Dazzling Ghostland: Sheridan Le Fanu’s Phantasmagoria
David Annwn
As the third chapter of Sheridan LeFanu’s Uncle Silas (1865), cuts to the fourth, there occurs a most remarkable moment in 19th century literature of horror.
Maud Ruthyn, the youthful protagonist, is thinking over her encounters with members of the Swedenborgian religious sect:
She is dwelling on her recent encounter with Mr Bryerly, a Swedenborgian and thinking of her walk with him past her mother’s sylvan tomb and his consoling words regarding the afterlife.
For a moment, in Maud’s lulled consciousness, it is as though the border between life and death has become permeable, subject to comings and goings. At the turn of the page and chapter, we jump to:
Does our consciousness, as readers, move in upon the vision here or does this tall image seem to rise out of the land of the dead towards us? Perhaps both simultaneously, because this moment is a nexus of conflicting spatial urges and affronts to these. Maud, it is clear, is partly drawn to the dazzle of the land where she now believes her mother resides. Her gaze is wide-focussed, being drawn through the mid-ground into the distance, and death seems an inviting and far off prospect, but this attraction receives a powerful rebuttal by the abrupt appearance of Madame de la Rougierre, an immoral adventuress, in the foreground, ‘before me’. She will manifest a much more immediate and violent threat of death in the novel. The impact is intensified by the sudden-ness of the figure’s appearance and lack of mediating detail of her approach. Her spectral form reminds of Brian Jarvis’s words about the looming and lurching of visions in Etienne Gaspard Robertson’s Parisian phantasmagoria lantern show:
At the beginning of this passage, Maud is ‘Leaning on’ her ‘hand,’ fancying that death’s gate is ‘hidden only by a strange glamour’. The scene is strangely unnerving. This is, after all, too early in the novel for the reader, like Maud, to be confident of Mr Bryerly’s motives. His being openly linked to magic lanterns hints at illusion. Maud is in a state of fancy, of reverie, and we remember Coleridge’s designation of Gothic novels as mechanisms inducing reverie. Like a reader of romances, her character is under a spell, as the words ‘strange glamour’ indicate; Walter Scott, in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 1830, writes ‘This species of Witchcraft is well-known in Scotland as the glamour, or deceptio visus […]’.(5) Surely, though, the motif of the wood, death-gate and visionary guide give rise to other uneasy resonances; we remember Dante Alighieri here, the persona in his Inferno being led through a ‘selva oscura’ by that seer and spiritual guide, Virgil, to the gate of Hell.
It is clear that Le Fanu has positioned each stage of this prelude to Rougierre’s appearance very precisely: the initial magic-lantern analogy and Maud’s sense of her own limited perceptions linked to the vision of the dead are deployed with great care. If the distinctively dark-clothed Swedenborgians remind Maud of lantern-slides, this association is reciprocal. The young woman’s closeted upbringing has produced a sharply-honed attention capable of a very tight focus on objects before her. It has also, initially, produced a passivity of observation like that of a watcher at a phantasmagoria or a reader of romances. As readers ourselves, we are shocked at the spectacle because our receptive minds have been subtly and powerfully focussed through the reverie of her gaze.
