Abstract: In this article, I marry star studies to haptic theory in order to explore the complex meanings of space and stardom in 1970s disaster films. I use the The Poseidon Adventure [1972] as my case study, a film often cited as one best epitomising the genre. I examine the way The Poseidon Adventure uses the physical space of the ship at the centre of the film to heighten the chaos of the sinking ship, and mediate the way we experience the (old and new) stars on screen. I consider how in disaster films we see great Hollywood stars battered, bruised, and beaten on screen and argue this allegorically signals a generic and cultural transition in American cinema, with old Hollywood film practices shed in favour of the politics and energies of New Hollywood. This paper offers insight into the underlying star politics of 1970s disaster films, which are often mediated only through the spectacle they provide audiences.

One of the defining film genres of the 1970s was the disaster film. Depicting scenes of mass carnage, the disaster film came to prominence in the 1970s in a wave of films staging shipwrecks and airplane crashes, joined by a band of new and old Hollywood stars facing these dangers on screen (Keane 2001 2). Critically and commercially, the most successful films disaster films of the 1970s were: Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and The Towering Inferno (1974), all of which lead to the popularity of other films or franchises including Earthquake (1974), Airport 1975 (1974), Airport ’77 (1977), and When Time Ran Out (1980) (ibid. 3). While critical scholarship on the genre has mostly centred on how disaster films were widely successful and critically lauded because of the way they allegorised America’s political, social, and economic plights on screen, many of these films actually instantiate other cinematic concerns. There is actually a dearth of scholarship that moves beyond the commercial and political currency of these disaster films.

Although the spectacles themselves in these disaster films are central, this essay assesses the way the disaster film utilises space on screen, in attempt to legitimise to their importance as a cinematic genre. Disaster films actively integrate discourses of cinema as travel experience and engage with the politics of star system to offer complex commentaries on cinema’s haptic meaning and the Hollywood star culture. I argue for the importance of combining the cultural and semiotic language of the star system with haptic theory in order to demonstrate the potential of extending the meanings of disaster films. It is only by marrying the two seemingly unrelated discourse that we can garner the more complex tensions that motivates so many audiences to see and engage with disaster films.

Stars in the 1970s disaster film have an allegorical and cultural function in the literal spaces contained within the text. Films like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno embody allegorical meanings that comment on the death of the Hollywood star system and the rise of “New Hollywood” cinema (Roddick 1980 248).[i] I argue the disaster film engages in discourses on travelling and architecture in an effort to not only heighten the spectacle of its disasters, but also to create its own reference points about cinema and physical space on screen, in particular spaces for travelling (the ship, the plane, and airports). By reconsidering the haptic and star meanings of the disaster genre – examined centrally through The Poseidon Adventure here – the affects and emotional meanings of cinema and architecture can be understood away from the ocular-centricism that has dominated critical discourse on cinema for decades (Jay 1988 310).

Cinema has long been cloaked in its own aesthetic, critical, and discursive aura that has privileged the visual experience over the haptic pleasure it provides viewers (see Mulvey 1975; Sontag 1977; Deleuze 1983; Jay 1988; Thomas 2001). In recent years there has been a growing scholarly and artistic (recuperative) interest in resurrecting the intersections cinema makes with architecture. While these intersections have a longer tradition than the twenty-first century, it is only in the last decade that we have seen more explicit interventions – and marriages – between these two discourses. In Atlas of Emotion (2002), American scholar Giuliana Bruno constructs an “atlas” of philosophical, affective, and psycho-geographic responses to art, cinema, and architecture, coalescing all in an attempt to demonstrate how “site” (physical space) and “sight” (visual experience) are inherently married to each other. Likewise, The Architecture of the Image (2008), film scholar Juhani Pallasmaa examines how architecture – like cinema – works around ideas of time, space, and movement, and similar to Bruno, attempts to collapse the distinction between “sites” and “sights” in order to emphasise the potency of haptic embodiment.

These recent works highlight the emerging discourse of haptics and cinema, privileging the physical responses to architecture and cinema alike while de-emphasising the long-standing ocular approach to the world of film. Pallasmaa makes the point that every film contains an image of an architectural space (2008 4). From this, we can see an inherent relationship begin to operate between the two (ibid. 5). Whether it is a building, a room, or even specifically Central Park in New York City, film engages in the poetics and politics of architecture: they define space, grid and demarcate a physical area, while centring narrative meanings and affects around this site.[ii] Indeed disaster films – which are addressed in more depth later – are sound examples to demonstrate the potency of haptics – they are characterised by physical movement on screen. Whether it is a moving plane (the Airport series), a sinking ship (The Poseidon Adventure), or the chaotic physical destruction of Los Angeles (in Earthquake), they offer viewers a type of journey experience.

Many of these writers on haptics draw on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) in which Benjamin considers the notions of authenticity and originality in art. In his essay, Benjamin writes on the connections between cinema and architecture, arguing that on the contrary both are “tactile arts” (1936 225). While cinema seemingly stresses its visuality and architecture emphasises its physicality, both cinema and architectural space generate and provide kinesthetic experiences to viewers and participants. Indeed vision is just as important to haptics as haptics is to film. As Kester Tauttenbury writes,

Architecture exists, like cinema, in the dimension of time and movement. One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences. To erect a building is to predict and seek effects of contrast and linkage through which one passes . . . In the continuous shot/sequence that a building is, the architect works with cuts and edits, framings and openings (1994 35).

By re-evaluating architecture in cinematic terms – and vice-versa by re-evaluating cinema in architectural terms – the two artforms imply a kinesthetic way of experiencing space. This intersection functions importantly in The Poseidon Adventure by problematising the architecture of stairs. Poseidon is concerned with the idea of “Hell Upside Down”, or an overturned cruise ship that forces its passengers to climb “up” to the bottom of the ship in order to escape. Staircases are an excellent example of how an architectural site has been utilised repeatedly by cinema to mark meaning, divide spaces, and represent political and familial hierarchies. For Peter Wollen, “The staircase is the symbolic spine of the house” (1996 15). Here is an instance where architecture and cinema unite. The staircases are places of movement and transition that are directly experienced by the body. The stairs in cinema stage political undertones of the private/public and unseen/seen dichotomy: either one can exit to a private space or enter a social public place through a set of stairs.

The Poseidon Adventure is driven by an intersection of architectural space and cinema. The film is about the “S.S. Poseidon” cruise ship making its last journey from New York City to Athens. On New Year’s Eve, however, the ship is overturned by an enormous tsunami caused by an underground earthquake (Keane 2006 72). The film is a metaphor for this cultural and cinematic conflation with architecture and stardom. Symbolically – because the ship is overturned – the notion of this staircase is inverted in Poseidon. Hence the characters do not “climb up” the ship but “climb downwards” to the ship’s haul.

A major turning point in the narrative is when one of the surviving co-captains tells all the passengers to stay where they are (in the central dining room, near the top deck of the ship) since they are closer to the top deck of the ship. Reverent Scott (Gene Hackman) pleads with them not to listen to the co-captain and instead them that they must go “up” (down) to reach the ship’s haul, since any attempt to escape needs to be made closer to the water’s surface. Although allowing a means for escape for a select few, this inversion figuratively reverses the hierarchies of title and power on the ship and placing a small group of the passengers in charge of the ship, as the co-captain drowns (and, by extension, allows others to drown) in the sinking vessel. I would push this analogy further, arguing how this inversion demonstrates the allegory of a transition of Old Hollywood values into that of New Hollywood. Given that it is the younger Gene Hackman – the then star of the drug-themed crime film The French Connection – who leads the fight for survival (leaving the mostly-older ship-goers to drown), the allegorical meaning is rich. Indeed this moment demonstrates how Poseidon privileges its younger stars and begins to kill off its older stars, seen frequently in other 1970s disaster films (see Dyer 1975, 1979).

The “guiding” cinematic experience of these disaster films – in particular Poseidon – is the way it exploits cinema as a travel experience. In Atlas of Emotion (2002), Bruno writes that “film is affected by a real travel bug” and that the “film ‘viewer’ is a practioner of viewing space – a tourist” (76, 61). Bruno asserts cinema has always been preoccupied with the travel experience, signalling how early cinema itself was composed on narratives of travelling to the moon (Goerges Melies’s A Trip to the Moon 1902), to outer space (Georges Melies’s The Impossible Voyage 1904), or train travel (Lumiere Brothers’ The Arrival of the Mail Train 1896).This ongoing preoccupation with not only capturing travel movement (trains, travel) onto the moving image itself but also with providing viewers with the experience of “statically travelling” is what informs the terms of references of the disaster genre (Bruno 2002 7). Given the socio-cultural climate these films were made in – with the rising popularity of the transgressive styles of New Hollywood and their interest in new filmmaking techniques and strategies – the disaster film drew on these early cinematic discourses on travel as a means to rework their cinematic and cultural meanings. Here they are reframed in light of the emerging 1970s counterculture and anti-establishment politics (Wood 2003). By this, the template of cinema as traveling/traveling as cinema began to be manipulated and exploited in texts like Poseidon and the Airport series through the presence old Hollywood stars alongside new ones.

