Recent research and increased interest

Traditionally hard to define, in recent decades critics have identified the subversive potential of the Gothic: it enables readers (or viewers) to question what is taken for granted: concepts of identity, family struc-tures and the ways in which a society is meant to work. The Gothic is thus not only a genre but a mode of negotiating contradictions in social life and conventions. It describes and shows extreme images and edgy spaces that are left out of other forms of narratives or representation.²⁴⁹

The subversive potential of the literary Gothic can be traced back to its earliest manifestation, The Castle of Otranto (1764). Horace Walpole’s short ‘novel’ features giant helmets and talking portraits, thus already anticipating the cinematic potential of Gothic literature, too. The text introduces characters that might appear to readers to be despotic or over-sensitive but, as Marshall Brown notes, “[a]ll the featured personages take their turn thinking. Most often, the diction generalizes a bit, giving a delicate sense of a narrator bridging the path to the interior […] The supernatural serves as a pretext for the focus on the thoughts and feel-ings of isolated individuals.”²⁵⁰ Thus, the Gothic has always been a mode to represent interiority, too.

Gothic has become valued as the quintessential precursor of Freudian thought [...] Freud’s spatial description of the unconscious and its ‘dream-work’ has clearly been developed from the very topography of now-visible surfaces and primeval depths essential to the design of the Gothic itself.²⁵¹

From a Freudian perspective, vampires appear to be especially powerful Gothic creatures: while live burials are a stock feature of many Gothic texts, vampires prototypically trigger taphephobia, the fear of premature burial, which is strongly echoed in a number of vampire films discussed in this thesis, too, most prominently in Carl Th. Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932).

249 Cf. Gina Wisker, Horror Fiction (London: Continuum, 2005) 218.

250 Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 31f.

251 Jerrold E. Hogle, “Theorizing the Gothic,” Teaching the Gothic, eds. Anna Powell and Andrew Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) 32.

According to George E. Haggarty, every practitioner of Gothic fiction is faced with the same literary dilemma: “What manner of prose narrative most effectively embodies a nightmare vision?”²⁵² Referring back to Edmund Burke, Haggarty reads the Gothic as an affective form, implying that these texts are meant to elicit particular responses in their readers: “Gothic works only become fully intelligible when we under-stand the extent of their affective rationale.” (13) Burke’s mid-eighteenth concept of sublime terror and its affective, psychological and ultimately social functions²⁵³ are an important backdrop for the design of the texts discussed here; however, Dorian, Dracula and Hyde affect their environ-ment and their readers in extreme and new ways, which will be dis-cussed as proto-filmic. Due to its specific mediality, film has its very own means to “embod[y] a nightmare vision”, some of which are anticipated by Wilde, Stoker and Stevenson.

In his deformity, Edward Hyde, for Stephen Arata “evokes the malignant beings of traditional folklore and fairy tale”,²⁵⁴ on which Stevenson has dwelled in those of his tales specifically set in Scotland, like “Thrawn Janet” or “The Merry Men”. In recent years, national per-spectives on the Gothic have been taken. Angela Wright has suggested the generic term Scottish Gothic for texts by Scottish writers that “ex-plore[ ] the reasons behind the inconsistencies of its nation’s history and population.”²⁵⁵ Wright finds texts by Stevenson and his fellow Scotsmen Walter Scott and James Hogg “analyz[ing] their nation’s fragmentation [by using] recognizable Gothic tropes.” Scottish Gothic texts share the re-presentation of Scotland not as a hostile, wild country, but rather as a place permeated by the past: “through its minutely detailed attention to the artefacts which give rise to narratives, Scottish Gothic debates the process of uncovering histories.²⁵⁶ In the Scottish Gothic, as in all Goth-

252 George E. Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (University Park & London: Penn-sylvania State UP, 1989) 3.

253 Cf. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), 5th ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1767).

254 Arata 2010: 65.

255 Angela Wright, “The Scottish Gothic,” The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Cath-erine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London and NY: Routledge, 2007) 73-82: 80f.