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The connection between Rougierre’s abrupt entrance and pre-cinematic technology is one that Le Fanu is also keen to emphasise later in the novel:
Elsewhere, in the famous country churchyard scene, Rougierre mortifies Maud by shouting:
Ghosts, witches and skeletons amongst the moonlit graves were the stock-in-trade of Robertson’s Directoire lantern show. With her cries of ‘Ça ira, ‘ça ira’ and ‘Lanterne’ (meaning ‘To the lamp-post, to lynch them,’ during the Terror), and her nominal association with red, both blood and over-use of rouge (Mrs Rusk nick-names her Madame de la Rougepot), this character evokes Le Fanu’s worst nightmare: the sanguinary excesses of the Revolutionary mob and, particularly, those ‘unnatural’ bloodthirsty women attending the guillotine. At times she seems literally to become an optical component from Robertson’s show, with all the macabre distortion and animation of one of his slides:
And just like one of Robertson’s trick slides, she can change, in a twinkling, into even more disturbing forms:
Rougierre’s grinning venom, her head so suddenly revealed as bald, her vigorous danse macabre and cry of ‘Mrs Deadhouse’ are not easily forgotten and rest uncannily in the imagination. Amongst her literary offspring is the bald and dancing, Mephistophelean Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a novel where the secular aloes bloom ‘like phantasmagoria in a fever land’ and riders vanish ‘one by one’ and reappear ‘again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms.’(10) Le Fanu’s villain casts a long shadow. Harold Bloom declared that McCarthy’s Judge Holden is ‘the most frightening figure in all of American literature’.(11)
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Le Fanu’s novels and stories focus upon the phantasmagoria more than those of any other purveyor of literary horror and suspense in the English-speaking world, indeed more than any other writer outside of the accounts of the professional showmen themselves. For over 27 years, Le Fanu used the phantasmagoria and magic lantern for a gamut of different effects in his writings; there are at least 17 direct references to these media, including detailed allusions to the lanternists’ techniques, equipment and proto-history. There are also many further implicit references, perhaps up to a hundred, found in his extended imagery of monstrification, illusions and shadows.(12) There are at least four times as many of these references in Le Fanu’s oeuvre as in the writings of other mature novelists of the period. Charlotte Brönte, Thomas Hardy (who had his own Gothic period of chilling tales) Charles Dickens, George Eliot all used a handful of such motifs. Additionally, in the case of authors who published a substantial number of novels, references to pre-cinematic technologies tend to be clustered exclusively in two or three of their works; this is certainly true of Hardy, Eliot and Dickens but with Le Fanu, the references span each stage of his work from the early stories into the 1870s. Some of the most crucial and intense moments of mystery and terror are expressed in terms of the ghost-lantern.
If Stephen King’s novels had featured as obsessive a proclivity for cinematic techniques like ‘slo-mo’, tracking and dolly shots, this would have received substantial critical attention. Yet Le Fanu’s continued and intense interest in early visual technology seems to have been overlooked. Far from being stock images randomly dropped in for effect by an overworked serial writer, these phantasmagoric tropes perform crucial functions in the novels: understanding Le Fanu’s allusions to these pre-cinematic media change the ways we read his work and alert us to a complex, inter-related mesh of reference. It also helps illuminate other seemingly puzzling aspects of his work.
For example, in his superb introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Uncle Silas, W.J. Mc Cormack probes the reasons for Le Fanu’s link from Maud’s visions of her father to Chateaubriand’s glimpses of his own sire in Mémoires d’Outre Tombe: ‘Here too the narrator’s father walks in a room so as to appear and disappear from and into the darkness.’(13) Mc Cormack then goes on to connect the title of the French author’s book (translated as Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb), with Emmanuel Swedenborg in that ‘it encapsulates the basic tactic of Swedenborgian phantasmagoria, the dreaming-back of life in death.’ He then refers to ‘the phantasmagoric schemer Silas.’(14) In making such links, Mc Cormack is, perhaps only partly consciously, touching upon further technological associations. Because another reason for that opening episode, the irregularly-shaped, ‘long room’ (so like the refectory-site of Robertson’s convent show), the reappearing and disappearing father emerging ‘like a portrait with a background of shadow’ and the link to Chateaubriand, is to set up the network of magic-lantern associations in the novel as a whole. For it is the Chateaubriand of the Mémoires who visits Robertson’s show and tells us the phantasmagoria is situated somewhere in the cloisters of a convent in Paris ‘after the Community of Capuchins had been pillaged.’(15)
These structural tropes linking Rougierre to the lantern of fear, accompany her through the whole novel. Her ‘quaint old Bretagne ballad’ tells of phantasmal metamorphoses and the song supposedly originates in that same Breton landscape which Chateaubriand called a ‘phantasmagoria’.(16) As a prelude to his show, Robertson told of its ancient lineage back to the Eleusinian mysteries. Rougierre gazes like ‘the Eleusinian priestess on the vase’ at Maud. Elsewhere Maud feels that she has been led into a chamber and ‘shown a specter’ by the Woman of Endor. One of Robertson’s most popular slides was the Witch of Endor. As Le Fanu knew, Walter Scott, in his Letters of Demonology and Witchcraft, 1830, described the ghost raised by the Witch of Endor as a ‘phantasmagoria’.(17) One reason that Silas seems ‘phantasmagoric’ is that, at times, he seems a living memorial of the lantern-show, his spectral form ‘pointing to the door imperiously with his skeleton finger’ could not be more like one of Robertson’s slides.(18)
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Three other examples will reveal a span of such references. In The Cock and Anchor (1845), Le Fanu starts to reference the lantern of horror openly. In this scene, Lady Stukely hearing of how she’s secretly reviled by her ostensible suitor, Sir Henry Ashwoode, emerges from her hiding-place in a recess:
It is, of course, a moment tinged both with pathos and humour: a mockery of Gothic conventions, such as the lady’s concealment, the gasp in the recess and the likeness of a spectre. Yet this spectre is here linked to the swelling ghostly projections of the lantern ghost-show. The ‘spectre’s’ association with ‘crashing fragments of monkeys, monsters, and mandarins’ is no random detail either, for one idea that Le Fanu returned to was the notion of the magic-lantern’s chaotic fragmentation of experience.