The poetics embedded within the moving space (ship, aeroplane, blimp, bus, rollercoasters, all of which were vehicles utilised in one disaster film or another) are what serve as the central cultural, political, and cinematic meanings that the disaster film seeks to problematise. As Bruno notes, “There is a mobile dynamics involved in the act of viewing films, even is the spectators is seemingly static. The (im)mobile spectator moves across an imaginary path, traversing multiple sites and times” (2002 55). What Bruno addresses is the way film negotiates physical spaces on screen viewers can vicariously experience, while also emphasising the staticity and immobility of the viewer in their seat all at once. If we consider Poseidon – often cited as the cinematic epitome of the disaster film – the captain calls the ship in the film “a hotel with a stern and boor stuck on each end” (Roddick 1980 246). The emphasis is on the ship as a site/sight of luxury, relaxation, and pleasure. The irony in this comment, as we see later, is that indeed it is the fact that the Poseidon is not a hotel that causes it to sink – it is a ship. This comment literalises the paradox Bruno address: the hotel does not move; a ship does. These series of meanings evoke the cultural and connotative meaning that representing travel on screen embodies in the disaster genre.

The moving space – whether it is encaged within the narrative of Poseidon Adventure or in the moving airplane in the Airport series – represents an intervention in the spatial and haptic experience of cinema. In terms of narrative, the site/sight of the exploded airplane, the sinking ship, or the burning hotel makes the spatial environment contained within the film dangerous, claustrophobic, and unsafe. Bruno observes, “Film inherits the possibility of such a spectorial voyage from the architectural field, for the person who wanders through a building or site also absorbs and connects visual spaces … In this sense, the consumer of architectural (viewing) space is the prototype of the film spectator” (2002 55). Bruno’s dialogue between an architectural space and the physical space controlled by the film instantiate many of the same haptic experiences and her re-prioritisation of the affective (as opposed to the visual) qualities of cinema is what I utilise in my analysis here. The disaster film itself – in this case, Poseidon – although preoccupied with spectacle, equally engages with problematising the relationship between physical space on screen and the cultural status and capital of its old Hollywood stars.

What makes the disaster film so palpable as a cinematic experience is the way the old Hollywood stars of the film are battered, bruised, and ultimately killed off (see Dixon 1999, Feil 2005). Richard Dyer writes that while a star is a reflection of the dominant social and political ideologies, they also are symptomatic of the “fissures” in these hegemonic ideologies and have the potential to be read in profoundly different ways (1979 3). I argue two central points on stars within the disaster genre: the death of the stars in the disaster genre allegorically comments on the decline of the Hollywood studio system which had dominated America film-making since the 1930s; and second, the stars act as stand-in for the audiences to vicariously experience the wreck and ruin wrought by the destruction of the travel experiences. Bruno argues this when she writes that we must move from “optical to haptic” (2002 6). This approach figures importantly in my reconsideration of the disaster film. My contention is that Poseidon kills off its former Hollywood greats as a figurative attempt to signal the death of the Hollywood studio and star system, and legitimise the emerging tides in Hollywood cinema.

Therefore, the cultural, cinematic, and semiotic meaning of the star functions importantly in the 1970s disaster film. The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno are major films that demonstrate the intersection of spatial destruction and the harm this carnage reaps on its Hollywood stars. The original advertisements for both films highlight how the stars are the central identifying features for mediating the experience of the film. The posters also imply the internal disasters within the narrative threaten the stability and indeed safety of these stars within the confines of the story. On a poster for The Towering Inferno (Figure 1), the star image of the actors is central with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman as the male leads battling not only each other (and their masculine bravodo) but to attempting to control the blazing skyscraper. The poster demonstrates the intersection of destroying the stars through floods, fire, chaos, and death. This advertisement also has a row of other Hollywood stars that appear in the film – such as William Holden alongside Faye Dunaway – and although these are ostensibly the supporting cast of the film, nevertheless, they too are presumably encaged within the wrath of the fiery tower. The original movie poster for Poseidon (Figure 2) evokes a sense of claustrophobia with its stars bordering a drawing of waves of water overflowing a ballroom. Called “Hell, Upside Down”, the graphic is engulfed with seawaters. The poster encourages viewers to believe that not all the stars of the film will be saved by narrative end. These advertising meta-texts embody the important formation these films bridge between the collapsing of space and the destruction of the star.

To demonstrate this transition, I examine Shelley Winters’ role in Poseidon. The most striking physical feature of Winters’ performance as Mrs Rosenburg is her overweight and bulging body. Winters purposely gained weight for the role and insisted that she do all her own stunts (Keane 2006 76). A successful supporting actress throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Winters’ re-emergence in this film allegorically aligns itself with the transition of Old Hollywood to New Hollywood.[iii] With the rise of more countercultural subjects and constructed around less bureaucratic institutions such as film studios, New Hollywood sought to dislocate the institutionalisation of films with the rigid studio structure (Berliner 2010 62). Winters, who embodies these cultural, star, and cinematic ties to the studio system, is forced in Poseidon to undergo a gruelling and exhausting escape that she is truly not capable of. Symbolically, her bulging and overweight body is suggestive of the hedonism and profits of Old Hollywood that is no longer able to meet the challenges of cinema of the 1970s. Winters’s Mrs Rosenburg is a figure of comic relief as the carnivalesque quality of her squatting, falling, and struggling index her weight and the fact this obese figure is the great Shelley Winters – or “that fat old cow” as another character calls her. Therefore, Winters – like Jennifer Jones’s character in The Towering Inferno – metonymically acts as a figure of the old studio system.[iv] Both Jones and Winters not only signal the star system but also are utilised by both films to heighten the danger, destruction, and claustrophobia nature of these restrictive and deathly spaces on screen (Yacowar 1977).

The disaster film “must be consider[ed] as a single group” and as part of “a long tradition of screen catastrophe”, fitting in with traditions of cinema representing spectacles on screen to heighten their haptic value (Roddick 1980 244). I argue disaster films declined in the late 1970s and early 1980s because they became an overused template that could not meet the demands of the changing cultural landscape. However, the template resurfaced in other different generic arenas such as the sci-fi action (The Terminator [1984], Die Hard [1988]), while being altered in the 1990s with less stars (Twister [1996]), or simply remade in the 2000s (Poseidon [2006]). Unlike the original 1970s disaster films, however, these later generic templates are less concerned with an ensemble of stars and are instead driven more by special effects (Keane 2006 101). As with the changes in cultural demands, the later series of films with disaster as a main narrative and thematic pull did no need to alter the star status or star value of their actors unlike the 1970s series of films – they were the reference points with which to exploit and parody the star to batter and bruise them in the film.

In this way, the disaster films of the 1970s instantiate many more complex and important cultural and cinematic meanings than existing scholarship suggests. Indeed, while the literature on the disaster film has mostly considered the financial, aesthetic, or commercial value of these films, this essay has privileged the star iconography and haptic meanings of these films to revise their cultural and cinematic value. Although this essay has only concentrated only on The Poseidon Adventure, this film nevertheless embodies many of the tropes of the disaster film, having been cited as the “epitome of the genre” (Roddick 1980 246). The disaster film marries the concerns of architecture with the haptic meanings of cinema, utilising space as a means to comment on the status of stars in the 1970s cultural milieu. Given the rise of scholarship examining the haptic experience of cinema, reconsidering bodies of cinema that have only be considering for their visual value has immense importance in understanding and legitimising some of the more meaningful concerns these films embody. This essay has explored the growing scholarship considering the physical responses cinema can provide spectators while also revising the dominant interpretations of the disaster film, arguing that in particular The Poseidon Adventure draws on histories of film as a travel experience. Ultimately, in reprioritising the spatial and star elements in films like The Poseidon Adventure, the haptic and affective experiences can be more palpably felt.

WORKS CITED

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press,1994.

Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’ Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. 217-252.

Berliner, Todd. Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema. Austin:University of Texas, 2010.

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New   York: Verso, 2002.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and     Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Dixon, W. W. Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood          Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Dyer, Richard. ‘American Cinema in the ’70s: The Towering Inferno.’ Movie 21   (1975): 30-3.

—— Stars. London: British Film Institute, 2008.

Elsaesser, Thomas & Hagener, Malte. Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses. London: Routledge, 2009.

Feil, Ken. Dying For A Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.

Jay, Martin. ‘The Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism.’ Poetics Today 9:2 (1988): 307-326.

Keane, Stephen. Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe. London: Short Cuts, 2006.

Mulvey, Laura. ‘Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.’ Screen 16:3 (1975): 6-18.

Roddick, Nicholas. ‘Only the Stars Survive: Disaster Movies in the Seventies.’Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film, and Television 1800-1976. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 243-269.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977.

Tauttenberry, Kester. ‘Echo and Narcissus.’ Architecture and Film (Architectural Design). Ed. Maggie Toy. London: Academy Press, 1994. 20-38.

Thomas, Deborah. Reading Hollywood: Spaces and Meanings in American Film. London: Short Cuts, 2001.

Wollen, Peter. ‘Architecture and Cinema: Places and Non-Places.’ Rakennustaiteen Seura 4 (1996): 10-29.

Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan … and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Yacowar, M. ‘The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre.’ Film Genre: Theory and Criticism. Ed. B. K. Grant. London: Scarecrow Press, 1977. 90- 107.

FILMOGRAPHY

Airport. Dir. George Seaton. Universal Pictures. 1970.

Airport 1975. Dir. Jack Smight. Universal Pictures. 1974.

Airport 1977. Dir. Jerry Jameson. Universal Pictures. 1977.

The Arrival of the Mail Train. Dir. Auguste & Louis Lumiere. Lumiere. 1896.

Die Hard. Dir. John McTiernan. Twentieth-Century Fox. 1988.

Earthquake. Dir. Mark Robson. Universal Pictures. 1974.

The Impossible Voyage. Dir. Georges Melies. Star Film Company. 1904.

Poseidon. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Warner Brothers. 2006.

The Poseidon Adventure. Dir. Ronald Neame. Twentieth-Century Fox. 1972.

Terminator. Dir. James Cameron. Orion Pictures. 1984.

