to one another through their art and through their traditions. I have recently read several novels recently that had mushrooms at their core and it made me really curious about mushrooms and folklore. And so I am providing one fun mushroom folklore fact today. Due to their seemingly magical overnight growth, it has been believed by various cultures around the world that fungi are imbued with magical and mythical properties. It was often believed that circles of mushrooms were actually poor portals to fairy realms and people were warned not to step inside so as not to be stuck in another world or become invisible to the human world. And although this is a really fun tidbit to share at your next book club or your next dinner party, it's also a doorway to understanding stories that have been passed on through the generations. And when we start looking deeper into these tales, we can find their significance. And that really is what is at the heart of this show. So if you are in, if this is a type of show that you would like to follow, make sure you hit that subscribe button so you get notifications every week when the podcast airs, whether you're watching on YouTube or you're listening on your favorite podcasting platform such as Spotify or Apple or iHeartRadio, whatever it is that you listen to your podcasts on so that you get those notifications. We have a fantastic spot spooky October show for you today. Julia O'Connell is the author of the popular blog Gothic Library. It's a gothic book blog catering to all dark minded readers looking to indulge their macabre imagination. She is a bibliophile and lover of literature. She is also a proud member of the Gothic subculture for many years now. Julia's journey into the dark side of literature began in the fifth grade when she picked up her very first vampire novel. We'll be talking today about Gothic literature, its roots, the folklore featured within it, as well as the new genres such as folk horror and weird fiction, which includes authors such as Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe that are considered to have spawned from this movement. So thanks so much for joining us, Julia.
Julia O'Connell: 02:34
You're very welcome. I'm happy to be here and I love your little opening tidbit. I'm a huge fan of Sporer, as some people are beginning to refer to mushroom horror as.
Vanessa Rogers: 02:45
Oh, that's funny because I it is showing up a lot more.
Julia O'Connell: 02:51
But it goes back. I found a story from the early 20th century, I think, or the turn of the 20th century that has some spooky mushrooms. So there's a long tradition to mushroom horror.
Vanessa Rogers: 03:03
Mushrooms are just so weird. You know, they. You think we think of them in terms of, like, plants, but they're not plants. They are their own. They're. They're their own kingdom. Right. And they, they're a huge kingdom, and they're kind of like in between the plants and the human world. And my husband is really into mushrooms, and he said that genetically we're most more closely related to mushrooms than to anything else or, like our DNA or something. I was. It just. They're just so weird and we know so little about them. I feel like. So it seems like a perfect place to. To start a novel.
Julia O'Connell: 03:39
And we'll definitely get into the weird tonight in our discussion.
Vanessa Rogers: 03:42
Absolutely. So tell us a little bit about your journey into how you started writing your Gothic library blog.
Julia O'Connell: 03:51
Yeah, I started this blog, wow. Like, over nine years ago in 2015. And I was posting once a week for at least eight years of that. I'm now posting every other week, but I've kept it up continuously posting on a schedule for nine and a half years. I started it the summer after I graduated college. And part of that was I really wanted to break into the publishing industry. So I tried to find a way to keep on top of what books were coming out and get my name out there and have an excuse to show up to book launch parties and talk to authors and talk to people in the industry. So that's part of why I decided to do a book blog. But I chose Gothic literature because I was also kind of missing that academic atmosphere of college and doing deep textual analysis and reading classic literature. So I wanted to kind of bridge those two areas. Both my budding career in the modern publishing industry. And, you know, I was an English major in college and have that love for older literature and especially Victorian and Gothic literature. And when I first started, I didn't know a lot about the Gothic. I knew that I loved Edgar Allan Poe and Dracula and Frankenstein and had read a few of the big classics in school. But I kind of went on a journey of learning as I went. And when I decided to name my blog the Gothic Library, I was like, okay, I guess I should really buckle down and figure out what the Gothic means and what I'm talking about here. And the blog is a balance. I kind of. Sometimes I post book reviews of a book that recently came out. And sometimes I post, you know, a deep dive into a trope or element of Gothic literature. And usually in those posts, I try to bridge the two. So if I'm reviewing a more recent book, I might talk about what tropes it uses or what older works it's referencing or building off of and how it's situated in the Gothic tradition.
Vanessa Rogers: 06:01
Now, when you say academia, like, you really enjoy that academic feel. Is that because a lot of Gothic books are of classic nature, or what do you mean by that?
Julia O'Connell: 06:13
Yeah, you know, the Gothic literary genre started in the late 18th century, so part of it is reading older works, and you kind of need to have a little bit more of an academic approach to them, to understand them in their historical context, but also just approaching any work with that deeper level of textual analysis.
Vanessa Rogers: 06:40
Yeah. So what do you think captivates you and other audiences specifically about the Gothic literature? Like, why are people drawn to it?
Julia O'Connell: 06:54
Yeah, I mean, there's so many reasons. And also, it's such a large umbrella that, you know, we can mean a bunch of different things by the Gothic as we'll get into. Some of it is cathartic in the way that horror is often cathartic. You get to experience extreme emotions in the safe situation of reading a book where it can't hurt you. The Gothic also is, you know, all literature does this to an extent, but it's really heightened in the Gothic as a way of exploring societal anxieties. And so you'll see that come up. I mean, you can often look at any sort of monster literature as a representation of some particular thing that society was scared of at the time. So that's interesting, both in the catharsis sense and also as a way as a lens to look at social change and social anxiety and what humans are afraid of. So I think it's also, you know, it's a way to look at yourself. It's a way to look at the larger society. And it's also just a way to have fun and go on a little roller coaster of extreme emotion and let go and dive into the silly, the ridiculous. The, you know, melodramatic, I would say, is definitely a big part of the Gothic.
Vanessa Rogers: 08:22
Mm. Yeah. Which I think is why I enjoy it so much. I find that I really like Gothic literature, and Jane Eyre is one of my. We're going to be talking about that later on, but when I. When you were sending me your list of things that we could talk about and you mentioned Jane Eyre, I had never considered Jane Eyre as being a part of the gothic literature movement at all. But that was one of my first favorite books that I ever just like, deeply loved. So. And I have. I have recently started to pick up a few more gothic books. One of the ones that I read with my book club was Mexican Gothic. And I was one of the only ones that really loved it. And I was like, really? Guys? This is so awesome. It's so atmospheric there. You know, they had their own reasons. But I was surprised that I was one of the only people who loved that one.
Julia O'Connell: 09:19
I loved Mexican Gothic. And I think it's also leading the trend that gothic and also just using the word gothic to market books is in fashion right now. So we're seeing a lot more books being actively described as gothic and knowingly engaging in gothic tropes and the gothic tradition.
Vanessa Rogers: 09:42
So do you have a first favorite that really drew you in? You said you picked up your first vampire book in fifth grade. Maybe you can tell us about that, what that one was.
Julia O'Connell: 09:52
Oh, yeah, yeah, it was. Now, the very first vampire book I picked up was Shattered Mirror by Amelia Atwater Rhodes. It was part of her Den of Shadows series in the early 2000s, and she was brilliant. She published the first of those books when she was 13 years old. So reading those as a pre teen myself, I was like, wow, she's just like me. Except that I was not writing and publishing, you know, full length vampire novels. But. And then the second vampire book I picked up about a year or two later was called Companions of the Night by Vivian Van De Valde. And it was that second book that made me realize, oh, this is a thing. And this is a thing I really like. And from that, I very intentionally went on a deep dive, reading anything and everything with vampires in it I could get my hands on, which was a lot, because that we're heading into leading up to the era of Twilight. So that was the boom of paranormal romance and vampire fiction. But I was also reading all of those from an early age. I was like, I need to know the literary context of this. So as I was reading, you know, the hot new paranormal romance that was coming out, I was like, let me also revisit the classics. So I read Anne Rice when I was definitely way too young to be reading Anne Rice. And I also picked up Dracula on my own in middle school because I just really wanted to know where all this was coming from and what these other books were drawing on.
Vanessa Rogers: 11:27
So. So, like, I read R.L. stein in middle school. Would that fall under this purview or would it be just like an offshoot for.
