The Haunting (film)

Claire Bloom and Julie Harris in The Haunting (1963)

It may be one of the scariest horror movies of all time -- at least among those that have no blood, no body parts, no chattering skeletons -- and it's surely one of the best adaptations of an American work of horror. Directed in 1963 by Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Andromeda Strain), it stars Julie Harris as Eleanor Lance, alongside Claire Bloom as Theodora (with wardrobe by Mary Quant, credited as the inventor of the "mini skirt"), Russ Tamblyn (later to star in West Side Story as well, but best known as Dr. Jacoby in David Lynch's Twin Peaks), and Richard Johnson as "Dr. Markway" (oddly changed from the "Dr. Montague" of the novel). Interestingly, Wise's first choice for Markway was Peter Ustinov, but he declined due to other commitments (he was directing his own play, "Photo Finish," on Broadway).

Other than that, though, it's a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House; Jackson was personally invited to one of the premieres by the director, and by all accounts she was delighted with it. Nevertheless, there are a number of important scenes that are missing; most notable perhaps  is that in the film Eleanor doesn't stop at a small café, and doesn't observe a young girl who refuses to drink her milk until she has her "cup of stars." This small but vital scene has spawned, as fate would have it, a sort of cottage industry of memes, posters, and yes of course cups, all dedicated to the spirit of Eleanor's silent, internal cheering on of the resistant girl. Indeed, though there's a great deal of voice-over with Eleanor's voice -- quite a lot, from the point of view of film -- it's only a small selection of the far more constant stream of her thinking which runs throughout almost the entire length of the novel. The role of the psychic investigator's wife -- Mrs. Montague/Mrs. Markway -- is also quite different in book and film. And, since the film was shot in England, where people drive on the other side of the road, the producers simply flipped the film; they also added a few highway signs for "Route 128," though they neglected to change a placard on a home from "House to Let" to "House for Sale," the more usual American phrase.

Ettington Park Hotel

The interiors of Hill House were all constructed on a soundstage, but for exteriors, they needed a real building -- and they chose an old manor house, since converted to a hotel, not far outside of Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare's birthplace). Known as the Ettington Park, it is one of those places on some people's bucket list to stay -- alongside, no doubt, the Stanley Hotel, which was used for exteriors of the "Overlook Hotel" in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." Those who do stay at Ettington Park will face just two slight disappointments -- there's no library with a spiral staircase -- and no haunted nursery, either. Perhaps they should consider adding them!

NB: I've added a set of discussion questions -- they are optional -- if responding to them is preferable, use them freely; otherwise, feel free to comment on any aspect of either the novel or the film. I also encourage you to consider responding to one another; that's often where the most interesting comments come about!

Also: here's an excellent site with some background on the film's production.

The Haunting of Hill House (part 1)

 Laura Miller, in her recent introduction to a new edition of the book, describes it as "setting a trap" -- both for its main character, Eleanor Vance, and for its reader. The trap is an improved version of the old "Poe" model: get your reader into the head of the protagonist, and once they're there, you can lure them into the deepest and darkest places, and they'll have nowhere else to go!

But it's also more than just a trap. Eleanor is a a curious sort of person -- somewhat reticent, shy, and inwardly turned -- indeed, she could very well fit the profile of many members of today's Gen-X and Gen-Y generations. She's also been victimized by a bossy sister, and saddled with the care of their aging, ailing mother.  In part as a result, she's had very little social contact outside the family; when she receives the invitation from Dr. Montague, the most significant thing about it is that it's an actual invitation -- and now, she's "expected" somewhere. Whether Hill House is haunted or cursed or just old and creepy matters not; what matters is that it's a house, a house where she's wanted, expected, and in which she belongs.

Which of course makes her the perfect central character for a horror novel.

According to an account by Paula Guran, Jackson had decided to write "a ghost story" after reading about a group of nineteenth-century "psychic researchers" who studied a house and somberly reported their supposedly scientific findings to the Society for Psychic Research. What she discovered in their "dry reports was not the story of a haunted house, it was the story of several earnest, I believe misguided, certainly determined people, with their differing motivations and background." Excited by the prospect of creating her own haunted house and the characters to explore it, she launched into research. She later claimed to have found a picture of a California house she believed was suitably haunted-looking in a magazine. She asked her mother, who lived in California, to help find information about the dwelling. According to Jackson, her mother identified the house as one the author's own great-great-grandfather, an architect who had designed some of San Francisco's oldest buildings, had built. Jackson also read volume upon volume of traditional ghost stories while preparing to write her own, "No one can get into a novel about a haunted house without hitting the subject of reality head-on; either I have to believe in ghosts, which I do, or I have to write another kind of novel altogether."