The Towering Inferno. Dir. John Guillerman. Twentieth-Century Fox. 1974.

A Trip to the Moon. Dir. Georges Melies. Star Film Company. 1902.

Twister. Dir. Jan de Bont. Warner Brothers. 1996.

When Time Ran Out. Dir. James Goldstone. Warner Brothers. 1980.

Notes

[i] “New Hollywood” refers to a period in the late-1960s and early 1970s when a wave of new American directors began producing films that moved against the classic Hollywood cinema grain. New Hollywood films, such as Bonnie & Clyde (1967) and The French Connection (1971), resisted traditional Hollywood narrative techniques, used grittier film methods, and often valorised the anti-hero at the centre of the story (Berliner 2010 51).

[ii] It is beyond the scope of this paper but also see The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard [Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958] for a comprehensive rumination on the poetics and subjective meanings invested in physical spaces.

[iii] Winters was nominated for multiple Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress, winning for her roles in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965). In most of her film work (like A Place in the Sun [1951] and Lolita [1962]), Winters was often sidelined to a supporting role, with her characters later killed from the narrative. Her roles in the aforementioned films see her play a very emotional, sometimes hysterical female character. In A Place in the Sun and Lolita she is convinced that her male partner is cheating on her. (Which, in fact, prove correct in both films.)

Bio: Nathan Smith is a graduate student at the University of Melbourne specialising in queer and star studies. He is also a freelance culture writer whose work has appeared in The Daily Beast, The New Republic, and Salon.

Abstract: The preservation of digital media in the context of heritage work is both seductive and daunting. The potential replication of human experiences afforded by computation and realised in virtual environments is the seductive part. The work involved in realising this potential is the daunting side of digital collection, curation, and preservation. In this lecture, I will consider two questions. First, Is the lure of perfect capture of data or the reconstruction of “authentic” experiences of historical software an attainable goal? And if not, how might reconsidering the project as moments of enacting rather than re-enacting provide a different impetus for making born digital heritage?

Keynote address originally delivered at the Born Digital and Cultural Heritage Conference, Melbourne, 19 June 2014

Let’s begin with a question. When did libraries, archives, and museums begin to think about software history collections? The answer: In the late 1970s. The Charles Babbage Institute (CBI) and the History of Computing Committee of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS), soon to be a sponsor of CBI, were both founded in 1978. The AFIPS committee produced a brochure called “Preserving Computer-Related Source Materials.” Distributed at the National Computer Conference in 1979, it is the earliest statement I have found about preserving software history. It says,

If we are to fully understand the process of computer and computing developments as well as the end results, it is imperative that the following material be preserved: correspondence; working papers; unpublished reports; obsolete manuals; key program listings used to debug and improve important software; hardware and componentry engineering drawings; financial records; and associated documents and artifacts. (“Preserving …” 4)

Mostly paper records. The recommendations say nothing about data files or executable software, only nodding to the museum value of hardware artefacts for “esthetic and sentimental value.” The brochure says that artefacts provide “a true picture of the mind of the past, in the same way as the furnishings of a preserved or restored house provides a picture of past society.” One year later, CBI received its first significant donation of books and archival documents from George Glaser, a former president of AFIPS. Into the 1980s history of computing collections meant documentation: archival records, publications, ephemera and oral histories.

Software preservation trailed documentation and historical projects by a good two decades. The exception was David Bearman, who left the Smithsonian in 1986 to create a company called Archives & Museum Informatics (AHI). He began publishing the Archival Informatics Newsletter in 1987 (later called Archives & Museum Informatics). As one of its earliest projects, AHI drafted policies and procedures for a “Software Archives” at the Computer History Museum (CHM) then located in Boston. By the end of 1987, Bearman published the first important study of software archives under the title Collecting Software: A New Challenge for Archives & Museums. (Bearman, Collecting Software; see also Bearman, “What Are/Is Informatics?”)

In his report, Bearman alternated between frustration and inspiration. Based on a telephone survey of companies and institutions, he wrote that “the concept of collecting software for historical research purposes had not occurred to the archivists surveyed; perhaps, in part, because no one ever asks for such documentation!” (Bearman, Collecting Software 25-26.) He learned that nobody he surveyed was planning software archives. Undaunted, he produced a report that carefully considered software collecting as a multi-institutional endeavor, drafting collection policies and selection criteria, use cases, a rough “software thesaurus” to provide terms for organizing a software collection, and a variety of practices and staffing models. Should some institution accept the challenge, here were tools for the job.

Well, here we are, nearly thirty years later. We can say that software archives and digital repositories finally exist. We have made great progress in the last decade with respect to repository technology and collection development. Looking back to the efforts of the 1980s, one persistent issue raised as early as the AFIPS brochure in 1978 is the relationship between collections of historical software and archival documentation about that software. This is an important issue. Indeed, it is today, nearly forty years later, still one of the key decision points for any effort to build research collections aiming to preserve digital heritage or serve historians of software. Another topic that goes back to Bearman’s report is a statement of use cases for software history. Who is interested in historical software and what will they do with it? Answers to this fundamental question must continue to drive projects in digital preservation and software history.

As we consider the potential roles to be played by software collections in libraries and museums, we immediately encounter vexing questions about how researchers of the future will use ancient software. Consider that using historical software now in order to experience it in 2014 and running that software in 2014 to learn what it was like when people operated it thirty years ago are two completely different use cases. This will still be true in 2050. This may seem like an obvious point, but it is important to understand its implications. An analogy might help. I am not just talking about the difference between watching “Gone with the Wind” at home on DVD versus watching it in a vintage movie house in a 35mm print – with or without a live orchestra. Rather I mean the difference between my experience in a vintage movie house today – when I can find one – and the historical experience of, say, my grandfather during the 1930s. My experience is what it is, not what his was. So much of this essay will deal with the complicated problem of enacting a contemporary experience to re-enact a historical experience and what it has to do with software preservation. I will consider three takes on this problem: the historian’s, the media archaeologist’s, and the re-enactor.

Take 1. The Historian

Take one. The historian. Historians enact the past by writing about it. In other words, historians tell stories. This is hardly a revelation. Without meaning to trivialize the point, I cannot resist pointing out that “story” is right there in “hi-story” or that the words for story and history are identical in several languages, including French and German. The connections between story-telling and historical narrative have long been a major theme in writing about the methods of history, that is, historiography. In recent decades, this topic has been mightily influenced by the work of Hayden White, author of the much-discussed Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, published in 1973.

White’s main point about historians is that History is less about subject matter and source material and more about how historians write.

He tells us that historians do not simply arrange events culled from sources in correct chronological order. Such arrangements White calls Annals or Chronicles. The authors of these texts merely compile lists of events. The work of the historian begins with the ordering of these events in a different way. Hayden writes in The Content of the Form that in historical writing, “the events must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence.” (White, Content of the Form 5) How do historians do this? They create narrative discourses out of sequential chronicles by making choices. These choices involve the form, effect and message of their stories. White puts choices about form, for example, into categories such as argument, ideology and emplotment. There is no need in this essay to review all of the details of every such choice. The important takeaway is that the result of these choices by historians is sense-making through the structure of story elements, use of literary tropes and emphasis placed on particular ideas. In a word, plots. White thus gives us the enactment of history as a form of narrative or emplotment that applies established literary forms such as comedy, satire, and epic.

In his book Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect, White writes about the “events, persons, structures and processes of the past” that “it is not their pastness that makes them historical. They become historical only in the extent to which they are represented as subjects of a specifically historical kind of writing.” (White, Figural Realism 2.) It is easy to take away from these ideas that history is a kind of literature. Indeed, this is the most controversial interpretation of White’s historiography.

My purpose in bringing Hayden White to your attention is to insist that there is a place in game and software studies for this “historical kind of writing.” I mean writing that offers a narrative interpretation of something that happened in the past. Game history and software history need more historical writing that has a point beyond adding events to the chronicles of game development or putting down milestones of the history of the game industry. We are only just beginning to see good work that pushes game history forward into historical writing and produces ideas about how these historical narratives will contribute to allied works in fields such as the history of computing or the history of technology more generally.

Allow me one last point about Hayden White as a take on enactment. Clearly, history produces narratives that are human-made and human-readable. They involve assembling story elements and choosing forms. How then do such stories relate to actual historical events, people, and artifacts? Despite White’s fondness for literary tropes and plots, he insists that historical narrative is not about imaginary events. If historical methods are applied properly, the resulting narrative according to White is a “simulacrum.” He writes in his essay on “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory,” that history is a “mimesis of the story lived in some region of historical reality, and insofar as it is an accurate imitation, it is to be considered a truthful account thereof.” (White, “The Question of Narrative …” 3.) Let’s keep this idea of historical mimesis in mind as we move on to takes two and three.

Take 2. The Media Archaeologist

My second take is inspired by the German media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst. As with Hayden White, my remarks will fall far short of a critical perspective on Ernst’s work. I am looking for what he says to me about historical software collections and the enactment of media history.

Hayden White put our attention on narrative; enacting the past is storytelling. Ernst explicitly opposes Media Archaeology to historical narrative. He agrees in Digital Memory and the Archive, that “Narrative is the medium of history.” By contrast, “the technological reproduction of the past … works without any human presence because evidence and authenticity are suddenly provided by the technological apparatus, no longer requiring a human witness and thus eliminating the irony (the insight into the relativity) of the subjective perspective.” (Ernst, Loc. 1053-1055.) Irony, it should be noted, is one of White’s favourite tropes for historical narrative.

White tells us that historical enactment is given to us as narrative mimesis, with its success given as the correspondence of history to some lived reality. Ernst counters by giving us enactment in the form of playback.