Julia O'Connell: 11:37
Yeah, I mean, R.L. stein is obviously horror and horror developed out of the Gothic and part of what I do on my blog. So I review books in any genre that I consider descended from the Gothic. But I will make an argument that pretty much all of popular literature and especially genre fiction is descended out of the Gothic. It's a wide net and I, you know, sometimes it's more of a stretch than others, but I can trace pretty much everything back to the gothic. And that's because Gothic literature was some of the first popular literature. You know, things that were being produced for the masses and consumed by the masses for fun. So a lot of different genres and genres you wouldn't expect draw on that and are descended from that tradition.
Vanessa Rogers: 12:32
Okay, so let's step back for a minute and try and define. I know that a lot of times on your blog you say it's a really difficult definition to hold on to, but can you define what Gothic literature looks like?
Julia O'Connell: 12:47
Yeah, yeah. So I will say, you know, it's very hard to put one sentence, say Gothic literature is. And have everything fit into that. So what I tend to use is a bundle of characteristics. So if something, you know, shares it doesn't have to have every single characteristic, but if it has a good proportion of that bundle, and that includes, for me, one of the key elements that almost every work of anything Gothic has is the concept of the past haunting the present. And that can be literal in the form of ghosts. It can be a little bit more figurative, like a past wrong that needs to be righted or a guilty conscience. But Gothic literature in general tends to be a little bit backward looking, or in some sense there's something from the past that's intruding into the present of the story. So that's often a key core concept that I look for. Other characteristics. There's the tone. There's usually a tone of dread or suspense, of fear, of heightened emotion in all sorts of extremes. There's also the setting, which is very important in Gothic literature. The setting often functions like a character itself. It feels alive, it impacts the plot of the story. And this can be. There's a few iconic settings, like, you know, an isolated old castle, an ancestral family home, the moors, or it might be somewhere exotic or something considered exotic by, you know, the British that were writing this in the early days. And you also get the setting in the sense of like the weather impact and the mood. So that's where you get like the dark, stormy night or fog or storms or something else that's the environment is definitely going to have an impact on the story. And then there's also tropes that tend to be reoccurring elements in Gothic stories. There's character tropes, there's plot tropes. So that can include things I often talk in my blog about. The kind of, like, prototypical Gothic heroine is the naive or, you know, the naive young woman. She's probably an orphan. She's been uprooted from her comfortable situation and placed into somewhere where she's vulnerable, whether she's just married a strange man or she's staying in her uncle's castle. So then you also usually have, you know, some sort of tyrannical man. Maybe he's a usurper, maybe there's a monster. And then you get other character tropes that we'll get into a bit when we talk about folklore, like the First Wife, which kind of starts with. Well, we could say it starts with Bluebeard and then Jane Eyre and then Rebecca, and comes up in a lot of different places. And then, of course, there's certain plot tropes that come up again, like a Faustian bargain, which is a bargain with the devil. There's prophecies and curses, which is another way of the past haunting the present. So maybe someone made a prophecy that, you know, the family will fall when this happens, and the story is about when that happens. So there's a few recurring things that I try to point out, and I have a whole section of blog posts on my blog where I go through specific tropes and try to trace them through different works. So I'm looking at this list of characteristics and seeing, you know, if a book has several of these. And then I'm also looking at, you know, whether it's. There's a sense of a continuous tradition. So if. If I'm looking at a modern work, if it's calling back to Jane Eyre in some way, or if it's calling back to Dracula, then I will put that in. And sometimes, you know, sometimes I don't want to firmly commit to saying this is a Gothic book, especially for moving out of the time period of the Gothic literary movement. But I will say it's in the Gothic tradition. It's continuing. There's a continuous through line from books that I could firmly say this is Gothic that has led to this other book. So that's what I use when I'm deciding, like, what books do I talk about on my blog. And then sometimes I just want to talk about a book, so I'll stretch that and make it fit.
Vanessa Rogers: 17:15
I've definitely done that on this show as well. Sometimes I just want a guest on, even though I'm going to have to make it stretch. Can you tell us where the term got coined? Because I wasn't even thinking along these lines. I was asking my husband to kind of, you know, thinking through some questions and he was like, well, does it have anything to do with Gothic literature or Goth fashion style? And that hadn't even crossed my mind that those could even intercept. But obviously that there is probably.
Julia O'Connell: 17:46
Yeah, I have a whole lecture that I have given at Goth conventions about the origins of the word Goth and how they're all connected. So I'll try to give the sparknotes version here. But obviously the Goths originally referred to the bands of Germanic tribes in late antiquity. So you have the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths that, you know, were fighting against the Roman Empire and they're best known for contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire. The Visigoths sacked Rome a couple times, but mainly in the 5th century CE that was. That was the end of the Roman Empire. And centuries later, you know, at that time, the Goths were a people group, and that's the only thing that that word meant. But when you get into the Renaissance, Renaissance Europeans were really looking back at the Roman Empire as like the height of civilization and something that they wanted to emulate. So they thought Rome was great. And so the people that destroyed Rome were bad, they were terrible, they were barbarians. So the word Gothic starts to be used as a pejorative to mean backwards and barbarian, you know, the antithesis of Roman civilization. And then you have the architecture coming into it. So they're all tied together. There was a style of architecture popular in the earlier medieval era, from about the 12th to 16th centuries. And I'm not sure if it was called anything particular at the time, but it's this very ornate style. They were. There were developments in architectural science about how to build pointed arches so that you could build even taller towers. And it was also very opulent and decorative. But when that began to fall out of fashion as neoclassical came into fashion in the late medieval, early Enlightenment era, they were looking back at this earlier style of architecture and saying, oh, that's barbaric, that's Gothic compared to our more mature and enlightened, very like clean lined neoclassical architecture. So you have that pejorative sense now being applied to this style of architecture.
Vanessa Rogers: 20:17
Where do you see this Architecture, I think, of Spain because there's a couple churches there. Right.
Julia O'Connell: 20:24
It's all throughout Europe. And a lot of it is especially the early original Gothic architecture you see in a lot of cathedrals and churches, so Notre Dame, all sorts of medieval cathedrals throughout Europe that have this very, you know, vaulted ceilings, pointed arches, flying buttresses, which, by the way, are. They're like support beams that come out from the side. They're also usually decorated with gargoyles and grotesques. But you can see it throughout Europe also in a lot of monasteries and fun fact, a reason why you often see Gothic architecture in Gothic literature, which I'm about to get to that connection, but to very, very briefly dive into political and religious history of Europe, when you have the Reformation in Britain, when Britain broke from Catholicism and the king passed a law about, like, the dissolution of the monasteries and was like, we don't need monasteries anymore because we're not Catholics anymore. So these old monasteries were given to the nobility. So a lot of noble families, like Lord Byron, his family estate was one of these old monasteries. So he's living in this piece of Gothic architecture. And they were often very old. So they're starting to crumble. And especially as the noble families lost their wealth, like Byron is literally living in this, like, crumbling, dilapidated abbey that used to be a religious building in the earlier medieval era, then became the ancestral home of a noble family. And you'll find that that's a very typical setting for a Gothic novel. So it all comes around. Yeah. And, I mean, we could go on a deep dive, but to bring us back to how we got from Goth, the Germanic tribe, Goth as a pejorative word, Goth as an early medieval style of architecture that was being looked down on. You have the neo Gothic architectural revival in the mid 18th century, and that's when the Gothic becomes cool again. So now people are referring to Gothic buildings and they're like, I like that. It's no longer an insulting world. They're like, I like that Gothic building and I want to build more in that style. And this architectural revival is intertwined with the advent of the Gothic literary movement. And in fact, both were kind of spearheaded by a man named Horace walpole in the mid-1700s in Britain. Horace Walpole was a politician from a wealthy family. He is credited with writing the first Gothic novel, the Castle of otranto, published in 1764. And when he first published it, the first edition, he published it as though it was a found manuscript. He published it anonymously without his own name on it, and he presented it. There was a little introduction, like this monk in this abbey found this old manuscript that was written in Italian from centuries ago. And here's the story. But people started to speculate pretty quickly that that was not actually where the story came from. So in the second edition of the book, he published it with his own name on it. And it had the subtitle, the Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story. And that's where you first see the word gothic being applied to a book, at least that we know of, that was popular. And he was also a huge proponent of the neo Gothic architectural revival. And as he was writing this book, he was building this estate for himself called Strawberry Hill House, that's built in the neo Gothic architectural style. So from the very beginning, we have those two things intertwining. He's sitting in this castle, like Gothic home while he's writing this book. The book takes place in a castle. So architecture is very entwined with the literature from the advent of the genre.
