Written over the last few years, each of these essays seeks to define and explore Literary Darkness, as well as its variants. How does “darkness” appear in literature? What would it mean for darkness to be textual versus metatextual? How can Horatian satires about dowries and Darcies be interpreted as dismal and horrific? And–most significantly–why is a classification like this important? All these questions and more come up in the essays below.
All writing on this page is part of a ongoing series on Literary Darkness that is continuing to be researched.
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Unquiet Slumbers for British Writers: Literary Darkness, and how it Pervades 18th-Century British Literature
On July 18, 1817, the author of several seminal works of English literature, Jane Austen, passed away. Her sister, in a letter to her niece immediately following Jane’s death, writes the following:
“When I asked [Jane] if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death, and some of her words were: ‘God grant me patience, pray for me, oh, pray for me!’ ”
Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey. The Letters of Jane Austen, LXXVI. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42078/42078-h/42078-h.htm
Despite the loss being incredibly tragic, Austen had effectively immortalized herself through her works. Only four years earlier, she had published arguably her most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice, a psychological horror in which Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters are forced to find husbands in a society which considers love to be largely transactional before it is too late, lest they subject themselves to poverty and suffering for the rest of their lives. To this day, it sends chills down the spines of readers all around the world, reminding them of the divine power of fate and how one wrong choice can result in the entirety of your life being changed for the worse.
Pride and Prejudice, although it is by no means as horrific in reality, does what many other British texts around this time did as well; the novel includes some elements of existential horror. What if I don’t find a good spouse? What if I die alone? Would I have to sacrifice lifelong happiness to provide it for others? Austen asks these questions and others to paint a picture of what life was like for many young women in her time, and similar queries can be identified in numerous pieces of literature from this era. Poverty, solitude, unhappiness, and similar topics seeped into almost anything one could read during this time. No matter whether it was intentionally morbid or a series of romantic mishaps, darkness was the ink that dripped onto the pages.
The late 18th Century, with the introduction of gothic literature saw a lasting schism in what was considered truly horrific, resulting in the birth of two major types of literary darkness. The earlier part of the century, towards the beginning of the Enlightenment, saw a widespread departure from religious fears such as the fear of God or Hell perpetuated by authors like Milton and Bunyan, and the latter half of the century saw an even further shift towards more tangible fears: the effect of death, misery, loss, and disease. Although the writing scene was changing, there were many who opted to continue creating works that put a greater emphasis on structure as opposed to symbolism, thus creating a distinction between textual and metatextual darkness.
Textual darkness is that which can be read directly from the work itself, that is, the negative emotions or imagery are a crucial part of the text and are therefore inextricably tied to it. Generally, anything that discusses death, disease, doom and gloom can be understood to incorporate textual darkness. This form is much easier to notice than its counterpart considering there is less of a need to think outside the bounds of the poem in order to draw a conclusion about the author’s intent.
Written in 1800, “The Haunted Beach” by Mary Robinson is a prime example of what textual darkness entails due to its abundance of miserable imagery. The poem depicts a beach (a haunted one, no less) forever associated with not only the loss of several sailors in a terrible shipwreck, but also the grisly murder of the ship’s captain by the fisherman who lives there. Robinson has no fear of revealing all the gory details of the deaths, including that the sailor was given “ten wide gashes in his head” in the literal darkness of nighttime, and the scene is one of unadulterated terror as a result. The fisherman himself is an intriguing figure in the poem, as he is simultaneously one who is miserable and one who has caused misery in others. The speaker heavily suggests that the fisherman murdered the captain for his riches, and as a result, the spirit of the sailor will effectively haunt him for the rest of his life, as ghostly imagery often represents. Living the rest of his life in his decrepit shack, the fisherman’s fate is detailed in the closing stanza of the poem:
“Bound by a strong and mystic chain, / He has not power to stray; / But destined misery to sustain, / He wastes, in solitude and pain, / A loathsome life away.”
Robinson, Mary. “The Haunted Beach” Lines 43, 77-81.
In essence, the man is a ghost himself, forever bound to the beach plagued by the screaming birds and the crashing waves and forced to live with his horrible deed. This conclusion is a desolate one, exemplifying horror portrayed directly in the text.
Another poet who embraced this medium is Jonathan Swift, seen in his poems “A Description of a City Shower” from 1710 and “The Progress of Beauty” from 1719. Swift, writing almost a century before Robinson, was one of the pioneers of this type of writing and specialized in the grotesque. Although he had not yet reached the level of nauseating detail included in his later works, most notably 1729’s A Modest Proposal, both poems invoke textual darkness through their use of harrowing visuals rather than discussion of dismal or sinful events. The latter poem utilizes this throughout to describe, rather misogynistically, the image of a woman, Celia, after her makeup has worn away over the course of a day. The speaker uses words that naturally have strong negative associations to describe her: She has “Crack’d lips, foul teeth, and gummy eyes…” and then he immediately goes on to discuss how whatever she used to darken her hair has ended up on her chest in “A mingled mass of dirt and sweat.” This use of vile words to describe Celia in the morning exemplifies this form of textual darkness as images versus events.
