Table Of Contenti
Horror in the Age of Steam
Change is terrifying, and rapid change, within a small amount of time,
is destabilizing to any culture. England, under the tutelage of Queen
Victoria, witnessed precipitous change the likes of which it had not
encountered in generations. Wholesale swaths of the economy and the
social structure underwent complete recalibration, through the hands of
economic progress, industrial innovation, scientific discovery, and social
cohesiveness. Faced with such change, Britons had to redefine the con-
cept of work, belief, and even what it meant to be English. Victorians
relied on many methods to attempt to release the steam from the anxie-
ties incurred through change, and one of those methods was the horror
story of everyday existence during an age of transition. This book is a
study of how authors Elizabeth Gaskell, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë
turned to horrifying representations of everyday reality to illustrate the
psychological-t raumatic terrors of an age of transition.
Carroll Clayton Savant holds a PhD in literary studies from the University
of Texas at Dallas. He is an Associate Professor of English and teaches
literature, composition, and humanities at Tarrant County College, where
he has created classes on horror, science fiction, dystopian realities, and the
voices of minority cultures. Savant has written and published extensively
on the relationship between music and literature in Victorian society, pri-
marily through the works of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and George
Gissing. His scholarship has appeared in The Victorian, The Victorian
Web, and through the San Francisco State University Press and Salem
Press. He is an academically trained musicologist with a background as
a concert pianist and orchestral musician. His current research interests
include the work of the Brownings, the history of the novel, and studying
Steampunk cultures.
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Horror in the Age of Steam
Tales of Terror in the
Victorian Age of Transitions
Carroll Clayton Savant
iv
First published 2021
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Taylor & Francis
The right of Carroll Clayton Savant to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Savant, Carroll Clayton, author.
Title: Horror in the age of steam: tales of terror in the
Victorian age of transitions / Carroll Clayton Savant.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020042118 | ISBN 9780367858582 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781003149446 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English literature–19th century–History and criticism. |
Horror tales, English–History and criticism. | Horror in literature. |
Psychic trauma in literature.
Classification: LCC PR878.T3 S28 2021 | DDC 823/.087380808–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042118
ISBN: 978- 0-3 67- 85858- 2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978- 1-0 03- 14944- 6 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
v
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
1 “If Ever I Saw Horror in the Human Face, It Was
Then”: Victorian Horror and the Terrifying Aesthetic
of the Taboo in an Unstable World 16
2 “The Monstrous Serpents of Smoke”: The Hellscape
of the Industrial Factory in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary
Barton and North and South and Victorian Fears of
an Industrializing Economy 69
3 Greeks, Freaks, and Raving Lunatics: The Monstrous
World of Science in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights 120
4 Hysterical Angels and Loud- Mouthed Hussies:
Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the
Transformation of Gendered Voices in Victorian
England 184
References 249
Index 261
vnewigenprepdf
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my family at Tarrant County College, especially Dean Lisa
Benedetti and department chairs Christina Ross and Zachary Frohlich,
for allowing me to develop the course that inspired the contents of this
book. Thank you for my English department chairs, Melissa Perry and
Wendi Pierce, for the space to develop this project and for your continual
encouragement.
Thank you to my readers, LeeAnn Olivier, Melissa Perry, and Zainah
Usman, for your feedback. Your comments and support have helped me
tremendously through this project. Thank you for those who offered to be
readers on this project, Cheryl Roberts and Michelle York; your support
allowed me to keep working, even when times felt bleak and dubious.
Thank you to my writing collective, Adrian Cook, LeeAnn Olivier,
Zainah Usman, and Hubert Woodson, for keeping me focused and
cheering me on as we each worked on our own individual projects.
Finally, thank you to my family, for your emotional and psychological
support. For my mom, who told me I could and should do this (even
though you wanted me to write a children’s book). For Matthew, for
being my emotional support, for helping out around the house while
I was busy doing research, and for reminding me to stay grounded and
continuously be mindful.
1
Introduction
In August 2017, I transitioned in my academic and teaching career,
moving from teaching advanced high school students in one of the urban
schools in Dallas to returning to my roots at the community college.
Two days before classes started, I was sitting in a large meeting when
one of my department chairs reached out to me, asking if I would be
interested in teaching a course in humanities. Given the timeline and the
rush to prep for the first weeks of classes, I declined, but I promised her
that I would create an interdisciplinary humanities course to offer come
Spring 2018. I had taught humanities collegiate courses in the past, and
I knew that the trend for an “Introduction to the Humanities” course was
to survey the fine arts from the Ancients to the current day, but I knew
that in teaching at a community college that services the Dallas/F ort
Worth region, I would need to find a theme or an approach that was
at once applicable to our students and something that was interesting,
unique, and engaging. In October 2017, under the yoke of grading com-
position essays and advising students as they began to prepare registering
for spring classes, I knew that I had to begin planning my humanities
course. So the search began. I looked up syllabi and course descriptions
for community college and university humanities courses and found that,
thematically, there was a vast array that opened the door to endless pos-
sibilities. After doing some research and some outside reading, I had my
mind set on two trajectories: a study of the battle between good and evil
or a course based on the myths of fallen heroes. Neither focus spoke to
me or sparked my passion as an educator or as a researcher; neverthe-
less, I made a decision and began researching texts to use in classes and
ways to approach a survey of the arts through the lens of the fallen hero.