In ‘The Spectre Lovers’(1851), a villager encounters a strange procession:
The alliterating ‘p’s of ‘painted pageant…’ supply an auditory correlative of the column of figures. It also provides the idea of a sequence of slides giving the impression of movement. This is one of the most detailed fictional evocations of the back projection from a magic lantern (fantascope), casting images from slides through a screen onto a column of smoke. Robertson created this smoke by setting light to blood, vitriol, aquae fortis and old magazines, a technique which would surely have convinced his audience that they suffered a ‘temporary defect’ of ‘vision’, their eyes streaming, their minds full of fire and brimstone. The blurring and the eerie visual dismemberment of the Le Fanu’s phantom soldiers is strictly faithful to accounts of the show.
This image is anticipated in the tale ‘Spalatro’ (1843), where a girl of ‘preternatural loveliness in limb and feature, but pale and bloodless as the dead’, emerges from a ‘light, semi-transparent vapour, which rolled and eddied in cloudy volumes.’(21) A pale, ‘bloodless’ girl emerging from ‘vapour’ and the ‘vapoury’ column so like a phantasmagoria – the echoes are unmistakable. By the time of House by the Churchyard (1861), and by an uncanny law of multiplication, a character’s ‘sensorium’ is described as ‘still all alive with the images of fifty phantasmagoria’
This ghost-show is out of control, reproducing itself manically. Le Fanu doesn’t always distinguish between popular magic-lantern shows, the intinerant lantern-shows specialising in slides of ghosts and the highly sophisticated phantasmagoria à la Robertson, but by the time of Carmilla (1872), he was ready to display his knowledge of two very different repertoires of visual spectacle.
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Terry Castle writes of the metaphorical displacement whereby, in literary works, the human brain itself became a phantasmagoria, the word itself increasingly being identified with ‘states of delirium and psychic alienation’.(23) She goes on to propound a theory of spectralisation of the mind. We see clear examples of these ideas in Le Fanu’s work. When Ashwoode sees the looming figure of Lady Stukely, his mind is distorting her image. Maud’s mind, inured to a lonely childhood has become a kind of magic lantern which projects the disk of her ‘observation’.
In writing of the preternatural stirring of Edgar Allen Poe’s character, Rowena, in ‘Ligeia’, Castle comments: ’a mental image seems to come to life, fantastically, in the flesh. The phantom becomes a reality.’(24) This is not, though, the usual pattern in Le Fanu’s work. Maud in Uncle Silas, sees certain characters in, as it were, phantasmagorical terms. In the case of Mr Bryerly, Maud is at first deceived but in the case of Rougierre, she is not. In fact, the reality of Rougierre’s evil nature is much worse than the threat envisaged by Maud’s ‘lanternist’ imagination. Additionally, nowhere in Poe’s writing does a character become a grotesque tell-tale phantasmagoria slide of themselves in the way that Maud’s French nanny and Silas do.