On the other hand, in what would otherwise seem like a standard poem about the rain–something which already has a strong association with unhappiness in literature–Swift spontaneously ends “A Description of a City Shower” with three unsettling lines listing the disgusting and horrific things that get washed away in a rainstorm including “Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, / Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, / Dead cats, and turnip tops…” The thought of dead animals and blood being washed up during a rainstorm is enough to make anyone wince, especially for a reader who would otherwise not expect such a drastic shift in tone from the speaker. Although this is a clear example of textual darkness being put to use, the closing lines of Swift’s poem behave more akin to a close cousin of the device, metatextual darkness.
The word “metatextual” quite literally means “above a text,” referring to something that is just as much a part of the story as it is separate. As a result, metatextual darkness is the opposite of textual darkness; it is misery that can only be discovered through inference and thinking beyond the words on the page (it is, more or less, “reading between the lines”). It is much more invasive, and is the primary reason that nearly all of British literature around the 18th Century has some sort of underlying desolation to it. This form usually involves fears that are less tangible, ones which stem not from a shocking event or image, like murder or dead puppies, but is more conceptual and generalized. Above all else, death as an idea and not an event is the most common use of the device, though similar topics like poverty, suffering, and fate are written about often enough to be included.
As mentioned before, Pride and Prejudice is by no means a frightening or morbid novel, but as a satire it pokes fun at parts of society which are inherently bleak. The institution of marriage is one that finds itself being looked at more closely as time goes on, with a growing number of people questioning whether it is necessary to uphold at all, but in 18th-Century England, a life without marriage was not an option for young women. The crux of the novel is marriage for love and not transaction, but at the same time, Elizabeth Bennet is still essentially forced to marry rich in order to prevent herself and her family from being destitute. Austen gives Bennet a happy ending, falling in love with the exceedingly wealthy Mr. Darcy, but undercuts her happiness by surrounding her with characters such as Charlotte Lucas, who reasons that “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar before-hand, it does not advance their felicity in the least.” Charlotte’s view is somewhat shocking in today’s society, but was very logical for its time; it was a grim reality for women like Jane Austen and her contemporaries. As long as you had money, you would suffer less, and the best way to accomplish this was to marry someone who had wealth, regardless if you were happy with them or not. Pride and Prejudice is a definitive example of a novel whose horror stems largely from the deeper meaning behind a text as opposed to what is written on the page.
What makes metatextual darkness especially interesting is just how malleable it is. It can be used throughout a text to weave a sub-narrative into the story being told on the surface, or it can only be incorporated through the use of a symbol that presents itself at crucial moments. Although it can be shaped much more with novels, which dedicate much more time to a story than a poem, it is by no means exclusive to the medium. Poems which utilize this device are likely to start out positively, then either use a volta to drastically change the tone of the poem as Swift did in “A Description of a City Shower,” or gradually introduce darker themes before ending the piece on an unhappy note.
Though it may seem almost like the 1790’s equivalent of a fight song at first, Anna Lætita Barbauld’s poem “The Rights of Women” demonstrates this slow-burn variant of metatextual darkness in poetry. The poem starts out by encouraging women to stand up for themselves and to tear down the oppressive systems of power that are keeping them held back. It is a very progressive message for its time, and would resonate with people to this day, however this sentimentality does not last for very long. Soon afterward, Barbauld begins to write about how women, despite being able to take over the world with their strength, “never canst be free” from having to watch their backs for men who will keep trying to stifle their voices. The poem continues to get more depressing from there, suggesting that one of the major responsibilities women would have after taking over would be to “Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude; / Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow…” In other words, women would be responsible for managing the emotions of men instead of the men being able to do it themselves, something which is not nearly as progressive as the beginning of the poem would suggest. At the very end of the poem, Barbauld assures the reader that being above anyone else would not be a pleasant way to live, and that it is impossible to maintain the lifestyle she was just promoting stanzas before. This subversion of the meaning behind the poem results in an unsettling end to what could have been an otherwise uplifting poem, using the metatext to deliver an unhappy message to the reader.
Religious fears, often found in works prior to the Enlightenment Period continued to be written about by authors well beyond that time, though as standards changed, so did the style. Although fears of damnation or divine judgment never subsided, they shifted from being one of the more common forms of written word, it eventually became more metatextual as authors and poets decided to start writing about other, more tangible or sensory subjects. Published in 1734, “An Essay on Man” written by Alexander Pope writes about divine influence, subtextually implying that there is nothing in the universe that matters if not God. Pope takes on an authoritative voice to tell the reader a series of “truths” about life, including but not limited to the indubitable existence of a higher power, the fact that seeking knowledge is futile and inherently negative, and that the best way to live is just to submit to the higher power with the emphasis that “…whatever is, is right.” This idea of existence as it is being the best as it possibly could be, when taking into account the various problems that exist within the universe, is a terrifying thought. This plays into a primal fear in people, the inability to change their surroundings for the better. As a result, “An Essay on Man” instills a sense of metaphysical darkness through the invocation of God’s authority, and by reminding the reader how small they are in the grand scheme of the universe’s power.
