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2019-08-01
Salem Belles, Succubi, and The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Salem Belles, Succubi, and The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic
Witchcraft and Gothic Erotic Affect Witchcraft and Gothic Erotic Affect
Sylvia Cutler
Brigham Young University
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Salem Belles, Succubi, and The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft
and Gothic Erotic Affect
Sylvia Cutler
A thesis submitted to the faculty of
Brigham Young University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
Mary Kathleen Eyring, Chair
Robert James Hudson
Nicholas A. Mason
Department of English
Brigham Young University
Copyright © 2019 Sylvia Cutler
All Rights Reserved
ABSTRACT
Salem Belles, Succubi, and The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft
and Gothic Erotic Affect
Sylvia Cutler
Department of English, BYU
Master of Arts
In order to reconcile the absence of sexually deviant witch figures (succubae, demonic
women, etc.) within the formation of American national literature in the nineteenth century with
the fantastic elements found in European variations on the gothic, my thesis aims to demonstrate
transatlantic variants of erotic signifiers attached to witch figures in nineteenth-century gothic
fiction and mediums across national traditions. I will begin by tracing the transatlantic and
historical impact of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum—an early
modern handbook of sorts used widely in witchcraft inquisitions—on Early American witch
trials, specifically where its influence deviates from a sexualized conception of the witch and
where a different prosopography of the historical witch emerges. Next, I will assess a short
sample of nineteenth-century American pulp fiction to demonstrate the historical impact of
America’s erotically decoded witch type on fictionalized versions or caricatures of the witch. In
doing so I hope to create a reading that informs a more transatlantically complex representation
of The Scarlet Letter. Finally, in order to underscore the significance of these national and
historical departures of The Scarlet Letter as a gothic novel, I will contrast Hawthorne’s novel
with a selective reading of nineteenth-century gothic texts from England and France that employ
the witch or demonic feminine motif in an erotically codified and fantastic setting, namely using
Old World magic and history that draws from French and English traditions.
To demonstrate the significance of erotically coded witches in the British tradition, I will
briefly examine Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” as a gothic text that relies heavily on the
erotic affect encoded in the figure of Geraldine. I will also touch on Prosper Mérimée’s “La
Vénus d’Ille” and Théophile Gautier’s “La Morte Amoreuse,” two remarkable short stories that
highlight the sublime terror of sexually deviant, occult female figures. Through such a collection
of readings of witches and erotic, occult women I hope to amplify a more latent theme
underlying The Scarlet Letter and America’s conflicted relationship with the gothic tradition:
namely its crucial lack of erotic enchantment as a channel for the experience of gothic affect, the
fantastic, and even sublime terror.
Keywords: witchcraft, gothic, affect, erotic, Salem belles, witches, succubi, The Scarlet Letter,
transatlantic, phantasmagoria, demonic women
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to express my profound gratitude to my invaluable committee members: to Mary
Eyring for crafting a brilliant and broadly applicable graduate seminar on witchcraft history and
literature and thus inspiring this thesis, Nicholas Mason for his long-term mentorship and his
careful and detailed feedback on not only this project but other academic pursuits, and Robert
Hudson for his scrupulous attention to my particular questions and interests within this thesis and
his vital guidance in helping me to realize those interests. I also want to acknowledge my parents
Mary Lynn and Edward Cutler for their unofficial mentorship on this project, especially my
mother, who often acted as an additional committee member in discussing my ideas with me and
encouraging me to look into texts I might not have initially considered. And lastly, I want to
acknowledge my husband Roland Laboulaye for selflessly sacrificing the time and energy he
could have devoted toward his own thesis to give me uninterrupted writing and research time,
especially during the summer months.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Salem Belles, Succubi, and The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft ....................................... i
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................... iv
Introduction: The Phantasm of the Witch ....................................................................................... 1
Eros, Gothic Referents, and the Problem of the American Tradition ............................................. 7
Transatlantic Variance and Early Modern Witchcraft .................................................................... 9
The Salem Belle and the Absent Succubus................................................................................... 11
Transatlantic Oscillation and Affect in The Scarlet Letter ........................................................... 15
Old World Enchantment: England and Gothic Erotic Affect ....................................................... 20
Venus Envy: France’s Fantastic Women and the Affective Allure of the Occult ........................ 24
Conclusion: The Erotics of Aesthetic Enchantment ..................................................................... 30
Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 32
1
Salem Belles, Succubi, and The Scarlet Letter: Transatlantic Witchcraft and Gothic Erotic Affect
Introduction: The Phantasm of the Witch
In an electrifying letter to his sister Elise in 1801, Charles Nodier, a French author
renowned for his influence on the conte fantastique, reported his various engagements in Paris,
noting especially a disinterest in the various vaudeville theater productions he attended during
his stay. Midway through his litany of busy nothings, however, Nodier can hold off the suspense
no longer; in an abrupt turn from the mundane, he reveals a thrilling account of a Parisian
spectacle that no other can rival: Etienne-Gaspard Robert’s la fantasmagorie, or the
phantasmagoria.
Nodier’s description of Robert’s (more widely known as Robertson’s) famous spectacle
of optical illusion reads exactly like the author’s gothic tales. His language is charged with
visceral passion and mysterious foreboding, leaving modern-day readers with the inescapable
feeling that his phenomenological account borders on something more than the effects of mere
trompe l’œil. In a curious insertion into his description of ghostly pageantry, Nodier forges a
compelling relationship between sensorial experience and literary bodies:
Les Mystères d’Udolphe, l’Abbaye de Saint-Clair, et les Souterrains de Mazzini ne sont
plus des romans. J’ai vu des fantômes, des ombres de toute espèce errer autour de moi et
se dissoudre sous ma main. Tous les miracles de la fable et de l’Ecriture . . . sont réunis à
la Fantasmagorie” (143).
[The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Abbey of Saint-Clair, and A Sicilian Romance are no
longer novels. I saw phantoms, shadows of all kinds wander around me and dissolve
2
under my hand. All the miracles of fable and Scripture . . . were brought together in the
phantasmagoria]” [my translation].
Nodier’s intriguing coupling of the phantasmagoria’s visual and sensory experiences with
literary bodies (Radcliffe’s gothic novels, most notably) introduces an important component for
understanding the aesthetic and affective experience of reading gothic literature. Rita Felski
posits that there is something in our human makeup that creates a predisposition for aesthetic
susceptibility, a type of enchantment that novels serve to illuminate for us through “aesthetic,
affective, even metaphysical meanings” (70). That the optical and even aural experiences that
produce a frisson or fear in the medium of a lantern show should feel distinctly reminiscent of
gothic conventions is a compelling concept, particularly in constructing an understanding of the
affective or cathartic allure that generated mass gothic readership near the turn of the century.