Vanessa Rogers: 24:37
And then what about the fashion movement?
Julia O'Connell: 24:40
Yeah, that one, you know, it's a little bit harder to draw a direct line, but so the fashion movement obviously comes from the music movement. So early goth bands were arriving on the scene in the late 1960s 70s. It was a post punk music genre, and critics started relating the dark and gloomy sound to the literary movement that has a similar aesthetic. And it was one particular music critic, John Stickney, who is generally credited with first using the word gothic. And he was describing the band the Doors, which, now that would be great debate about whether they would be considered goth music. And you'll notice that that's a trend, especially in the early days of goth, that, like any real goth band, would adamantly state that they're not goth. So there was a huge disagreement around the term and how it should be used and what it was applied to. But by the late 60s, early 70s, you have certain bands in a certain style of music beginning to be referred to as goth. And there's some sort of nebulous connection between the music and the literature. And then it becomes a little bit more deliberate. I think the music is more directly influenced by film adaptations of Gothic literature. So you have songs like Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus, which is a reference obviously, to the actor who famously played Dracula in a film adaptation of the gothic novel by Bram Stoker. So you have, you know, these artists and Susie and the Banshees were inspired by a Vincent Price horror film. And Vincent Price is also influenced by Gothic literature. So you have these bands being influenced both in the lyrics and titles of their songs and their band names, by these film adaptations. And then I think you also have the fashion. And goth fashion became, you know, the style that these musicians were known for, and then the fans of the musicians became known for. And a lot of them are influenced by vampire movies, horror movies. So that's where you get this kind of like Victorian fashion sense in the goth. And they're also. They just have a similar macabre mindset. So it's not surprising that it would be connected, because both Gothic literature and Goth culture are interested in the dark, the macabre, the spooky, the taboo, finding beauty in darkness, interest in death. So they're all kind of connected. And I will say that the goth scene is very literary. You could probably walk up to a goth and at least talk to them about Poe. They may not have read, you know, Horace Walpole's the Castle of Otranto, but usually they know some Edgar Allan Poe. They probably love film adaptations, interested in the modern horror genre. So there's. There's still a connection between Gothic literature and the goth subculture, even if sometimes it goes through a couple other steps before it gets there. Yeah.
Vanessa Rogers: 27:55
Seven steps to the Gothic fashion.
Julia O'Connell: 27:57
Right.
Vanessa Rogers: 28:00
So when Horace. What was his last name?
Julia O'Connell: 28:04
Horace Walpole. Walpole. W A L P O L E.
Vanessa Rogers: 28:08
And I think I'll put up a link to that first Gothic book because I think that might be of interest to people because it was very popular. People really enjoyed it.
Julia O'Connell: 28:17
Yeah, yeah, it. You know, so he spoke about in his introduction to the book that he was blending existing genres. There was this concept of the romance, which meant something different back then than it does now. Romance was kind of like a novel. And also there was this earlier sense of, like, epic, you know, epic journeys, like Arthurian legends were kind of referred to as a romance. But there was this new kind of idea of modernism and trying to depict life in a realistic way, especially psychologically, and trying to, like, have psychologically real characters. So Horace Walpole, with this first Gothic story, was trying to blend both the kind of grandiose romance, which could have supernatural elements, and his is a very chivalric. Like, you could see it fitting in with the Arthurian. There are knights, there's a damsel in distress, and a chivalric hero who's actually pretty useless and she kind of saves herself. But he's also trying to bring in this kind of realistic psychology which is adding to that atmosphere of suspense and dread. That you're feeling along with the characters while they experience fear as something is lurking in the shadows of the hallways. So he was very deliberately trying to blend two different genres of literature and that made it immediately popular. Also, you know, the kind of scandal around it being published. It was anonymous. It turns out that it's from this very respectable politician. But he's writing this kind of over the top extreme book and he had a lot of imitators and he also had a lot of people trying to improve upon what he wrote who thought they could do the gothic better or differently. So you have some other early gothic writers being Ann Radcliffe. She was writing in the late 1700s, 1790s, she published six Gothic novels. And she's kind of might be considered the mother of the gothic novel, especially the early gothic. And she had a lot of, a lot of imitators specifically trying to imitate her style. And she's known for what's sometimes called the terror gothic. She was not as interested in the very shock and gore of like a dead body right in front of you. She was much more interested in the more psychological terror and the fear of that unseen thing that's lurking just out there. And you don't get that like jump scare, you know, she was anti, you know, the early gothic literature version of jump scare and more into the psychological terror element of it. So you kind of. There's kind of two different schools in the early gothic as some people are leaning more towards the terror. And she differentiated it as terror versus horror. But of course most, most talented authors are using both elements in their stories. Ann Radcliffe is also known for the explained supernatural. Most of her books, you know, it's like a Scooby Doo episode where all along you, you think it's a ghost, but there's a rational explanation at the end. But some of her books do incorporate actual supernatural elements and that is recurring throughout Gothic literature. You'll have lots of Gothic literature that does have actual supernatural elements and you'll have some that has a suggestion of the supernatural, but it has a rational explanation or it partially has a rational explanation.
Vanessa Rogers: 32:09
Now is there anything that is happening culturally while these gothic literature books are being written?
Julia O'Connell: 32:16
Yeah, significant a ton. I so perhaps most importantly. So this is kicking off in the late 1700s, as I said, and it's co signing with the neo Gothic architectural revival. It's also coming as sort of a reaction against the Enlightenment, which is a philosophical movement across Europe in the centuries preceding it. That's all about science and rationalism. And everything has an explanation, but you kind of have some people who want to push back about that. And there's a nostalgia for mystery and the supernatural and extreme emotions rather than pure rationalism. So part of the appeal of the Gothic is indulging in that and rejecting the idea that everything has to have a purely rational, logical explanation. And so the Gothic is kind of part of the larger Romantic movement, which was a pushback against rationalism and the Enlightenment. But, of course, you'll see those elements blended together. When we get to Mary Shelley, who could be considered the mother of science fiction, she's bringing, you know, those new advances in science and technology, but with these Gothic elements of monster and extreme emotions and sublime landscapes, and really delving into these existential, frightening questions about the consequences of playing God when you have access to these new sciences and technology. So that's a huge part of it. You also have, in the late 1700s, the French Revolution, which frightened all of the rest of Europe. You know, they're seeing and hearing about this bloody cultural shift and images of extreme violence happening in the streets of France. And so there's a lot of anxiety about violence, anxiety about there's some class consciousness, but anxiety about the shift that's happening in that class consciousness. And you'll see that play directly and indirectly into a lot of the literature of this period. And then, of course, there's also the Industrial Revolution happening. So. And everything that comes with that, there's urbanization, there's massive social shifts, social change, influxes of immigration in and out of different areas. So there's a lot happening in this time period. There's a lot of unrest and imbalance and anxiety and change. And I think that's all going into the pot of what's making Gothic literature.
Vanessa Rogers: 35:00
Yeah. So what kind of characters or creatures do we find in Gothic literature? Where does it start and. And where does. I guess there's not really an end because people keep coming up with more and more. But is there a chain of events?