So, do you believe in ghosts? Does one need to, in order be enthralled by a tale that includes them? And as to houses, perhaps you know a haunted-looking one in your neighborhood. In your comments, let your fellow students know what views you had before -- and after -- entering Hill House; if you like, you can make use of these discussion questions, which are keyed to the first half of the novel.

"The Bus"

Original 1965 illustration for "The Bus"

With each miniature masterwork, Shirley Jackson gets a little more "under our skin." Here again, we have a tale of displacement: of time, distance, and of the sudden loss -- or acquisition -- of a feeling of familiarity. We've all had those moments of dissociation -- familiar things seeming suddenly unfamiliar, and vice versa -- but what if, after we rubbed our eyes, they still remained reversed?

"The Bus" is filled with the small frustrations of the everyday, amplified since we know that the main character is elderly, and at times confused. She is determined, all the same, to reach her destination. How many times have any of us heard the words "this is your stop" from a bus driver or conductor -- who are we to question them? We begin, indeed, with empathy: what a sad turn of events -- what will happen to this innocent old woman? And then, by slow degrees, we begin to anticipate another fate: is this just some random house, with a faint whiff of familiarity? Or is it, though at first unrecognized, home?

Not only buses, but bus stations can be sites of our disorientation. In the Twilight Zone episode "Mirror Image," we meet Millicent Barnes, a seemingly clear-headed and intelligent young woman who's waiting for a bus to take her to the town of Cortland, where she's about to start a new job. As in Jackson's story, the ticket agent is a bit of a crabby man, but in this episode strange things start to happen long before any bus arrives. Millicent's suitcase is already checked -- or is it? -- and, after a trip to the washroom, she catches a glimpse of a familiar figure in the waiting room: herself!

The arrival of a friendly fellow passenger offers at least a sympathetic ear, and partial relief from the confusion -- until it doesn't. As was the trademark in the Twilight Zone, even the twist at the ending has another twist, as Serling's unmistakeable voice intones that all he has to offer are "reasons dredged out of the shadows to explain away that which cannot be explained."

The Lottery

Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery" -- in which a town selects each year those of its fellows it will stone to death -- generated more letters to The New Yorker than any other story in its history. Some of these letters were written by quite prominent persons; many seemed to take the story as a claim about some actual town in New England, and rejected it as spurious or insulting. A few years ago, a current writer for the New Yorker tracked down a few of the surviving writers of these letters, and some of them stuck to their criticism of nearly seventy years earlier. Miriam Friend, whose husband had been a scientist working on the Manhattan Project, had written to Jackson asking her to explain its meaning "before my husband and I scratch right through our scalps trying to fathom it." Reached in 2013, she told the interviewer she hadn't changed her mind; it was still "such a harsh story."

Jackson herself read all these letters, and incorporated them into a talk she gave on a number of occasions, "Biography of a story" where she took wry pleasure in the musings and misunderstandings readers communicated to her. In a way, it's rather like what happens instantaneously on Twitter or Facebook today; a writer impugns her readers' values and beliefs, and is suddenly called into the court of public shame. Only Jackson wasn't ashamed, only bemused -- and the story ended up as a breakthrough moment in her career.

Perhaps no less remarkable is that the tale was taken up for a film treatment in 1969 by Encyclopedia Britannica, whose film series was, in nearly all other cases, drily educational. Their director Larry Yust, whose other EB shorts included "Electrons at Work" and "How to Produce Current with Magnets," did not flinch at the story's subject-matter, or soften it in any way. The soft Kodachrome tones of his production make the blood at the end even redder. It's been adapted several times since, but never so effectively.

Once again this week we have four discussion questions -- choose one and post your reply below (you don't need to paste the entire question in, just your response).