The beauty of textual versus metatextual darkness is that the two are not entirely separate from one another; they can often be used in tandem. There are many situations in which the text will be painting a picture of horror for the reader (for instance, 1818’s Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, which is on the surface about a monstrous reanimated man who goes on a murderous rampage) while the metatext will be drawing upon more amorphous fears in the background (the loneliness of the monster due to him being rejected by society is his motivation). Often, the implementation of both results in the most effective attempts at horror.
In 1798, the poet William Wordsworth composed the beginnings of a collection of poems called “The Lucy Poems.” The five poems each describe a young woman, Lucy, whom the speaker had loved and lost, and use both forms of literary darkness to comment on both death and loneliness. The second poem, “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” begins with an introduction to Lucy and transitions into a description about how lovely Lucy is, calling her “A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye! / —Fair as a star, when only one /Is shining in the sky” in the second stanza. However, as soon as the reader is introduced to Lucy, the speaker goes on to lament her death, crying “The difference to me!” Not only does the poem directly discuss death, the poem also revolves itself around loneliness and generalized loss. The latter being metatextual, the poem touches upon a deep-seated human fear of losing love, raising unsettling questions similar to those in Pride and Prejudice revolving around future happiness, and whether you are fated to live pleasantly for the rest of your life.
Very similar to Wordsworth’s Lucy Poems in tenor and tone is Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard,” due to its subject matter. The poem itself is, as the title suggests, an elegy intended to humanize the people buried in the courtyard, and asks whether the world will ever know what kinds of success they saw in life or how successful they would have been had they lived on:
“Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid / Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; / Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, / Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.”
Gray, Thomas. “Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard” Lines 45-48.
The memory of individuals and the questions regarding what could have been reflect both canonical misery as well as grief which extends beyond the imagery of the poem, meaning that both forms of darkness are being put to use.
What is especially interesting about the darkness behind the poem is that it reflects his own unhappiness. The poem is widely accepted to be written surrounding the death of a man named Richard West, Gray’s inspiration and dearest friend. Following West’s death, Gray was so impacted by the loss that he completely changed his writing style, resulting eight years later in the release of the elegy. In essence, Gray took his own misery, channeled it into the poem, and published it, resulting in him achieving fame and notoriety very quickly (much to his dismay). The poem was an outlet for him to put his grief to words, resulting in the underlying themes to present themselves much more clearly.
Finally, the text and metatext are both extensively used to relay dark themes to readers in the poetry of William Blake, specifically his collection, Songs of Innocence and Experience published in 1794. Although many of the poems are short and pleasant reads, some of the poems Blake includes are drastically more unsettling. Take, for example, the plethora of lost children, specifically “A Little Boy Lost” in Songs of Experience. The poem is about a young boy who is burned at the altar for heresy simply for asking a priest “how can I love you / Or any of my brothers more?” and questioning God’s authority. This poem reflects a similar metatextual fear of God to that of Pope’s “An Essay on Man,” but is also textually dark due to the image of a child being murdered in front of his parents. A different poem with the same title from Songs of Innocence sees a child getting lost in the woods after following the ghost of his father and crying “O do not walk so fast! / Speak, father, speak to your little boy, / Or else I shall be lost.” The fear of being lost is one that many children are forced to face at a young age, though it remains in adults as a fear of helplessness, making the metatextual aspect of the poem reflect this as well. Overall, Blake’s poems blur the line between the textual and metatextual darkness, using the two simultaneously to bring forth fear in the reader.
Throughout British prose and poetry, darkness always seems to pop up in one way or another; even when a reader thinks they are safe, pain and suffering is right around the corner. Whether that is within the work itself, with ghosts flying around and blood everywhere, or meant to be extracted from the work, with deep-seated fears being played into, it is undoubtedly somewhere waiting to be found. As seen in poems like “The Haunted Beach,” the words alone can create a dismal atmosphere, whereas with works like “An Essay on Man” it is the meaning behind them which instills a sense of dread in the reader. Regardless of who is writing or what is being shown, chances are there is some element of darkness between the lines to get the reader to think about the more upsetting side of life.
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Darkness is Cheap, and Dickens Wrote Extensively About It: How Interpretation and Ambiguity Bring Literary Darkness to Life
Introduction
In an article from the September 7, 2020 edition of The New Yorker, long-time film critic Anthony Lane excitedly discusses a newcomer to the silver screen. He observes that “To a remarkable extent, the new movie is full of cheer. It feels boisterous, bustling, and, at times, perilously close to a romp,” and in regards to its racially-diverse casting, “Opinions will be fiercely held on both sides; either way, it’s hard to picture a more vivacious contribution to the debate than [the director]’s movie.” What may not be surprising is that the movie itself is, indeed, full of whimsy and fun. What may be very surprising is that his review was for The Personal History of David Copperfield, the most recent adaptation of Charles Dickens’ bildungsroman from 1849.
