Charlotte Riddell was an Irish author though this is a distinctly Scottish style tale of the demonic. You can read the story here.
It’s a short tale but effective in that short space. I’ll leave aside the framing device of a group of people trapped in a manse by bad weather. I’ll also leave aside the ‘witty’ by-play of the listening characters. The central story itself is a thoroughly horrifying little tale which keeps you going back to it, wondering, pondering and ever so slightly disturbed.
The disturbance, in part, arises from the unanswered questions that the story leaves us with. Was the dream ‘real’? Was an exchange made? What would his choice have been if he hadn’t been drugged? One of the text’s clearest sources of horror is the young preacher’s justification of choosing a substitute and his very clear temptation (unbalanced but not defeated by the realisation that Sandy has turned over a new leaf) to give Sandy up whatever the state of his immortal soul. Would he have had the moral courage to send himself to hell? Did he take himself out of the decision making process? How responsible is he for the choice that leaves Sandy dead?
I really love how this story draws on so many different ideas about demonic representation and appearance. We have the introduction and that glorious description of a Miltonic fallen angel – majesty marred by scorn and contempt. There’s something particularly effective in the image of a devil who is somehow so far above you that he can only hold you contempt. A devil who knows your weaknesses and scorns them as beneath him. There’s also always something just chilling about a wicked smile and a terrible beauty.
He was like a god. Majesty and power were written on every feature, were expressed in every gesture; but O, the awful scorn of his smile, the contempt with which he regarded me! The beams of the setting sun fell full upon him, and seemed to bring out, as in letters of fire, the wickedness and hate and sin, that underlay the glorious and terrible beauty of his face.
An intriguing part of the introduction is the unheard name. Although he’s later referred to as ‘Satan’, but is introduced with considerably more mystery:
I had never heard it before, but, by some extraordinary intuition, I knew what it meant. He was the Evil One; the name seemed to be taken up by the echoes, and repeated from rock to rock and crag to crag.
The mystery of his name is one that tugs at the corner of your mind, especially after a second read. What’s the secret here? And who is this figure? What is revealed here or what absence, what lack in our knowledge of the demonic and the Divine is revealed by this hiding of a name?
I also love the image of encroaching darkness with the devil at its centre in a pool of light.
A great horror of darkness came about us, only the place where we stood remained light. We occupied a small circle walled round with the thick blackness of night
It’s an unusual image of the demonic. We might expect an unbroken darkness, light being the province of angels and divine agents. But then, Lucifer is the ‘bearer of light’. The image is almost like a spotlight. The world narrowing to a single point, a single decision. There’s also an interesting metaphorical meaning in there – the way an evil act can feel like the light in the darkness, and escape from the difficulties around us, otherwise unpassible and implacable.
Another feature that I loved in this tale is its use of the demonic dream. As I’ve written and spoken about extensively elsewhere, the theological understanding of dreams had not disappeared in the 18th or 19th centuries. (Give me a shout using the contact form if you’re interested in any of my long form explorations of dream theology in the 18th and early 19th centuries or you can get a nice overview here!) There some very different understandings of dreaming than we might expect today. Nowadays, after the advent of psychoanalysis, we generally tend to think of dreams as revealing something about the conscious or subconscious, as manifestations of what’s going on in the depths of our minds. While the idea of dreams being a reflection of our thoughts of the day was a common theory in the early Modern period and onwards, there were also plenty of other explanations and understandings for different types of dreams. For a modern dreamer, ‘I dreamed it’ usually means that it wasn’t ‘real’. However, the 18th and 19th centuries inherited a more equivocal relationship to dreaming. Particularly in the 18th century, ghosts that appeared in dreams might well be as real as ghosts seen outside of them as the dream was considered by theorists and writers like Daniel Defoe and Thomas Tryon to be a space in which the soul was more open to communion with the spiritual. More relevantly for our case, a Medieval and Early Modern concept of the demonic dream, and sleep and dreaming as spaces of particular vulnerability lingered on. We see plenty of examples in Gothic fiction of dreams which are demonically activated (in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, for example, the devil boasts about sending a warning dream to Elvira, a dream which leads to her death at the hands of her own son). We also see the demonic appearing and acting in dreams directly as in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya when the devil (in his Zofloya disguise) appears to Victoria in dreams and tempts her in them. I really enjoyed Charlotte Riddell’s use of these concepts of demonic dreaming as potentially real spaces of danger. In keeping with much 19th century Gothic dream writing though, the dream isn’t offered with only one interpretation. We are forced to consider whether or not it’s real and, if it is real, the extent to which its events affect the world outside the dream.
The last point to bring up about the demonic and one of my favourite passages in the story is the Dante-esque walkabout in hell. Unlike Dante though, who is guided through hell, purgatory and heaven, our preacher is lured into and trapped in a hellish space. The combination of compulsion and sweeping misery and despair is harrowing.
Compelled by a power he could not resist to see the most awful sights, the most frightful sufferings. There was no form of vice that had not there its representative. As they moved along his companion told him the special sin for which such horrible punishment was being inflicted. Shuddering, and in mortal agony, he was yet unable to withdraw his eyes from the dreadful spectacle; the atmosphere grew more unendurable, the sights more and more terrible; the cries, groans, blasphemies, more awful and heart-rending.
Where did the horror lie in this tale for you? And what struck you about the depiction of the demonic. I, personally, think it’s singularly effective but I’d love to hear other opinions.
As we leave the story for today, I feel like I’m sitting with that audience of listeners in the manse experiencing ‘that creeping sort of uneasiness which so often seems like the touch of something from another world – a hand stretched across the boundary-line of time and eternity, the coldness and mystery of which make the stoutest heart tremble’. I don’t know that it’s the devil that makes me shudder though. I have a feeling it’s the preacher – the man who’d give up another’s soul to save his own.
Romancing the Gothic 