256 In October 2009, the University of Stirling held a symposium on “Scottish Gothic, 1764 to Present”.

ic fiction, past and present collide. Graves, castles, manuscripts and in-scriptions are all strongly contested sites of authenticity and authori-ty.”²⁵⁷ Hogg’s Justified Sinner²⁵⁸ and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde both feature haunted doubles, but this is not the only similarity that makes them Gothic as well as significantly Scottish texts. Both present frag-mented narratives, hinting, according to Wright, to “Scotland’s fractured state.” Drawing the reader’s attention to a problematic narrative frame is a preoccupation they share with the first Gothic novel, too. Like The Castle of Otranto, both texts are “intimately concerned with the presser-vation and correct transmission of a manuscript.” One wonders how-ever: Why has Jekyll & Hyde, in stark contrast to the Justified Sinner, been filmed so often?²⁵⁹ Is the reduction of the narrative complexity of Steven-son’s tale through the melodramatic stage versions, which have in-formed all the classic filmings, the only reason? In this thesis, I will dis-cuss two unacknowledged Jekyll & Hyde filmings, one by Jean Renoir, the other one by Ken Russell, which have most profoundly transposed Stevenson’s unsettling narrative setup to the screen by connecting Hyde’s monstrosity to the mode of his transmission.

257 Cf. Wright 2007: 73-6.

258 James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner: Written by Himself: With a Detail of Curious Traditionary Facts and Other Evidence by the Editor (publ. anon. 1824), ed. Peter Garside (Edinburgh: EUP, 2001).

259 While some consider David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) a free adaptation of the Justi-fied Sinner, the only filming acknowledging Hogg as a source is Osobisty pamiętnik grzesznika... przez niego samego spisany (1986) by the Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has. In a 2012 newsletter on his homepage, Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin an-nounced that he is still working on a film script of the Justified Sinner – and that his attempts to get it filmed so far have been in vain. Ian Rankin, “May 2012 Newsletter,”

11 April 2013, <www.ianrankin.net>. The Oxford scholar Barry Murnane calls Fight Club “the most successful doppelganger film of recent years” and Michaela Krützen discusses the movie as a broad adaptation of sorts of earlier Jekyll & Hyde filmings, emphasizing Tyler’s being Jack’s repressed, split-off self, acting out Jack’s hidden desires and developing a love interest for his girlfriend. Cf. Barry Murnane, “Doppel-ganger,” Weinstock 2014: 172-7: 176 and Michaela Krützen, Dramaturgien des Films:

Das etwas andere Hollywood (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2010) 151-8. Additionally see Kirsten Stirling, “‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr Jackass’: Fight Club as a Refraction of Hogg’s Justified Sinner and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” Refracting the Canon in Con-temporary British Literature and Film, eds. Susana Onega Jaén and Christian Gutleben (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004) 83–93.

While the label Scottish Gothic represents an instance of localizing the Gothic, there have been fruitful attempts at assessing its global di-mension. In the introduction to their 2013 anthology Transnational Gothic, Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall set out to provide “a much-needed perspective that eschews national borders” that have limited definitions of the Gothic by analyzing “various commonalities apparent in global Gothic fictions.”²⁶⁰ Charting its recent history, Elbert and Marshall document that Gothic criticism has not only traditionally been limited to the discussion of either British or American literature; it has closely followed trends in critical theory, too, focussing on issues of gender and race: feminist readings of Gothic fiction, both canonical and by previously neglected women writers,²⁶¹ have, in recent years, been re-placed by gendered and queer readings.²⁶²

“Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer’”, claim William Hughes and Andrew Smith in their 2009 anthology Queering the Gothic.²⁶³ In this and similar recent publications, the labels ‘Gothic’ and

‘queer’ are juxtaposed in terms of their paradigmatic transgressiveness.

Both question the normative – the Gothic as a genre, queer as a per-spective in culture and criticism challenging ‘acceptable’ categories of (gender) identity. Both are ‘liminal’ – queer in heteronormative culture, the Gothic by negotiating the tabooed.²⁶⁴ In Queer Gothic (2006), George E. Haggerty claims that Gothic novels have, from their first description of “long labyrinth[s] of darkness” and “subterraneous” passages on-

260 Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall, “Introduction,” Transnational Gothic: Lit-erary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall (Farnham: Ashgate 2013) 1-16: 1, 3.