In an essay called “Telling versus Counting: A Media-Archaeological Point of View,” Ernst plays with the notion that, “To tell as a transitive verb means ‘to count things’.” The contrast with White here relates to the difference in the German words erzählen (narrate) and zählen (count), but you also find it in English: recount and count. Ernst describes historians as recounters: “Modern historians … are obliged not just to order data as in antiquaries but also to propose models of relations between them, to interpret plausible connections between events.” (Ernst, Loc. 2652-2653) In another essay, aptly subtitled “Method and Machine versus the History and Narrative of Media,” Ernst adds that mainstream histories of technology and mass media as well as their counter-histories are textual performances that follow “a chronological and narrative ordering of events.” He observes succinctly that, “It takes machines to temporarily liberate us from such limitations.” (Ernst, Loc. 1080-1084)

Where do we go with Ernst’s declaration in “Telling versus Counting,” that “There can be order without stories”? We go, of course, directly to the machines. For Ernst, media machines are transparent in their operation, an advantage denied to historians. We play back historical media on historical machines, and “all of a sudden, the historian’s desire to preserve the original sources of the past comes true at the sacrifice of the discursive.” We are in that moment directly in contact with the past.

In “Method and Machine”, Ernst offers the concept of “media irony” as a response to White’s trope of historical irony. He says,

Media irony (the awareness of the media as coproducers of cultural content, with the medium evidently part of the message) is a technological modification of Hayden White’s notion that “every discourse is always as much about discourse itself as it is about the objects that make up its subject matter. (Ernst, Loc. 1029-1032)

As opposed to recounting, counting in Ernst’s view has to do with the encoding and decoding of signals by media machines. Naturally, humans created these machines. This might be considered as another irony, because humans- have thereby “created a discontinuity with their own cultural regime.” We are in a realm that replaces narrative with playback as a form of direct access to a past defined by machine sequences rather than historical time. (Ernst, Loc. 1342-1343)

Ernst draws implications from media archaeology for his closely connected notion of the multimedia archive. In “Method and Machine,” he says, “With digital archives, there is, in principle, no more delay between memory and the present but rather the technical option of immediate feedback, turning all present data into archival entries and vice versa.” In “Telling versus Counting,” he portrays “a truly multimedia archive that stores images using an image-based method and sound in its own medium … And finally, for the first time in media history, one can archive a technological dispositive in its own medium.” (Ernst, Loc. Loc. 1745-1746; 2527-2529.) Not only is the enactment of history based on playback inherently non-discursive, but the very structure of historical knowledge is written by machines.

With this as background, we can turn to the concrete manifestation of Ernst’s ideas about the Multimedia Archive. This is the lab he has created in Berlin. The website for Ernst’s lab describes The Media Archaeological Fundus (MAF) as “a collection of various electromechanical and mechanical artefacts as they developed throughout time. Its aim is to provide a perspective that may inspire modern thinking about technology and media within its epistemological implications beyond bare historiography.” (Media Archaeological Fundus) Ernst explained the intention behind the MAF in an interview with Lori Emerson as deriving from the need to experience media “in performative ways.” So he created an assemblage of media and media technologies that could be operated, touched, manipulated and studied directly. He said in this interview, “such items need to be displayed in action to reveal their media essentiality (otherwise a medium like a TV set is nothing but a piece of furniture).” (Owens) Here is media archaeology’s indirect response to the 1979 AFIPS brochure’s suggestion that historical artifacts serve a purpose similar to furnishings in a preserved house.

The media-archaeological take on enacting history depends on access to artifacts and, in its strongest form, on their operation. Even when its engagement with media history is reduced to texts, these must be “tested against the material evidence.” This is the use case for Playback as an enactment of software history.

Take 3. The Re-enactor

Take three. The Re-enactor. Authenticity is an important concept for digital preservation.   A key feature of any digital archive over the preservation life-cycle of its documents and software objects is auditing and verification of authenticity, as in any archive. Access also involves authenticity, as any discussion of emulation or virtualization will bring up the question of fidelity to an historical experience of using software.

John Walker (of AutoDesk and Virtual Reality fame) created a workshop called Fourmilab to work on personal projects such as an on-line museum “celebrating” Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. This computer programming heritage work includes historical documents and a Java-based emulator of the Engine. Walker says, “Since we’re fortunate enough to live in a world where Babbage’s dream has been belatedly realised, albeit in silicon rather than brass, we can not only read about The Analytical Engine but experience it for ourselves.” The authenticity of this experience – whatever that means for a machine that never existed – is important to Walker. In a 4500-word essay titled, “Is the Emulator Authentic,” he tells us that, “In order to be useful, an emulator program must be authentic—it must faithfully replicate the behaviour of the machine it is emulating.” By extension, the authenticity of a preserved version of the computer game DOOM in a digital repository could be audited by verifying that it can properly run a DOOM demo file. The same is true for Microsoft Word and a historical document in the Word format. This is a machine-centered notion of authenticity; we used it in the second Preserving Virtual Worlds project as a solution to the significant properties problem for software. (Walker, “Introduction;” Walker, “Analytical Engine.”)

All well and good. However, I want to address a different authenticity. Rather than judging authenticity in terms of playback, I would like to ask what authenticity means for the experience of using software. Another way of putting this question is to ask what we are looking for in the re-enactment of historical software use. So we need to think about historical re-enactment.

I am not a historical re-enactor, at least not the kind you are thinking of. I have never participated in the live recreation or performance of a historical event. Since I have been playing historical simulations – a category of boardgames – for most of my life, perhaps you could say that I re-enact being a historical military officer by staring at maps and moving units around on them. It’s not the same thing as wearing period uniforms and living the life, however.

Anyway, I need a re-enactor. In his 1998 book Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz described historical re-enactment in its relationship to lived heritage. (Horwitz) His participant-journalist reportage begins at a chance encounter with a group of “hard-core” Confederate re-enactors. Their conversation leads Horwitz on a year-long voyage through the American South. A featured character in Confederates in the Attic is the re-enactor Robert Lee Hodge, a waiter turned Confederate officer. He took Horwitz under his wing and provided basic training in re-enactment. Hodge even became a minor celebrity due to his role in the book.

Hodges teaches Horwitz the difference between hard-core and farby (i.e., more casual) re-enactment. He tells Horwitz about dieting to look sufficiently gaunt and malnourished, the basics of “bloating” to resemble a corpse on the battlefield, what to wear, what not to wear, what to eat, what not to eat, and so on. It’s remarkable how little time he spends on martial basics. One moment sticks out for me. During the night after a hard day of campaigning Horwitz finds himself in the authentic situation of being wet, cold and hungry. He lacks a blanket, so he is given basic instruction in the sleeping technique of the Confederate infantryman: “spooning.” According to the re-enactor Scott Cross, “Spooning is an old term for bundling up together in bed like spoons placed together in the silver chest.” (Horwitz) Lacking adequate bedding and exposed to the elements, soldiers bunched up to keep warm. So that’s what Horwitz does, not as an act of mimesis or performance per se, but in order to re-experience the reality of Civil War infantrymen.

It interested me that of all the re-enactment activities Horwitz put himself through, spooning reveals a deeper commitment to authenticity than any of the combat performances he describes. It’s uncomfortable and awkward, so requires dedication and persistence. Sleep becomes self-conscious, not just in order to stick with the activity, but because the point of it is to recapture a past experience of sleeping on the battlefield. Since greater numbers of participants are needed for re-enacting a battle than sleep, more farbs (the less dedicated re-enactors) show up and thus the general level of engagement declines. During staged battles, spectators, scripting, confusion and accidents all interfere with the experience. Immersion breaks whenever dead soldiers pop up on the command, “resurrect.” In other words, performance takes over primacy from the effort to re-experience. It is likely that many farbs dressed up for battle are content to find a hotel to sleep in.

Specific attention to the details of daily life might be a reflection of recent historical work that emphasizes social and cultural histories of the Civil War period, rather than combat histories. But that’s not my takeaway from the spooning re-enactors. Rather, it’s the standard of authenticity that goes beyond performance of a specific event (such as a battle) to include life experience as a whole. Horvitz recalled that,

Between gulps of coffee—which the men insisted on drinking from their own tin cups rather than our ceramic mugs—Cool and his comrades explained the distinction. Hardcores didn’t just dress up and shoot blanks. They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time travel high, or what hardcores called a ‘period rush.’ (Horwitz, Loc. 153-157)

Stephen Gapps, an Australian curator, historian, and re-enactor has spoken of the “extraordinary lengths” re-enactors go to “acquire and animate the look and feel of history.” Hard-core is not just about marching, shooting and swordplay. I wonder what a “period rush” might be for the experience of playing Pitfall! in the mid-21st century. Shag rugs? Ambient New Wave radio? Caffeine-free cola? Will future re-enactors of historical software seek this level of experiential fidelity? Gapps, again: “Although reenactors invoke the standard of authenticity, they also understand that it is elusive – worth striving for, but never really attainable.” (Gapps 397)

Re-enactment offers a take on born-digital heritage that proposes a commitment to lived experience. I see some similarity here with the correspondence to lived historical experience in White’s striving for a discursive mimesis. Yet, like media archaeology, re-enactment puts performance above discourse, though it is the performance of humans rather than machines.

Playing Pitfalls

We now have three different ways to think about potential uses of historical software and born digital documentation. I will shift my historian’s hat to one side of my head now and slide up my curator’s cap. If we consider these takes as use cases, do they help us decide how to allocate resources to acquire, preserve, describe and provide access to digital collections?