Julia O'Connell: 35:19
Yeah, I mean, supernatural beings and creatures are in it from the beginning. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole has a ghost. And it's interesting because it's very different from how ghosts are depicted today. They're not these transparent figures floating off the floor. The ghost in the castle of Otranto is a giant, massive suit of armor, and it's the ghost of St. Nicholas. And he's, you know, connected to the history of this castle and is coming to, you know, bring forward a prophecy that a usurper has taken over the castle and the rightful heir needs to take its place. So the antagonists of the story, they first see like a giant hand in this room. And all the servants like run away screaming because they just saw a giant hand in metal plate armor. So that's, you know, that's one thing. And there's also, there's like a ghostly monk that shows a skeleton monk that shows up in this story. So you very early on you get a lot of these like a skeleton in a hooded robe. And several other early gothic novels also have very frightening ghosts. There's the Monk by Matthew Lewis is another late 18th century novel. And this is one of the more kind of shocking and gory ones, but it has a whole subplot about. There was a ghost legend of the Bleeding Nun that haunts this castle. And one of the characters, she's trying to run off with a guy, so she decides she's going to dress up as the Bleeding Nun so they can escape the castle. And if anyone sees them, they'll think, oh, it's just the local ghost. But he ends up getting into a carriage with the actual ghost of the Bleeding Nun, which is quite a terrifying scene. So you have these ghost stories, I would say are very early on, and ghosts that take all sorts of forms, whether it's, you know, a giant hand plate armor or a bloody nun or a skeleton in a robe. And then of course, pretty early on you start getting the vampire, one of the most classic of monsters. And the vampire, you know, it comes into Western consciousness from the East. It comes from kind of a bunch of different areas. But one of the ways that it first got popularized in Britain, as there were these newspaper articles that were being translated, it was supposedly a true case, a real thing that happened in what's now Serbia, I think, somewhere out in that area of Eastern Europe. And there was a soldier who claimed that he had been bitten by a Turkish vampire while he was fighting the Turks. And he survived the encounter, but then he went home, lived his normal life in the village and then died. And when he died, his dead body rose up and started attacking his fellow villagers. And people wrote this up as a real news story of something that actually happened in 1725 or 26. And that story started to be translated and published in English language newspapers in the 1730s. And that's the story of Arnold Paul was the man's name. So that's kind of one of the first ways that people in England start hearing about this concept of the vampire. And so it's associated with out east, the Turks, the Serbs, Eastern Europe. And it shows up in poetry a lot earlier, both German and English language poetry. But one of the first prose pieces of literature to feature a vampire is John Polidori's short story, the Vampire. And that was, if you're familiar with the story of how Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. There was an infinite infamous knight in 1816, when Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Lord Byron's personal physician, John Polidori, all they were hanging out, they were on vacation together in the Villa Deodati in Switzerland. And it was just raining and cold their whole vacation. So they were cooped up inside, they were bored. And Byron says, hey, let's have a ghost story writing contest. The only full length novel that comes out of that. And at this time, Byron is a famous author, Percy Shelley is a famous author, and Mary and John are kind of just along for the ride. They are the only two that have published works come out of this night. Byron wrote a fragment of a story that was going to become a vampire story, but he didn't even get to the part where vampire things start happening. You can look, it's called Lord Byron's Fragment, and it's about this aristocratic character named Lord Ruthven, John Polidori. After this night, he took that fragment that Byron wrote and he rewrote it and finished it and made it into his own story that he calls the Vampire. And he inserts Byron into that aristocratic character. So that's part of why vampires are so Byronic. They're, you know, they're aristocratic, they're charming, they're charismatic, but they're like bad boys and they're dangerous and they seduce women because that's what Byron did. And Polidori was like writing him into this monster.
Vanessa Rogers: 40:48
Oh, my gosh.
Julia O'Connell: 40:49
There we have, you know, a literal, you know, supernatural monster. And then we have the, the human monstrous element coming into it. So Polidori's Vampire is one of the first prose vampire stories in Gothic literature, and that was published in 1819. And then you have vampire literature kind of exploding from there. There was a penny dreadful that was serialized in the 1840s, which is, you know, you could buy these cheap little serialized stories for a penny and working class could read them. So that's part of how you start getting gothic literature to the masses and becoming this popular literature thing. But there was one of these called Varney the Vampire, and it was published anonymously. There's lots of speculation about who the author was, but that also kind of starts to define what the vampire Looks like in literature. And of course, you also have Carmilla by J. Sheridan le Fanu in 1871, which is one of your best known female vampires. Carmilla is preying on another young woman whose home she's staying in. There's some very kind of lesbian overtones that you'll see repeated in later vampire works. And then, of course, we have Dracula, Bram stoker, published in 1897, which really cements the vampire at probably, you know, the top of the pyramid in the supernatural monsters food chain and has defined vampires in literature ever since then.
Vanessa Rogers: 42:26
So that's vampires, I'm pretty sure. Dracula. Well, I don't know. I feel like Dracula was probably the first real vampire book that I read, but I was struck by it because I think it was the first book that was written in the first person. I don't think I had ever read a book that was written in that style. And I know a lot of people don't particularly like that style of writing, but I loved it.
Julia O'Connell: 42:54
Yeah. Well, yeah. So Dracula's epistolary is all told in letters and diary entries, and that was a very popular format in the Victorian era. And also, I talk about in one of my Gothic trope articles on my blog, I have what I call the found document framing device. So going back to that very first Gothic novel with Horace Walpole, and he's like, this guy found this manuscript in an abbey. Like, people love the, like, oh, I just. I found these sheets of paper and they have this interesting story to them. And, you know, it. It adds this element of distance. So you can be like, well, I'm not the one saying that these crazy supernatural things are real. I just. I just found this piece of paper. Yeah. But it also adds an authenticity about, like, no, this is a thing that really happened, that I found this document from a real person. So that comes up a lot in a lot of Gothic literature and also in a lot of the ghost stories that come after it. And I love epithelary and found document formats.
Vanessa Rogers: 43:59
Well, I'm glad I'm not alone. Another character that you mentioned, or I guess maybe it's more of a trope, is the doppelganger.
Julia O'Connell: 44:10
Yes. Yeah. So that's another thing that's, you know, difficult to define, can mean a lot of things. The. The word is German for double goer. So it's a double of some sort. Sometimes this means a physical double in that it's something of identical appearance, or it can be like a supernatural or a maddened double or even one person who split into two in some way. And the term was actually popularized by the short story Die Doppelganger, written by the Prussian author E.T.A. hoffman in 1821. And it comes up in lots of Gothic stories. One that I particularly love is a Scottish novel called the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg, published in 1824. And that one, it really gets into kind of the religious divides that are happening in Scotland in this era. And it has the found document trope. The story is told twice over. There's these two brothers, one good brother and one bad brother, and they're kind of set up in con contrast. So you almost have the doppelganger element of these two contrasting brothers. And the story is told first from the perspective of the good brother. And then he, like, finds the diary of the bad brother and gets the story over again from his perspective. But the bad brother, his name is Robert, and he's a believer in this extreme form of the philosophy of predeterminism. So he believes that certain people are predetermined to go to heaven and other people are predetermined to go to hell. And obviously he's been told that he's predetermined to go to heaven. So. And he's convinced that this half brother that he hates is predetermined to go to hell. So he's like, everything I do is already right and justified because I'm, you know, I'm the good one and he's a bad one. And the devil takes advantage of this. The devil shows up in the same physical appearance as Robert. So Robert encounters someone who looks exactly like himself, and he's like, ah, obviously we must be friends. You're a cool guy. You look just like me. It kind of creates this sympathy between them. But then the devil also, you know, he takes advantage of this closeness to tempt him into doing bad things. Like, hey, you should murder that guy that you don't like, because it would be morally correct of you to do so, because you're already going to heaven and he's already going to hell. So you're just shortening his time on earth. You know, he has a very persuasive argument, but then he also, because he looks exactly like Robert, he goes around, like, committing sins and being a horrible person in Robert's face and body and ruining Robert's reputation. So that's a very fun example of the doppelganger. And actually, you'll see something similar to that happening in Dracula. There's a Part where Jonathan is stuck in Dracula's castle, and Dracula takes all of Jonathan's traveling clothes, and Jonathan sees him leave the castle and go out into the town, and he's out committing crimes and acting like a terrible person in Jonathan's clothes and thereby ruining Jonathan's reputation. So I wonder if that was a deliberate borrowing or, you know, just a coincidence. But that's a fun tidbit. Edgar Allan Poe also has a doppelganger story. His story, William Wilson, is about another identical doppelganger, but this doppelganger kind of acts as the protagonist conscience. He, like, shows up every time the protagonist, William Wilson, is about to do something bad, like cheat at cards or seduce a married woman, and this doppelganger shows up and gets in the way. So that's another interesting idea. Is he, like, a manifestation of the guilty conscience or something? Yeah. And then, of course, you have Robert Louis Stevenson's strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is the more typical divided self, where Dr. Jekyll is this respectable Victorian gentleman, but he has these dark urges. He's a hypocrite, and he wants to be able to indulge his hypocrisy. So he invents a potion where he can split or take over a different appearance, but thereby symbolically split himself and indulge in bad behaviors while separating himself from the consequences. Which is, in effect, basically the same thing that Dorian Gray does in Oscar Wilde's the Portrait of Dorian Gray, where you have the portrait acting as a doppelganger for Dorian Gray. And Dorian Gray is able to go out and live this dissolute life, while his portrait shows the consequences of getting uglier and older, while Dorian Gray remains young and beautiful and his sin is not being reflected in his appearance, as was often a belief at the time, that if he were bad, it would. People will be able to tell that in your appearance. There's plenty of modern doppelgangers in horror as well. I actually just read and just reviewed on my blog, a recently published horror novel that came out last year called the Spite House by Johnny Compton. And it's a haunted house book. And the main character is staying in this haunted house, and he encounters someone, a manifestation that looks exactly like himself in the hallways of this house.