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What is the wider literary context for such intense synergy between novels and phantasmagoria in Le Fanu’s work? We look in vain for references to pre-cinematic visual media in other works of what has been called ‘Irish Gothic’: Regina Maria Roche’s Children of the Abbey (1796), Mrs. Kelly’s Ruins of Avondale Priory (1796), and Mrs. F. C. Patrick’s The Irish Heiress (1797). Yet other Irish writers and writers resident in Ireland seemed to find a particular affinity in the tropes of visual technologies. From Edgeworthstown in 1798, Maria Edgeworth writes to her aunt Sophy:
Edgeworth subsequently used magic lantern analogies to hint at the fashionable transience and grotesquerie of life in the ‘Big Houses’ of Ireland in The Absentee, Ormond, Leonora and Helen. Such was the convergence of optical and literary media that Marguerite Power, Countess of Blessington, titled her book of social glimpses The Magic Lantern (1823).
Some of the most notable Gothic and horror literary productions of 1790-1820 reference the burgeoning optical media. In Mrs Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), ‘vessels, glided upon the scene and passed away, as in a camera obscura’.(26) The literary circles around William Godwin the author of Lives of the Necromancers himself were identified with phantasmagoria. Godwin’s friend, Hazlitt was fascinated by magic lantern shows or ‘phantasmagorias’ and he drew on them and on the new science of electricity to give animation and movement to his essay profiles. In Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman published posthumously in 1798, Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin’s wife wrote that ‘A magic lamp now seemed to be suspended in Maria’s prison […]’.(27)
Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Godwin wrote in her journal for 28 December 1814: ‘Go to Garnerin's Lecture of electricity, the gasses, and the phantasmagoria’.(28) Balloonist Jacques Garnerin’s cabinet de physique and lantern of fear obviously made a considerable impression on the future author of Frankenstein. In that novel, she writes of marvellous philosophers who,
This is not to mention the Robertson-inspired titling of Fantasmagoriana, the anthology of ghost stories which proved so influential in the famous writing contest which first provoked the creation of Frankenstein. In The Last Man, 1826, Mary Shelley as she was now named, drew upon her knowledge of the spectacle, writing that ‘futurity, like a dark image in a phantasmagoria, came nearer and more near, till it clasped the whole earth in its shadow’.(30)
The settings of Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, centring on a Capuchin church, monastery, graveyard and convent, surely anticipate Robertson’s future placement of his Fantasmagorie in the Capuchin convent adjoining the Place des Piques. One of Robertson’s most feared slides was a version of Lewis’ Bleeding Nun. Robert Miles cites Matilda’s magic mirror bordered with ‘strange and unknown characters’ used to conjure up a ‘real-time’ image of Antonia, bathing, and comments ‘As such, one might say that the magic mirror signifies the veil of textuality that mediates’.(31) I’d go much further: Lewis’ mirror, its smoke and occult characters is an obvious trope of the magic lantern and, in particular, the phantasmagoria.
After all phantasmagoria-mania was to last more than 20 years in Paris and London. Books such as Phantasmagoria: Authentic Relations of Apparitions and Visions (1805), Phantasmagoria, or the Development of Magical Deception (1803) and articles such as Nicholson’s ‘Narrative and Explanation of the Appearance of Phantoms and other Figures in the Exhibition of the Phantasmagoria' (1802) were commonplace.
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In terms of direct contextual influence though, Le Fanu had no further to look than one of his admired literary models, Walter Scott. In Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), and The Maid of Perth (1823), Scott utilises magic lantern and phantasmagoric imagery. The Scottish novelist also called Godwin’s novels ‘philosophical phantasmagoria’.