Dickens is an author not often regarded for his hilarious prose, although he has dabbled in some comedic works such as The Pickwick Papers. His body of work, despite usually ending on a positive note, is generally about depressing subjects, with four of his major works being about orphans with various maladies and melancholies with Christmas happening at one point or another.
Literary darkness works its way into nearly any piece of writing because it is an exceedingly broad concept. The idea of “darkness” is highly subject to personal experience and opinion; a haunted house to Laura Ingalls-Wilder is a luxury condo to Morticia Adams. Therefore, it is necessary to shed some light on the operational definition of darkness as it pertains to this paper.
Defining the Parameters, and a Brief Refresher
The simplest definition of “darkness” is any image or concept that stems from suffering or unhappiness. Blood, guts, and gore are indubitable examples of darkness, as are poverty, sadness, and loneliness, though the two groups do not fall into the same categories. Textual darkness is that which can be observed or read directly in a text, and metatextual darkness is more abstract, based on concepts or ideas that are intangible or are not directly mentioned in the text itself. For instance, whereas blood—an image—is textual, isolation—an idea—is metatextual. With such a clear distinction between the physical and the abstract, it should then be incredibly easy to sort everything into the two categories… or so one would think.
When it comes to critically discussing and dissecting literature, interpretation is the word of the day. Any critic who holds an opinion on a piece of literature or interprets an author’s words a certain way does so under the influence of their own experiences and beliefs. Exemplified by the Ingalls-Wilder–Addams dichotomy, one person could interpret a piece of writing as meaning something in an entirely different way from what someone else thought it meant. Some pesky authors even use this to their advantage, making texts mean different things within their own bounds. This results in a word which strikes fear into the souls of many: ambiguity.
Ambiguity and Why it is Incredibly Annoying
Life would be so much easier if we didn’t have to worry about literary interpretation being so varied, but as ambiguity is inevitable, we must proceed with caution.
The reason ambiguity is so significant in the realm of textual and metatextual darkness is that this “matter of opinion” aspect to reading would—at first glance—nullify the existence of the device. If everyone has a different perception of the meaning behind a text, then how can one conclude that something is dark at all?
What is inherently textually or metatextually dark should not be conflated with what is demonstrably true. In other words, textual and metatextual darkness is a general description of anything that can be isolated within or extracted from a novel, not an absolute truth about the meaning of a work. As Roland Barthes details in his essay, “The Death of the Author,” there comes a point where the readers, analysts, and critics are forced to draw a distinction between their own line of reasoning and the author’s.
We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
Barthes, Roland, translated by Richard Howard. “The Death of the Author.” pp. 6. 1977. http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf
What is crucial towards the analysis of literature, to Barthes, is the removal of the author from their creation; the same is necessary to determine what instances of textual or metatextual darkness populate a work. Thus removes some layer of ambiguity, that which is based on the author’s own interpretation of their work. No author can ever fully convey their thoughts to a reader in the same way that the inner workings of a person’s mind go unknown to everyone else.
This, of course, is incredibly annoying.
Without a clear definition of what someone is reading, they may be more subject to what critics may consider “erroneous” ideas. Put simply, these are ideas which either do not have an obvious connection to the work they are intended for or lack substantive evidence that the interpretation can be considered valid. For instance, if one were to take the final chapter of Ulysses and suggest it is entirely about Molly’s crippling egg allergy heretofore unmentioned in the text, it would be seen as ridiculous. Even with the evidence that she hates “[getting] his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice,” they would likely be mocked. If they were to take several hints throughout the novel that such may be the case they might have better standing, but ultimately, they would still be considered by many to be blatantly incorrect. However, other critics who use specific scenes from The Catcher in the Rye to suggest that Holden Caulfield is a victim of internalized homophobia would be considered more in the realm of plausibility while still deterring people with contrasting interpretations of the text.
As much as knowing that no one will ever be absolutely correct in their analysis of a work may be disappointing, this allows a reader to more deeply interact with a text. With personal interpretation, something as ridiculous as a secret egg allergy can be considered sensible, even if it is objectively silly. As a result, with something as broad as darkness, it is simultaneously easy to extract exactly what may be considered dark, and impossible to ever be indisputably correct. As a result, one is presented with a conflict of interest: is the interpretation of the text sensible and certain, or is it the result of a hyperactive imagination and incorrect interpretation of the text?
Regardless, textual and metatextual darkness, while still subject to this ambiguity, transcends the objective meaning of a text. It is neither sacred nor sacrilege, and therefore lends credence to the nuance of the text itself. This dynamic has appeared in nearly all works of literature throughout history, but it found its home especially in nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature.
Save Me, Davey!