David Jones’s recent work on Gothic eroticism and magic lantern shows presents an attentive
reading of the presence of phantasmagoria and gothic affect in gothic literature, and, like Felski’s
work, emphasizes the importance of aesthetic immersion as a form of enchantment. For Jones,
the affective experience of the magic lantern spectacles that were so popular during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggests a link between mass consumption of visual
experiences and the necessity of recreating visually compelling experiences for sensory effect in
gothic literature.
Yet Jones’s careful examination of the cultural significance of the phantasmagoria in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reveals an even more striking relationship between
gothic literature and the gratification of the senses: Robertson’s prominent pairing of erotic
images with his phantasmagoric productions. While Jones notes that Robertson’s sexual
signifiers ranged from images of classical nudity to bestiality (62), the most prominent sexual
3
signifiers were images of monstrous women in “situations of dominance” (63), expressed in
figures as varied as the Witch of Endor (whose figure was the most popular icon on posters
promoting Robertson’s shows), dancing witches, the witches from Macbeth, and even sexually
voracious succubi (62-63). Why, we might ask, was inciting eros in the form of the monstrous-
feminine so crucial to fulfilling the affective experience of terror in the phantasmagoria’s
audience? Jones, echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s theory that eroticism is “a movement toward the
Other” (2), suggests that “Sex and the threat of sexual violence are integral to gothic writing” (2).
Jones supports this through Lewis’s The Monk, claiming that “Without Ambrosio’s lustful
excesses with Matilda, a demon disguised in female form, and his overpowering desire for the
innocent Antonia . . . the plot would lack its aura of depravity” (2).
What is most intriguing about Jones’s commentary is his use of the term “aura” to
describe the affective and erotic power necessitated by these demonic female figures. Arguments
like Jones’s that the gothic tradition often relies on an embodied image of the erotic Other to
produce a dark, affective aura notably finds its origins in the affective presence found in
Medieval Catholic icons and subject matter, a religious tradition from which Protestant authors
of the gothic often drew as a foil or anti-Catholic backdrop. Yet, in The Gothic and Catholicism,
a re-reading of the use of anti-Catholic sentiment in the gothic tradition, Maria Purves observes
that the gothic also “mines Catholic materials and motifs for their sublime potential, which
follows Burke’s blueprint for the production of the sublime” (5). Purves adds that these Catholic
materials created a space in which the enlightened reader could enjoy the freedom of symbolic
possibility and imagination while keeping their more rational Protestant faculties in check (5).
The visceral moods embodied in the symbolic and its implications for the experience of
4
sublimity, particularly as it relates to gothic terror, certainly cannot go unnoticed—especially in
the case of the monstrous-feminine as image and sexual signifier.
1
Yet while it is a sufficiently fruitful exercise to read the affective significance of the
powerfully erotic, monstrous female in gothic texts or mediums like Robertson’s
phantasmagoria, one could also complicate this in an analysis of gothic traditions that appear to
eschew powerfully female sexual signifiers and Catholic Medieval influence altogether. In doing
so, one might ask the following questions: Is the erotic a requisite component for fear, and, by
extension, is it truly the most powerful conduit to the sublime? Gothic texts ranging from
Coleridge’s “Christabel” to Nodier’s Smarra: ou les démons de la nuit seem to echo the gothic
readership’s affective need—whether in parody form (as is often argued is the case for
Coleridge’s “Christabel”) or for pure supernatural delight—for the monstrous-feminine motif,
feeding into popular gothic elements that enhance supernatural experiences through erotic
1
I acknowledge my debt to a vast body of gothic scholarship from the 1990s and early 2000s,
particularly Michelle Massé’s In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism, and the Gothic (1992),
Maggie Kilgour’s The Rise of the Gothic Novel (1995), Teresa Goddu’s Gothic America:
Narrative, History, and Nation (1997), and Michael Gamer’s Romanticism and the Gothic:
Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (2000).
While the dwindling of gothic scholarship might suggest it has been exhausted as an area for
critical research, I hope my thesis demonstrates that there is still much to be explored in this
generic mode. For example, Gothic Studies still remains a productive space for newer arenas of
academic criticism, particularly within Queer Studies, Postsecular Studies, and Postcritical
Studies. Likewise, with the cultural proliferation and resurgence of gothic-inspired television
shows and contemporary Wiccan crystal spell work and crystal therapy within the past few
years, transhistorical and even transatlantic studies in the gothic may offer some insight into the
postsecular fascination with the occult and its associated mediums.
A more recent, cultural study of what the gothic looks like now by Catherine Spooner, entitled
Post-millenial Gothic: Comedy, Romance, and the Rise of Happy Gothic, suggests that the visual
and spectacular aesthetic of the gothic has become perhaps the most prioritized in twenty-first
century culture, which makes a reading of the proliferation of the witch as erotic symbol and
motif all the more compelling as one looks to the affordances of visually stimulating or
provocative figures in the gothic tradition.
5
presence. Yet, while the gothic’s monstrous-feminine elements and its erotic significance in
Western literature seem more obvious in many British and Continental gothic texts, few critics
note the sheer absence of this effect and phenomenon in many American gothic texts, as well as
the problem this absence creates for forming a truly provocative and affectively stimulating
national body of gothic literature.
Where this tension of erotic embodiment as a conduit to gothic terror and the American
gothic tradition affords further analysis is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s well-known and widely
consumed The Scarlet Letter, most notably because the author appears conflicted about
presenting the events as either happening within the realm of realism or realism with a touch of
fantasy. In order to demonstrate the sheer power of erotic feminine daemonology in the tradition
of the gothic and fantasy, my aim for this thesis is to trace the motif of the witch or demonic
woman (the most obvious American stand-in for this sort of figure) in its transatlantic variations
in America, England, and France to suggest a new interpretation of Hester Prynne’s role in
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s well-loved novel. While Hester Prynne’s deviant sexuality and semi-
demonic offspring, Pearl, are suggestive of Old World, erotic codification of witches copulating
with the Devil, Hester’s characterization is also representative of a uniquely American take on
witchcraft and demonic copulation, wherein sexual deviance or copulation with the Devil is
relatively absent.