Vanessa Rogers: 49:25
Well, I came across one when I was also reading in middle school, and I was not a reader of Sweet Valley High, but there were just a couple of, like, supernatural books in the Sweet Valley High when. And I. And I read one where there were twins, and one of the twins was bad and the other one was good. And. But the bad one was blaming everything on the good twin.
Julia O'Connell: 49:47
And so I'm an identical twin myself, so I can be a little bit picky when it comes to twins and literature. I'm not a doppelganger, but, you know, twins definitely come up in Gothic literature a lot.
Vanessa Rogers: 50:04
That's so funny. And, yes, you know, for some reason that book particularly stuck with me, maybe because it was like the first time I'd ever encountered that type of storyline. So how do you see the Gothic literature moving? Where. Where is it today? Where has it moved? Because you. At one point you talked about. Maybe later on we were going to talk about weird fiction, but yeah, we're.
Julia O'Connell: 50:37
Going to get there.
Vanessa Rogers: 50:37
Yeah, okay.
Julia O'Connell: 50:38
But. So that's part of it is. I think it's hard to say what's Gothic now, because I think the Gothic has divided up into many subgenres and it's given rise to modern horror. But it. There's kind of two branches. There's Gothic romance and Gothic horror. So, you know, I feel there's Jane Eyre, which we haven't had as much time to talk about, but there's a lot of romance novels continuing in the Jane Eyre tradition. And some of those are letting go of more of the horror elements that they're keeping this, you know, the dynamic between the mysterious, brooding man with a secret and the woman. So there's Gothic romance. And I think Gothic is still very actively being used in that subgenre to describe that, especially now that we're seeing an upswing in dark romance, which I think is pulling from Gothic romance and diving into even more of those extremes. And then there's Gothic horror, and then there's people bringing them back together again, like Silvia Moreno Garcia with Mexican Gothic. And, you know, I think Gothic is in an upswing, and specifically people using the word Gothic and very deliberately engaging with those tropes. But even when that's not the case, the Gothic is still very present in all of the genres that are descended from it, which obviously horror and all of horror's many subgenres, and I would argue science fiction coming out of Mary Shelley and a lot of the early Gothic writers there. And then we're going to get into, you know, weird fiction and folk horror also relating in. So the Gothic is still around, it's still alive, but there's just so many different descendants of it that I feel like it's kind of been dispersed and broadened out, that it's harder to pick up a book and be like, this is a Gothic novel, right? Yeah, 19th or 18th century sense.
Vanessa Rogers: 52:35
So let's talk about Bluebeard, because you've mentioned it, I think, and as part of the proto Gothic literature. Is that right?
Julia O'Connell: 52:44
Yeah. So I use proto Gothic to mean anything that happened, you know, before this first Gothic novel with Horace Walpole, but that is having influence on the Gothic literary genre. So there are a couple works of literature that, you know, it's all a continuous tradition. So Gothic novels are not just borrowing from the other Gothic novels before them. They're reaching further back and borrowing from folklore and other published stories. One element of proto Gothic would be some Shakespearean work. Hamlet, I would consider proto Gothic. And it's being very deliberately referenced in the Castle of Otranto. You know, you have these in Hamlet, a ghost coming back and asking for vengeance, for betrayal. And that's, you know, ghosts coming back, walking the castle ramparts is a very typical Gothic image. And there's also Hamlet and Ophelia's descent into madness. Madness is another trope that comes up in Gothic literature a lot. And there's also Shakespeare's Macbeth is also a proto Gothic work. You again have a ghost, Banquo's ghost, but you also have witches, which another supernatural creature we didn't have time to go into a lot of detail about. And they're giving prophecies, which I mentioned is one of the ways of the past haunting the present. And Macbeth is also that tyrannical usurper that you see a lot in Gothic literature. So there's. There's Shakespeare that these later Gothic works are borrowing from. And then there's folk tales, one of the most prominent being Bluebeard. And I don't know if you want to give some background on the publication of Bluebeard. I'm only loosely familiar with the French folktale first being published.
Vanessa Rogers: 54:36
You know, I haven't actually looked into Bluebeard very much. And when I read it, when I was reading it on your blog, I realized I had heard the story once before and it was from the book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes from When Women who Run With Wolves. And so I, I wanted to look. I looked up what she said about this story. But basically, can you give a little bit of a synopsis of what Bluebird Bluebeard is?
Julia O'Connell: 55:08
This is a French folktale, and my understanding is it was first published in 1697 by the French folklorist Charles Perrault. And the story, there's a couple different versions as there always is with folktales. But this young woman is married to this man, Bluebeard, and he's very wealthy in this big house. And he tells her she can explore anywhere in the house except for this one locked room. And he leaves for a few days to go take care of his business. And he gives her the key to the locked room, but you can't go in that one locked room. And what does she do? She goes in the locked room and she discovers the dead bodies of the seven wives who came before her. And she realizes that she's in danger, she needs to get out of there. And she ends up being rescued by her brothers and saved from that fate.
Vanessa Rogers: 56:04
And there's something to do with the key, right? Like when you stick the key into the keyhole, blood is on the key and that's the sign that shows.
Julia O'Connell: 56:12
Yeah. So he knows that she's accessed the room. And obviously there's implication that that's when he kills the wives, is when they disobey his order. They visit the locked room. He knows that they did, and so now she's going to be next and join the wives. And so this shows up in Gothic literature in a number of different ways. Jane Eyre actually deliberately references it. I mean, first of all, the premise is similar. Jane is this young, vulnerable woman. She's not married to Rochester at the beginning of the story, but she's. She's in his house. It's kind of the overall prototypical Gothic plot of this young, naive, vulnerable woman in the house of the wealthy, powerful man. And when Jane is first being given a tour of Thornfield hall, she gets to the upper floor hallway that we will later learn is where the wife in the attic is being kept. And she kind of hears this like, maniacal laughter happening, and there's something odd going on. But she describes the hallway as being like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle. So she doesn't even know yet that there's anything wrong, that there's any secrets being hidden in this house. But she already has this instinct. But there's a locked room that she's not allowed to access, and that actually it's his previous wife in that locked room, and that discovering that secret is going to, you know, have an effect on their relationship. But in Chain Air, it's not the young woman who breaks into the room, it's Bertha Mason who gets a hold of the key and breaks out. Reversal. Yeah, Bertha Mason, the first wife, she sneaks out and she sneaks into Jane's bedroom. And is kind of tormenting her at night. And interestingly, Jane first thinks she's a vampire when she wakes up and has this very blurred image of, like, a woman with dark hair over her face. So that, you know, those hints and elements of the supernatural of earlier Gothic literature sneaking into Jane Eyre. And then when the contents of that locked room are revealed, it does lead Jane to escape the potential marriage to Rochester temporarily. But. So that's kind of the prototypical Bluebeard plot being kind of superimposed onto Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, which then begets a whole tradition in this kind of Gothic romance genre. Another prominent title being Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. The Jane Eyre is in the 1840s, 1847, Rebecca, nearly a century later, 1938, but kind of retelling Jane Eyre in a different way. In this case, it is a young woman marrying this older, wealthy man. And in Rebecca, the. The narrator is unnamed. And this is another. I think it's told on the first person, but she's only ever referred to as the second Mrs. De Winter because Rebecca's name overshadows it. Rebecca is the first wife, and she's being haunted by this knowledge of the first wife. The narrator builds up Rebecca in her mind as, like, the perfect wife, and she's living in her shadow. And in Rebecca, there's no locked room, only the disused west wing of the house, which is where Rebecca's bedroom is left pristine and untouched, exactly the way it was. And it's being cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who has this very obsessive relationship with Rebecca. And the narrator has not been, you know, barred from this room, explicitly told not to enter, but she still, instinctually, she waits until Mr. De Winter is away from the house for the few days, just like Bluebeard, before she goes exploring and snooping in this room. And she doesn't discover the secrets when she first visits the room. But ultimately, Maxim de Winter is concealing a secret, and indeed, he is concealing. Concealing the murdered body of his first wife, Rebecca. It's just. It's in the cabin of a boat that's sunk in the lake. And when that boat is unearthed and that first wife is discovered, ironically, that actually brings the narrator and Mr. De Winter together and repairs their marriage. So that actually, you know, is kind of the opposite ending of the Bluebeard narrative. But there's still parallels there.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:00:59
And similar to Jane Eyre, they end up coming back together in the end.