Charles Dickens wrote about negative subjects so often that he has a word named after him: Dickensian, meaning “squalid and poverty-stricken,” with the added qualification of “resembling or suggestive of conditions described in Dickens’ novels.” There is much to be said about literary darkness for any of his novels, but with a dense 729 pages in the Barnes and Noble Classics edition, David Copperfield is packed with depressing ideas. The novel, similar to Dickens’ other masterworks, utilizes themes of abuse, poverty, as well as loss and loneliness to demonstrate how nothing in life is constant.
From the moment he is born, David is thought to be cursed, with several women in the neighborhood believing “first, that [he] was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that [he] was privileged to see ghosts and spirits,” due to his being born “towards the small hours on a Friday night.” The fact that this is included in the second paragraph of the novel indicates that the rest of David’s life is going to be far from ideal, with him being thrown into suffering time and time again. His father is already dead by the time he is born, allowing another man, Mr. Murdstone, to become his mother’s husband. This, of course, does not end up being good for David, as Murdstone and his sister are cruel, abusive, and condescending towards David, with the former telling him, “if I have an obstinate horse or dog… I beat him.” The abuse David endures follows him to school, and just when he thinks he is free from Mr. Murdstone’s torment, his mother dies. With fifty chapters left in the novel, David is already undergoing serious traumatic events and experiencing the worst parts of life.
While he is in school, David lives with Mr. Micawber, arguably the living embodiment of poverty. Micawber and his family find themselves in debt throughout the novel to the point that they are essentially living paycheck to paycheck, so much so that it ends up affecting David as well. “In my forlorn state,” he writes, “I became quite attached to the family, and used to walk about, busy with Mrs. Micawber’s calculations of ways and means, and heavy with the weight of Mr. Micawber’s debts.” Poverty, debt, and other financial problems appear throughout David’s turbulent life, often in places where it seems least likely to. His aunt, Betsey Trotwood, lives a comfortable life with Mr. Dick until spontaneously she returns to David woefully telling him “I am ruined, my dear Trot! All I have in the world is in this room, except the cottage; and that I have left Janet to let.” Out of nowhere, she has been reduced to nothing, much to David’s horror.
Above all else, the novel uses loss in such a way that makes it clear that death looms over everyone’s lives and can strike at any moment. David, despite already suffering the loss of his mother at a young age, has a moment towards the end of the novel involving his wife, Dora. In one of the more harrowing Dickens scenes, David watches as his wife wastes away as a result of disease, only to have her dog die minutes later. Although David is able to recover and remarry quickly, Dora’s death in addition to the dog’s is devastating for David, to the point where for the first time in the novel, he fails to remember a portion of his life as “Darkness comes before my eyes; and, for a time, all things are blotted out of my remembrance.” David’s life, as a whole, is dotted with losses, but nothing affects him poignantly enough to permanently block out significant moments in his personal history.
Mrs. Warren’s Debatably-Ethical Profession
Much like Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw did not hold back from discussing topics that were considered controversial for their time. Shaw’s works, however, were typically about subjects that were much more invasive; misogyny, sexual misconduct, and even unfettered capitalism are subjects he was not afraid to discuss. Although these themes can largely be seen in his 1912 play, Pygmalion, which tells the story of Professor Henry Higgins’ “taming” of Eliza Doolittle and her rejection of his advances, its predecessor, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, amplifies it to discuss the ethics of sex work and solicitation. Although both subjects have become less taboo over time, and are now being introduced in conversations more often, they still prompt other questions about how toxic masculinity plays a role in the suppression of women, a difficult subject even for today.
What makes Mrs. Warren’s Profession revolutionary is its implementation of certain characters to accuse society at large of blaming women for problems they have no control over. Reverend Gardner, a member of the clergy, is one of Shaw’s primary analogues for society’s mistreatment of women, as he acts holy but is fundamentally not; he and Mrs. Warren had correspondence while she was a sex worker. This hypocrisy leads to him being mocked by his son, Frank, throughout the play. His hypocritical nature serves as a greater critique of those who behave as though they don’t contribute to a system that harms women, but are the very people keeping it in place.
Additionally, the play broaches such topics as incest, one which was much too graphic–and still is to an extent–to be given proper attention and criticism at the time. A major aspect of Crofts’ character is just this, as he has a discussion with Praed during Act I that stems entirely around Mrs. Warren’s daughter, Vivie. He repeatedly asks Praed if he knows who Vivie’s father is, and gets progressively frustrated with Praed’s inability to provide an answer. After Praed presses him to explain why he is so insistent, Crofts reveals his motivation: “If you do know—I only say, if you know, you might at least set my mind at rest about her. The fact is, I fell attracted.” Crofts is, in essence, ensuring that he is not Vivie’s father due to his attraction to her, something that even he admits is extremely unsettling to think about. Although most of the men in the play have serious flaws regarding their relationship with women, the uncertainty regarding Crofts’ relationship to Vivie is the most blatant with its incestuous implications.
