Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern: Desire, Eroticism and Literary Visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker

Abstract

David J. Jones, Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern: Desire, Eroticism and Literary Visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) The efforts to understand cinema as one stage of a much longer history of projected media have fertile implications for scholars of horror and the gothic, especially in terms of the fearful potential of the magic lantern (sometimes known as 'the Lantern of Fear') and its ancillary media. Jones's characterisation of Carmilla herself as 'a character [who] flickers seductively between picture, corporeal presence, vaporous absence and dreams, and passes through those quick alterations repeatedly and ambiguously' (p. 147) and the novella itself as 'the literary equivalent of a phantasmagoria show' (p. 142) is particularly provocative, and useful in terms of Le Fanu's shadowy representation of lesbianism. The introduction links debates about the cinematicity of literature to questions of lanternicity, and raises the fact that authors like William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, and Ira Levin frequently reference cinema in their horror novels; the influence of cinema on these and other literary works is manifest and undeniable, and provides an analogue to help us understand how lanterns influenced literature in previous centuries.

David J. Jones, Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern: Desire, Eroticism and Literary Visibilities from Byron to Bram Stoker (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

The efforts to understand cinema as one stage of a much longer history of projected media have fertile implications for scholars of horror and the gothic, especially in terms of the fearful potential of the magic lantern (sometimes known as 'the Lantern of Fear') and its ancillary media. David J. Jones's Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern is an excellent source for anyone interested in such explorations. Jones furthers the work of scholars like Terry Castle, Laurent Mannoni, and Mervyn Heard, which recovers the place of the magic lantern and the phantasmagoria in media history, and takes this narrative in new directions in a book less about lantern practice itself than how the lantern took its place in the stock of modern media metaphors, especially literary ones.

As his title implies, Jones emphasises the close allegiance between sex and death. The shadowy, ghostly images of lantern projections proved not only available to gloomy meditations on death, but also to eroticism (the frankly pornographic lantern slides that Jones reproduces will be instructive to many). Indeed, lanternic imagery is often evoked in literature at the juncture of gothicism and eroticism. A set of 'lanternist sexual codes' (p. 203), Jones argues, provided gothic writers with a set of stock images and scenarios that could be transferred from the lantern to the page while retaining a powerful set of implications.

It is with the classic seduction sequence from Dracula (1897), in which Jonathan Harker is accosted by a set of three vampire women, that Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern begins, and it may be a revelation for students of Dracula to learn the significance of those lines comparing the vampires' laughter to the 'intolerable, tingling sweetness of waterglasses when played on by a cunning hand' (qtd. p. 4), which harkens back to a similar image in Lord Byron's Don Juan (1819-23), when the title character has a forbidden encounter with a Spanish woman disguised as a friar. Jones asks, 'why is the sound of fingers on glass evoked in texts at either end of the nineteenth century so readily or even at all in these dark evocations of transgressive sexual encounters? [...] Was there something in this unearthly, tantalising sound which contemporaries understood as a cue for fear and erotic frisson, part of a great submerged shared cultural heritage which readers in the twenty-first century have lost?' (p. 5). These are compelling questions and provide an ideal entry point into Jones's project of unearthing lost contexts and restoring the magic lantern's status in the history of media.

Jones eventually returns to Dracula and its less-frequently discussed semi-sister novel, Stoker's The Lady of the Shroud (1909), as one of his case studies of the 'lanternicity' of nineteenth-century literature. Earlier chapters explore the lanternic qualities of other literary works, including Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Lord Byron's Cain (1821), Manfred (1817), and Don Juan, Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853), and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). Jones's characterisation of Carmilla herself as 'a character [who] flickers seductively between picture, corporeal presence, vaporous absence and dreams, and passes through those quick alterations repeatedly and ambiguously' (p. 147) and the novella itself as 'the literary equivalent of a phantasmagoria show' (p. 142) is particularly provocative, and useful in terms of Le Fanu's shadowy representation of lesbianism. Jones locates these works within a history traceable back to lanternists like Georg Schröpfer and Philipstal, shaping that history to recover the currents of eroticism in the gloomy spectacles of the phantasmagoria and its descendants. Jones pays particular attention to the ways in which stock gothic scenarios familiar from lanterns - including the Matthew Lewis-derived 'Bleeding Nun' and the rape of a woman by a demon - appear and reappear in literary works. In the book's conclusion, Jones discusses the lantern-influenced neo-gothic works of dramatist Len Jenkin, visual artist Kara Walker, and graphic novelist Guido Crepax, and the continuing tendency to deploy magic lantern codes with respect, especially, to eroticism.

While these elements work very well, Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern includes a rhetorical framing device about cinema, especially horror cinema, that is less fully realised. The introduction links debates about the cinematicity of literature to questions of lanternicity, and raises the fact that authors like William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, and Ira Levin frequently reference cinema in their horror novels; the influence of cinema on these and other literary works is manifest and undeniable, and provides an analogue to help us understand how lanterns influenced literature in previous centuries. This much is a point well observed. When the conclusion returns to this subject, Jones notes that the rape scene in Levin's Rosemary's Baby not only harkens back to a familiar horrific/erotic lantern scene (the rape of a young woman by a demon mentioned above) but is full of cinematic and newsreel imagery. Jones notes that the book was, of course, adapted by Roman Polanski in 1968, but, rather disappointingly, does not discuss how the scene adapts to the screen. This is illustrative of the way in which, while Jones discusses the survival of certain stock lantern images into cinema, he does so in a rather cursory fashion, and devotes just one paragraph to the literal presence of magic lanterns in films; one of the most prominent, Ingmar Bergman's The Magician (1958), goes unmentioned. It is particularly surprising to find only a few isolated references to Georges Méliès, whose La Lanterne magique (1903) features a gigantic magic lantern and whose entire body of work is full of resonances with lantern practice.

It seems unfair to critique the book for not being something it doesn't claim to be, but I hope some other scholar finds a way to employ the very useful concept of 'lanternicity' to explore the survival of the gothic magic lantern in cinema. As it is, Sexuality and the Gothic Magic Lantern should prove a valuable read for scholars of representations of the supernatural, for the history of projected media, for the gothic, and for historians of pornography as well.

Murray Leeder