Invasion of the Body Snatchers / "The Beautiful Stranger"

In a way, it's a nightmare as old as humanity: what if we, or the ones we love, turned out to be imposters? How would we know? What would we do? And who would believe us if we told them?

Although billed as science fiction, most of the real drama of 1953's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is psychological. It opens on an almost bucolic note, as suburban doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns from a medical conference and is picked up from the train station by his office nurse. Everything is fine, she says, except for a few strange complaints: Dr. Bennell's once and future flame Becky (Dana Wynter) has one. It seems her cousin Wilma Lentz is convinced that her Uncle Ira isn't really Uncle Ira. When the Doc visits, though, Ira seems his usual, pipe-smoking, grumbly self, by Wilma is unappeased; "There's something missing," she insists, "there's no emotion ... just the pretense of it." Miles does his best to reassure her, but between this and the rest of his patients -- many of whom, though seemingly anxious to see him while he was way, have cancelled their appointments.

Of course, it takes a while for him to realize that people are being replaced by pods placed by aliens in their basements, pods which -- as they mature -- take on the exact form and personality of the people they are to replace, only minus any genuine emotion or personality.

Dr. Bennell eventually regrets his initial failure to realize what's gone wrong -- in the frame narrative (added to the film after audiences found the original, uncertain ending too frustrating) he's explaining his story to an initially skeptical psychiatrist. At one point, in a voiceover, he muses that, as a doctor, he was quite used to people losing their individuality over time, just not so many or so quickly:

In my practice, I've seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn't seem to mind... All of us - a little bit - we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.

It's this prescient awareness of the 1950's unawareness of itself that has endeared the film to later fans, and has given rise to the phrase "pod people" being applied to social conformists. The 1978 remake with Donald Sutherland in the lead role (and in which McCarthy has a brief but memorable cameo) is also worth seeing, for the same reasons.

With "The Beautiful Stranger," Shirley Jackson proposes a different kind of sudden replacement: for the young woman in this story, things seem to be going well enough, though her husband is hardly the sensitive, supportive type. But once the "beautiful stranger" arrives, we find ourselves sharing in an unexpected and volatile exuberance -- could this be true? There are some shades of another story, The Return of Martin Guerre, an 1982 film based on a far earlier event of a war veteran's unexpected return -- a double one, in fact. Indeed, after enough time, how do we know that a long-lost loved one is in fact the same one we loved so long ago? Jackson's trick here is that it has not, in fact, been "so long" -- in fact, it's only just been yesterday. In a way, it's also an inverse version of Body Snatchers, the sort of snatching that gives a soulless person a soul -- and yet it somehow unhinges the main character, sending her into a strange world where she almost no longer seems ... herself!

William Wilson/Mr. Pelham

 

Scene from "The Case of Mr. Pelham"

"It's usually considered bad luck to encounter your double, or your doppelgänger as they say in German. Unless, that is, you have an identical twin! The belief that it's unfortunate goes back at least to the Romantic era of the late 1790's and early 1800's, and is associated with many of its leading writers, and indeed Mary Shelley's creature in Frankenstein (1818) may in some ways be seen as Victor Frankenstein's monstrous double. Edgar Allan Poe took up the idea in his short story "William Wilson" (1839), which is also the only one of his stories to be set in his own childhood, at a school he attended in Stoke Newington, outside London. Dostoyevsy's The Double (1866) builds further on this, making his character's double as extroverted and gregarious as the original is timid and shy. And of course even Stevenson's classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is such a tale, though the "hook" here is that they are, in fact, the same man.

But it's with film, and especially television, that the idea of doubles really takes off; through the technique of masking, it's actually quite easy to put two separate images of the same actor on the same screen. Alfred Hitchcock had great fun with the idea in "The Case of Mr. Pelham" (1955, shown above), and the concept took a comedic turn with the "identical cousins" of the Patty Duke Show. Horror master David Cronenberg elevated the story to new heights in his Dead Ringers (1988), a tale of twin Canadian gynecologists, both played by Jeremy Irons, which is -- almost unbelievebaly! -- based on a true story. And of course the much-awaited "third season" of David Lynch's Twin Peaks revolved almost entirely around the idea, with "good" Cooper -- trapped for a time in the life of "Dougie Jones" -- battles with the bad one. Lynch prefers the term tulpa -- but it comes down to much the same thing, and person.