I was halfway through my course prep and I was still uninspired when
a round of grading came in. On a Friday afternoon, at the very end of
October, I opened my laptop, turned on the television, and sat down to
grade. In the past, I had always graded with a distraction running in the
background: I would use the distraction as a means for intensifying my
concentration and as a way to let me ask critical questions of the essays
I was reading. That day was no different: I turned on a horror film and
got to work. After I finished my quota of grading for the day, I sat up and
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2 Introduction
was riveted by some nameless B-g rade horror flick. The lightbulb kicked
on, and I had an epiphany: why not teach a class on horror?! Horror had
always been a guilty pleasure of mine; it was a way for me to unwind
and decompress. In fact, my mom almost proudly recalls that at three
years of age, my favorite movie was Poltergeist. Regardless, at my institu-
tion, I have offered the “Introduction to the Humanities: Horror, Terror,
Culture” course every semester since Spring 2018, and, sometimes to my
surprise, the class always makes, many semesters filling to capacity. In
the class, we study philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, culture, psychiatry,
fiction, poesy, music, and film, but above all, we study things that go
bump in the night. This book is a product of that class.
If horror is a guilty pleasure of mine, it is no secret that I adore any
and all things related to Victorian England, specifically the works of
George Eliot. When I completed my doctorate in 2015, I immediately
began revising and editing my dissertation for publication. My doctoral
thesis was a study of music and sounds in the novels of George Eliot,
George Gissing, and Thomas Hardy; however, much of my grad- school
work focused on Victorian literature and the role and function of music
in nineteenth-c entury British society, so I found the revision process
tedious and cumbersome. In short, I felt like I had exhausted myself in
the field of musicology and Victorian life, so I took a break from the
project, using elements from my dissertation to write a series of art-
icles for The Victorian Web and presenting chapters at various Victorian
Studies Association conferences. In 2018, I officially stepped away from
concertedly working on revising my book for publication and focused
solely on teaching. Ironically, the more I focused on teaching, especially
my humanities class, the more I felt the fire in my belly return: I felt that
there was something that I could actually do in combining a study on
horror with a study on the Victorians. This book is a fusion of personal
and professional passions: on one hand, it is an academic exploration
into the popular genre of horror, and on the other hand, it is an academic
expansion of the study of Victorian literature.
The study of horror crosses disciplines, time periods, academic fields, and
types of audiences. As Noël Carroll notes, in his seminal study on The
Philosophy of Horror, the genre has become a ubiquitous form, as it is
a staple across contemporary art forms, popular and otherwise,
spawning vampires, trolls, gremlins, zombies, werewolves, demonic-
ally possessed children, space monsters of all sizes, ghosts, and other
unnameable concoctions at a pace that has made the last decade or
so seem like one long Halloween night.
(1– 2)
As Carroll alludes, the form, especially at the opening of the last decade
of the twentieth century, affected all forms of artistic output: television,
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Introduction 3
film, fiction, visual art, and even cultural sensibility. The horror sens-
ibility has only intensified throughout the current century, and we can
see this in the popular television and streaming series as well as through
the ever- present horror flick. The popularity of the discipline leaves a
door open for the academic study of the genre, drawing in popular and
academic audiences alike. Studies like Carroll’s argue that the horror
genre is innately a multidisciplinary mode; ironically, though, scholars
who study horror limit their investigations to only one discipline, exam-
ining the literary development of horror, with its roots in the Gothic;
tracing the evolution of horror in film, often dividing up the genre into
subgenres and categories; or exploring the visual representations of the
horrific in the plastic arts. Likewise, horror studies privilege one audi-
ence or another, innately suggesting that there is no middle ground for
a comprehensive examination of the genre that bridges the gap between
popular audiences and academic researchers. Such explorations into the
genre, though significant, are often myopic in scope and reductive in
breadth, especially for a discipline that is attempting to find its academic
grounding. The goal of this work is to do just that: to bring the study of
horror directly into the academic world by combining previous popular
and academic forays into the genre with the academically evergreen field
of Victorian studies. Throughout this book, I will explore the aesthetic
and philosophical roots of the horror genre, tethered helplessly to that of
the Gothic, to illustrate how the former is inherently not only a product
of the latter but also quite different in its approach to depicting terror,
fear, and the supernatural. Secondarily, I will apply my aesthetic com-
parative examination of the Gothic and the horrific to a close reading
of some of the most popular and most influential Victorian novels of
the nineteenth century.1 In this approach, I hope to rescue the study of
horror, providing an academic space for its examination and to likewise
add a new methodology for the study of Victorian history and Victorian
literature.
Collectively, those who have followed in Carroll’s footsteps, such
as David Punter (1996), Brigid Cherry (2009), Clive Bloom (2010),
Fred Botting (2014), and Daryl Jones (2018), have all attempted to
not only provide a definitive guide to studying horror, tracing its his-
tory and development, but they have likewise all sought to create a
workable definition for that which constitutes the genre. Overall, as
Carroll notes, horror serves one purpose: to affect the audience emo-
tionally and to elicit a reaction from those who consume it, and as
the popularity of the genre can attest, audiences love the thrill of the
scare. In essence, horror is considered horrific because it uses a number
of creative devices, which I will show in Chapter 1 of this book, to
negatively affect the audiences that consume it. The negative emotions
that are aroused through experiencing depictions of terror, whether on
screen, in text, or in an architectural manifestation, are twofold: they
are emotional and psychological, yet they are also inherently physical