Julia O'Connell: 01:01:04
Yes, yes, they both stories have a happy ending of sorts, and both End in a house fire.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:01:10
And it made me think. It made me think of Beauty and the Beast. Now it's not the exact same because obviously there's no hidden wife, but there is a part of the house, the west wing, that is not allowed to be accessed by Belle. And so is that also taken? I think that was a much older story as well. It might be older in fact than Bluebeard. I'm not sure if its age, but I know that Beauty and the Beast is one of the old.
Julia O'Connell: 01:01:38
I have not done a deep dive into Beauty and the Beast yet, but I have a very strong instinct that it is a proto gothic work. I mean, it has these elements of a forbidden wing and a prophecy and a curse. But it also has this dynamic that I think is at the core of the gothic romance of the monstrous man and the vulnerable woman and kind of getting underneath the monstrousness and revealing what's there. And I think you can kind of see that in Jane eyre. I mean, Mr. Rochester is a very gruff, brooding, aggressive, mean person, but when she's living with him, she kind of unearths the man underneath that. So you kind of have the from the monster to the man romance happening there. And I think that dynamic gets explored even more in other gothic romances and dark romances that are descending from that genre. But I'll have to do some more thinking on that so I can do an in depth blog post someday.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:02:38
Yeah, I'd be interested in that. Okay, so let's briefly look at folk horror a little bit. You define it as any horror tale that draws on regional folklore.
Julia O'Connell: 01:02:50
Yeah, that was my first kind of like off the cuff definition. And then I was immediately unhappy with it. I often now try to make these one sentence definitions. I first really began thinking about this genre when I was reviewing, you know, folk horror is also having a moment of revival, I think. And a few years ago there was this anthology, a young adult anthology called the Gathering Dark, edited by Tori Bobalino. And it had a whole bunch of very popular young adult authors in it. Hannah Witten, Chloe Gong, Aiden Polidoros. Came out in 2022. And I went to the book launch party, got my copy of the book, went to review, it was like, okay, so what is folk horror? And so there's this element of regional folklore. Like usually it's a folklore that's very specific, but sometimes it's not. And so there's a story in this book. Aiden Polydoros's story involves Bloody Mary, which I would class as an urban legend. But Is an urban legend separate from a rural folk tale? You know, are those separate and distinct or are they part of the same category? And obviously the editor of this anthology thought that that fell into folk horror. So you can kind of see how those lines are blurred. So I ended up revising my definition. You know, it's not just folklore, but also folk religion, folk customs, folk rituals that these authors are drawing on, often of a pre Christian or pagan folk tradition. And they might be drawing on like a real life folklore from something that actually existed, like the Druids or, you know, or a very specific creature from a folklore that exists in the real world. Or they might be creating a fictional community with its own folklore that has been created for the purpose of the story. And I think I tend to see the second one more often in folk horror, but I haven't. I would, I would like to, you know, do a study of that and combine them. But there's also a few recurring themes. The rural setting tends, you know, folk horror is folks seed. So you tend to be in a more rural setting. There's usually a supernatural element, like a supernatural entity associated with nature in some sense, especially why it's good for these rural settings. It's in the forest, it's in the woods, or it's connected to the land. And then they're usually worship of or sacrifice to this entity. So those are some of the characters. I'm beginning to slowly build my bundle of characteristics to define folk horror here. But the term was first popularized by a BBC documentary from 2010 called A History of Horror in which the writer and actor Mark Gattis. I don't know how to say his name, but he used it to refer to three iconic British horror films, the Blood on Satan's Claw, Witchfinder General and the Wicker Man. And I think that's especially. The Wicker man is what most people have in mind when you say the word horror. And I think it's still largely associated with film, especially the more recent A24 film, Midsommar that came out a few years ago would, I think is part of this trend in folk folk horror coming back into fashion?
Vanessa Rogers: 01:06:25
That's what I was thinking of when I, when I saw the term that it was more associated with. That's how I associate it at least. But I haven't come across a lot of folk horror books, although I don't tend to gravitate towards horror. I like creepy and weird rather than. I don't really want the gore and the blood.
Julia O'Connell: 01:06:46
Yeah, well, we'll Lean into the weird in a second. But I do want to give you a couple more modern examples. And people might debate me on this because I think it's not a very thoroughly defined genre. But I mentioned the Gathering Dark was this anthology that very specifically used the folk horror label. Another that I thought of was. And part of it is I have this image when I think of folk horror as, like, monstrous deer creatures, of which there's a surprising amount in literature. And one story that exemplifies this is the novella the Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy. And it's about this kind of, like, anarchist commune that they form their own little community, but they end up making a Faustian bargain of sorts with a supernatural deer entity in the woods nearby. And it's very creepy and a story that has stuck with me ever since I read it. Another supernatural deer creature is in Stephen Graham Jones, the Only Good Indians, and that's drawing on Native American tradition and beliefs about Dear Woman and consequences for hunting deer incorrectly. And it's about a group of young native men, and they go out hunting and they kill a deer that they're not supposed to kill. They kill a pregnant deer, female deer, and they don't, you know, abide by the rules and traditions, and they end up being haunted and brutally, brutally killed by the spirit of this deer woman. It's a very. A tough book, but also one that really lingered. And then to move away from Dear a little bit, there was another book that I reviewed on my blog relatively recently called Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley. It came out in the UK in 2019, and they were making it into a film. I'm not sure if that ever went anywhere, but it was released in the United States last year. And it's very much, you know, this fictional folklore and a fictional village. But this. It's this English village called Stithwaite. And there's a malevolent entity in the woods called Jack Gray that, you know, visits naughty children. And the. The character, the main character is kind of dealing with whether this is real or not and what connection it has to the creepy tree growing on his land. So there's definitely full cat fullcore out there in literature. It's not always labeled as such, you know, and I'm definitely looking to do a more comprehensive survey of what's out there at some point, but I think that's another category that's coming back in. Oh, and another book that I'll talk about again is the Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher, which I I haven't read this one yet, but I love T. Kingfisher. She writes a lot of gothic horror. And the Twisted Ones is very much a retelling of a piece of weird fiction that we will get to.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:10:02
I read a. What is her name?
Julia O'Connell: 01:10:06
Key Kingfisher.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:10:08
Yeah. And it was the Dead Ones. Moo.
Julia O'Connell: 01:10:12
Yeah. Of the Dead, my favorite. I think that was also the first book I read by her. And my absolute favorite, a retelling of Pose. The Fall of the House of Usher with mushrooms.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:10:23
Not realize it was a retelling.
