Handling the Corpse in Late Victorian Supernatural Tales

1. Sarah Bissell University of Glasgow Handling the Corpse in Late Victorian Supernatural Tales

2. Why does the corpse recur in the genre as the century advances? • Shift in focus from immaterial to corporeal in supernatural fiction: ethereal spectres displaced by physically powerful ghosts and material monsters • Public attention to bodily health; rise of the “New Woman” • Introduction of crematoriums • “Jack the Ripper” murders and press response

3. “Material” Ghosts “I broke the skull against the floor, and stamped upon its dry bones. I flung the head away under the bed, and rent the brittle bones of the trunk in pieces. I snapped the thin thigh-bones across my knee, and flung them in different directions. The shin-bones I set up against a stool and broke with my heel. I raged like a Berserker against the loathly thing, and stripped the ribs from the backbone as the work of destruction went on … There was but a raffle of broken bones and strips of parchment and crumbling wool … ‘I have smashed the foul thing into a hundred pieces,’ I said.” Perceval Landon, “Thurnley Abbey” (1908)

4. Crematoriums in Britain “The British cremationists were making an enormous cultural claim by insisting on a purely naturalist account of corpses, by insisting that dead bodies were just a species of dirt and should be treated and talked about as such.” Thomas Laqueur, “Form in Ashes” (2008)

5. Whitechapel Murders, 1888

6. Wilkie Collins,“The Dead Hand” (1857) “There was the sad, peaceful, white face, with the awful mystery of stillness on it, laid back upon the pillow. No stir, no change there! He only looked at it for a moment before he closed the curtains but that moment steadied him, calmed him, restored him – mind and body – to himself.” • Corpse reinstated as productive inhabitant of rationalist universe • Tale’s uncanny potential undermined

7. Robert Louis Stevenson,“The Body Snatcher” (1884) • Uses early Victorian scandal to work through late Victorian anxieties • Conflicting tensions between corpse as material object or commodity, and corpse as sacred • Corpse returns as Gothic monster in tale’s conclusion

8. Violet Hunt,“The Prayer” (1895) • Corpse as ambivalent spectacle: Edward as ghost / vampire / zombie / “body … without a spirit” • Resurrection depicted as fruitless and macabre • Developing dissociation between corpse and person • Corpse (and reader) implicated in bleak death-in-life existence

9. Conclusion • Myriad factors contribute to increasing visibility of the corpse in nineteenth-century supernatural fiction • Dissociation between person/corpse works to displace the idea of the body as sacred relic, transforming it into a more ambivalent (and thus disturbing?) object upon which various late Victorian cultural anxieties converge