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some Gothic
Dec. 9th, 2019 03:45 amSo I can't actually recommend Charles Brockden Brown's Gothic novel Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798) unless you are into the history of horror or the history of Gothic novels, due to a plot conceit that has through no fault of the author become extraordinarily silly, but it has a scene in it which I have never encountered anything remotely like in anything else I've ever read.
I read the book because when I am sick and exhausted and ground down, one of the things I do is to locate and read something or other that H. P. Lovecraft discusses in Supernatural Horror in Literature. I have been doing this since high school and I haven't run out yet-- he cites a lot of things. This book is waaaaaay more readable than at least half of them, and I intend to go on to other work by the same author. However, it simply cannot be read as a suspense novel nowadays, which, I repeat, is not because of any actual problems with the book itself.
You see, the protagonist is a young woman living with her brother and his family somewhere in what would in a hundred years be Main Line Philadelphia, with all the money that implies, and she has a nearly-fiance, and the problem they start having is that the adults in the family hear voices. The voices sometimes sound like members of the household who aren't actually there, and sometimes sound ineffable or VERY LOUD and ineffable, and tell people to do or not do things. And for more than half the book's length all of the characters are caught up in the question of whether the voices are supernatural, and if so whether they are benign or malignant, or if there is some of each going on, and did anyone actually summon them, or is this a Socrates-daemon situation? and the modern reader sits there rather impatiently twiddling their thumbs, because there is a perfectly reasonable explanation no one has yet mentioned, and then--
( And then I learn something interesting about the state of pop science in 1798. )
I read the book because when I am sick and exhausted and ground down, one of the things I do is to locate and read something or other that H. P. Lovecraft discusses in Supernatural Horror in Literature. I have been doing this since high school and I haven't run out yet-- he cites a lot of things. This book is waaaaaay more readable than at least half of them, and I intend to go on to other work by the same author. However, it simply cannot be read as a suspense novel nowadays, which, I repeat, is not because of any actual problems with the book itself.
You see, the protagonist is a young woman living with her brother and his family somewhere in what would in a hundred years be Main Line Philadelphia, with all the money that implies, and she has a nearly-fiance, and the problem they start having is that the adults in the family hear voices. The voices sometimes sound like members of the household who aren't actually there, and sometimes sound ineffable or VERY LOUD and ineffable, and tell people to do or not do things. And for more than half the book's length all of the characters are caught up in the question of whether the voices are supernatural, and if so whether they are benign or malignant, or if there is some of each going on, and did anyone actually summon them, or is this a Socrates-daemon situation? and the modern reader sits there rather impatiently twiddling their thumbs, because there is a perfectly reasonable explanation no one has yet mentioned, and then--
( And then I learn something interesting about the state of pop science in 1798. )
