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Abstract
This article sets out to examine the pervasive influence of spiritualist and occultist thinking on a number of Fin-de-siècle writers of popular horror fictions set in Wales or Ireland and published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably in the work of Arthur Machen, but also in that of William Hope Hodgson and H. P. Lovecraft. The article also examines the influence of occult Celticism on a pair of landmark early Universal horror films, James Whale's The Old Dark House (1933) and George Waggner's The Wolf Man (1941), both set in Wales. The article examines the significance of the omphalos as a geomantic singularity of spiritual force, a portal between two worlds, and uses this to suggest ways in which many writers around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century saw themselves as straddling a borderland between the worlds of spirit and matter. Furthermore, the theories and rhetoric of Celticism, I suggest, are put to characteristically contradictory ends in these fictions (and elsewhere), simultaneously validating the spiritual identity of the native Welsh and Irish, and subhumanizing or monstering them through their recurring representation as inarticulate beast-men.
Notes
1. CitationJoyce, Ulysses, 383.
2. CitationGosse, Omphalos. For a sympathetic account of Gosse's work by an eminent modern evolutionary theorist, see CitationGould, ‘Adam's Navel’, 99–113. The omphalos has become a recurring trope in psychoanalytic theory: for a modern study, though one whose Lacanian interests are very far from my own in this paper, see CitationBronfen, The Knotted Subjects.
3. CitationWeber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, 155. For an analysis of Entzauberung specifically in the context of fin de siècle and Edwardian spiritualism and occultism, see CitationOwen, The Place of Enchantment, 10–16.
4. CitationOwen, The Place of Enchantment, 38.
5. CitationOppenheim, The Other World, 4.
6. CitationBrown, The Life of W.B. Yeats, 33.
7. The Wolf Man, dir. George Waggner (Citation1941). The screenplay was written by CitationCurt Siodmak, who uses this memorable folk charm as the epigraph to his autobiography, The Wolf Man's Maker.
8. CitationCurt Siodmak, first treatment of The Wolf Man, in CitationRiley, The Wolf Man, 31. ‘Llanwelly’ recurs throughout Siodmak's final screenplay, and is commonly referred to as the film's setting, but is never mentioned in the finished film, and neither is Wales in general mentioned as a setting. In his commentary to the 2004 DVD reissue of the film, Tom Weaver speculates that this may be because it was feared that Sir John Talbot's comment that ‘We are a backward people’ might have caused offence if it were identified with any one particular nation. When The Wolf Man was first proposed, by the French director Robert Florey in 1931, its location was to be the ‘Swiss-Tyrolian [sic] Alps … c.1850’: see Monster By Moonlight! The Immortal Saga of the Wolf Man, dir. David J. Skal (Citation2004), which reproduces Florey's treatment.
9. CitationCurt Siodmak, shooting script for The Wolf Man, in CitationRiley, The Wolf Man, 1–2. This script, of 9 October 1941, is not the final version used for Waggner's film, and includes a number of scenes which were not approved by the censor. As late as this penultimate version, ‘Larry Talbot’ is an American optical engineer called ‘Larry Gill’, who has come to Wales to install Sir John Talbot's new telescope, though he tells Sir John that ‘My people were Welsh. They left here in 1822’ (CitationRiley, The Wolf Man, 17).
10. This sense of a Ruritanian Wales unbounded by geographical and temporal specificity is heightened by the fact that Universal Studios used the same backlot set – which they called the ‘European Village’ – to represent any European location at any time in history: see Monster By Moonlight! for an account of this set.
11. CitationArnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 12.
12. CitationTrumpener, Bardic Nationalism.
13. For an account of Arnold which is particularly strong on his Celticism, see CitationMurray, Matthew Arnold.
14. CitationMill, Considerations of Representative Government, 314.
15. Citation‘E.B.’, A Trip to North Wales, 3.
16. CitationCurtis, Apes and Angels.
17. CitationKilleen, Gothic Ireland, 9.
18. CitationPriestley, Benighted, 18–19.
19. CitationPriestley, Benighted, 17, 19.
20. CitationPriestley, Benighted, 30.
21. CitationOwen, The Place of Enchantment, 49, 62.
22. CitationMachen, The Caerleon Edition of the Works of Arthur Machen, vol. 8: Far Off Things, 9, 18–19.
23. CitationMachen, ‘The Great God Pan’, Caerleon Edition, vol. 1, 6.
24. CitationMachen, ‘The Great God Pan’, Caerleon Edition, vol. 1, 6, 75–6.
25. CitationMachen, ‘The Great God Pan’, Caerleon Edition, vol. 1, 6, 20, 22.
26. CitationMachen, ‘The Great God Pan’, Caerleon Edition, vol. 1, 6, 81. For the theoretical underpinnings of this argument, see CitationDouglas, Purity and Danger; CitationKristeva, The Powers of Horror.
27. CitationMachen, The Three Impostors, Caerleon Edition, vol. 2, 76, 81.
28. CitationMachen, The Three Impostors, Caerleon Edition, vol. 2, 83. Solinus's De Mirabilibus Mundi is an authentic work, though it does not contain this passage.
29. CitationMachen, The Three Impostors, Caerleon Edition, vol. 2, 94–5. The correct Welsh term for the fairies is ‘tylwyth teg’.
30. CitationMachen, The Three Impostors, Caerleon Edition, vol. 2, 108.
31. CitationMachen, The Three Impostors, Caerleon Edition, vol. 2, 89.
32. CitationMachen, The Three Impostors, Caerleon Edition, vol. 2, 110.
33. For ‘doomed race’ theories in and around the eighteenth century, see CitationStafford, The Last of the Race.
34. CitationTrumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 66–127.
35. CitationMachen, The Hill of Dreams, Caerleon Edition, vol. 3, 9, 19.
36. CitationMachen, The Hill of Dreams, Caerleon Edition, vol. 3, 60.
37. CitationMachen, The Hill of Dreams, Caerleon Edition, vol. 3, 112.
38. CitationMachen, The Hill of Dreams, Caerleon Edition, vol. 3, 247.
39. CitationMachen, The Terror, Caerleon Edition, vol. 7, 17.
40. CitationMachen, The Terror, Caerleon Edition, vol. 7, 65.
41. CitationMachen, The Terror, Caerleon Edition, vol. 7, 33, 37.
42. See Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1907), Sax Rohmer, The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (1913), and John Buchan, The Thirty-nine Steps (1915). It is worth noting in this context that two of these writers were Irishmen (Childers and Rohmer) and one a Scot (Buchan).
43. CitationMachen, The Terror, Caerleon Edition, vol. 7, 145–6.
44. CitationMachen, ‘The Bowmen’, Caerleon Edition, vol. 7, 151.
45. See CitationClarke, The Angel of Mons, for a detailed history of the Angel of Mons and an account of the various explanations for the appearances. Apart from writing the original story, Machen seems to have had no knowledge of the hoax.
46. CitationHodgson, The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, 113–15.
47. CitationHodgson, The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, 111.
48. CitationHodgson, The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, 110.
49. CitationHodgson, The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, 128, 133.
50. CitationJoshi, H.P. Lovecraft, 299; CitationLovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, 88–95.
51. CitationLovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, 146.
52. CitationLovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 83.
53. CitationLovecraft, ‘The Rats in the Walls’, in The Call of Cthulhu, 89.
54. CitationLovecraft, ‘The Rats in the Walls’, in The Call of Cthulhu, 98.
55. CitationLovecraft, ‘The Rats in the Walls’, in The Call of Cthulhu, 108.
56. CitationLovecraft, ‘The Rats in the Walls’, in The Call of Cthulhu, 384, n. 33.
57. See CitationAlaya, William Sharp.
58. CitationStead, ‘Preface’, iii.
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