“Shivering with Antici…pation” Gothic Adaptation and the French Revolution’s Terrors

Our societal obsession with tragedy is quite peculiar. In theory, we shouldn’t want

anything to do with that which solicits negative feeling, yet we find ourselves enthralled with the

idea of watching some poor sucker in a movie tremble in reaction to his own misfortune. The

phenomenon is not exclusive to cinema: we rubberneck accidents, read tabloid articles about

celebrity divorce and, perhaps most importantly, rip through stories of Gothic suffering with

incredible urgency.

At no point in history was mankind’s literary obsession with distant terror more apparent

than in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which brought the Gothic tropes of terror once

confined to the page into the bloody world of Revolutionary France. With the death of King

Louis XVI and the storming of the Bastille, the bloody murder at the end of Wadpole’s The

Castle of Otranto began to look less like a fictional fright and more like something one could

find in a newspaper article about the latest happenings of the Terror. The Gothic found itself

sharing a stage with the equally terrifying reality of unrestrained democratic attempt. As reality

began to mirror the fictional environments of the Gothic, the genre adapted. Authors sought to

bring readers even farther into different aspects of the fictional, into a world where the terrible

demanded and received response. The trajectory of the Gothic adjusted out of a need to

circumvent the newfound terror wrought by the consequences of the French Revolution, an act of

deliberate upset which defined the Gothic as a response to humanity’s natural desire for the

reassurance of our circumstances through the demonstration of distant circumstances worse than

our own. While historical horrors and terrors such as the French Revolution have been entrusted

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to memory, the fictional horror and terror of the Gothic persists because of the cathartic service it

provides.

In order to understand how the French Revolution affected the progression of the

Gothic’s ability to incite terror and horror, one must first understand the state of textual Gothic

terrorism (in the sense of the genre’s ability to provoke a sense of horror) preceding the French

Revolution. From the publication of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of

Otranto, the Gothic demonstrates an ability to demand attention by means of horror and terror.

Robert Hume elaborates on how Walpole instills attention in his text:

The Castle of Otranto holds the reader’s attention through dread of a series of terrible

possibilities—Theodore’s execution, the (essentially) incestuous marriage of Manfred

and Isabella, the casting-off of Hippolita, and so on…Walpole uses violent death only at

the beginning and end of his book. The reader is prepared for neither of these deaths,

which serve only to catch the attention and to produce a climax, respectively. (Hume 282)

One’s initial motivation to persist in reading Walpole’s novel originates from the initial,

terrible shock provided—a giant helmet unexpectedly falling from the sky certainly instills

surprise and curiosity, and rightfully demands explanation and justification. But as the reader

receives neither of these things upon continuation, a loss of interest occurs as one’s desire for

continued reading evaporates, leaving the reader desensitized. Fortunately, Otranto’s lack of

stimulus suffers no repetition in later Gothic works, and lies as an exception to the genre’s

development in response to the French Revolution.

With the penning of On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir Bertrand,

A Fragment, John and Anna Aikin further define and refine Walpole’s shocking implementation

of Gothic stimulus. Anna Aikin’s essay, which discusses why readers enjoy the terror of the

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Gothic when they really shouldn’t, justifies the reader’s enjoyment of the sparsely placed,

suspenseful terror in Otranto, and smartly illustrates the reasons behind the diminishing interest

in the novel upon progression.

In summary, Aikin postulates that we enjoy scenes of suffering because of how they

allow us to derive a greater pleasure from extending our sympathy to the sufferers. Additionally,

she notes how we don’t enjoy terror as much as we enjoy satisfying our curiosity, and surmises

that our willingness to accept the terror of the Gothic occurs out of a desire for closure. In the

cases of terrors provided by our imagination, our conduit for the execution of our curiosity, we

gain pleasure in our enjoyment of what we find curious, which supersedes and diminishes the

pains of terror in response (Aikin 127). In terms of applying Aikin’s theory to Otranto, the terror

brought by the falling helmet that crushes Conrad, while hilarious from the modern viewpoint, is

tolerated for the sake of the satisfaction of our curiosity, but because the falling helmet—in

addition to the other minor terrors prevalent throughout the text—never receives full justification

from Walpole, the reader loses their incentive to finish the text. In contrast, Sir Bertrand

manages to keep the reader’s interest by presenting various catalysts of terror in rapid

succession. While the curiosity elicited by the presentation of terror fails to be satisfied, it does

lead the reader to complete the (admittedly short) fragmented text. By means of Sir Bertrand’s

improvement of the terrorist methodology conceived by Walpole through Otranto, the early

Gothic demonstrates its capacity to instill reaction through the use of terrorist anticipation,

contrived by means of the supernatural or the unexplained.