So give us your thoughts on this story -- and, as with our earlier posts, feel free to make use of these discussion questions (you need only answer one) if you like.

Us

It's one of the grimmest takes on the age-old theme of the double or döppelganger -- here, one's replacements stand, zombie-like, at the edge of one's driveway, waiting for their moment, baseball-bats in hand. But it begins, as do so many tales of doubling, with a single uncanny moment, when Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) encounters her double in (where else?) a house of mirrors at a carnival. The mirrors provide an apt scene, but also introduce the critical element of doubt: could it all just be in her head?

We fast-forward to adult Adelaide, still haunted by this childhood trauma, on vacation with friends. She's still cautious about large public places, and the beach is no resort for her, especially after she catches a glimpse of a man on a stretcher carried by paramedics, and -- soon after -- a seeming double of that man, bloodied and strange.

And then the fun begins: the lurking menacing mute gathering of the döppelgangers, a little closer to home in each shot. When they come, their resemblance becomes still creepier; we see them mimic the actions of their 'originals,' but in a weirdly clumsy manner. Then the killing begins.

We learn that these doubles are the "tethered" -- creatures linked to those they so resemble, and seeking to free themselves by killing the originals and severing the  ropes that tie them to them. It's a strange sort of linkage in which -- at least in one sense -- their murderous rampages are almost a cry for freedom. Adelaide, of course, is the only one who really understands all this, and it's her struggle -- and her final battle with her own tethered replicant -- that brings the film around to its final denouement.

So what does Us add to the long tradition of doubles? Are its concept of the "tethered" and its "science experiment" explanation any different from the usual suspects? And is its ending somehow creepier or more meaningful than that of earlier such tales? And do you sense the political undertones of this film, perhaps agreeing with Jordan Peele that, untimately, "all horror films are political"? (see his interviews here and here).

Your thoughts here.

Chesnutt's Conjure Tales

Charles W. Chesnutt was one of the most prominent African-American writers and community leaders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He and I share a hometown -- Cleveland, Ohio -- which was, in his day, a powerful engine of industry and social mobility; by mine it had become a much-reduced city better known for its burning river than its cultural output. Still, Cleveland has always had a sort of attitude -- a 'tougher than the rest' outlook that has kept its place on the map secure,

Chesnutt thrived, like Poe, in a journalistic era, one where excellence in short stories and essays could win one a precarious place in the public eye. And, in his "conjure" stories, he actively reclaimed African-American traditions, folklore, and humor, from a time when they had been largely re-appropriated by white writers. Prominent among these was Joel Chandler Harris, who collected genuine Black folktales featuring such recurrent characters as "B'rer Rabbit," "B'rer Bear," and "B'rer Fox," and then re-cast them through the imagined voice of an older Black man he created and called "Uncle Remus." In that guise, told to a young white boy, tales that might otherwise have been deprecated became iconic -- for decades, Uncle Remus was the bestselling children's book in America; Theodore Roosevelt read it to groups of children and invited Harris to join them at the White House.

But of course this was a problem, especially given that the tales were written in exaggerated "Black" dialect -- which is where Chesnutt came in. Well-aware of Harris's tales and their popularity, he decided to work to "signify" upon them, creating an alternate interlocutor -- one "Uncle Julius" -- who, though seemingly aiming to please his presumptively white listeners, was in fact taking them all for a ride -- by turning his seemingly "quaint" tales against their white hearers. It was an effect greatly appreciated by his readers, and which led eventually to a collection of tales that rivaled Harris's own. Chesnutt very ably mimicked Harris's mimicry -- in almost a sort of "SNL" spirit -- and showed how, in a very essential way, all stories are about power -- that of the speaker as well as that of the listener. 

In 1946, twelve years after Chesnutt's death, the Walt Disney Company decided to turn Joel Chandler Harris's versions of these folktales into a feature film, Song of the South. It was an unrepentant version, full of the sort of magical Black figurations that, while seemingly celebrating that tradition, turned it into a muted and cartoonish version of itself. It's now kept securely under lock and key, though bootleg versions exist, and Disney's own "Splash Mountain" attraction retained the characters -- though this is soon to be replaced by "Tiana's Bayou Adventure." 