Julia O'Connell: 01:10:25
Oh, yeah. Yes, it's posed. The Fall of the House of Usher. The characters are all named after the characters.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:10:32
Well, now I'm gonna have to go.
Julia O'Connell: 01:10:33
Back and reread the poem and then reread that story. But it's a brilliant retelling.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:10:40
Yeah, it's a really great one. And then there's a sequel coming out to that one, isn't there?
Julia O'Connell: 01:10:45
Yes. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I have it on my Kindle, but I haven't read it yet. But keep an eye on the blog and I'll discuss it there at some point.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:10:54
And now, speaking of Edgar Allan Poe, he's listed under Weird Fiction.
Julia O'Connell: 01:11:00
Yeah, I know. I wrote that on my blog post. I might debate it now he's thrown around in there, but I would say weird fiction, I was going to say it comes in later, but it's another one of these nebulous genres that it's difficult to define. It's an offshoot of the gothic. I would describe weird fiction as it's a subgenre of speculative fiction. So it almost always has some sort of supernatural element to it, and it's often blending like horror and science fiction or something in that realm. And it. You see it most in short stories, particularly. The heyday of weird fiction is also kind of the heyday of short stories in general, with the proliferation of magazines and pulp magazines like Weird Tales, which is kind of like redefining weird fiction as the kind of thing that would be published in Weird Tales magazine. But that's in the latter half, towards the end of the 1800s until the mid-1900s, is like the heyday of the short story. It's also the heyday of the ghost story and of weird fiction.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:12:19
So those happening simultaneously, they're all kind of tangled together.
Julia O'Connell: 01:12:23
So it's a little bit hard to pick them all out from each other. But weird fiction, it's usually horror, but the horror elements have, like, a weird or unusual twist. There's a few themes that recur one being atavism, this idea of backwards evolution. So the idea that society or an individual could regress to a primal state. So you'll see that in some Lovecraft stories like the Rats in the Walls in which the, the protagonist ends up learning that his family farmed human cattle and ate them. And both the, both the cannibals and the cannibalized kind of regress into these animalistic beings. You also usually see in these stories there's a lot of the occult, and it kind of grows out of this rise of interest in the occult in the late 19th century. So there's, there's deities, there's demons, there's supernatural creatures from either religion or folklore or mythology, and there's some sort of black magic. And some of those are being, you know, borrowed from real traditions or they're made up or they're created out of the anxieties of Christians that are imagining demonic cults worshiping Satan out there in the woods. But you also have the people that are like really intrigued by that idea. And there's usually also an interest in ancient traditions or magic or rituals that are persisting into the present day. So something like the ancient druids, oh, we thought that they were killed off and assimilated, but actually there's a whole little cult of them hiding in the woods that are still doing this ritual or something. And you'll see that in Lovecraft and in a lot of these early weird fiction authors. And so Lovecraft being most famous for the Cthulhu mythos, often weird fiction is symbolized by the image of the tentacle. So you'll see that a lot in like the COVID of Weird Tales magazine or you know, awards given in this genre. So Lovecraft is kind of the most famous example of a, an author regularly described as weird. And he actually wrote a definition of weird fiction in his 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, in which he differentiates weird fiction from the classic gothic tales and ghost stories by saying that the true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. According to rule, a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread, of outer unknown forces must be present. Now I think that's a little bit of an unfair characterization of the gothic and the ghost story. Like ah, they're, they're all formulaic and it's, you know, these chain cheated ghosts. But there is something about weird fiction that it's trying to be outside of that, like that plus more a little beyond it A weird twist. Kind of like moving away from the stereotypical tropes of the gothic and ghost story genres.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:15:38
Yeah.
Julia O'Connell: 01:15:39
And that something more. It might be extra dimensional beings, alien life forms or monstrous creatures that are like outside of the usual canon of vampires, werewolves. Or it might be just left completely ambiguous that there's some supernatural entity, but it's beyond description. You'll see that in a lot of Lovecraft and other people in a circle. It's like I saw something but I couldn't describe it. And it's like, well, that's one way to put a supernatural entity that, you know, it's beyond anything you could imagine because you're just not going to describe what it is.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:16:13
I've lost all the words.
Julia O'Connell: 01:16:14
Yeah. But so to, you know, I'm saying it flourished kind of at the turn of the 20th century. But one of the earlier authors who was a huge influence on Lovecraft was this Welsh author, Arthur Mackin and he wrote a ton of short stories. I actually got sent. Hippocampus Press is a small indie publisher that they focus on Lovecraft and weird fiction and have published a lot of this. But they sent me like a four volume. There's like four of these books that are like the complete works of Arthur Mackin. But this is for a dedicated fan. It's everything he's ever written in chronic chronological order, which is a little bit intense to dive into. So I haven't.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:16:58
Did he write the White People?
Julia O'Connell: 01:17:00
Yes. So the White People is the short story that T kingfisher's the Twisted Ones is a retelling of. Oh yeah. So that's an interesting example of early weird fiction is being made relevant again by T Kingfisher. But he's also best known for his novella the Great God Pan and that. So you're dealing with the mythology of this Greek nature God Pan, who's like a satyr in the wilds in the woods. But it has this sci fi element to it. And in Mackin's story there's a scientist experimenting with a brain surgery that would allow someone to see the hidden world, the like plan of existence that Pan and other creatures like him exist in. But also, you know, Pan is a name that they're putting on this creature and there's some implication, is it the Greek God Pan or is it the devil? And he's the scientist is experimenting on this woman, giving her this ability and she ends up, you know, it's very couched in suggestion, but she presumably has sex with Pan, the devil, whatever this entity is and she gives birth to this very bad witch like woman who does all these terrible things.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:18:21
Very Rosemary baby.
Julia O'Connell: 01:18:22
Yeah. Yes, yes. And so that's one example of Greek mythology and folklore being brought into weird fiction. Another author in the weird fiction genre is Algernon Blackwood, who's writing at the turn of the century. And he drew on Native American folklore a lot. He spent a lot of time in Canada and, you know, interacting with the indigenous peoples of Canada. And he wrote the story the Wendigo, which is inspired by Anishinaabe folklore. Some. Many people would have issue with how he depicted the creatures and kind of starting a trend of depicting Wendigos in horror literature that often deviate significantly from Anishinaabe depictions and beliefs. But he is bringing in that Native American folklore into modern horror and weird fiction. And you mentioned Mackin's story, the White People. That one involves, it's the diary of a young girl who's slowly being initiated into this world of black magic. And there's ancient rites, rituals, the occult. There's some mention of nymphs and supernatural creatures. So you're getting kind of all of those mentioned elements I mentioned about ancient rites, cults, worshiping, mysterious supernatural entities coming in there. And all of those are going to have their influence on Lovecraft. And also Lovecraft's circle of friends, he had other writers who were sometimes writing in his worlds. He had his friend Clark Ashton Smith, who also wrote in the Cthulhu mythos, and a network of author that he was friends with. So they're all writing these supernatural horror stories, these entities from other dimensions, maybe other worlds, other planets, and they're weird. But as much as Lovecraft was a major figure in weird fiction, he's not the only one. And not all weird fiction looks like Lovecraft. And there's been a really good indie publisher in Britain that's made an effort to highlight a lot of the authors of weird fiction that have been kind of overshadowed by Lovecraft. And unfortunately, this publisher just ended their tenure. They're called Handheld Press, and as of this year, they no longer exist. But you can still go on their website and buy their books for at least next year. But they have wonderful anthologies, including volume one and volume two of Women's Weird, where they're highlighting the female authors who were being published alongside Lovecraft and all his friends in Weird Tales magazines and other similar magazines. And a few of those authors I just want to highlight real quick to give them their due. You know, some of them were writing slimy, tentacled entities Like Lovecraft. So there's this woman, Eleanor Scott, and her short story the Twelve Apostles is in one of those two women's weird volumes. And it's about a devil worshiping priest who his ghost kind of manifests as this slimy, tentacled entity in the house that he's haunting. Other women in these volumes are writing kind of more typical ghost stories, but with a little twist to them. One that I love is called the Haunted Saucepan by Marjorie Lawrence. And it's Lawrence, and it's literally about a saucepan that's haunted. So you have this very domestic, very female coded kitchen object that is the site of a haunting. And another one that's a ghost story with a twist is called Outside the House by Bethy Kiffin Taylor. And that one has a haunted space. So there's this family home where if you're outside the house after dark, the whole space transforms into this haunting. And you can't get. If you are outside the house after dark, you get kind of stuck in this world of ghosts. And that one's particularly scary. And there's also, you know, tales that are just odd, that are hard to categorize as like a ghost story or tentacled monsters. There's one called the Hall Bedroom by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, in which Borders in a boarding house. Anytime they stay in this one particular bedroom with a weird painting in it, they seem to, at night, in their dreams, enter this other dimension that they experience through one sense at a time. So first they're feeling things and hearing things and smelling things, and then it culminates in the fifth sense. So all of those stories are. They're brilliant. They're. They're by amazing authors who have been largely forgotten, although there's a few. There's a few authors in there like Edith Wharton, that she's still celebrated as like a great American novelist, but she was also writing ghost stories, some of them with a weird twist to them. But they also make a point. In this volume, the editor, Melissa Edmondson, in her introduction makes a point that weird fiction is not separate from the gothic and the ghost story the way that Lovecraft was trying to draw that line between them, but that it's. It's part of a continuous tradition with those other genres.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:24:10
Why do you think it is that Lovecraft has become so popular? Because I think his, his popularity has risen with.