In order to reconcile the absence of sexually deviant witch figures (succubae, demonic
women, etc.) within the formation of American national literature in the nineteenth century with
the fantastic elements found in European variations on the gothic, my thesis aims to demonstrate
transatlantic variants of erotic signifiers attached to witch figures in nineteenth-century gothic
fiction and mediums across national traditions. I will begin by tracing the transatlantic and
6
historical impact of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum—an early
modern handbook of sorts used widely in witchcraft inquisitions—on Early American witch
trials, specifically where its influence deviates from a sexualized conception of the witch and
where a different prosopography of the historical witch emerges. Next, I will assess a short
sample of nineteenth-century American pulp fiction to demonstrate the historical impact of
America’s erotically decoded witch type on fictionalized versions or caricatures of the witch. In
doing so I hope to create a reading that informs a more transatlantically complex representation
of The Scarlet Letter. Finally, in order to underscore the significance of these national and
historical departures of The Scarlet Letter as a gothic novel, I will contrast Hawthorne’s novel
with a selective reading of nineteenth-century gothic texts from England and France that employ
the witch or demonic feminine motif in an erotically codified and fantastic setting, namely using
Old World magic and history that draws from French and English traditions. To demonstrate the
significance of erotically coded witches in the British tradition, I will briefly examine Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” as a gothic text that relies heavily on the erotic affect encoded in
the figure of Geraldine. In addition to the telling vignette noted above of Charles Nodier’s
experience with Robertson’s erotic phantasms of the witch, I will also touch on Prosper
Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille” and Théophile Gautier’s “La Morte Amoreuse,” two remarkable
short stories that highlight the sublime terror of sexually deviant, occult female figures. Through
such a collection of readings of witches and erotic, occult women I hope to amplify a more latent
theme underlying The Scarlet Letter and America’s conflicted relationship with the gothic
tradition: namely its crucial lack of erotic enchantment as a channel for the experience of gothic
affect, the fantastic, and even sublime terror.
7
Eros, Gothic Referents, and the Problem of the American Tradition
This remarkable absence of erotically codified female figures in the American gothic
tradition is best implied in Henry Adams’s famous observation in “The Dynamo and the Virgin,”
when he questions “whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power
of sex, as every classic had always done” (11). After some reflection, Adams decides that “he
could think only of Walt Whitman . . . . All the rest had used sex for sentiment, never for force;
to them, Eve was a tender flower, and Herodias an unfeminine horror. American art . . . was as
far as possible sexless” (11). “The Dynamo and the Virgin” highlights the aesthetic
consequences of American artists and authors rejecting the power of female sexuality, or “force,”
and it appears that Adams uses the word “force” here the way Jones might describe an “aura” in
erotic gothic literature; there is something purely affective about the presence of these sexual
female signifiers in literature and art. Adams writes that the Virgin, or the Venus, both of whom
he uses to embody this female force, are “Symbol or energy” and have served “as the greatest
force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than
any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done” (17). As an American in France, Adams
is startled by the powerful presence of what Robertson intuited his phantasmagoria needed to
thrill an audience and what gothic authors like Lewis or Nodier sought to embrace in their
affective channeling of the supernatural or sublime—female sexual energy. Adams also speaks
to America’s Puritanical erasure of Catholic iconography from its cultural backdrop, a factor that
no doubt contributes to the lack of auratic and erotic appeal of the female occult and divine.
If Adams’s observation about America’s sexless national mythology is actually
observable, and this essay hopes to convey that it is, then where does it come from? In Gothic
America, Teresa Goddu observes that “When modified by American, the gothic loses its usual
8
referents” (3). Goddu traces this breaking of referents—from the lack of old ruins or a deep-
seated, “haunting” national folklore—to Charles Brockden Brown’s insistence that “the field of
investigation, opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from those which exist
in Europe” (3, cited in Goddu 4). Many gothic or romance writers sought to draw from
America’s unique history to build a distinctly national literature during the nineteenth century,
which for writers like Hawthorne often proved difficult in mirroring European gothic or romance
traditions. In the preface to The Marble Faun, Hawthorne writes:
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a
country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy
wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is
happily the case with my dear native land . . . . Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and
wallflowers, need ruin to make them grow” (Hawthorne).
Though Hawthorne’s commentary here is often read as tongue-in-cheek, it nevertheless hints at a
uniquely problematic landscape for the American gothic—one lacking the historical chaos and
terror of the Old World from which the American aesthetic sought to detach itself. And while
Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark rightly points out one of the New World’s most influential
and uniquely “American” gothic backdrops, namely the metaphysical presence of “blackness”
readily available for “mediations on terror” (36) due to the lurking presence of slavery, she
likewise recognizes the paradoxical desire for the New World to whitewash its own history in
order to free its canvas of the dark or unenlightened Old World influence, to transfer “internal
conflicts to a ‘blank darkness’” (38).
This perceived anxiety concerning America’s lackluster national wellspring for dark
romantic motifs offers a compelling framework for examining the absence of antiquity (think
9
Henry Adams’s insistence on the sexual force of the Venus for creating great art) in what Goddu
calls “America’s self-mythologization as a nation” (4). Considering what Adams says about the
absence of female sexual force in America, what would the monstrous-feminine stand-in look
like in an American mythology—one that strives toward a blank slate while navigating its own
dark, mental landscape? And furthermore, does the absence of a dark erotic presence extinguish
sublime and mysterious energies found within the gothic, as Hawthorne seems to suggest?
Transatlantic Variance and Early Modern Witchcraft
The evolution of the witch motif from one side of the Atlantic to the other weaves a
peculiar and sometimes contradictory story of the role witches play in historical and literary
narratives in America. If Americans were to draw from their own mythology, which many, like
Hawthorne, sought to do through reconstructing witchcraft trial documents, texts, and lore, they
would find that the transatlantic variations in Early American witch history reveal a remarkable
absence or fragile link between sexual deviance and witchcraft—a historical trace that doesn’t
seem to impact European epistemologies of demons, witches, and sexual deviance to the same
extent. In fact, in “Witchcraft and Sexual Knowledge in Early Modern England,” critic Julia
Garrett asserts that epistemologies for Early Modern sexuality can often be derived from treatises
and texts about witchcraft, especially in documents outlining witchcraft proceedings (33). One of
the more prominent examples of sexual discourse and witchcraft is Kramer and Sprenger’s
Malleus Maleficarum, a valuable source for understanding Early Modern European attitudes on
female sexuality and the erotic in the context of witchcraft. In Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus,
the seductive and sexually deviant potential of the witch is heavily tied up in the language of the
text, creating a reading experience as sexually transgressive and provocative as Lewis’s The
10
Monk or Coleridge’s “Christabel.” One tantalizing example from Part I Question VI of the
Malleus reads as follows:
Three general vices appear to have special dominion over wicked women, namely,
infidelity, ambition, and lust. Therefore they are more than others inclined towards
witchcraft . . . . Again, since of these vices the last chiefly predominates, women being
insatiable, etc., it follows that those among ambitious women are more deeply infected
who are more hot to satisfy their filthy lusts; and such are adulteresses, fornicatresses,
and the concubines of the Great (47).