Irish, English and Scottish sources aside, Gary William Crawford wonders
Of course, the most obvious sign of Schiller’s influence is precisely the prominence of lanternists throughout Le Fanu’s work; additionally, we can go considerably further. In Schiller’s Der Geisterseher/ The Ghost-seer, the Prince of **d** , earlier the victim of a hoax, a Lanterna Magica show masquerading as a conjuration of spirits, says:
I have shown elsewhere that this is one of E. A. Robertson’s main sources for the prefatory speeches to his show in Paris.(34) Such is the density of synergetic exchange between visual and literary media 1830-40 that Le Fanu, as well as reading these words, might easily have heard a version of them accompanying phantasmagoria. It is worth comparing the above passage to the words of Le Fanu’s Richard Marston in The Evil Guest (1851), as he looks into a fire, seeing the ‘phantoms of murdered time and opportunity’:
Soon after, Marston’s obsessive vision is consciously linked to Schiller and the phantasmagoria:
The tale is rife with the iconography of lantern shows, the flashing of images on minds, the viewer’s passivity, the images’ disembodiment and the closing of the spectacle with a falling curtain:
The revenant presence of the recently deceased, a staple figure in Robertson’s show where Robespierre and Marat were ‘resurrected’ nightly, is at the centre of Le Fanu’s tale: the dead Wynston Berkley becomes ‘the hero of the hellish illusion.’ Like the figures projected on the screen at the Capucine convent in 1799, ‘though dead,’ Berkeley ‘is invested with a sort of spurious life’.
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Can we extrapolate from Le Fanu’s obvious fascination with the phantasmagoria to hazard that he had personally witnessed such shows? The first appearances of such spectacles in Ireland pre-date his birth by many years. In February, 1802 the premiere of the Irish phantasmagoria took place at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, Dublin. Its success led successively to a ‘new phantasmagoria and ‘New Ghosts’’. In 1804 one of the ghost show’s pioneers, Philipsthal opened his spectacle at the Little Theatre, Capel Street, Dublin.
By the time Le Fanu was eight, Jacques Charles, incorporating the discovery of dissolving views (gradual super-imposition of images), and moving slides opened his Dublin ‘Lectures on Apparitions and Ghosts’. A major feature of this latter show was figures projected in ‘a film of smoke’ produced by burning charcoal and incense, giving ‘an aerial appearance to the spectres’.(37) Le Fanu could easily have witnessed later spin-offs of these phantasmagorias in the Dublin of his university years. He also viewed Meyerbeer’s opera ‘Robert le Diable’ at the Theatre Royal. This is important contextually because, as Gavin Selerie has pointed out, Le Fanu, in Haunted Lives, focuses on Meyerbeer’s church-yard scene:
E.A. Robertson’s real name was Robert, and this ‘moving picture’ takes place in the ruins of a convent, the nuns’ ghosts rising from their coffins led by the Abbess. It is as though the Irish author is transfixed by the phantasmagorical associations of this scene in the opera.
Le Fanu also visited London in 1838 and was given tickets to the Haymarket by Sheridan Knowles.(39) The Haymarket had, by this time, been associated with phantasmal visual displays for over 30 years.(40) Douglas Jerrold’s ‘A Gallantee Showman nor, Mr Peppercorn at Home’, a play about a magic lanternist had opened at the Strand the year before. A gallantee, gallanty or Savoyard showman was the type of projectionist who roamed the country, magic lantern on his back, often with a music instrument to accompany his shows and an assistant with a monkey or other creature trained to do tricks.
The gallantee spectacle was a highly mobile cultural force. These itinerant shows were cheap and linked with the life of beggars, Romanies, tramps and quack healers. The travelling magic lantern was fairly light to carry from village to village, and because slides often got lost or broken in transit, and the programme altered according to the showman’s state or whim, the sequence of images was often chaotic, surprising and sometimes muddled. There were no quality controls and many mountebanks and amateurs took up the ‘art of light.’
That highly-polished form of magic-lantern show called the phantasmagoria was mainly an urban phenomenon: its milieu was large venues in Paris, London, Berlin, Madrid, Dublin, Edinburgh and other major cities. The shows were expensive and attracted the more well-heeled customer. (Josephine Bonaparte and Chateaubriand saw Robertson’s show.) Because of the array of different equipment needed: several heavy fantascope lanterns, large screens, smoke and liquids, a glass harmonica, a gong and a metal sheet to roar, when struck, like thunder, the phantasmagoria were fixed performances, with a strong processive, ritualistic sense and a replicable schedule of images (however chaotic-seeming their airy demons and their power to send the audience into a disordered frenzy). The phantasmagorists issued programmes for their performances and Robertson’s Programme Instructif is still extant.(41) Perhaps up to ten stage-hands were needed to run the show: ushers, a ventriloquist, a master of ceremonies to give a spoken introduction and live actors to walk through the audience in masks to augment the impact of projected ghosts. The lantern-display was often preceded by a cabinet de physique, or science exhibition which needed more organisation and staff to arrange the equipment. Robertson himself was no roving fairground huckster - he styled himself as a sceptical and philosophical scientist.