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner

It's one of the foundational tales of the Romantic movement, an exemplar of horror ('the nightmare life-in-death was she') and grim irony ('water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink'). Its also one of the few of the Lyrical Ballads to actually be a ballad (there are a few others in ballad stanza, but only one or two -- perhaps "We are Seven" -- that really embody the ballad's mixture of lyricism and repetition). And it's proven very durable, still an engaging read in an era in which the combination of the words 'narrative' and 'poetry' elicits a sense of dread -- not of the horror of the tale but the tedium of the form.

Coleridge originally wrote the poem in mock-antique orthography, with "ancient" spelled old-style as "antient," and "mariner" with a completely unnecessary final e as "marinere." Happily, he abandoned this in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, and added helpful side-notes, an early instance of a poet annotating his own work. He chose for its setting the extremes of the ocean, evoking both the Sargasso Sea (a mid-ocean area with much floating vegetation where ships were often becalmed) and the Antarctic -- the mariner's headlong careening south is a journey similar to what we read from Poe  in "MS. Found in a Bottle." The natural sublime, in the form both of the sea's teeming with unknown life, and the sterile and hostile cold of the realm of ice, is perfectly framed here, and the supernatural elements are perfectly integrated into the natural ones. And of course the mariner shoots the albatross, which is later hung about his neck by the superstitious sailors -- giving us a metaphor that's still in political use today.

As I mentioned in class, it's an excellent poem to hear read aloud -- one my favorite versions is by Sir Richard Burton -- though Ian McKellan also does a reasonably good turn, and says "greybeard loon" with real feeling.

Whistle and I'll Come For You, my Lad ...

Everyone likes a good old-fashioned ghost story -- and no one wrote them better than the British author M.R. James. Although he had a very successful academic career, eventually becoming the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and later the Provost of Eaton, his little side-career of writing ghost stories has proven to be his most lasting legacy.

Although varied in their subjects, a good many of them involve professors and antiquarians, either conducting research or else on holiday, who stumble upon some ancient text, cryptic stained-glass window, or mysterious artifact. The whistle at the center of "Whistle and I'll Come To You" is perhaps the most famous, with its two inscriptions in Latin: Quis est iste qui vent ("Who is this who is coming?") and Fur fla bis fle ("Thief, blow twice, go mad"). But wait -- saying anything more would ruin the story!

One of the reasons that James's tales have had such staying power is that their brief, economical structure made them ideal for adaptation to the new medium of television, with nearly fifty separate versions of his tales, including episodes of Night Gallery, Mystery and Imagination, Omnibus, and Ghost Stories for Christmas (with Christopher Lee). "Whistle and I'll Come To You" has actually been done twice by the BBC. The first was in 1968 starring Michael Hordern (a veteran character actor whom some may recall as Vincent Price's first victim in 1973's Theatre of Blood); the second, made in 2010, features John Hurt. The different ways in which each is handled tell us something about the durability of James's stories, as well as the way a director's mind works -- what's the essence of the story? Is there another angle which could open it up to a fresh treatment? And for the actor, who has the challenging task of portraying a rational, educated man faced with something no rational mind could grasp, there's certainly a lot of great material in James's Professor Parkin; personally, I think Hordern captures it best -- a man perpetually on the edge of knowing what to do, shunned a little for his awkwardness, brilliant but easily perplexed. In this class, though, it's you who will be the judge!

Please choose one of these discussion questions and post your answer below:

The Sandman

A generation before Poe, when the idea of a gothic horror story was decidedly more a German than an English or American notion, E.T.A. Hoffmann was widely regarded as the master of the genre. Not all of Hoffmann's stories involved horror as such -- but they were all "tales," in the sense that they set aside, for a moment, all the particularities of everyday life and took place in a generalized, imaginary realm halfway between moralistic parables and frightening fancies, where children were quite often in the thrall of cruel and unpredictable adults, and fears took palpable form. His tales in many ways resemble those of the Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, which were first published just four years before "Der Sandmann."