These women, “hot to satisfy their filthy lusts,” produce a striking and unsettling image of sexual
deviance strongly tied up in women’s susceptibility to succumbing to witchcraft and copulating
with “the Great,” or the Devil. Kramer and Sprenger’s text, a foundational document in many
witchcraft trials for determining the guilt of suspected offenders, relies markedly on women’s
predilection for sexually deviant and dominating behavior. Many of the trials that spread through
Europe during the witch-craze linked witchcraft with previous crimes of sexual deviance and
accusations of demonic copulation, cementing an image of the witch in many European contexts
as a signifier for dangerous sexuality—whether the accusations were true or not.
Yet while the connection between sexual deviance, seduction, and witchcraft is highly
pronounced in much of Early Modern European witchcraft history and lore, evidence of Early
American witchcraft trials and erotic encounters with the Devil is comparatively sparse. This
complicates the self-mythologization of American gothic texts, for it substantially hinders any
conceptualization of monstrous female sexuality found in witch mythology across the Atlantic.
In his review of the surviving New England witchcraft trial documents, David Hall remarks that
references to “a sexual relationship between witches and the devil” are quite rare compared to
11
the European witch-hunts (7). This reality is further amplified in John Demos’s foundational
scholarly text on American witchcraft, Entertaining Satan, which accounts for the potential
frequency of licentious behavior by tracking criminal acts of accused witches in New England.
Perhaps not surprisingly, cases of sexual deviance, lewd carriage, adultery, or fornication
associated with the individuals accused are not high on his list, with only five witches from
Demos’ sample of crimes committed by accused witches involving sexual offenses (77).
Compared to 20 cases of assaultive speech or even 10 cases of theft, this number is highly
significant, particularly in forming an epistemology for American Puritan sexuality and its
relationship to American witch lore.
To suggest, however, that the American witch trials happened in a vacuum would
certainly be misleading, and there is strong evidence of transatlantic exchange between
America’s dealings with witchcraft and the influence of legal systems in Europe. Louisa Jayne
Foster, for instance, has traced the ideological foundations of the Salem witch trials across the
Atlantic and she points to the Malleus as one of the primary texts. This perhaps makes it all the
more striking that the ideological underpinnings behind New England’s witch trials seem to bear
almost no trace of the highly sexualized language and treatment of women accused of witchcraft
in the pages of the Malleus—even when so many of the examples found within the Malleus seem
to bear heavily on the licentiousness of the accused.
The Salem Belle and the Absent Succubus
Fast forward again to the nineteenth century and one begins to wonder what role a
seemingly desexualized history of witch hysteria did play in America’s reimagining of events,
particularly as authors drew on their distinct history’s witch types to craft their own national
brand of gothic fiction. Foster astutely observes that nineteenth-century authors often used the
12
Salem witch as a redemptive figure rather than a seductively dangerous monster—placing her in
the role of the heroine rather than the gothic villain. Something like a regretful, revisionist
history begins to emerge in the treatment of these redeemed witches, suggesting a more
“enlightened” or apologetic awareness of the evils committed in America’s early history. Foster
adds that Charles W. Upham, the author of Lectures on Witchcraft: Comprising A History of the
Delusion in Salem, in 1692 (1831),
firmly locates his nineteenth-century history within a narrative of U.S. enlightened
rationalism. This nationalistic, restorative focus also explains Upham’s consistent
references to corresponding European witchcraft trials, which, he argues, made use of
“barbarous and inhuman practices . . . not countenanced by our forefathers to the same
extent” (Lectures 41). The trials at Salem are, therefore, endowed with a specific identity
within what was a transnational phenomenon (66).
Upham’s observation that the trials at Salem held a somewhat unique identity in the transnational
phenomenon of witch hunting is spot-on; this attempt to set America’s experiences with
witchcraft apart from its European counterparts through a redemptive narrative produces a
handful of ideations of the witch that transform the potential presence of monstrous-feminine
sensibilities in much of America’s gothic literature.
As a result of this redemptive trend in the American witch motif, two competing
caricatures of the witch emerge in mid-nineteenth century American gothic fiction. Lisa M.
Vetere outlines the American gothic witch as either the “weak old crone,” or “a benign young
beauty,” otherwise termed by Vetere as the “Salem belle” (127). Whereas the “weak old crone”
aligns more strongly with history’s prosopography of the New England witch, the Salem belle
fills a peculiar, anachronistic role in the fabrication of uniquely American witch lore. According
13
to Vetere, the virtuous Salem belle “registers hegemonic gender ideals” in the emerging gender
roles of Victorian society (127), and for Gabriele Schwab, this mid-nineteenth century American
gothic “phantasm of the witch” (177) provides a useful appropriation and reconstruction of the
Puritan witch as an appealing, beautiful type who in many ways fulfills the demands of European
gothic romance conventions. The emergence of this sentimentally appealing witch lore is curious
in the broader tradition of witches and monstrous women, and the Salem belle perhaps provides
the perfect balance between realism and fantasy. As a gothic heroine, she possesses all the
necessary attributes; and according to Michelle Massé, she is “inculcated by education, religion,
and bourgeois familial values” (18)—an anachronistically designed Victorian-Puritan hybrid. As
a gothic heroine-turned-wrongly-accused-Salem-witch, she provides a realistic, enlightened
version of America’s haunted history without becoming a truly fantastic figure—a fantasy that,
according to writers like Charles Brockden Brown, Charles W. Upham, and James Kirke
Paulding does not fit within a distinctly American literary framework. And while American
gothic literature was by no means devoid of the more accurately characterized older female
witch from Puritan history, it is indeed curious that her counterpart, the Salem belle, should play
an equally visible and perhaps even more powerful role within the emerging framework of
American witch lore.
Schwab further explains that while the historical appeal of the Salem witch trials played a
grounding and historically realistic role in the conceptualization of American gothic literature,
the seductive presence of the young, beautiful witch allowed authors to fulfill “quite a different
reading appetite, which thrives less on . . . historical interest than on the witch as a feared but
seductive object of desire” (174). As an example of a more romantically appealing stand-in for
historical American witchcraft lore, the Salem belle represented a bewitching, as well as
14
glamorous and sentimentally appealing, version of the historical witch, all while conforming to
emerging Victorian gender roles. Yet as the virginal, helpless heroine, the Salem belle could
speak to the cruel barbarism of the Salem witch trials as a worthy victim of meekness and
beauty; as an enlightened stand-in for vulnerable Puritan women, she could perch atop the
scaffold and transform it into a pedestal, all while providing the allure and charm of Puritan
witch history essential to maintaining the unique realism of American gothic fiction.