In the first chapter of his famous vampire novelette, Carmilla, Le Fanu describes Laura’s feverish view-point of a local priest and maids, inside the aristocratic milieu of the castle nursery, a ‘large room’, where ‘the scanty light’ shines through
Helen Stoddart has written of this moment that Laura’s ‘memory is constituted at this point by a series of lucid tableaux mordants’, employing a theatrical metaphor.(43) Yet, Le Fanu could not be more insistent on the distinct impression of a lantern-show here; the ray of light, the lattice, the praying figures and Carmilla’s preceding appearance seem elements of a phantasmagoria. Robertson’s show contained slides of static, praying figures as well as scenes of reverence for young girls, as in the resurrection of the poet Young’s daughter. In using such imagery, Le Fanu is clearly looking back to the age of the large, urban-based phantasmagoria: the pictures are clearly ‘isolated’ in darkness and successive (not chaotic and random); yet this ‘isolation’ of images also anticipates the work of the photographic chronophotographers, Marey and Muybridge, just a few years later. This description is clearly linked to the orderly procession of the ‘pictured pageant of a phantasmagoria reflected upon smoke’ in ‘The Spectre Lovers’, yet it lacks the smooth and eerie continuity of the spectral cavalcade.
Le Fanu was increasingly at pains to distinguish the phantasmagorists from the lantern journeymen of a different age. Further into Carmilla, he provides the most colourful and detailed vision of a gallantee man in fiction:
This is the most extraordinarily elaborate and grotesque description, hinting that, as well as viewing contemporary phantasmagoria, Le Fanu had also consulted the myriad humorous prints available of lanternists with animal heads or of groups of beasts mounting their own lantern-show. Given Le Fanu’s framing of the tales we know that the action of Carmilla is situated in the 1750s or 60s and this is one of the roving lantern-men common in Europe:
In a number of tales and prints, the monkey turns the table on their gallantee man, and takes on the role of projectionist. The man’s hunch-back, multifarious accoutrements, foils, masks and ‘fangs’ associate him with Punchinello, his ‘buff, black and scarlet’ outfit and criss-cross belts to Harlequin, both of them Commedia dell'arte figures. The carnivalesque and ‘grotesque body’ as Bakhtin has defined them are relevant here.(46) Punch and the magic-lantern entertainments could appear side-by-side in some attractions such as in Picardy puppet shows which
(The House by the Churchyard, features a woman dressed like a puppet and references both phantasmagoria and magic-lantern shows.) The mountebank’s ‘execrable’ mixed languages hint at archaic, chaotic energies, a picaresque wanderer, jack of all trades and none.
By the late 1860s the magic lantern had largely moved out of the streets and into domestic settings so the gallanty man was a presence of the past. We know of Le Fanu’s readings in Goethe’s Faust, not least because of references to Mephistopheles in Carmilla and Marguerite in Wylder’s Hand (1864); in part II of that poem, the deluded scholar feels himself ‘king of a thousand salamanders’ and watches the vision of a chariot illuminated by:
Such links of the dark arts to the magic lantern cannot have passed by the Irish author without notice. For Le Fanu, as well as including the hybrid monsters, the alchemical pairing of salamanders and mandrakes, stresses the lanternist’s links to folk magic; as well as carnivalesque associations, his white fangs and hunchback both link him to the world of animals and deformed seers: it is he who causes Carmilla’s displeasure by noting her pointed teeth. Le Fanu is obviously fascinated by this mercurial Autolycus (a Greek name meaning ‘lone wolf’, ergo his ‘fangs’), with his bag of natural remedies. He is glimpsed crossing from the outside world into the castle’s courtyard with a dog at his heels like the Tarot Fool. We note also the lanternist’s ‘box of conjuring apparatus’, and this reminds us that the magic lantern was originally conceived as a valuable tool for magicians. In a text which Le Fanu can have hardly missed: Letters on Natural Magic: Addressed to Sir W Scott (1832), David Brewster writes:
The key connection between magicians and the magic lantern, though, is linked to that image that started this study: the conjurer’s or phantasmagorist’s supposed power to raise the dead and display revenants or mortals with the appearance of resurrection.