Most significantly, the play discusses the negative impact of unfettered capitalism specifically on women, an issue that was rarely spoken of in Shaw’s time. Shaw, a socialist, was very concerned with society’s systemic oppression of women, insisting that the problem was not women doing sex work, but society forcing women into the profession. Mrs. Warren is a complicated figure, as she was originally a sex worker herself, but she eventually became the owner of several brothels around Europe. In creating this paradox, Shaw asks whether she is ethically correct, adding more nuance to an already complicated problem. About the play, he wrote that it was crafted with a specific purpose in mind:
“…to draw attention to the truth that prostitution was caused, not by female depravity and male licentiousness, but by simply underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully that the poorest of them are forced to resort to prostitution to keep body and soul together.”
Powell, Kerry. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. Cambridge University Press, 2006. pp. 229
This explanation is proof enough that Shaw was not telling Mrs. Warren’s story for the sake of anything other than social critique, and yet, the ethical uncertainty behind her owning the brothels is left unresolved. Because of this, the audience is responsible for drawing a conclusion, leaving it up to interpretation.
Although both David Copperfield and Mrs. Warren’s Profession include certain elements that are textually unsettling, the overwhelming majority of the darkness within both stems from their metatextual implications. With the former, such subjects as loss, poverty and misery affect nearly all of the characters in some form, and with the latter, misogyny and incest are equally significant. As a result, both works rely on metatextual darkness through ambiguity and interpretation to relay their points. Most importantly, the play and the novel each provide moments where the motivation behind certain characters or the reasoning behind certain events is left unsaid. This causes readers to be caught in the state of limbo between correctly interpreting and falsely extrapolating the meanings behind the texts.
Poetry about Unsettling Things
Contrary to the previous works which are longer reads, poetry is a unique form of literature in how it implements darkness. As novels and plays often have hundreds of pages or a handful of acts to gradually introduce topics, poems are often much shorter, resulting in a reliance on visuals to convey their deeper meaning. While this trend is by no means a rule, it is generally more clear which elements of a poem are textual versus metatextual. That being said, poems are not completely insulated from metatextual darkness, as the textual elements often lead to deeper questions stemming from the ambiguity of the text.
The poetry of Robert Browning is no stranger to using textual darkness, but his implementation of subtle metatextual elements through ambiguity is especially distinctive. Two of his poems, “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” are quite notable, as they both introduce the reader to an unreliable narrator who discusses his love and how he ended it by force. As a result, both poems feel like subversions of the overtly-romantic poetry of other notable writers, causing them to be disquieting to read.
“Porphyria’s Lover” predominantly employs textual darkness to set the scene but hides metatextual elements in plain sight. From the first line, it is clear that the night is gloomy, with the entire first stanza being dedicated solely to personifying the bad weather:
“The rain set early in to-night, / The sullen wind was soon awake, / It tore the elm-tops down for spite, / And did its worst to vex the lake.”
Browning, Robert. “Porphyria’s Lover.” Poetry Foundation, lines 1-4. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46313/porphyrias-lover
This personification of the wind in addition to the rain being present sets for one of the least pleasant scenes that a reader could be greeted with. This does not bode well for the characters in the poem. Into the speaker’s home enters Porphyria, his lover, who is notably affectionate towards him. After she tells him that she left a family engagement to be with him, indicating how she broke the rules of her society, the speaker kills Porphyria in a rather sophoclean manner: he strangles her with her own hair. As if murdering his lover was not horrific enough, he proceeds to sit with her corpse and play with her eyelids, justifying his deed as “…thus we sit together now, / And all night long we have not stirred / And yet God has not said a word!”
What makes this poem so horrifying is its images of murder, strangulation, and kissing corpses, of course, but a deeper sense of horror stems from the speaker himself. The reader is not familiar with the speaker’s past, nor his future. There is no implication of why the speaker would have felt compelled to murder his lover in such a way in the first place, and there is equally no explanation as to why he decides to sit with her for the remainder of the night besides possibly God’s lack of a response. As a result, the metatextual element of the poem is the speaker’s ambiguous insanity. A subject toyed with in other works such as Hamlet, the reader of the poem is never absolutely sure whether the person they are listening to is reliable, leading to an unsettling air surrounding the text.
Unambiguously, the Conclusion
Although literary darkness can be difficult to pin down due to interpretation and ambiguity muddying the waters, ultimately, those two factors play an important role in allowing it to be seen. Interpretation is not only beneficial to the perception of what is textual but is crucial to the existence of metatextual darkness, and ambiguity in a text is what amplifies metatextual darkness to something that can be legitimately analyzed.
In an article for The Guardian, Gwyneth Hughes writes about her experience reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a novel left unfinished upon Charles Dickens’ death:
“It’s fairly well known that Dickens died halfway through writing his murky story about an opium-addicted, erotically obsessed choirmaster called John Jasper, who plots to murder his nephew and love rival, Edwin Drood. What’s less well known is that Dickens died on purpose – to avoid having to finish it. Or that’s what I came to believe, after months of wrestling in darkened rooms with the questions he ran out of time to answer.”
