Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales Read Free Page A

Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, published in the
Dublin University Magazine
in 1853. Both of Le Fanu’s stories climax with the discovery of the cruel judge suspended by his own hanging rope, whilst in ‘The Judge’s House’ it is the innocent lodger who is the victim of the judge’s toxic apparition.
    However, it would be misleading to imply that, in displaying similarities with Le Fanu’s work, Stoker was merely plagiarizing his ideas. Many of the plot devices that both authors used were longstanding staples of the Gothic tradition. The pictorialimage that comes to life and steps out of its frame, substituting itself for its original in ‘The Judge’s House’, is a concept that can be traced from Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
(1764) to Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890), via Charles Maturin’s
Melmoth the Wanderer
(1820) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1850). In addition, inclement weather, spooky houses, local superstitions, disturbed dreams, vampires, doubles, second sight and malevolent beasts appeared frequently in the Gothic novels and stories of John Polidori, Mary Shelley, Matthew Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. Gothic, while imaginative, is certainly not an innovative genre as far as fictional plot mechanisms are concerned. Sets are recycled, plots rehashed and atmosphere remains invariably hyperbolic. Where the very best writers of the Gothic
are
original is in reworking these potentially formulaic devices and indulgence in uncanny excess into relevant, incisive and captivatingly unique tales in their own right. Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, for example, is not merely a pictorial dramatization of the Faustian pact for the
fin de siècle
audience; it is also a direct challenge to society’s superficiality, revealing the complex duality of the human condition.
    Stoker understood the need for this balancing act between high fancy and deep focus, and his ability to weave such seemingly hackneyed elements seamlessly – and vividly – into his fiction without incurring accusations of belaboured cliché stands as evidence of his considerable abilities as a writer of the Gothic story. The weather may be preternaturally rough at times of high drama; pictures may come to life; animals may stalk humans; dreams and visions may foretell doom; and men may fight for, die for, kill for – and kill – women, yet joining these extreme events lies an overarching unease about the transgression of boundaries. Life and death, known and unknown, animal and human, man and woman, dream and reality, good and evil: each duality is in conflict in the stories, and each remains largely unresolved at their closure. For Stoker, life on the boundaries signified intense anxiety, the human spirit displaying itself at its most dangerous, and most resolute.Transgression of borders socially or morally imposed results in the disruption of the imperceptible balance of power, and descent into chaos. For death to impose itself on life, for animal to impose itself on human, or for woman to impose herself on man meant a fundamental questioning of the divide separating each from the other, and the ultimate need for a reassessment of the ‘acceptable’ status quo.
    ‘The Squaw’ (1893), for example, reflects the deep unease expressed in much later nineteenth-century popular literature about the need for the reassessment of the boundaries that separate human and animal. The tale of a cat’s revenge upon Elias P. Hutcheson of Nebraska for his accidental killing of her kitten is so effectively chilling precisely because the cat expresses very human emotions. Its initial cry of distress upon the death of its litter, ‘such as a human being might give’, soon gives way to a display of keen intelligence and calculated revenge that results in the American’s gruesome death in the Iron Virgin, a formidable cabinet