Having been introduced by Otranto and refined by Sir Bertrand, the Gothic now existed

in a state adequate enough to illicit terrible reaction from the eighteenth century reader. With the

advent of the French Revolution, however, the Gothic found its ability to do so equally matched

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by the happenstances of the real world. While the preliminary Gothic primarily invoked reader

reaction by means of Radcliffean terror— the anxious sense of dread one feels when faced with

the mystery of possibility, — the French Revolution instead solicited voyeuristic reaction via

horror, usually through gruesome shock and reaction to the explicitly portrayed. The British

reactions to the storming of the Bastille, the execution of King Louis XVI, and the Reign of

Terror all stand as violent testament to the French Revolution’s ability to produce events which

can instill horror upon the observer.

British reaction to the French Revolution was by no means restrained to horror, for

sensations of terror occurred as well. In response to the British declaration of war against post-

revolutionary France, the French pursued numerous avenues for the potential invasion of Britain,

with Napoleon at one point considering the use of troop-carrying hot-air balloons and the

construction of a tunnel under the Channel. French pursuit of such hypotheticals, in addition to

the stationing of an army at Boulonge—a coastal town in France visible from the English side of

the Channel—between 1798 and 1805 fanned the flames of anticipation: for seven years, the

British dreaded the terrible possibility of French invasion. Even King George III found himself

concerned with Napoleonic possibility, stating the following in a letter to Bishop Hurd:

[Britain] is here in daily expectation that Bonaparte will attempt his threatened invasion;

the chances against his success seem so many that it is wonderful he persists in it…

should his troops effect a landing, I shall certainly put myself at the head of my troops

and my other armed subjects to repel them. (King George III 14)

Though the King of England himself found the possibility of French success slim, he still

suffered from the anticipatory dread of terror at the possibility of such a fact. This sense of dread

at the hands of the possible was expressed in the British printed world as well—even Robert

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Dighton’s sharply illustrated caricatures bowed to the dread of possibility, albeit satirically. His

lengthily titled print An Accurate Representation of the Floating Machine Invented by the

French for Invading England and acts on the principals of both Wind and Water Mills etc plays

off of the rampant fear of invasion, using a ridiculously contrived contraption to illustrate how

British fears distorted realistic perception. This distortion—perpetrated by the large amount of

scuttlebutt throughout all echelons of British society—reiterates Radcliffe’s view on the

manifestation of terror as an anxious sense of dread felt in the face of obscurity, and illustrates

how the terror present in the British reaction to the militaristic consequences of the French

Revolution names the Revolution itself as equally capable of provoking feelings of terror, which

had previously laid exclusively within the jurisdiction of the Gothic. Ronald Paulson, in

discussing the relation between the French Revolution and the Gothic, discusses how the French

Revolution’s turmoil and suspicion made both parties’ equal in terms of their ability to instill

feelings of horror and terror:

When the Revolution itself came, and as it progressed, it was precisely this inability to

make out the events on a day-to-day basis, but with the suspicion of personal

skullduggery beneath each new changing-hands of property, that make the Gothic novel a

roughly equivalent narrative form. (Paulson 542)

In the eyes of the (in) famous novelist Marquis de Sade, the newfound, horrific reality

brought by the turmoil of French Revolution desensitized Gothic readers to the point where

Gothic authors were forced to invoke the supernatural and demonic in order to solicit terror and

horror; he saw it as “the necessary offspring of the revolutionary upheaval which affected all of

Europe” (13). If the French Revolution possessed the ability to instill an equal or greater amount

of terror than the Gothic, then the Gothic as a genre needed to adapt for the sake of continued

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relevance. Under Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, the Gothic genre pivots. Unlike the

early Gothic, which used unjustified instances of the supernatural for the solicitation of terror,

Radcliffe employs what she refers to as the explained supernatural: a writing style which

presents the reader with seemingly supernatural occurrences that precede natural justification

later in the text. The explained supernatural resolves the mystery that the early Gothic habitually

left in question in consequence to its implementation of the crudely supernatural. Its application

within Udolpho provides the reader with the satisfaction of curiosity which, as stated by Aiken,

acts as the preliminary driver for one’s perseverance through the naturally unenjoyable terrors of

the Gothic. In this sense, Radcliffe’s interpretation of the Gothic gives the reader what they want

most: the means to solve mystery.