In May 2013, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the U.S. Library of Congress (henceforth: LC) held a conference called Preserving.exe. The agenda was to articulate the “problems and opportunities of software preservation.” In my contribution to the LC conference report issued a few months later, I described three “lures of software preservation.” (Lowood) These are potential pitfalls as we move from software collections to digital repositories and from there to programs of access to software collections. The second half of this paper will be an attempt to introduce the three lures of software preservation to the three takes on historical enactment.

1. The Lure of the Screen

Let’s begin with the Lure of the Screen. This is the idea that what counts in digital media is what is delivered to the screen. This lure pops up in software preservation when we evaluate significant properties of software as surface properties (graphics, audio, haptics, etc).

This lure of the screen is related to what media studies scholars such as Nick Montfort, Mark Sample and Matt Kirschenbaum have dubbed (in various but related contexts) “screen essentialism.” If the significant properties of software are all surface properties, then our perception of interaction with software tells us all we need to know. We check graphics, audio, responses to our use of controllers, etc., and if they look and act as they should, we have succeeded in preserving an executable version of historical software. These properties are arguably the properties that designers consider as the focus of user interaction and they are the easiest to inspect and verify directly.

The second Preserving Virtual Worlds project was concerned primarily with identifying significant properties of interactive game software. On the basis of several case sets and interviews with developers and other stakeholders, we concluded that isolating surface properties, such as image colourspace as one example, while significant for other media such as static images, is not a particularly useful approach to take for game software. With interactive software, significance appears to be variable and contextual, as one would expect from a medium in which content is expressed through a mixture of design and play, procedurality and emergence. It is especially important that software abstraction levels are not “visible” on the surface of play. It is difficult if not impossible to monitor procedural aspects of game design and mechanics, programming and technology by inspecting properties expressed on the screen.

The preservation lifecycle for software is likely to include data migration. Access to migrated software will probably occur through emulation. How do we know when our experience of this software is affected by these practices? One answer is that we audit significant properties, and as we now know, it will be difficult to predict which characteristics are significant. An alternative or companion approach for auditing the operation of historical software is to verify the execution of data files. The integrity of the software can be evaluated by comparison to documented disk images or file signatures such as hashes or checksums. However, when data migration or delivery environments change the software or its execution environment, this method is inadequate. We must evaluate software performance. Instead of asking whether the software “looks right,” we can check if it runs verified data-sets that meet the specifications of the original software. Examples range from word processing documents to saved game and replay files. Of course, visual inspection of the content plays a role in verifying execution by the software engine; failure will not always be clearly indicated by crashes or error messages. Eliminating screen essentialism does not erase surface properties altogether.

The three takes compel us to think about the screen problem in different ways. First, the Historian is not troubled by screen essentialism. His construction of a narrative mimesis invokes a selection of source materials that may or may not involve close reading of personal gameplay, let alone focus on surface properties. On the other hand, The Re-enactor’s use of software might lead repositories to fret about what the user sees, hears and feels. It makes sense with this use case to think about the re-enactment as occurring at the interface. If a repository aims to deliver a re-enacted screen experience, it will need to delve deeply into questions of significant properties and their preservation.

Screen essentialism is also a potential problem for repositories that follow the path of Media Archaeology. It is unclear to me how a research site like the MAF would respond to digital preservation practices based on data migration and emulation. Can repositories meet the requirements of media archaeologists without making a commitment to preservation of working historical hardware to enable playback from original media? It’s not just that correspondence to surface characteristics is a significant property for media archaeologists. Nor is the Lure of the Screen a criticism of Media Archaelogy. I propose instead that it is a research problem. Ernst’s vision of a Multimedia Archive is based on the idea that media archaeology moves beyond playback to reveal mechanisms of counting. This machine operation clearly is not a surface characteristic. Ernst would argue, I think, that this counting is missed by an account of what is seen on the screen. So let’s assign the task of accounting for counting to the Media Archaeologist, which means showing us how abstraction layers in software below the surface can be revealed, audited and studied.

2. The Lure of the Authentic Experience

I have already said quite a bit about authenticity. Let me explain now why I am sceptical about an authentic experience of historical software, and why this is an important problem for software collections.

Everyone in game or software studies knows about emulation. Emulation projects struggle to recreate an authentic experience of operating a piece of software such as playing a game. Authenticity here means that the use experience today is like it was. The Lure of the Authentic Experience tells digital repositories at minimum not to preserve software in a manner that would interfere with the production of such experiences. At maximum, repositories deliver authentic experiences, whether on-site or on-line. A tall order. In the minimum case, the repository provides software and collects hardware specifications, drivers or support programs. The documentation provides software and hardware specifications. Researchers use this documentation to reconstruct the historical look-and-feel of software to which they have access. In the maximum case, the repository designs and builds access environments. Using the software authentically would then probably mean a trip to the library or museum with historical or bespoke hardware. The reading room becomes the site of the experience.

I am not happy to debunk the Authentic Experience. Authenticity is a concept fraught not just with intellectual issues, but with registers ranging from nostalgia and fandom to immersion and fun. It is a minefield. The first problem is perhaps an academic point, but nonetheless important: Authenticity is always constructed. Whose lived experience counts as “authentic” and how has it been documented? Is the best source a developer’s design notes? The memory of someone who used the software when it was released? A marketing video? The researcher’s self-reflexive use in a library or museum? If a game was designed for kids in 1985, do you have to find a kid to play it in 2050? In the case of software with a long history, such as Breakout or Microsoft Word, how do we account for the fact that the software was used on a variety of platforms – do repositories have to account for all of them? For example, does the playing of DOOM “death match” require peer-to-peer networking on a local area network, a mouse-and-keyboard control configuration and a CRT display? There are documented cases of different configurations of hardware: track-balls, hacks that enabled multiplayer via TCPIP, monitors of various shapes and sizes, and so on. Which differences matter?

A second problem is that the Authentic Experience is not always that useful to the researcher, especially the researcher studying how historical software executes under the hood. The emulated version of a software program often compensates for its lack of authenticity by offering real-time information about system states and code execution. A trade-off for losing authenticity thus occurs when the emulator shows the underlying machine operation, the counting, if you will. What questions will historians of technology, practitioners of code studies or game scholars ask about historical software? I suspect that many researchers will be as interested in how the software works as in a personal experience deemed authentic.   As for more casual appreciation, the Guggenheim’s Seeing Double exhibition and Margaret Hedstrom’s studies of emulation suggest that exhibition visitors actually prefer reworked or updated experiences of historical software. (Hedstrom, Lee, et al.; Jones)

This is not to say that original artefacts – both physical and “virtual” – will not be a necessary part of the research process. Access to original technology provides evidence regarding its constraints and affordances. I put this to you not as a “one size fits all” decision but as an area of institutional choice based on objectives and resources.

The Re-enactor, of course, is deeply committed to the Authentic Experience. If all we offer is emulation, what do we say to him, besides “sorry.” Few digital repositories will be preoccupied with delivering authentic experiences as part of their core activity. The majority are likely to consider a better use of limited resources to be ensuring that validated software artefacts and contextual information are available on a case-by-case basis to researchers who do the work of re-enactment. Re-enactors will make use of documentation. Horwitz credits Robert Lee Hodge with an enormous amount of research time spent at the National Archives and Library of Congress. Many hours of research with photographs and documents stand behind his re-enactments. In short, repositories should let re-enactors be the re-enactors.

Consider this scenario for software re-enactment. You are playing an Atari VCS game with the open-source Stella emulator. It bothers you that viewing the game on your LCD display differs from the experience with a 1980s-era television set. You are motivated by this realization to contribute code to the Stella project for emulating a historical display. It is theoretically possible that you could assemble everything needed to create an experience that satisfies you – an old television, adapters, an original VCS, the software, etc. (Let’s not worry about the shag rug and the lava lamp.) You can create this personal experience on your own, then write code that matches it. My question: Is the result less “authentic” if you relied on historical documentation such as video, screenshots, technical specifications, and other evidence available in a repository to describe the original experience? My point is that repositories can cooperatively support research by re-enactors who create their version of the experience. Digital repositories should consider the Authentic Experience as more of a research problem than a repository problem.

3. The Lure of the Executable

The Lure of the Executable evaluates software preservation in terms of success at building collections of software that can be executed on-demand by researchers.

Why do we collect historical software? Of course, the reason is that computers, software, and digital data have had a profound impact on virtually every aspect of recent history. What should we collect? David Bearman’s answer in 1987 was the “software archive.” He distinguished this archive from what I will call the software library. The archive assembles documentation; the library provides historical software. The archive was a popular choice in the early days. Margaret Hedstrom reported that attendees at the 1990 Arden Conference on the Preservation of Microcomputer Software “debated whether it was necessary to preserve software itself in order to provide a sense of ‘touch and feel’ or whether the history of software development could be documented with more traditional records.” (Hedstrom and Bearman) In 2002, the Smithsonian’s David Allison wrote about collecting historical software in museums that, “supporting materials are often more valuable for historical study than code itself. They provide contextual information that is critical to evaluating the historical significance of the software products.” He concluded that operating software is not a high priority for historical museums. (Allison 263-65; cf. Shustek)

Again, institutional resources are not as limitless as the things we would like to do with software. Curators must prioritize among collections and services. The choice between software archive and library is not strictly binary, but choices still must be made.

I spend quite a bit of my professional life in software preservation projects. The end-product of these projects is at least in part the library of executable historical software. I understand the Lure of the Executable and the reasons that compel digital repositories to build collections of verified historical software that can be executed on-demand by researchers. This is the Holy Grail of digital curation with respect to software history. What could possibly be wrong with this mission, if it can be executed?   As I have argued on other occasions there are several problems to consider. Let me give you two. The first is that software does not tell the user very much about how it has previously been used. In the best case, application software in its original use environment might display a record of files created by previous users, such as a list of recently opened files found in many productivity titles like Microsoft Office. The more typical situation is that software is freshly installed from data files in the repository and thus completely lacks information about its biography, for want of a better term.