Yet what effect does this enchanting, though sentimentally sexual witch found in the
Salem belle motif have on the mind of the gothic reader? One classic example outlining the
character of the Salem belle is found in a previously anonymous nineteenth-century work
Richard Kopley recently attributed to author Ebenezer Wheelwright, entitled The Salem Belle: A
Tale of 1692 (1842). The Salem Belle details the tragic journey of a young woman wrongfully
and vindictively accused of witchcraft during the Salem trials by a cunning, spurned suitor
named Trellington. This story reads like many others of its kind, including Elizabeth Gaskell’s
Lois the Witch (1861) and a myriad of other American “pulp fiction” narratives like Eliza
Buckminster Lee’s Delusion, or the Witch of New England (1840). In a recent edition of the
novel, Richard Kopley has even suggested that The Salem Belle was an inspiration for
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (6). Wheelwright’s novella, known for its blatant historical
inaccuracies, paints the perfect picture of domestic womanhood through the Salem belle Mary
Lyford. Of Mary’s charm, Wheelwright writes:
Her personal attractions were surpassed by none, and her manners and conversation were
scarcely rivalled by any of her associates. Yet she was simple and unpretending in her
demeanor; her religious character, from long reflection and deep conviction, was firm and
15
decided; . . . yet there was a charm of inexpressible beauty, interwoven with her every
movement, a purity of mind and purpose, a visible communion with things unseen (46).
Wheelwright’s profile of Mary Lyford described above establishes this wrongfully accused
Salem witch as an exact replica of the Salem belle motif, and it is important to note that in
additional descriptions of Mary Lyford, “bewitchment” and “charm” are frequently used to
describe her quaintly seductive character—vestiges of witch-like power that can be ascribed to
her without marring the appeal of her youth, beauty, and virtue. Her submissiveness and purity
set her apart as the Victorian role model for domestic womanhood, yet she possesses the
mysterious charm and bewitching manner that ultimately puts her in danger of accusation. In
Wheelwright’s story, this wrongfully accused Salem witch is saved by the craftiness of her
brother and her love interest, Walter, as they play off the jail guard’s witchcraft superstitions and
use “fake” magic to cleverly conjure her escape. This version of a witchcraft narrative fits the
more realistic model that nineteenth-century authors like James Kirke Paulding suggested
American fiction should perpetuate, and indeed, many “escapes” from Salem in these tales were
wrought by playing off of the townspeople’s superstitious tendencies. Wheelwright draws on the
distinctly American history of Salem but does so with a strong touch of realism. Her mildly
seductive appeal provides her with a fraction of the Old-World succubus’s eroticism, but not to
the point that her distinct characterization as an American witch is compromised.
Transatlantic Oscillation and Affect in The Scarlet Letter
Yet, compared to the more provocative monstrous women found in various European
gothic texts and mediums from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, what does it
feel like to consume these American novellas? Given Hawthorne’s anxieties over the American
16
gothic’s inability to access mystery or the transformative powers of antiquity, it might be worth
noting that his own conception of the witch appears conflicted by this loss of erotic presence in
the American literary landscape. In fact, one might posit that the witchcraft lore presented in The
Scarlet Letter (1850) appears to consciously grapple with the more seductive, gothic well of
European history that Hawthorne finds somewhat dried up in America’s literary history. Though
Hester Prynne is never put on trial as a witch, her actual sexual deviance and seductive charm
characterize her as the antithesis to the American Salem belle, and she carries with her the
powerfully seductive magic of the medieval succubus. Schwab outlines what she calls the
“witchcraft pattern,” an observable triad of witch types found at the center of many gothic
narratives that is likewise present in The Scarlet Letter. She writes:
It is always one of the two witch types: the beautiful wild witch (who will become the
model for Hester Prynne) or the child-woman witch . . . A third type of witch—the most
common historical victim—may, in the fictional texts, occupy only the position of a
peripheral figure: the old or deformed witch possessing magic powers, who comes to
represent, in fact, the inverse of seduction (178).
In many respects Hester does share certain characteristics with the stereotypical Salem belle. As
a gothic heroine, she is bewitchingly beautiful, suffers persecution at the hands of Puritan
fanaticism, and has, through her seductive beauty, bewitched a man, Dimmesdale, to the point of
destruction.
Yet Hawthorne’s depiction of Hester ultimately varies from the typical Salem belle
particularly in the way he consciously associates her with European witchcraft traditions outlined
in influences or examples like the Malleus. One example of this is Hester’s and others’ need to
trace the parentage of her daughter, Pearl, to possible demonic lineage. At the end of the novel,
17
Mistress Hibbins (the novel’s more obvious witch type) suggests that Pearl’s lineage is of the
“Prince of Air” (163), a rumor that runs rampant among Salem throughout the novel. And,
though Hester is certainly aware of who Pearl’s real father is, she often questions “who sent”
Pearl and whether she might indeed have demonic origins (67). Impishly denying she has a
Heavenly Father, Pearl at one point demands that Hester reveal the identity of her true father.
Hawthorne writes that Hester “remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the talk of the
neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly elsewhere for the child’s paternity, and
observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring”
(67). That Hawthorne’s heroine accounts for these considerations of a “monstrous birth”
regarding her impish daughter’s true parentage is somewhat surprising, especially because it
appears to harken back to Old World beliefs about witches copulating with demons or the Devil.
Hester’s observation is strangely suggestive of the Medieval and Early Modern witch lore that
appears fairly evident in witchcraft proceedings like those found in the Malleus, which derived
its information from supernatural happenings in countries such as Germany, France, Italy, and
England. While Satanic copulation does not make its way into American witchcraft proceedings,
Pearl often identifies the Salem witch trials’ notoriously terrifying “Black Man” as her father
(47).
Contrasted with their American equivalents, many Early Modern or Old-World
witchcraft trials from the locations referenced above focused more extensively on the possibility
of women bearing Satan’s spawn, even though many witchcraft theorists toward the fifteenth
century believed this to be impossible. That they chose to question women regarding these
sexual encounters, even during the seventeenth century, is quite disturbing, as centuries of
doctrinal understanding precluded the possibility of corporeal intercourse with Satan or demons.
18
Walter Stephens suggests that for Early Modern European witch interrogators, “sex with demons
was a highly complex idea” that had evolved “very slowly within the literature culture since
about 1150” (44). Stephens continues that these ideas had to overcome “philosophical,
physiological, and theological objections of tremendous weight and variety. In a nutshell, the
objections had one source: Western Christian theologians had proclaimed for centuries that
angels and demons are ‘pure spirits’ and as such have no bodies at all” (44–45). In contrast with
witchcraft theorists in Early America, there seems to be clear abhorrence for even condoning
false or superstitious Medieval ideas about Satan’s corporeal and erotic power over women. In
“The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul,” Elizabeth Reis examines Medieval folklore
pertaining to sexual interactions between the Devil’s imps and witches in the context of New
England Puritan beliefs. She implies that tracts written on witchcraft in the colonies rendered by
individuals like Increase Mather were generally skeptical of such unions—especially in their
ability to produce actual bodies. Mather declares:
What fables are there concerning incubi and succubae and of men begotten by daemons!