Hoffmann was also a musician and a stage director, with the result that his tales often have  a theatre-like three-act structure, with powerful visual imagery and strong atmosphere. These have led them to be frequently adapted for stage, and later for screen; among the more notable versions have been Arthur Saint-Léon's "Coppélia" (1870), Offenbach's opéra fantastique "Tales of Hoffmann" (1881), Powell and Pressburger's 1951 film based upon it, and Paul Berry's 1993 Oscar-nominated stop-motion animation "The Sandman." Most recently, the young German director S. Andreas Dahn has brought out a relatively faithful period version, one which -- alas -- is not yet available on disc or streaming; the image above is of "Bela B." Felsenheimer in the title role.

But there's much more to this story than its dramatic touches, and vivid imagery. There's the primal scene of a child excluded from the adult world, the implicit threat of the Sandman, stealer of eyes (Freud read this as a displaced threat of castration), and the peculiar charms -- or lack thereof -- of an automaton woman. We often think that we today -- with our Terminators, cyborgs, replicants, and other semi-human robotic figures -- have invented the uncanny notion of a non-human human being, but in fact the idea is far older, going well back into the eighteenth century. Some of the automata built then still exist today, such as Maillardet's writing automaton. This small boyish figure, designed to sit at a writing desk and draw, was hard to identify when it was deposited at the steps of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute many years ago. Under patient care, its mechanism was restored, and a pen placed in its hand -- after which it produced six drawings, one of which the machine itself "signed," declaring, "I am the automaton of M. Maillardet" -- and so it identified itself (the idea was incorporated by David Selznick into his graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was adapted as a film by Martin Scorsese.

So read the story -- I suspect you will soon join the ranks of those haunted by its peculiar, shadowy scenes. Then choose one of this week's discussion questions, and post your answer below.

Descent into the Maelstrom/MS. Found in a Bottle

 Let us all pause and shed a tear for Edgar Poe -- not, as most of us might suppose, because he led a troubled, brief life, but because this life has so often eclipsed the merit and significance of his work. Poe, it appears, will always be with us, peering over our shoulder as we read, and despite his charms, this is far from an ideal situation. The writings of an author must speak for themselves across the gulf of time, and in an ideal world, the author does not, indeed cannot accompany them, save in that subtlest of survivals, the scattered cells of his or her words.

While Poe is best remembered for his macabre tales -- "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Black Cat," or "The Masque of the Red Death," in his time he was noted for his tales of the sea, of explorers and adventurers who risked -- and sometimes lost -- their lives on hazardous voyages that brought them to fantastical countries. Such tales were a stock-in-trade of his day, with those of Sinbad the Sailor the best-known -- but one could easily think of modern science-fiction serials, such as Star Trek, as the inheritors of this tradition.

Poe's unique gift was to blend such fanciful adventures with elements of extraordinary realism, giving a fresh sense of the limited power of humans in the face of the sublime forces of the oceans. The effect was very carefully obtained. Poe had devoured any number of nautical narratives, and always had some navigational manuals, along with the Encyclopedia Brittanica, close at hand. He had not, it is true, the benefit of very much experience at sea -- but he was master and commander of the words, the perfect mixture of nautical terminology and first-person terror, that could make his readers shiver in their imaginary sea-boots.

"A Descent into the Maelstrom" was an early work, and opens innocently enough as a sort of travelogue: the reader is taken to the edge of a cliff, where a wizened old local is going to tell his tale of the sea below. And yet, as it develops, it turns into a horror story, one in which -- as with so many haunted houses -- the experience has driven its teller into old age overnight with fear, escape though he did. It's a perfect little diversion, ending with an almost too-practical solution, rather like a problem in mechanics.

"MS. Found in a Bottle" take Poe's dark romance with the sea to a far deeper and more disturbing level. Published in 1833, it earned him a fifty-dollar prize -- then a considerable sum -- from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. In it, Poe makes use of a device he would come to rely on frequently: a first-person narrator who is an absolute realist, one to whom "the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity." For what better person to tell us of wonders beyond our wildest imaginings? The story draws from other myths and tales as well, such as that of the "Flying Dutchman" (which goes back way before Disney) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. And yet, in a way that's difficult to entirely pin down, it goes far beyond these tales by evoking the uncanny scene of a ship filled with ancient navigators, all indifferent to their guest, plummeting to their doom with peculiar looks of joy upon their faces.