The second, related problem is fundamental. Documentation that is a prerequisite for historical studies of software is rarely located in software. It is more accurate to say that this documentation surrounds software in development archives (including source code) and records of use and reception. It is important to understand that this is not just a problem for historical research. Documentation is also a problem for repositories. If contextual information such as software dependencies or descriptions of relationships among objects is not available to the repository and all the retired software engineers who knew the software inside-and-out are gone – it may be impossible to get old software to run.

Historians, of course, will usually be satisfied with the Archive. Given limited resources, is it reasonable to expect that the institutions responsible for historical collections of documentation will be able to reconcile such traditional uses with other methods of understanding historical computing systems? The Re-enactor will want to run software, and the Media Archaeologist will not just want access to a software library, but to original media and hardware in working order. These are tall orders for institutional repositories such as libraries and archives, though possibly a better fit to the museum or digital history centre.

In Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence, James Newman is not optimistic about software preservation and he describes how the marketing of software has in some ways made this a near impossibility. He is not as pessimistic about video game history, however. In a section of his book provocatively called “Let Videogames Die,” he argues that a documentary approach to gameplay might be a more pragmatic enterprise than the effort to preserve playable games. He sees this as a “shift away from conceiving of play as the outcome of preservation to a position that acknowledges play as an indivisible part of the object of preservation.” (Newman 160) In other words, what happens when we record contemporary use of software to create historical documentation of that use? Does this activity potentially reduce the need for services that provide for use at any given time in the future? This strikes me as a plausible historical use case, but not one for re-enactment or media archaeology.

Software archives or software libraries? That is the question. Is it nobler to collect documentation or to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous software installations? The case for documentation is strong. The consensus among library and museum curators (including myself) is almost certainly that documents from source code to screenshots are a clear win for historical studies of software. Historians, however, will not be the only visitors to the archive. But there are other reasons to collect documentation. One of the most important reasons, which I briefly noted above, is that software preservation requires such documentation. In other words, successful software preservation activities are dependent upon technical, contextual and rights documentation. And of course, documents tell re-enactors how software was used and can help media archaeologists figure out what their machines are showing or telling them. But does documentation replace the software library? Is it sufficient to build archives of software history without libraries of historical software? As we have seen, this question was raised nearly forty years ago and remains relevant today. My wish is that this question of the relationship between documentation and software as key components of digital heritage work stir conversation among librarians, historians, archivists and museum curators. This conversation must consider that there is likely to be a broad palette of use cases such as the historian, media archaeologist and re-enactor, as well as many others not mentioned here. It is unlikely that any one institution can respond to every one of these use cases. Instead, the more likely result is a network of participating repositories, each of which will define priorities and allocate resources according to both their specific institutional contexts and an informed understanding of the capabilities of partner institutions.

References

Allison, David K. “Preserving Software in History Museums: A Material Culture Approach. Ed. Ulf Hashagen, Reinhard Keil-Slawik and Arthur L. Norberg. History of Computing: Software Issues. Berlin: Springer, 2002. 263-272.

Bearman, David. Collecting Software: A New Challenge for Archives and Museums. Archival Informatics Technical Report #2 (Spring 1987).

— “What Are/Is Informatics? And Especially, What/Who is Archives & Museum Informatics?” Archival Informatics Newsletter 1:1 (Spring 1987): 8.

Cross, Scott. “The Art of Spooning.” Atlantic Guard Soldiers’ Aid Society. 13 July 2016. Web. http://www.agsas.org/howto/outdoor/art_of_spooning.shtml. Originally published in The Company Wag 2, no. 1 (April 1989).

Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. (Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press, 2012). Kindle edition.

Gapps, Stephen. “Mobile monuments: A view of historical reenactment and authenticity from inside the costume cupboard of history.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 13:3 (2009): 395-409.

Hedstrom, Margaret L., Christopher A. Lee, Judith S. Olson and Clifford A. Lampe, “‘The Old Version Flickers More’: Digital Preservation from the User’s Perspective.” The American Archivist, 69: 1 (Spring – Summer 2006): 159-187.

Hedstrom, Margaret L., and David Bearman, “Preservation of Microcomputer Software: A Symposium,” Archives and Museum Informatics 4:1 (Spring 1990): 10.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. Kindle Edition.

Jones, Caitlin. “Seeing Double: Emulation in Theory and Practice. The Erl King Study.” Paper presented to the Electronic Media Group, 14 June 2004. Electronic Media Group. Web. http://cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/emg/library/pdf/jones/Jones-EMG2004.pdf

Lowood, Henry. “The Lures of Software Preservation.” Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Software Preservation (October 2013): 4-11. Web. http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/multimedia/documents/PreservingEXE_report_final101813.pdf

Media Archaeological Fundus. Web. 21 Jan. 2016. http://www.medienwissenschaft.hu-berlin.de/medientheorien/fundus/media-archaeological-fundus

Newman, James. Best Before: Videogames, Supersession and Obsolescence. London: Routledge, 2012.

Owens, Trevor. “Archives, Materiality and the ‘Agency of the Machine’: An Interview with Wolfgang Ernst.” The Signal: Digital Preservation. Web. 8 February 2013. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2013/02/archives-materiality-and-agency-of-the-machine-an-interview-with-wolfgang-ernst/

“Preserving Computer-Related Source Materials.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 1 (Jan.-March 1980): 4-6.

Shustek, Len. “What Should We Collect to Preserve the History of Software?” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 28 (Oct.-Dec. 2006): 110-12.

Walker, John. “Introduction” to The Analytical Engine: The First Computer.” Fourmilab, 21 March 2016. Web. http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/

— “The Analytical Engine: Is the Emulator Authentic?,” Fourmilab, 21 March 2016. Web. http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/authentic.html

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987.

— Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000.

— “The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory.” In: History and Theory 23: 1 (Feb. 1984): 1-33.

Bio

Henry Lowood is Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections and for Film & Media Collections at Stanford University. He has led the How They Got Game project at Stanford University since 2000 and is the co-editor of The Machinima Reader and Debugging Game History, both published by MIT Press. Contact: lowood@stanford.edu

Abstract: In 1981, two Melbourne University students were hired part-time to write a text adventure game. The result was the game The Hobbit (Melbourne House, 1981), based on Tolkien’s book (Tolkien), which became one of the most successful text adventure games ever. The Hobbit was innovative in its use of non-deterministic gameplay, a full-sentence parser, the addition of graphics to a text adventure game and finally “emergent characters” – characters exhibiting apparent intelligence arising out of simple behaviours and actions – with whom the player had to interact in order to “solve” some of the game’s puzzles. This paper is a case history of developing The Hobbit, and covers the development process, the internal design, and the genesis of the ideas that made The Hobbit unique.

 

Figure 1.  C64/128 The Hobbit (disk version). Melbourne House.

Introduction

This paper is a case history of the development of the text adventure game, The Hobbit (Melbourne House, 1981). The game was a translation of Tolkien’s novel of the same name (Tolkien) into a game that could run on the first generation of home computers that were just beginning to hit the market.

As co-developer of The Hobbit, I offer my recollections of the development process, the internal design, and the genesis of the ideas that made the game unique. Those ideas included the use of non-deterministic gameplay – the game played differently every time and sometimes could not be completed due to key characters being killed early in the game – very different to other games, which had only a single path through the game and responded the same way each time they were played. The Hobbit contained a full-sentence parser that understood a subset of natural language, dubbed Inglish, as compared to the simple “verb noun” constructions accepted by other adventure games of the time. There were graphic renditions of some of the game locations, another groundbreaking addition to a text adventure game. And finally, “emergent characters” – non-player characters exhibiting apparent personalities and intelligence – with whom the player had to interact in order to solve some of the game’s puzzles. In combination, these features led to a game experience that transformed the industry.

Little has been written about the development of the first generation of text-based computer games; this case history provides insight into this developmental period in computer game history. I compare the development environment and the resulting game to the state-of-the-art in text adventure games of the time. Lastly, I discuss the legacy and recent revival of interest in the game.

“Let us not follow where the path may lead.
Let us go instead where there is no path,
And leave a trail.”

– Japanese Proverb

The Tenor of the Times 

It was early 1981. I was a Bachelor of Science student at Melbourne University, majoring in Computer Science (CS) and just starting my last year. These were the early days of Computer Science education, and the curricula required today for undergraduate Computer Science students had not yet been developed. In our classes we were studying topics like sort algorithms and data structures and operating systems such as BSD Unix. Another class focused on calculating rounding and truncation errors occurring as a result of a series of digital calculations. We were taught software development using a systems analysis method called HIPO[1] – Hierarchical Input-Process-Output, the best practice in structured programming – and that documenting our code was a good practice. Object-oriented programming was still in the future.

During our first couple of years in the CS program, programming projects were written using “mark sense cards”, which we marked up with pencils and fed into card readers after waiting in a long queue of students – sometimes for an hour or two to get a single run. You had to get the program running within a certain number of runs or the card reader would redistribute the lead across the cards, making them illegible.

By the time we reached the last year of the Bachelor’s degree, in our CS classes we were actually allowed to log onto a Unix machine in the lab and work there, if we could get access to a terminal (which often meant waiting for hours, or booking a timeslot, or waiting till late in the evening). We programmed in Pascal, Fortran, Assembler, C (our favorite), and Lisp. Our favorite editor was, universally, Vi. I remember programming a PDP8 in Assembler to run a toy train around a set of tracks, switching the tracks as instructed; we hand-assembled the program, typed it in and debugged it using a hexadecimal keypad.