No doubt but the devil may delude the fancy, that one of his vassals shall think (as the
witch at Hartford did) that he has carnal and cursed communion with them beyond what
is real . . . . . But to imagine that spirits shall really generate bodies, is irrational (Reis
114–115).
While views like Mather’s were certainly not uncommon among his European contemporaries, it
is fascinating that this disturbing obsession with witches copulating with the Devil never reached
the other side of the Atlantic, or at least not to an observable extent. That Hawthorne positions
Hester and her child’s lineage in this Old World paradigm of obsession with female sexual
deviance perhaps reveals Hawthorne’s initial anxiety about America’s lack of a more exotic,
19
mythological history, one that could trace back to the terror and fantasy of Medieval and even
Early Modern witch lore in Europe.
Hawthorne further reveals this anxiety about the New World’s place in a fantastical
paradigm in other moments in the novel as well, suggesting that his characterization of Hester
and Pearl as witch-like figures must subvert America’s witchcraft history in order to fit the
conventions of the gothic genre. Hawthorne repeatedly describes Pearl in mythological terms not
associated with an Early American lore—often as an elf or imp. When Dimmesdale meets Pearl
and Hester in the woods, he describes Pearl to Hester as an “elfish spirit” from “the legends of
our childhood” (141). Hester also describes Pearl through fantastic, Medieval lore. She declares,
“But how strangely beautiful she looks with those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the
fairies, whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet us” (139–140). These
allusions to “dear old England” and “the legends of our childhood” echo a certain longing for
Old World, Medieval lore, perhaps a conscious decision on Hawthorne’s part that reflects his
own desire to invoke the mythological and appealing power of a tradition that seems virtually
nonexistent in his nineteenth-century America, and even potentially the Early American setting
of the novel. This same longing is amplified toward the close of the novel when Hester and
Dimmesdale devise a plan to escape to the Old World with Pearl, suggesting that their magic
simply cannot abide in the virginal, barren lore of an American historical landscape. Hester and
Dimmesdale determine that “the Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more
eligible shelter and concealment than the wilds of New England or all America, with its
alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans scattered thinly along the
sea-board” (145).
20
The concealment in the crowds and cities evoked above in comparison with the scattered
settlements in America reflects their inability to fit in with their Old-World magic in a New-
World literary imagination (though at the end of the novel, Pearl returns to live out her days in
England, while Hester remains to counsel other forlorn waifs in Salem). Hawthorne writes that
there is “more real life for Hester Prynne, here in New England, than in that unknown region
where Pearl had found a home” (176). That Hester with her Old-World magic remains in the
“more real” literary landscape of America suggests the value of infusing New World gothic lore
with Old World lore, which is clearly what Hawthorne has done in this novel. Ultimately,
Hawthorne recognizes that to some extent American gothic fiction cannot thrive without
acknowledging the richly seductive mythology of European witchcraft. While Hester Prynne
certainly fails to take on the occult presence of witches and succubi from many European gothic
texts, her conflicted ontology seems to suggest keen recognition on Hawthorne’s part that
America’s own historical landscape and mythology cannot quite produce the desired effect of
erotic terror in a New World literary setting.
Old World Enchantment: England and Gothic Erotic Affect
While gothic novels in America speak to sensationalist reading impulses common among
consumers of the gothic on either side of the Atlantic, feelings of terror induced by the
supernatural are stripped bare by the historical medium these stories strive to emulate—even,
ultimately, in the case of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. While these novels profess to take up
gothic themes, they do very little in the way of inciting the strong emotions associated with terror
or sublimity—especially through erotic presence. Contrasting this version of the “monstrous-
feminine” in American gothic fiction with its more notably erotic counterparts in texts like
21
Coleridge’s “Christabel” provides a rich reading experience that in comparison highlights the
absent “force” described in “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” the “aura” Jones describes in the
phantasmagoria, and even the strangely life-giving quality that ruin and darkness provide for
romance in Hawthorne’s musings over his own country’s lack of mystery. In “The Material
Sublime and Theory of Mind in Coleridge and Keats,” Renee Harris draws on cognitive
psychology to demonstrate the previously misunderstood complexity of passive reading
experiences—a mode of sensationalized or purely affective reading, especially during the time of
sensationalist gothic fiction, that Coleridge bemoans as thwarting our cognitive capabilities. Yet
while Romantic authors like Coleridge (and perhaps more notably William Wordsworth in the
Preface to Lyrical Ballads) berates gothic writers for mindlessly consuming sensationalist
fiction, he nevertheless seems to advocate for a higher form of sensual immersion in his own
poetry. Indeed, poems like “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel” are known for their play upon the
erotic as a sensualist tool for conjuring up sublime or supernatural thrills.
Though Harris acknowledges Coleridge’s disdain for passive readers of the gothic novel,
she also highlights Coleridge’s own implementation of purely sensory narrative tools (paired
with moments of authorial control) as a recourse for channeling a sensation akin to Keats’s
material sublime. Harris writes:
Despite their maligned reputation in the cultural debates of the Romantic era, passive
reading postures require complex cognitive and affective work. In a matter of a few
hundred milliseconds, the human brain translates the written word into bodily meaning,
producing a physiological intimacy between bodies involved in acts reading. Through a
material sublime of instantaneous cognitive translation, narrative is brought to affective
life and the text is co-created by poet and reader (26).
22
The narrative arc of Coleridge’s own foray into the gothic in “Christabel,” whether a pastiche of
gothic conventions (as Andrew Cooper and others seem to suggest) or otherwise, relies
especially on this flood of sensation as an immersive sensory reading experience—most notably
in the demonically powerful form of Geraldine. The most chilling sensations provoked by
Geraldine culminate in Christabel’s homoerotic encounter with this lusty witch. Here Coleridge
plays on the captivating erotic presence of Geraldine’s physical body and commanding gaze for
dramatic and erotic effect:
Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around;
Then drawing in her breath aloud,
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
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…
Then suddenly, as one defied,
Collects herself in scorn and pride,
And lay down by the Maiden's side!—
And in her arms the maid she took,
Ah wel-a-day!
And with low voice and doleful look
These words did say:
'In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,
23
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel” (ll. 245–252; 260–268).
This famous scene, pared down in later editions for its overt sexuality, plays on erotic and
sensual sensations through the affective physicality of bodily contact to create a sense of all-
consuming possession—a necessary interplay between body and the erotic sublime. Coleridge
presents the reader with an erotic viewing experience: the reader, like Christabel’s own furtive
glances at the woman, voyeuristically enjoys Geraldine’s body and breasts. Coleridge also alerts
the reader to the fact that both women are naked when Geraldine takes Christabel in her arms,
suggesting a tactilely erotic experience generated by fleshly contact with the demonic Other.