261 Cf. for example Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic:

The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979); Michelle Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (1992); Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992); Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism (1998).

262 Cf. for example Cindy Hendershot, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (1998); Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-Siècle (2004).

263 William Hughes and Andrew Smith, “Introduction,” Queering the Gothic, eds. Wil-liam Hughes and Andrew Smith (Manchester & New York: Manchester UP, 2009) 1-10: 1.

264 Cf. Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressive Monstrosity (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2012) 2f.

wards, always served as intermediators in a safe space: “Gothic fiction of-fered the one semirespectable area of literary endeavour in which modes of sexual and social transgression were discursively addressed on a regu-lar basis.”²⁶⁵ Haggerty discusses the transgressive potential literary rep-resentations of homosexual encounters have had in a patriarchal society.

In a chapter called “Identity and Dissolution in Apocalyptic Gothic,” he proposes a queer reading of Jekyll & Hyde, which is almost anachronistic.

Hyde, who blackmails Jekyll into what the respectable doctor calls “my nameless situation,” (41) is Jekyll’s “smaller, slighter, and younger” com-panion, a suspicious lower-class friend, with whom he finds himself even in bed, after a night of sexual roaming, in what Haggerty calls “one of the most intriguing bed scenes in all of gothic literature.”²⁶⁶

From the 1990s onwards, a growing number of studies of the Goth-ic have discussed issues of race: of how the AmerGoth-ican GothGoth-ic has come to represent racial oppression and slavery²⁶⁷ and of how the Gothic Novel, and especially nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, negotiates Brit-ish imperialist endeavours.²⁶⁸

Riding the wave of transnational criticism, Elbert’s and Marshall’s collection is commendable. However, their exclusive focus on fiction (with the occasional mention of poetry and drama) does not seem to do

265 George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Urbana-Champaign et al: U of Illinois P, 2006) 2f.

266 Haggerty 2006: 123-8: 127. For an earlier queer reading of Jekyll & Hyde see the chap-ter “Jekyll’s Closet” in Showalchap-ter 1990: 105-26. Contemporary reviewers of the tale have noticed that “[n]o woman’s name occurs in the book, no romance is even sug-gested in it.” However, female reviewers like Frances Julia Wedgwood did not miss anything in “the most remarkable work”. Henry James for example claims that “Mr.

Stevenson achieves his best effects without the aid of the ladies […] The gruesome tone of the tale is, no doubt, deepened by their absence”. (Frances Julia Wedgwood,

“Review of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” The Contemporary Review (April 1886): 594f and Henry James, “Review of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,”

Century Magazine (April 1888): 877f both rpt. in excerpts in Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ed. Katherine Linehan (New York: Norton, 2003) 100 & 101f)

267 Cf. for example Renée Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (2000); Justin D. Edwards, Gothic Passages, Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic (2003).

268 Cf. for example H.L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1996); Cannon Schmidt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (1997).

justice to their subject, the formally eternally transforming Gothic. For example, in recent years, the Gothic – and its German equivalent Schwarze Romantik – have increasingly been applied to visual arts predating film. The enormous public interested in the intermedial potential of the Gothic is accounted for by two recent exhibitions, one at Tate Britain, London, called “Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination” (15 February – 1 May 2006),²⁶⁹ the other one at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main: “Schwarze Romantik: Von Goya bis Max Ernst” (26 September 2012 – 20 January 2013) and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris: “L’ange du bizarre. Le romantisme noir de Goya à Max Ernst” (5 March – 9 June 2013). Most recently, the British Film In-stitute has organized “a nationwide season” called “Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film.” From October 2013 to January 2014, the BFI Southbank held a series of events, combining special screenings of restored horror classics and rediscoveries from the BFI archives, discussion rounds, new DVD releases and publications on the topic in “a celebration of gothic film and TV across the UK,” as the specifically established BFI Gothic blog announced.²⁷⁰