By satisfying curiosity and the anxieties that accompanied it by means of her use of

terror, Radcliffe’s Gothic succeeds in providing the novel’s reader with a sense of resolution and

certainty that the French Revolution could in no way provide. Radcliffe’s use of the explained

supernatural both indulges the Aiken faculties of satisfied anticipation and curiosity, which in

turn fuels our desire for the horror and terror of the Gothic and makes the terror needed for the

solicitation of such feeling tolerable by means of its resolution. Though the early Gothic’s ability

to instill terror and horror found itself challenged by the French Revolution’s own capacity to do

so, the success of Radcliffe’s explained supernatural illustrates just one of the many ways the

Gothic circumvents the horror and terror brought by the French Revolution.

With the French Revolution as a catalyst for the Gothic’s development, one would think

that the most notable variations in the Gothic would appropriately occur within the confines of

French Gothic literature. While the most popular Gothic works in France during and following

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the revolution were translations of the British Gothic, the French Gothic did respond to the

upheavals brought by the revolution and all its consequences, albeit in a more subtle fashion.

François Félix Nogaret’s Le Miroir des événemens actuels1, published in 1790, concerns an

automation-creating contest held between six talented inventors who compete to win the heart of

Aglaonice, a woman whose innocence and untimely fainting draw parallel to Udolpho’s Emily

St. Aubert. The Gothic characteristics of the text stem from the six inventors “use [of]

mechanical technology to disguise its own existence, to produce the imitation of life in ever-

increasing verisimilitude to its natural and human ‘originals’” (Landes 110). More specifically,

they appear through the thematic questions raised in response to the inventors’ successful

creation of artificial life and the means by which it is used: the Gothic notion of horror can be

observed in the automations’ ability to act in the place of organic life, demonstrated with an

automation stating Nicator’s love for Aglaonice without prompt (Nicator is the sixth of the six

inventors). Similarly, the Gothic notion of terror manifests in the anticipatory anxieties that

appear not only in the presentation and success of artificial life in Le Miroir, but in the wait in

between the demonstration of each inventor’s automation, for the increasing humanity of each

subsequent automation terrorized by means of the hypotheticals raised over the humanity of the

automations. Nogaret’s portrayal of life created at the hands of man—the automations created by

the inventors—as a vehicle for each inventor’s attempt to woo Aglaonice—which by extension

refers to the creation of a better society through the reproductive action that would follow—

symbolizes the optimistic lens through which the initial stages of the French Revolution were

viewed, for as the Revolution attempted to create a new nation out of talent and merit for the

sake of national betterment, the coincidentally named Dr. Frankenstein and the other five

inventors too sought to use their talent and merit to create artificial life for the sake of courting

1 Fittingly translates into English as “The Mirror of Current Events”

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an organic woman. Unlike Udolpho, which used the explained supernatural to satisfy anxieties

over the unpredictability of the French Revolution, Le Miroir celebrated the possibilities of

reform, at least at first. Julia Douthwaite, who exposed Le Miroir’s similarities to Shelley’s

Frankenstein in her article “The Frankenstein of the French Revolution,” comments on how

Nogaret’s tale builds on the ideals of the French revolution:

Underlining the importance of Le Miroir for the political history of revolutionary France

is the demand for action that frames this text… This book, and its tale of the wily

inventors seeking the beautiful virgin, should ultimately serve the goal of anti-clerical

activism. From the writer’s skill, a fraternal bond is created among men and the nation’s

fight against obscurantism makes a concrete step forward.” (383).

It’s important to note the positivity with which Le Miroir’s first edition addresses the

French Revolution. The second edition, published in 1795, parallels the path of regression the

French Revolution followed through the various instances of violence at the hands of radical

idealism. The political message that once invoked solidarity to the French Revolution was

deliberately made undecipherable by Nogaret. Douthwaite elaborates:

A new framing device and significant textual omissions [in the second edition] transform

the tale from a patriotic allegory and a concrete vehicle of enlightenment into a frivolous

tale of libertinage. This not-so-subtle shift in emphasis underlines the turn, in the five

years between 1790 and 1795, from a conception of literature as a moral and political

force capable of intervening in History, and the author as a speaker of Truth, to a

conception of literature as merely a leisure pursuit and the author as entertainer.