“The Mystery of Edwin Drood: A Dickens of a Whodunnit.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 4 Jan. 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/04/mystery-edwin-drood-dickens-bbc.
For Dickens to die before finishing the novel is the most powerful way ambiguity is created in a text. Unlike ambiguity for the sake of creating uncertainty within a reader, it is much more tragic for an author to die, as there is no way to possibly know what was supposed to happen at the end. The literal death of the author creates a sensation of liminality: the reader isn’t supposed to be reading the text, and yet they are doing so while filling in the blanks. Of course, with all that empty space on the pages, there is much more room for darkness to creep in.
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Unbeing Dead isn’t Being Alive… It’s Complicated: The States of Being as Informed by Literary Darkness
In literature as in life, death is an overarching reality. Of all the hundreds, if not thousands of common themes explored in literary works, death is by far one of the most prevalent and most malleable. At any given moment, death is an end, a beginning, sometimes a midpoint; Death can be a dear friend, a dear foe, or even a lover; and most fascinatingly, Death has been omniscient and known nothing, been relentless but caring… Death is fickle. One person may settle on death as described in 1 Corinthians as “the last enemy to be destroyed,” and another may picture a benevolent man just doing his job–a more recent depiction of it as per Sir Terry Pratchett. All in all, Death has been everything all at once.
As a result of these varied depictions, Death is deceptively difficult to fit into either textual or metatextual darkness. If death is seen as an event, it must be textual, but it carries such uncertainty with it that it is impossible to fully determine whether it is actually dark or not. Even through the Christian lens, which refers to death as an “enemy,” only sinners would truly suffer after death… is it both? Additionally, the uncertainty of what happens after one dies creates a level of metatextual darkness so deep as to make the entire affair much more complicated. It is happy, it is sad, it is malevolent and not, and it is, most of all, a nightmare to dissect because so many interpretations of it exist.
For the Victorians, it was likely much more easily categorized.
Victorian society was by no means a deathtrap; not everything could kill you, just a lot more than can kill you today. As a result, death was much more commonplace, and people treated it accordingly. According to D. Lyn Hunter, “Death was a common domestic fact of life for Victorians… so they developed elaborate rituals to deal with it.” The Victorians were deeply invested in the mourning process, demonstrated to a T by all the things women were expected to do following a loss. Also from Hunter;
For 12 months and a day, they wore a plain, black dress made of a drab, blended fabric, which covered the entire body, including a cap. Black ribbon was tied to their underwear. After two months, two flounces could be added to the skirt. After one year, the women could switch their dress fabric to silk colored in lavender, mauve or violet. They were also forbidden from socializing during this 28-month period.
Hunter, D. Lyn. “A Victorian Obsession with Death.” Berkeley, 5 Apr. 2000, https://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2000/04/05/death.html. pp. 2.
This ritualized form of mourning is equally reflected in literature of the time, most notably in the works of Charles Dickens. Several of his novels include extended scenes next to characters’ deathbeds, notably Dora Spenlow’s in David Copperfield or Little Nell’s in The Old Curiosity Shop, wherein narrators reflect on the individual’s life to excess and ponder the nature of being alive versus dead. Regardless, the orthodox death narrative from the period was focused on death as an ending event rather than a continuation or a character.
That being said, the Victorians did not focus solely on expected deaths, ones that happen slow enough for soon-to-be corpses to deliver a few poignant last words and change the outlook of observers for good. Dickens was no stranger to sudden, sometimes horrific deaths, but many other writers alluded to deaths outside of the narrative, often creating an unsettling absence in a character’s stead. Published in his Lyrical Ballads, “We Are Seven” by William Wordsworth exemplifies this concept using a conversation between a young girl and an older man. The man asks the girl about her siblings, and though two are buried in a churchyard, she repeatedly tells him that she and her siblings make up seven. She tells the man, “My stockings there I often knit, / My kerchief there I hem; / And there upon the ground I sit, / And sing a song to them.” Her insisting that there are still seven children despite two being dead, and mentioning that she continues to spend time with them, can equally be read as innocent and sweet as it can be seen as unsettling and morbid–the narrator leans towards the latter, insisting that there are only five though his persistence falls upon deaf ears.
The two perspectives on death exhibited by the girl and the narrator highlight this dichotomy between benevolent and malevolent death through the human perspective. The narrator’s stance on death is much more rooted in the belief that it is an absolute end–a thief of life. His belief is countered by the girl, who sees death as just a different state of being than the one shared by her, her living siblings, and the man. Death, to her, is not necessarily an end, whereas the man is convinced that someone being dead means they are gone beyond any shadow of a doubt.
Although “We Are Seven” exemplifies two differing perspectives on death, the girl’s interpretation of it also plays into another Victorian fascination, that being undeath. Although death was a common occurrence in Victorian literature, life beyond the grave gradually began to take hold over writers in various forms, often involving the supernatural or monstrous. The idea of a distorted afterlife started to appear more often in the Victorian era, as poems and narratives began to speculate what it would be like for death not to be the definitive end it had traditionally been.