By this time I’d built my own PC, from a project in an electronics hobbyist magazine. I’d purchased the mother board, which came as a peg-board with a printed circuit on it, minus any components or cross-wiring. I would go to the electronics parts store with my list of chips, resistors, capacitors and diodes, and solder for my soldering iron.  In the store they’d say, “tell your boyfriend we don’t have these” – it was not even considered possible that I might be the person purchasing them. The system had a small number of bytes – around 128 bytes, I believe (that is not a misprint) – of free memory, and used a black and white TV as a monitor. For this system we wrote programs out on paper in a simple Assembler, hand-assembled it and typed it in using a hexadecimal keypad. There was no save function, so whenever the system restarted we had to re-type in the program. It was quite impressive to see the programs we could develop in that amount of space.

I was used to being one of around 2-4 women in my university classes, whether it was a smaller class of 30 students or one of the massive Physics classes holding perhaps two or three hundred. Sexism was alive and kicking. The norm for women – for most of the fellow students at my all-girl high school, MacRobertson – was to become secretaries or nurses (although my closest friend for many of those years became a lawyer, traveling to the ‘Stans to negotiate for oil companies, and is now chairman of the board). One fellow student (luckily, I don’t remember who) gave me the ultimate compliment: “you’re bright, for a girl!” In self-defense, I partnered with another woman – Kerryn – for any pair projects. Whenever we had 4-person group projects we joined with another frequent pair, Phil Mitchell and Ray, who were amongst the few men willing to partner with us; these group experiences later led to me recruiting the other three to work at Melbourne House.

My game-playing experience was very limited. There was a Space Invaders arcade game in the lobby of the student union at the university that I sometimes played. For a while there was a game of Pong there, too. The Unix system featured an adventure game we called Adventure – Colossal Cave, also often referred to as Classic Adventure (CRL, 1976). In our last year I played it obsessively for some time, mapping out the “maze of twisty little passages”, until I had made it to through the game once. At that point it instantly lost interest for me, and I don’t believe I ever played it again. I was not aware of any other computer games.

State-of-the-art PC games were a very new thing – PCs were a very new thing – and at the time were written in Interpretive Basic by hobbyists. Sometimes the games were printed in magazines, taking maybe a page or two at most, and you could type them into any computer that had a Basic interpreter and play them. The code was generally written as a long list of if-then-else statements, and every action and the words to invoke that action was hard-coded. The game-play was pre-determined and static. Even if you purchased the game and loaded it (from the radio-cassette that it was shipped on), you could generally solve the puzzles by reading the code. The rare games that were shipped as compiled Basic could still be solved by dumping memory and reading the messages from the dump.

Getting the Job

I was working early Sunday mornings as a part-time computer operator, but wanted a job with more flexibility. On a notice board I found a small advertisement looking for students to do some programming, and called. I met Alfred (Fred) Milgrom, who had recently started a company he called “Melbourne House”, and he hired me on the spot to write a game for him. Fred was a bit of a visionary in thinking that hiring students with Computer Science background could perhaps do a better job than the general state-of-the-art of self-taught hobbyists.

Fred’s specifications to me were: “Write the best adventure game ever.” Period.

I told Phil Mitchell about the job, as I thought he had the right skills. I brought him along to talk to Fred, who hired him to work on the game with me. Kerryn and Ray joined us later that year to write short games in Basic for publication in the books that Melbourne House was publishing. These books featured a series of games, most of them about a page or two in length. The books were often sold along with a radio-cassette from which you could load the game rather than having to type it in yourself. Ray only stayed briefly, but Kerryn I think stayed for most of the year, and wrote many games. She’d sit at the keyboard and chuckle as she developed a new idea or played a game she’d just written.

Software Design, Cro-Magnon Style

So, what would “the best adventure game ever” look like? I started with the only adventure game I’d ever played: Classic Adventure. What did I not like about it? Well, once I’d figured out the map and solved the puzzles, I was instantly bored. It played the same way every time. Each Non-Player Character (NPC) was tied to a single location, and always did the same thing. Lastly, you had to figure out exactly the incantation the game expected; if the game expected “kill troll”, then any other command – “attack the troll”, for example – would get an error message. You could spend a long time trying to figure out what command the game developer intended you to issue; as a result, most adventure games tended to have the same actions, paired with the same vocabulary.

Phil and I split the game cleanly down the middle, with clearly defined interfaces between the two halves. I took what today we would call the game engine, physics engine and data structures (although those terms did not exist then). Phil took the interface and language portion. I don’t remember who had the original idea of a much more developed language than the standard “kill troll” style of language used by other text adventures of the time; my thinking stopped at the level of having synonyms available for the commands. I had almost no involvement in the parser; I remember overhearing conversations between Fred and Phil as the complexity of what they were aiming at increased. For a time, Stuart Richie was brought in to provide language expertise. However, his thinking was not well suited to what was possible to develop in Assembler in the space and time available, so, according to what Phil told me at the time, none of his design was used – although I suspect that being exposed to his thinking helped Phil crystallize what eventually became Inglish. No matter what the user entered – “take the sharp sword and excitedly hack at the evil troll”, say, he’d convert it to a simple (action, target) pair to hand off to me: “kill troll”, or perhaps, “kill troll with sword”.  Compound sentences would become a sequence of actions, so “take the hammer and hit Gandalf with it” would come to me as two actions: “pick up hammer”, followed by a next turn of “hit Gandalf with hammer”.

I put together the overall design for a game that would remove the non-language-related limitations within a couple of hours on my first day on the job. I knew I wanted to use generalized, abstracted data structures, with general routines that processed that structure and with exits for “special cases”, rather than the usual practice of the time of hard-coding the game-play.  My intent was that you could develop a new game by replacing the content of the data structures and the custom routines – a “game engine” concept I did not hear described until decades later. We even talked about developing a “game editor” that would allow gamers to develop their own adventure games by entering items into the data structures via an interface, but I believe it was never developed. I very early on decided that I wanted randomness to be a key feature of the game – recognizing that that meant the game could not always be solved, and accepting that constraint.

I envisaged three data structures to be used to support the game: a location database, a database of objects and a database of “characters”. The location “database” (actually, just a collection of records with a given structure) was pretty straightforward, containing a description of the location and, for each direction, a pointer to the location reached. There could also be an override routine to be called when going in a direction. The override allowed features or game problems to be added to the game map: for example, a door of limited size (so you could not pass through it while carrying too many items) or a trap to be navigated once specific constraints had been met. There’s a location (the Goblin’s Dungeon) that uses this mechanism to create a dynamic map, rather than having fixed connections to other locations: for each direction, an override routine is called that randomly picks a “next location” for the character to arrive in from a given list of possible locations. Another innovation in the location database occurred when Phil added pictures to specific locations, and drew them when the player entered one of those locations. Rather than representing the entire map of the Middle Earth in the game (as I might do today), I simplified it into a set of individual locations where noteworthy events occurred in the story, and represented those as a linked set of locations, with the links oriented in the directions as laid out on the map. So, for example, “go North” from one location would immediately take you to the next location North in the game where a significant event occurred. I did not then have a notion of variable travel time based on distance between the two locations.

Similarly, I conceived of an object database with a set of abstract characteristics and possible overrides, rather than hard-coding a list of possible player interactions with specific objects as was done in other games. Each object had characteristics and constraints that allowed me treat them generically: weight, size, and so on – in effect, a simple (by today’s standards) physics engine. An object could have the capability to act as a container, and a container could be transparent or opaque; a transparent container’s contents could be seen without having to open it first. There were generic routines that could be applied to all objects: for example, any object could be picked up by something bigger and stronger than it, or put into a bigger container (if there was enough room left in it). Some routines could be applied to any object that matched some set of characteristics; an object could also have a list of “special” routines associated with it that overrode the general routines. There was a general “turn on” routine that applied to lamps, for example, that could also be overridden for a magic lamp by a different, more complex “turn on” routine. I went through the book noting where objects were used to further the plot (swords, lamps, and most obviously, the ring), then added those objects to the game, with appropriate generic characteristics and actions (weight, the ability for lamps to be turned on) and special routines as needed (for example, the ring’s ability to make the wearer invisible).

Each non-player character (NPC) was also an object that began in an “alive” state, but could, due to events in the game, stop being alive – which allowed a player to, for example, use a dead dwarf as a weapon, in the absence of any other weapon). However, the physics engine caused “kill troll with sword” to inflict more damage than “kill troll with (dead) dwarf”.

In addition to regular object characteristics, each NPC had a “character”, stored in the third database. I conceived of an NPC’s character as being a set of actions that the NPC might perform, a sequence in which they generally performed them and a frequency of repetition. The individual actions were simple and were generally the same actions that a player could do (run in a given direction, attack another character, and so on); but again, these routines could be overridden for a specific character. The sequence could be fixed or flexible: an action could branch to a different part of the sequence and continue from there, or even jump to a random location in the sequence. The apparent complexity of the character comes from the length and flexibility of its action sequence; the character “emerges” as a result. For example, Gandalf’s short attention span and kleptomania were represented by a sequence like: “[go] <random direction>. [Pick up] <random object> [Say, “what’s this?”]. [Go] <random direction>. [Put down] <random object>.”

The division between inanimate object and NPC was left intentionally a little blurry, giving extra flexibility. For example, the object overrides could also be used to modify character behaviour. I actually coded an override where, if the player typed “turn on the angry dwarf”, he turned into a “randy dwarf” and followed the player around propositioning him.  If he was later turned off, he’d return to being the angry dwarf and start trying to kill any live character. Fred and Phil made me take that routine out.