(Douthwaite 384)

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The two drastically different editions of Le Miroir indicate two more means by which the

Gothic reacted to the terror and horror wrought by the French Revolution. At first, the horror of

the French Revolution lay in positive possibility: reaction to the violent storming of the Bastille

contained a vehicle for a hopeful sort of catharsis that eventually manifested in the establishment

of the First Republic. Similarly, the feelings of anticipatory dread associated with Gothic terror

inhabited the anxieties of those who worried of the Revolution’s success or failure. Through the

first edition of Le Miroir, the Gothic responds to revolutionary manifestations of horror and

terror by making the pleasure in the resolution of feelings of horror and terror largely outweigh

the negative experiences of horror and terror themselves: a positive reaction to the feelings

brought by the terror and horror of the Revolution which reflected the positivity with which the

early Revolution was regarded. But as the horrific revulsion and terrorist dread seen in France’s

political instability and in the Reign of Terror started to outweigh the pleasure that came with the

resolution of Revolutionary horror and terror, The Gothic adjusted. Nogaret’s reduced second

edition augmented the presence of terror—by means of improved obscurity which stemmed from

Nogaret’s omissions—and horror, which stemmed from the grotesqueness of Nogaret’s

omissions. Much like Udolpho, Nogaret’s unorthodox implementation of the Gothic

demonstrates how the genre changed itself in response to the French Revolution.

Perhaps the greatest response to the terror and horror of the French Revolution occurs

after its circulatory conclusion. Published in 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein debuted after

the French Revolution had come full circle, going from monarchy to democracy to empire to

monarchy once again. Much like how the post-Battle of Waterloo world attempted to understand

the apparent chaos of the Revolution, Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein attempts to give meaning to the

meaningless by bestowing life upon the lifeless. Like Victor, Shelly sought to create meaning

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and longed for “an intelligible explanation of how the progressive ideals of the French

Revolution had collapsed in despotism, both at home and abroad” (Clemit 30). In spite of its

conclusion, the French Revolution still managed to instill horror and terror upon Europe. The

total body count of all the wars fought in the name of and in response to the Revolution was

more than enough to instill horror upon the post-Napoleonic. Similarly, the dreadful anxiety felt

at the hands of the Revolution’s apparent futility invoked terror as well. In order to instill any

sort of reaction to the horrible or terrible in a reader, Shelley had to present instances of horror

and terror greater than those of the French Revolution.

Shelley succeeded in this endeavor by placing humanity in the place of God. Through

Victor’s act of creation, Shelley allows the reader to observe the fictional consequences of the

crude human desire for capabilities beyond our own faculties. In doing so, she creates an

empathetic link between this desire and the consequences of this desire’s fictional satisfaction,

which allows for the horrible and terrible to carry greater weight due to their relativity. So as to

make such a relation more potent, Shelley bestows upon her monster similar faculties to those of

his creator, forcing the reader to grapple with the juxtaposition of a hideous body and a beautiful

mind, exemplified by numerous instances of wonderful dialogue. In one of the confrontations

between Victor and the monster, the monster remarks on his purposelessness:

I was dependent on none and related to none. The path of my departure was free, and

there was none to lament my annihilation. My person was hideous and my stature

gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was

my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.

(Shelley 178)

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The monster’s confrontation with the most basic philosophical questions of life is a

deliberate illustration of human nature in nonhuman form. Shelly’s use of the monster as an

external vehicle for the presentation of the usually internal questions of identity and purpose is

deliberate in its intent to instill sympathy within the reader. By virtue of common human

experience, the reader will have experienced the same dreadful terror at the hands of the dreadful

ambiguity of individual purpose that the monster grapples with. Interestingly, the Monster’s

experience with horror stems from the very sense of obscure terror that reader sympathizes with.

In the midst of the monster’s dreadful existence, it comes across Victor’s diary, which describes

how he vividly grew to detest his creation in the aftermath of giving it life, a revelation that

elicits revulsion from the monster:

Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin; the whole

detail of that series of disgusting circumstances which produced it is set in view; the

minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which

painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read. ‘Hateful day

when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Accursed creator! Why did you form a

monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? (Shelley 181)

While a response to this question would make a fantastic paper topic on its own, the

monster’s horrid reaction demands attention. In terms of the Gothic, the monster is experiencing

the same sensation of revulsion that the reader experiences in response to the horrific: The

ultimate reciprocation of sympathy occurs. The monster’s reaction to Victor’s diary, in addition

to his struggle against the obscure nature of his existence, allows the reader to experience terror

and horror both sympathetically and practically, which indicates Frankenstein’s contribution to

the Gothic as the definitive manifestation of its ability to amplify sensations of horror and terror

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by virtue of sympathy. Due to the reader’s exposure to both types of horror and terror—the

practical and the sympathetic—and the French Revolution’s singularly-dimensioned provocation

of the pair, which stems from not only the inability to solicit sympathy in the face of the

destruction wrought by the Napoleonic Wars but the inability for the post-Waterloo reader to

understand the Revolution in its entirety—Frankenstein manages to muster more terror and

horror than the recent memory of the French Revolution. Therefore, Frankenstein exists as yet

another example of how the Gothic adjusts in the face of the French Revolution’s own ability to

instill Gothic feeling.