The hybrid catalogue of ‘parts of monkeys, parrots, squirrels’ of the showman’s caparison in Carmilla remind one of ‘riot--masks and dice, laughter, maledictions, and drumming, fair ladies, tipsy youths’ of The House by the Graveyard, and both passages feature references to ‘mountebanks, masks and laughter’. It’s no accident either that both extracts also recall the ‘crashing fragments of monkeys, monsters, and mandarins’ of The Cock and the Anchor.
That the phantasmagoria can prove a metaphor for the mind’s playing back mental events of the past is a truism of Nineteenth Century studies but, by Carmilla, Le Fanu grasped that the phantasmagorist is, essentially, a montageur, a maker who wrenches fragments from their natural context and re-combines them in new orders. Le Fanu’s gallanty man is a figure with archaic origins in conjuring and chaos. E.A. Robertson, the famous type of a phantasmagorist was an Enlightenment montageur par excellence, stealing the arguments of his prefatory speeches from Schiller, Voltaire, Sterne and Rousseau and filching images for his slides from Matthew Lewis, Füssli and Young. Yet his ‘magic’ was ‘instructif’ and his diablerie came complete with programme.
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Sixty years separate Sydney, Lady Morgan née Owenson’s extensive review of the earliest double-effect dioramas and Bram Stoker’s description of Dracula’s first arrival on English soil, illuminated by a ‘fleeting diorama of light and shade’.(50) Both Irish writers were obviously fascinated by the incipient visual media, in Stoker’s case, even using pre-cinematic tropes into the age of cinema proper. In the intervening years, Le Fanu’s literary production manifested itself as the single most important body of phantasmagoric fiction in English. Fads for naming books after lantern shows and phantasmagoria came and went but never had an author evoked the paraphernalia and history of the ghost show so insistently. W.B. Yeats was seven when Le Fanu died. It has been mooted that Yeats' poem ‘The Stolen Child’ owes much to the older writer’s Laura Silver Bell (1872). It could also be the case that Le Fanu was also responsible for the transmission of other important images into modern Irish literature. Daniel T O’Hara writes that ‘Yeats believes that poetry and phantasmagoria are one. ‘The poet is never the man who sits down to breakfast,’ he reminds us in ‘A General Introduction for My Work,’ ‘there is always some phantasmagoria.’’(51)
To give his references credibility and power, Le Fanu delved into the origins of the magic lantern showman. He understood the impact of projection on smoke, spectral slides and dissolving views, sequentiality and the attributes which defined the phantasmagoria. He knew how to produce macabre literary ‘close-ups’ of villains’ faces and quick metamorphoses like trick lantern slides. Over the 1860s, Le Fanu became known for his increasingly solitary life-style. If the experience of isolation could modify perceptions like those of Maud Ruthyn into states resembling that of the phantasmagoria watcher’s reverie, why not those of the fabled reclusive existence of Le Fanu, the ‘Invisible Prince’ of Dublin?
As early as 1800, the Marquis De Sade, in the Reflections on the Novel, argued for Mathew Lewis' dominance of the Gothic field, stating ‘Perhaps at this point we ought to analyse these new novels in which sorcery and phantasmagoria constitute practically the entire merit […].’(52) For Coleridge, in terms of the Gothic, the literary romances and lantern shows were both analogous. ‘Phantasmagoria’ referred to books and optical shows the same. As Andrew McCann writes ‘in Coleridge's own critical writing,’ ideas of the primary imagination, and its superiority to the more disordered and random products of 'fancy'
Le Fanu would never accept such a dichotomy of ‘primary imagination’ and ‘fancy’ but he might well find such an association of literature with lantern show seductive. The author as phantasmagorist then, and Le Fanu as the projectionist, the mastermind behind the greatest lantern-inspired ghost-show ever known? Did Le Fanu suspect that, ultimately, an author like himself shared deep affinities with urbane lanternists like Robertson? The analogy cannot have passed him by. Is this why the imagery of these spectacles, instead of being deployed as a scatter of fleeting signifiers as in most literary works of the 19th century, intruded upon and multiplied so potently inside his writings?