Julia O'Connell: 01:24:18
Yeah, a huge part of it was just the documentation and preservation. And I forget, I don't remember if it was Clark Ashton Smith or one of his other friends, but There was one of his friends who loved his works that made an effort to collect and publish his stories after his death. And so it's just the fact that, like, they still exist and are accessible, where a lot of these women, you know, their stories were published once in the magazine and then forgotten about if no one made the effort to like collect and reprint and put them back in front of the public eye. He also, you know, I mean, I think a lot of people are really interested in the Cthulhu mythos and a lot of that really stuck out. And, you know, it makes sense that those stories stuck around, but there's, there's a lot of other stories that deserve to stick around that didn't have the kind of support. Yeah, and Lovecraft also, I mean, he cultivated these networks of author friends. So he had a lot of other authors who were familiar with him, familiar with his works, writing in his sandbox, continuing to talk about him and share his stories, whereas some of these women or other authors did not have that kind of support network keeping them going.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:25:38
So we've, we've covered a lot. What do you feel? Have we missed anything that you feel like we need to briefly talk about?
Julia O'Connell: 01:25:46
Yeah, well, I'll just say one sentence about the New Weird, because I was saying weird fiction is kind of from this era of the height of the short story and epitomized by these weird tales magazines. But there is kind of a subgenre that's being talked about called the New Weird. I haven't looked into this a whole lot, but the, a couple of the authors that epitomize it are China Mieville and Jeff Vandermeer, who are bringing the weird into the 21st century. I also want to very quickly highlight that Handheld Press has a lot of other really great collections in addition to Women's Weird. And they also have a British weird volume. They have, they have another anthology called Strange Relics, which is a whole anthology about archaeology of the supernatural. So if you're very interested in folklore and also this like ancient religions persisting idea, that's like a whole little niche subgenre in this kind of weird fiction era. So that volume has a lot of really interesting stories, including some that deal more with the Greek God Panic. And they also have published some great collections highlighting some of these women who have not been given their due. So I recently read, if you love the more traditional ghost stories, although she has some weird ones as well, Edith Nesbitt, they have a whole collection of her stories called the House of Silence. And so Some, a lot of them are very comfortably in the ghost story genre. But she also has one called the Pavilion, which has a vampiric vined plant. So you get the vampires, you get the sci fi element with botany, so that, you know, that's, I would consider that weird fiction. And another very little known author, Helen de Gary Simpson, they have a collection of her works called the Outcast and the Rite, which as you might guess also involves some of these, you know, ancient rites coming in. So definitely check out Handheld Press, their website, they're a British publisher, but you can buy ebooks or physical books from them online at least for the next year. And in general, I think people just need to read more short stories and especially short stories from this golden age era. There's all sorts of things in there. There's ghost stories, there's weird fiction, there's folklore coming into it. That's also the golden age of the mystery genre. So definitely get out there and explore the world of short fiction. And if you want some suggestions of short stories to read, I'm actually doing a reading challenge right now on social media called A Scare a Day. It's created and led by Romancing the Gothic, which is a brilliant online community led by Dr. Sam Hurst. And actually if you're interested in Gothic literature and more of this, check out their website. We've been doing it started at the beginning of the Pandemic and they get lecturers and they've had talks about all sorts of folklore in Gothic literature by people who are far more experts in that field than I am. So check out romancingthegothic.com to look at their past lectures which are all up on YouTube for free. And if you want to participate, we still have a few days left in October. We're for the last three years we've done a scary story a day for October and Dr. Sam Hirsch has posted the list of stories on the Romancing the Gothic website. And each day of October we're reading a short story or a poem that's gothic or weird or supernatural or ghostly. So you can check out my Twitter or bluesky feed to see my thoughts on the stories that we've been reading. I'm on Twitter. My personal Twitter is juliajoice Edits and I believe on the same thing on Blue Sky. And you can also check out my. Oh, I'm just Juliajoice Bsky Social on Bluesky and my blog is GothicLibrary on Twitter.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:30:09
Do you have it under your Twitter page, your Gothic library Twitter page as well?
Julia O'Connell: 01:30:15
I Haven't been doing the challenge on the Gothic Library, but I am going to do a recap at the end of the month where I'll go through my thoughts and that will be posted on the Gothic Library. Maybe I should retweet myself from my Gothic Library account so you can follow.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:30:31
We'll add the link to this Sarah Day on our show notes so that people can, can find it, because that sounds really awesome. I have a friend who really, who always asks, like, what? Let's suggest a few short stories to read. And we can, because we live far away from one another.
Julia O'Connell: 01:30:50
Yeah. And Sam Hurst has done an amazing job of getting a real variety. We're reading things from the 1800s and we're reading things from the modern day. And it's spanning all sorts of subgenres of the dark and spread spooky and discovering a lot of authors who I had never heard of or was less familiar with, or they're authors I've heard of. Like we read Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker, which is a short story that's possibly a deleted first chapter from Dracula, you know, so, yeah, there's all sorts of great discoveries in there. And last year we read a really good mushroom horror story. So definitely check out, check out last year's challenge as well.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:31:36
Are they written in like a written form? Are they like, is it storytelling them? How are they?
Julia O'Connell: 01:31:44
Yeah, so Sam has collected links to where these stories are available for free online. And if they're not available, Sam has typed them up and put them on the Romancing the Gothic website. I also, I read a lot in audio, so some of the better known stories are out there in audiobooks. I always search them on Librivox, which is where you'll find a lot of public domain audiobooks or public domain fiction as audiobooks. And some of them are, you know, they're well known enough that they've had professional audiobooks made of them. Otherwise they're in the written form. Some of them are easier to read than others. Some are on Project Gutenberg, some are, you know, on archive.org and scanned books. So, you know, it's a bit of a grab bag, but. And sometimes they're on the podcast Pseudopod, which is another excellent place to find short stories, especially if you like them in the audio form. And they're all about the weird and their icon is a tentacle. So we're looping back around to weird fiction here.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:32:56
Well, this has just been so fantastic. I'm so glad we brought you on. Originally I contacted you because I found your one post about folk horror, but I love learning all about the history of Gothic literature. So thank you so much for joining us.
Julia O'Connell: 01:33:14
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Vanessa Rogers: 01:33:17
And thank you folksy folks, for unraveling the mysteries of Gothic origin today. Like I said before, we were going to provide links on our website in our show notes. My website is www.fabricafolklore.com, but you can also look on the show notes underneath. Obviously not links to every book that she mentioned because there were lots of books in there, but we'll do our best and add some of the more prominent ones that we talked about. Like I said before in the intro, if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe, Share Follow us on social media and once again, I'm Vanessa Y. Rogers. You've been listening to Fabric of Folklore and until next time, keep the Folk Alive.