In poems such as “She Moved Through the Fair,” those who have died are often prone to returning to finish what they failed to accomplish during life. The narrator recounts the final time he saw his betrothed alive, and the first time seeing her unalive: “Last night she came to me, my dead love came in… and this she did say / ‘It will not be long, love, ’til our wedding day.’“ This chilling final stanza to the poem, with the dead fiance returning to her love, is one which blends the romantic with the horrifying due to its uncanniness. Although devastating, a crucial part of loss is acceptance–despite never being able to see the person again, one must be at peace with their absence. However, when this progression is interrupted as it is in the poem, there is a sense of wrongness, as though a law of nature has been reversed.
With this in mind, the transition from death to undeath sees much clearer lines between what is textual and metatextual, as the reader can now extract both distinct images and deeper meanings. Although “We Are Seven” is at once an examination of both death as a benevolent and malevolent figure, plummeting it into the depths of ambiguity, “She Moved Through the Fair” lends itself more to stratification. The image of a dead woman walking and talking is textually dark whereas the return of the woman herself is more metatextual, as it is a reversal of our human understanding of life versus death. As a result, narratives about undeath, being entirely speculative, are much easier to process and derive meaning from, whereas death is too difficult to fully define due to our lack of knowledge about its aftermath.
As undeath began to be explored, writers began to utilize certain figures to structure different narratives and represent a variety of concepts, spawning supernatural creatures that continue to influence horror today. Although there were many different monstrous archetypes that were born during this era, one of the more common figures in poetry and prose alike was that of the blood-sucking vampire. Often depicted as licentious, manipulative, or downright sociopathic, vampires were largely used by writers to explore the desecration of one’s afterlife, or–by extension–examine how life after death flies in the face of morality.
The crux of a vampire’s existence is the propagation of their undeath, whether they want to or not. This is notable in their role as a seducer, as they need to drink blood to survive–this creates an uncertainty in whether they are attracted to a human or sees them as sustenance. This dynamic was deeply explored in Carmilla, by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, wherein the titular vampiress tells a human, “Yes, very–a cruel love–strange love, that would have taken my life. Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood.” Carmilla’s feelings toward Laura are very complex, as they appear to either be love, craving, or some mix of both, a common intersection explored in vampire narratives.
Reflecting Carmilla’s complex feelings towards Laura, in “Christabel,” Geraldine and Christabel’s relationship is just as complex, if not more. The speaker delves quite deep into the more intimate details regarding the relationship between the two, describing the following towards the end of Part I:
“The cincture from beneath her breast: / Her silken robe, and inner vest, / Dropt to her feet, and full in view, / Behold! her bosom and half her side— / A sight to dream of, not to tell! / O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!”
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Christabel.” 1800. Lines 249-254.
The relationship between the two women is one which, at the time it was written, would have already been seen as going against nature, but has the added gravity of being between a human and a monster. The overt sensuality of their relationship is one that alludes to this idea of undeath as immoral: Geraldine, as a supernatural being, defies the laws of nature both as they relate to human aging or death, but also as they were understood to relate to sexuality. As a result, her entire existence is an affront to nature, enough to rub off on Christabel.
Additionally, a crucial facet of their relationship is a spell which prevents Christabel from being able to tell anyone what happened between the two women, leading to even more complexity. In some way, Christabel does not have total control over her actions because of Christabel, leading into the third and final state of being as dictated by literary darkness: possession.
Contrarily to death and undeath which relate to life itself, possession is less about whether one is alive or dead and more related to losing control over one’s own life. A loss of control, which is an unsettling thought in its own right, ties in with the idea of an outside force wreaking havoc on one’s life as seen to an extent in “Christabel.” The possession can either produce a particular effect, as seen in the poem with her inability to reveal what happened between her and Geraldine, or it can be much more extreme; other forms of possession can include brief moments where control is lost, and total loss of autonomy.
Some of the more extreme instances of possession feed directly into a fear of losing control, notably in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as Jekyll’s body is used as a vessel for some supernatural force to commit crimes. Jekyll and Hyde ends up showcasing the problems that arise when Jekyll allows his addiction to overtake him. In his own words, ““It was on this side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde.” In essence, Jekyll’s addiction to the chemical he has created is what results in Hyde’s possession over him, and he is at its mercy. As a result, the story, using the fear of losing control associated with possession, becomes a parable on the dangers of addiction. The three states of being–death, undeath, and possession–are each closely related to one another, as they work their way into so many stories from the era. Each one in some way represents a loss of life, whether that stems from no longer being in control of oneself or no longer being in general. With this in mind, it becomes clear that the three states of being represent much more than just dying or not–they are used to depict various parts of the human condition. Despite this, the darkness surrounding them can still be explored, and each one will continue to haunt all who seek to derive meaning from them.
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