While we still feel its effects, the horror and terror of the French Revolution are history.

In contrast, the gothic invocation of horror and terror persists today because of the service they

provide. While humanity as a whole has progressed to a point where we can unequivocally state

that our current quality of life overshadows that of one hundred years ago, we still feel insecure

in terms of how well we have it. In our capitalist society, we rather ignorantly consider one’s

financial status to be indicative of one’s quality of life—there’s a reason why we fantasize about

driving Ferraris and living in mansions filled with supermodels. The various instances of

extravagance in our lives—take everything related to the Kardashians, for example—instill a

sense of superficial envy. We want to be rich, successful, and famous because it’s what society

portrays as the pinnacle of success, and while the wise correctly claim the opposite, we still find

ourselves blinded by the possibility of achieving affluence.

The Gothic possesses a capacity to bring its reader back into reality by invoking negative

affluence—the possession of something we don’t want. In the surprisingly Gothic movie Aliens,

for example, Ripley fights a whole bunch of horrifying, killer aliens who reproduce by

involuntarily hugging your face and bursting from your chest. After Ripley throws the Alien

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queen out of the airlock and the credits roll, we’re filled with relief: we’re glad that we

(hopefully) don’t live in a world filled with the Aliens from the movie, and we’re relieved that

we no longer have to experience the dreadful terror of the obscure brought by the movie’s

conceit. A similar relief overcame the Gothic readers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

who put down books such as Frankenstein and Dracula and gave thanks to the fact that their

circumstances were better than those of the book’s characters. Similar to how those who

observed the French Revolution gave credence to their lack of direct involvement, we appreciate

the fiction of the Gothic every time an encounter with the genre ends. The influence of the

Gothic prevails throughout history because of how it reaffirms the positive qualities of our own

existence by demonstrating distant circumstances worse than our own. It makes itself

indispensable, and we welcome shivering in response with antici-

…pation.

Works Cited:

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Aikin, John, and Anna Laetitia Aikin. "On Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror; with Sir

Bertrand, A Fragment." Ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles. Gothic Documents: A

Sourcebook, 1700-1820. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. 127-9. Print.

Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Sigourney Weaver et al. Twentieth Century Fox Home

Entertainment, 2003. DVD.

Clemit, Pamela. “Frankenstein, Marry Shelley’s Myth-Making. The Godwinian Novel: The

Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelly. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1993. 139-74. JSTOR. Web. 9 December 2015.

Dighton, Robert Freville. An Accurate Representation of the Floating Machine Invented by the

French for Invading England and acts on the principals of both Wind and Water Mills

etc. 1798. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Collections- National

Maritime Museum. Web. 9 December 2015.

Douthwaite, Julia. “The Frankenstein of the French Revolution: Nogaret’s Automation Tale of

1790.” European Romantic Review 20, 3 (2009): 381-411. MLA International

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Hume, Robert D. "Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel." PMLA 84

(1969): 282-90. Print.

King George the Third. "The King to the Bishop of Worcester." Letter to Richard Hurd. 30 Nov.

1803. Napoleon and the Invasion of England: The Story of the Great Terror. London: J.

Lane, 1908. 14. Print.

Landes, Joan. "The Anatomy of Artificial Life: An Eighteenth-Century Perspective." Genesis

Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life. By Jessica Riskin.

Chicago: U of Chicago, 2007. 96-111. Print.

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Nogaret, François-Félix. Le Miroir des événemens actuels ou la belle au plus offrant, Histoire à

deux visages. Paris: Au Palais Royal & Chez les Marchands de Nouveautés, L’An de

notre salut, et le deuxième de la Liberté, 1790. Print.

Paulson, Ronald. "Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution." ELH 48.3 (1981): 532-54. JSTOR.

Web. 9 Dec. 2015.

Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” The New Monthly Magazine 7 (1826): 145-52.

JSTOR. Web. 9 December 2015.

Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Ed. Bonamy Dobrée. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

Print.

Sade, Marquis de. "An Essay on Novels." The Crimes of Love. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.

Print.

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein. Ed. Patrick Nobes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: Penguin, 1986. Print.