The Shadow

We've probably all experienced the sensation: somewhere, somehow, we saw a new possibility open up before us, or felt a strange impulse to follow a desire that we could hardly name. We were wise, or so we thought, to resist the temptation, to stay on the path of our sober-minded, plan-in-advance selves. And then, perhaps years later, we wondered why, and what things might have been like if we hadn't.

Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow" takes up this question -- decidedly one that haunts adults rather than children -- in a strange allegory that reads like a fairy tale but burns at the soul like some mad tale of Poe. And like Poe (and Shelley, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and many others), Andersen hit upon the folk legend of a double, or doppelgänger, as a metaphor for this desire deferred. With roots deep in popular folklore, these tales of someone with an uncanny resemblance to one's self are chilling enough as far as they go -- for it seems that there's only room in the universe for one of them: either the double or the self must die.

In Andersen's tale, the "learned man" (perhaps "scholar" would be a more apt English translation) permits his shadow to do pursue a course of action he himself was too timid to attempt, and initially counts himself fortunate. The lack of a shadow, after all, was but a minor inconvenience -- what of it? The twist here is that this decision precipitates the birth of a separate entity, one that eventually comes to possess all of the boldness and sense of purpose that the student lacked. The student, gradually and inexorably, is fated to become the shadow's shadow, and eventually even less than that.

Many people assume that fairy tales ought to teach some moral lesson. They forget that, in their original forms, most folktales had no such lesson; it was moralizers such as Perrault (who published the most popular versions of "Cinderella" and "Little Red Riding Hood") who attached morals to them, in part to make them safe for family reading, to harness their wild imaginings in the name of civilizing influence.

But although "The Shadow," like many of Andersen's tales, has a sort of moral in it, there's also a strong contravening force: if we are to avoid the fate of the unfortunate scholar, we must in fact act on our desires, must sometimes step outside the moral and personal codes that bind us. And indeed, anyone who creates -- whether a writer of fictions, a visual artist, or a filmmaker -- is already engaged in the shadow business.

So read this story, and let it speak to you freely -- then post your comment below. If you'd like, you can respond to one of the discussion questions I've prepared to help get your thoughts flowing. I've also put up a link to one quite famous response to this story by the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin -- the first few pages of her essay offer a remarkable interpretation of the story.

Welcome to English 120: Self and Shadow

The moment we walk out the front doors of our homes and apartments, we enter the world of social expectations. Our entire journey to adulthood is filled with their study -- we must first learn language, then how to speak properly to parents, teachers, and playmates; at school, we learn to sit attentively at our desks, and not to make noise in libraries. Later, to get our drivers' licenses, we learn the rules of the road, and in our workplaces we learn to follow the guidelines laid down by our supervisors. Our life is so rule-bound, indeed, that it's no wonder we need release at the end of the day, whether that comes in the form of food, entertainment, or just relaxation. Yet  are those enough? What unfulfilled wishes, what resentments, what cravings are left for our shadows to pursue?

In this class, we'll look at the way a number of different literary writers have represented this world of shadows. We'll begin with one of the first and most potent of these tales, Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow." Next, it's Edgar Allan Poe, whose contributions to this tradition include such macabre tales as "Descent into the Maelstrom" and "Manuscript Found in a Bottle." We'll wrap up our first three weeks with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Ryme of the Ancient Mariner," a tale told by a madman, but signifying a great deal!

After that we'll turn our attention to another early tale, E.T.A. Hoffman's original "Sandman," a far more disturbing figure than either the innocent 1950's version of "Mr. Sandman" or the comic/graphic novel versions of the twentieth century. Then, there comes a ghost -- summoned accidentally, but no matter -- in the M.R. James's classic "Whistle and I'll come to you," along with its brilliant television adaptation by Jonathan Miller. Lastly, we'll take on the work of America's greatest writer of the surreal, Shirley Jackson, particularly the very last stories she completed, many of which touch on this theme of welcome -- or unwelcome -- doubleness. 

Wherever possible, our readings will be made available freely, as will our viewings, though in a few cases you will need to order the book or rent a movie from a streaming service. In addition to the online responses in our discussion, there will be a formal final paper of 4-6 pages in length, on a text or film of your choosing from among those we've read or seen as part of the class.