To get a sense for just how terror-inducing these affective encounters are for readers
consuming this erotic scene, an entry from John Polidori’s diary (a friend of Byron and the
Shelleys and the author of “The Vampyre,” a precursor for Dracula) provides a fascinating
account of the affective significance of Coleridge’s poem. In a diary entry from 1816’s volcanic
winter or the “Year Without a Summer”—when the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and Polidori’s ghost-
story contest produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—Polidori shares a humorous account of
Percy Shelley’s visceral and nightmarish reaction to the famous lines cited above:
Twelve o’clock really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of
Coleridge’s Christabel, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly
shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw
water in his face, and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and
suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which,
taking hold of his mind, horrified him (128).
This scene, though certainly intended to be humorous, is also strangely suggestive of the terror
behind demonic, erotic presences in gothic motifs: as a result of interacting with Coleridge’s
24
sexually deviant witch, Shelley transfers a frightening, horrifying image onto the body of Mary
Shelley (the unnerving and perhaps revolting image of eyeballs in the place of nipples).
Emotionally compelling and completely unnerving reactions like Shelley’s speak to moments of
aesthetic power in gothic texts, an affect that the erotic seems to channel profoundly in its
monstrous-feminine motifs. And while the Shelley family cannot possibly represent full-fledged
proof of a link between gothic affective reactions tied up in the erotic, it is nevertheless
compelling to note such a reaction to gothic themes and would not be over-reaching to suggest
that similar reactions might have occurred among other readers.
Venus Envy: France’s Fantastic Women and the Affective Allure of the Occult
We move now to the French equivalent for the nineteenth-century gothic tradition,
namely the generic mode of la fantastique, or the fantastic. In his famous theory of the fantastic,
Tzvetan Todorov provides an interesting framework through which one might examine the
supernatural and affective experiences found within gothic literature. Drawing a line somewhere
between the uncanny and the marvelous, Todorov defines the experience of the fantastic in
literature as follows:
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils,
sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of
this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two
possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the
imagination – and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has
indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality – but then this reality is controlled by
laws unknown to us. Either the devil is an illusion, an imaginary being; or else he really
25
exists, precisely like other living beings – with this reservation, that we encounter him
infrequently. The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty (25).
Thus, in Todorov’s estimation, the fantastic in literature fills an ambiguous space in modernity;
one must either acknowledge the power of the human imagination as a rationalizing medium, or
hesitate in the ambiguous, porous space left open for contemplating the actual possibility of
supernatural events. Where gothic fiction like The Salem Belle or even The Scarlet Letter falters
is in the realm of relying perhaps too much on realism or realistic takes on supernatural figures
like the witch and not enough in the uncertain space of the occult, never indulging in the
possibility of coming against the supernatural world without some sort of rational explanation.
Whereas American authors often felt compelled to present their witches in a redemptive, realist,
historical light, the French fantastic provides the necessary wavering and occult uncertainty that
invites feelings of terror—a conduit, I might argue, for granting demonic female figures their
erotic, sublime potential.
The fantastic, or this wavering uncertainty in the face of the supernatural, is evident
throughout a variety of nineteenth-century French texts, but for the scope of this thesis I will
indulge in just two short stories with remarkable demonic women: Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille”
(1837) and Gautier’s “La Morte Amoreuse” (1836). Mérimée’s “La Vénus d’Ille” is narrated by
a Parisian archeologist who meets with a fellow enthusiast named M. de Peyrehorade, a villager
of Ille, who has just dug up an old bronze statue of the Venus. The archeologist’s visit coincides
with Peyrehorade’s son Alphonse’s wedding, and, on the day of his marriage, Alphonse
accidentally leaves his bride’s wedding ring on the finger of the Venus statue. The climax and
fantastic moment of the story hinges on Alphonse’s new wife’s allegation that on the wedding
night the statue of the Venus comes to life and suffocates and murders Alphonse with her cold,
26
heavy embrace. Alphonse’s bride, the sole witness to this strange event, later describes the
encounter with the Venus to the narrator and he recounts it as follows:
The bed creaked like it had been weighed down by an enormous weight. She was
incredibly afraid, but didn’t dare turn her head . . . . Then she made an involuntary
movement, or perhaps the person who was in the bed made one, and she felt contact with
something cold like ice . . . . A little while afterward, the door opened a second time, and
someone entered who said: Good evening, my little wife. Soon after he pulled back the
curtain she heard a muffled scream. The person who was in the bed, next to her, rose
from the bed and appeared to be stretching her arms in front of her. She turned her head
then… and she saw her husband on his knees …. between the arms of a giant, green
figure embracing him with incredible strength. … She said that she recognized it to be the
bronze Venus (Mérimée 67–68, my translation).
The narrator follows that “Ever since the Venus arrived in the country, everyone has been
dreaming!” (68). This terrifying encounter with the Venus-come-to-life strikes the narrator, our
rationalist, as the stuff of nonsense, but he can never actually prove that Alphonse’s wife did not
see this figure, and here the story becomes all the more chilling. John Lytle rightfully points out
that while the narrator attempts to satirize the villagers and their superstitious fears about the
statue, he is ultimately unable to conjure enough imagination to disprove the event through
scientific evidence. Lytle likewise suggests that “By opposing an analytical relation to the past to
one that is tradition-bound or unreflective, we begin to see that the narrator’s ‘rational’ point of
view and that of the ‘superstitious’ villagers do not align merely with Todorov’s categories of the
strange and the marvelous, but may indeed question the very utility of historical thinking itself”
(182). Lytle makes a fascinating point here that favors a mode of thinking necessary for enjoying
27
these tales: a “willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge 6), an ability to look at real-world
events, historical or present, with an eye to the affective discomfort and simultaneous thrill that
superstitious thinking provides someone like the gothic reader. To indulge in the openness of a
fantastic text is a reminder that these forces—immediately identifiable in the aura of the Venus
when it emerges from the ground in this tale, or even when it emerges back into our own
history—carry with them an affective weight, one that we should embrace as a conduit to
sublime terror.
It is also no surprise that Mérimée chooses to channel these provocations through the
erotically codified figure of the Venus, nor is it by accident that the Venus appears and
overpowers Alphonse in what was meant to be a somewhat happier erotic encounter—the
couple’s wedding night. An emergent theme in many of these Romantic French texts is a
fascination and even sometimes horrified perception of female eroticism or sexuality. In his
influential study on prostitution in nineteenth-century France, Charles Bernheimer observes that
a large variety of the texts and artworks that he studied from this period included “powerful
expressions of disgust for female sexuality” (4). He continues to observe that as the nineteenth
century in France progresses, these expressions become “increasingly repellent … as imagery of
infectious disease and biological rot comes to supplement the already widespread images of
animality, carnality, regression, and castration associated by men with woman’s sexual function”
(4). This renewed repulsion, fear, and grotesque depiction of female eroticism reemerges at a
fascinating time, and perhaps most strikingly echoes perceptions of female sexuality and
eroticism present in The Malleus Maleficarum and the witch hunts of Early Modern Europe.