There is no doubt that Irish history is inscribed deeply throughout Le Fanu’s fiction yet, in the end, writing in that dark room in Merrion Square, did life itself, all the long travails of invasion, Lord Melbourne’’s ‘betrayal’ of Irish Protestantism, mutual hatred and savagery, that nightmare of history from which Stephen Dedalus would say, fifty years later, he was trying to awake, seem, like a magic lantern show, a metaphor for more expansive but hidden realities? Is it any accident that, as Nina Auerbach writes, Le Fanu’s Carmilla has proved so rewarding a filmic source for Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses, Roy Ward Baker’s The Vampire Lovers (1970), Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971) and Tony Scott’s The Hunger (1983)?(54) Or is this application of the phantasmagoric analogy into the world of cinema just too convenient, one metaphor too far?
Le Fanu’s spiritual beliefs became as complicated and hedged about with doubts and anxieties as his social ideology. An enemy of Catholic politicisation, he nevertheless came, in time, to admire Jesuit asceticism. Beset, as he regarded he was, by Fenianism and Liberalism, he was also never able to renew his belief in orthodox Christian sureties. Ardent scepticism aside, in the light of the evidence presented here, one cannot help but wonder whether, like his Swedenborg-inspired Maud, her maker Le Fanu sensed that his fictions of horror were but glimpses of deeper secrets and that, he, in precisely that sense had always been a phantasmagorist:
1. Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (Oxford World Classics, 1981), 14.
2. Ibid., 15.
3. Ibid., 16.
5. See The Oxford English Dictionary, Vol IV, fourth impression (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 198.
6. Uncle Silas, 64.
7. Ibid., 32.
8. Ibid., 25.
9. Ibid.
10. Cormac Mc Carthy, Blood Meridian or the evening redness in the west (London: Picador, 1990), 52.
12. I have traced another ten such references just in Uncle Silas.
13. Uncle Silas, viii.
14. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 156.
18. Uncle Silas, 314.
21. W.J. Mc Cormack, Sheridan Le Fanu (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1997), 65.
23. Castle, 158.
24. Ibid,161.
28. Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Feldman & Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore & London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 56.
30. Mary Shelley, The Last Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 257.
33. Friedrich von Schiller, The Ghost-seer, trans. Andrew Brown, Hesperus, London, 2003, pp. 80-1.
34. David Annwn, ‘Returning to Fear: New Discoveries in Robertson’s Fantasmagoria’, The New Magic Lantern Journal, Vol 10, Number 4, Autumn 2008, 59-64.
36. Ibid.
37. Mervyn Heard, Phantasmagoria, The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern (Hastings: The Projection Box, 2006,) 154, 173 & 203.
38. Quoted in the superb Le Fanu’s Ghost (Hereford: Five Seasons Press), 37. See also 34-8.
39. Mc Cormack, 54.
40. Heard, 149.
41. Laurent Mannoni, Light and Movement, Incunabula of the Motion Picture (Fruili: Giornate Del Cinema Muto, 1995), 118-119.
42. Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), 211.
43. Helen Stoddart, ‘The precautions of nervous people are infectious: Sheridan Le Fanu’s symptomatic Gothic’ in Gothic Concepts in literary and cultural studies, ed. Botting & Townshend (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), 108.
44. Carmilla, 228-9.
45. John Barnes, ‘The History of the Magic Lantern’, Servants of Light, The Book of the Lantern (Ripon: The Magic Lantern Society, 1997), 27.
46. See Jack Morgan, The Biology of Horror, Gothic Literature and Film (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 132-3.
48. Author’s translation.
49. Sir David Brewster, Letters of Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (London : John Murray, 1846), 76.
50. Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 120.
52. Fred Botting, Gothic (London & New York: Routledge,1996), 62.
55. Uncle Silas, 424.