Touching on this fascinated disgust with female sexuality, Allison Coudert observes that “Many
historians have commented on the apparent increase in sexual anxiety during the early-modern
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period. The introduction of syphilis into the Old World contributed to sexual anxiety as well as
to an upsurge in misogyny” (318). That many of these authors choose to supplement their own
texts with this renewed fear of female sexuality and associate it with decay or the grotesque is
not only suggestive of the literal diseases causing individuals to experience real terror during the
nineteenth century, but it also suggests a striking awareness of the sublimely terrifying potential
that hearkening back to Medieval and Early Modern perceptions of sexually deviant, occult
women, namely succubi and witches, might bring to their texts.
One particularly compelling example of an erotic, occult figure here is Gautier’s
succubus, Clarimonde, in “La Morte amoureuse.” In Gautier’s short story, Romuald, a priest, is
propositioned by a beautiful young woman named Clarimonde to give up his orders and live a
life of love and passion with her instead of his religious life. He initially chooses the Church, but
it is not long until he his summoned to Palace Concini, a place of debauchery, to perform the
rites for a dying young woman. That woman is, of course, Clarimonde, and although she is dead
upon his arrival, he kisses her and brings her back to life. Though he hears rumors that
Clarimonde has already died many times before, he willingly follows her to Venice when she
appears in his room, alive and well, just days later. They indeed live a life of love and passion
together, but soon Clarimonde’s health starts to wane again, until one day she drinks Romuald’s
blood after he accidentally cuts his finger. Of this strange, pivotal encounter Romuald recounts
with utter horror that Clarimonde
leaped out of her bed with animal agility—the agility, as it were, of an ape or a cat—and
sprang upon my wound, which she commenced to suck with an air of unutterable
pleasure . . . . Gradually her eyelids half closed, and the pupils of her green eyes became
oblong instead of round. From time to time she paused in order to kiss my hand, then she
29
would recommence to press her lips to the lips of the wound in order to coax forth a few
more ruddy drops (Gautier).
This grotesquely erotic scene strings together a number of images and not-so-subtle sexual
metaphors to create a truly terror-inspiring moment. Gautier describes Clarimonde’s act with the
strong suggestion that Romuald’s “finger” is a phallic stand-in, and that Clarimonde’s pleasure is
derived not only from gorging herself on his bodily fluids, but from what might easily be read as
a dominating sexual encounter. Ying Wang observes that Gautier’s tale places the monstrous,
erotic feminine at the forefront of the action to induce fear through female dominance, a gesture
that he ultimately argues immortalizes this work in the canon of the French fantastic. He likewise
observes that “Clarimonde’s strong, seductive power constitutes one of the fatal factors that
effeminizes the masculine hero. It seems to suggest that in relation to this couple, the female
figure, masculinized by her supernatural force, defies and transgresses the traditional limits of a
type of sexuality that normally favors male domination” (177, my translation). As both Wang
and Bernheimer’s observations of the century seem to suggest, fear of the erotic, dominating
female body typified many real-world fears of errant female sexuality; to play up these fears
through erotic, occult women appears to inspire more than a frisson or titillating thrill—it
embodies real terror.
Even though Romuald realizes Clarimonde is a vampire shortly after this grotesque,
erotic encounter, he remains bewitched by the goodness and beauty, even the humaneness, that
Clarimonde portrays in the light of day, and thus continues his relationship with her—though
again she crawls into bed with him night after night only to stick him with pins to extract more
blood. After the Abbé Sérapion discovers Clarimonde’s hold on Romuald, he chastises him for
giving up not only his soul, but also his body, and implores him to see her as the monster that she
30
really is. After years of feeling plagued by “visions of debauches” (Gautier), Romuald finally
concedes; the Abbé disinters her body and reveals her true identity: a rotting corpse—once a
great beauty, now a dangerous succubus. The revelation of the rotting body at the story’s
conclusion again speaks to the fear of female bodies and a grotesque, perhaps misogynist
relationship to female eroticism. Though many feminist critics rightfully argue against the
exploitation of these sexualized female bodies in art and literature, one cannot help but recognize
that the erotic, whether used in moments of titillation or grotesque terror, plays a powerful,
affective role in these gothic tales.
Conclusion: The Erotics of Aesthetic Enchantment
To conclude this brief foray into the affective significance of the female erotic image in
gothic literature, a final glance at Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature seems to invoke the sentiment
behind enchanting affect’s necessity in constructing a lost porosity formed in post-Enlightenment
epistemologies. Of the experience one feels under the spell of aesthetic enchantment, Felksi
writes:
Not only your autonomy but your sense of agency is under siege. You have little control
over your response; you turn the pages compulsively, you gaze fixedly at the screen like a
sleepwalker. Descriptions of enchantment often pinpoint an arresting of motion, a sense
of being transfixed, spellbound, unable to move, even as your mind is transported
elsewhere . . . . Rather than having a sense of mastery over a text, you are at its mercy.
You are sucked in, swept up, spirited away, you feel yourself enfolded in a blissful
embrace. You are mesmerized, hypnotized, possessed (55).
31
The type of experience Felski outlines here is quite compelling compared to the “possession”
inherent in the gothic world of sexual terror and fantasy, a world in which the psyche is acted
upon by exogenous forces stimulated through reading experience. The affective experience
produced by the text is designed to work its own magic on the reader and not solely the reader
working her imaginative magic on the text. While stories of the Salem belle or even Hester
Prynne are compelling in their own right, their refusal to engage with the dark underbelly of the
human psyche, that deep-seated fear and awe of female sexual force, as Henry Adams describes
it, ultimately renders them lacking in their ability to straddle the fantastic, to conjure up the
disturbing, dark, and possessing aesthetic necessary to crafting the sublime terror required of a
truly terrifying gothic tale.
Ultimately, there is something within our makeup that seems to crave the sensory
effusion of sublime terror. Reading the historical impulses on both sides of the Atlantic through
the witch motif, or the concept of the monstrous-feminine, seems to suggest that the force
embodied in sexual signifiers plays an important role in affective reading experiences aligned
with the gothic. What do we really make of Robertson’s urge to infuse his phantasmagoria with
the erotic images of the witch, or Gautier’s pairing of the allure of the succubus with his
bewitchingly beautiful gothic heroine? While contemporaries of the gothic genre’s heyday and
certainly critics of today discount the value of sensationalist literature, there is something to be
said of the affective longing accounted for in these texts, as well as the mysteriously provocative,
witchy, and sensual means authors of this mode channeled to slake their readers’ mortal
longings.
32
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