In order to develop each character, I went through the book and, for each character, tried to identify common sequences of behavior that I could represent through a sequence of actions that would capture the “texture” of that character. Some characters were easy; for a troll, “{If no alive object in current location} [go] <random direction> {else} [kill] <random object with status ‘alive’>” was pretty much the whole list. Others were harder, such as characterizing Thorin; and yes, I did write the now-classic phrase, “Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.” (I hereby apologize for how frequently he said that; short character-action list, you see.) An action could invoke a general routine which was the same for all NPCs – like, choose a random direction and run, or choose a live object in the location and kill it; or, it could be an action specific only to this NPC, as with Thorin’s persistent singing (as seen in Figure 2). For Gandalf, the generic “pick up” routine was used under the covers, but overridden for Gandalf to utter “what’s this”.

Figure 2. Gandalf and Thorin exhibit classic behavior. Courtesy Winterdrake.

Sometimes an alternate behaviour list could be chosen based on events, as can be seen in Figure 2. For example, the friendly dwarf would become violent once he’d been attacked (or picked up). For a while, we had terrible trouble with all the NPCs showing up in one location and then killing each other before the player had the chance to work his way through the game, before I got the character profiles better adjusted. Some character would attack another, and once a battle was in progress any (otherwise friendly) character entering that location would be attacked and end up joining in. The same mechanism was used to allow the player to request longer-running actions from NPCs, such as asking a character to follow you when you needed them to help solve a puzzle in a (sometimes far) different location from where they were when you found them. In general the NPCs were programmed to interact with “another”, and did not differentiate whether the “other” was the player or not unless there was a game-related reason for doing so. The NPCs exhibited “emergent behaviour”; they just “played” the game themselves according to their character profile, including interacting with each other. In essence, the NPCs would do to each other almost anything that they could do to or with the player.

Phil programmed the interface to accept input from the player, and after each turn he would hand control to the NPC system, which would allow each (remaining) alive character to take a turn, as can be seen in Figures 2 and 3. For the time, this design was revolutionary; the model then was to have a single, non-mobile NPC in a single location, with only a couple of specific actions that were invoked once the player entered that location, and behaving the same way each time you played the game. Even in the arcade games of the time, we were able to identify that each object the player interacted with behaved the same way each time, and they did not interact with each other at all.

Figure 3. The player modifies Thorin’s default behavior – to the player’s cost.

At the beginning of the game, we would generate, for each NPC, a random starting point in that NPC’s action list, giving the game much of its random nature. This combination of factors led to the “emergent characters”; or, seen another way, “a bunch of other characters just smart enough to be profoundly, infuriatingly stupid” (Maher).

I quickly transitioned to the concept of the player merely being another character, with a self-generated action list. At some point I experienced the emergent nature of the characters while trying to debug and was joking about the fact that the characters could play the game without the player being there; that discussion led naturally to the famous “time passes” function, where, if the player took too long in taking his next action (or, chose to “wait”, as in Figure 1), the characters would each take another turn. This feature, which Melbourne House trademarked as
“Animaction” (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.), was another innovation not seen in prior text adventures, where game-play depended wholly on the player’s actions. (It is also noteworthy how many of the game’s innovations began as jokes. I now believe this to be true of much innovation; certainly it has been, for the innovations I’ve been involved in.)

The next, seemingly obvious step to me was to allow – or even require – the player to ask the NPCs to perform certain tasks for him (as seen in Figure 4), and to set up puzzles that required this kind of interaction in order to solve them. This addition added another layer of complexity to the game. As commented by one fan, “As most veteran Hobbit players know, a good way to avoid starvation in the game is to issue the command “CARRY ELROND” whilst in Rivendell. In the game Elrond is a caterer whose primary function is to give you lunch and if you carry him then he will continue to supply you with food throughout the game.”[2] Another had a less tolerant view: “Sometimes they do what you ask, but sometimes they’re feeling petulant. Perhaps the seminal Hobbit moment comes when you scream at Brand to kill the dragon that’s about to engulf you both in flames, and he answers, “No.” After spending some time with this collection of half-wits, even the most patient player is guaranteed to start poking at them with her sword at some point.”[3]

Figure 4. The Hobbit starting location, and a player action that I never thought of.

The non-determinism of the overall game meant that it was not, in general, possible to write down a solution to the game. There were specific puzzles in the game, however, and solutions to these puzzles could be written down and shared. However, people also found other ways to solve them than I’d anticipated. For example: “A friend of mine has discovered that you can get and carry both Elrond and Bard. Carrying Elrond with you can by quite useful as he continuously distributes free lunches. And, to be honest, carrying Bard is the only way I’ve found of getting him to the Lonely Mountain. There must be a better way.” (“Letters: Gollum’s Riddle”) As commented by a retrospective, “And actually, therein sort of lies the secret to enjoying the game, and the root of its appeal in its time. It can be kind of fascinating to run around these stage sets with all of these other crazy characters just to see what can happen — and what you can make happen.” (Maher)

Inglish

While I worked on the game, Phil designed, developed and wrote the language interpreter, later dubbed Inglish. I had little interest in linguistics, so I generally tuned out the long discussions that Fred and Phil had about it – and was supported in doing so by the encapsulation and simple interface between the two “halves” of the game, which prevented me needing to know any more.

Figure 5. Opening scene from one of many foreign language versions.

Every word was stored in the dictionary, and since only 5 bits are used to represent the English alphabet in lower-case ASCII, the other 3 bits were used by Phil to encode other information about speech parts (verb, adjective, adverb, noun), valid word usages, what pattern to use when pluralizing, and so on. I’ve seen screen images from versions of the game in other languages (e.g., Figure 5), but I do not know how the translations were done or how the design worked with these other languages.

Phil translated player commands into simple “verb object” commands to hand to me, with some allowed variations to allow for different action results. For example, I seem to remember that “viciously kill” would launch a more fierce attack, and use up more strength as a result, than just “kill”. Rather than a set of hard-coded messages (as was the norm), we generated the messages “on the fly” from the dictionary and a set of sentence templates. At the end of some action routine, I would have a pointer to a message template for that action. The template would contain indicators for where the variable parts of the message should be placed. I would then pass the message, the subject and object to the language engine. The engine would then generate the message, using, once again, spare bits for further customization.  To take a simple example, “Gandalf gives the curious map to you” used the same template as, say, “Thorin gives the axe to the angry dwarf”.

We were so limited by memory that we would adjust the size of the dictionary to fit the game into the desired memory size; so the number of synonyms available would sometimes decrease if a bug fix required more lines of code. It was a constant trade-off between game functionality and language richness. As a result of all the encoding, dumping memory – a common method of solving puzzles in other text adventures – provided no information for The Hobbit.

Software Development, Cro-Magnon-Style

Our initial development environment was a Dick Smith TRS80 look-alike, with 5 inch floppy drives. Initially I believe we used a 16k machine, then a 32k, and towards the end a 48k or perhaps 64k machine. Our target machine for the game was initially a 32k TRS80. During development, the Spectrum 64 was announced, and that became our new target. Game storage was on a cassette tape, played on a regular radio-cassette player. As the other systems became available we continued using the TRS80 platform as the development environment, and Phil took on the question of how to ports the game to other platforms.

We had a choice of two languages to use for development: Basic, or Assembler. We chose Assembler as we felt the added power offset the added difficulty in using the language.

During initial development, the only development tool available was a simple Notepad-like text editor, and the majority of code was written that way. Later I believe a Vi-like editor became available; even later, I have faint memories of a very early IDE that allowed us to edit, assemble the code and step through it (but that also inserted its own bugs from time to time).

We initially worked with the system’s existing random number generator, but realized that its pseudo-random nature made the game play the same way each time – against what I hoped to achieve. Phil then spent some time writing a “true” random number generator, experimenting with many sources of seed values before he was successful. He tried using the contents of various registers, but discovered that these were often the same values each time. He tried using the time, but the TRS80 did not have a built-in battery or time, and most people did not set the time each time they started the system – so again, if someone turned the machine on and loaded the game, we would get the same results each time. After some experimentation he finally succeeded, and the game – for better or worse, and sometimes for both – became truly random.

Debugging was a nightmare. Firstly, we were debugging machine code, initially without the advantage of an IDE; we ran the program, and when it crashed we tried to read the memory dumps. In Assembler, especially when pushing the memory limit of the system, the Basic programmer’s technique of inserting “print” statements to find out what is happening is not available. We had characters interacting with each other in distant parts of the game, and only actions in the current location were printed on the game player’s console. In one of several cases where a game feature was originally developed for other reasons, we initially wrote the “save” mechanism to help us debug parts of the game without having to start from the beginning each time. It then became part of the delivered version, allowing players to take advantage of the same function.

At some point, the idea of adding graphics came up, I think from Phil. Fred commissioned Kent Rees to draw the pictures, and Phil figured out how to draw them on the various systems; I do know that he adapted the pictures from the originals Kent provided in order to make them easier to draw. The first version of his code always drew the picture when you entered a location that had one; however, it was so slow and annoyed us (me) so much that Phil quickly added a switch to turn them off.

Sidelines

In between coding The Hobbit, we occasionally took time to work on other games. Fred would give us $20 to go and play arcade games, sometimes as often as each week, to see what other folk were doing and what the state of the art was in that industry. Someone in our group of four wrote a version of Pac-Man. We spent hours with one person playing Pac-Man, trying to get up to higher levels in the game, while the others leant over the arcade machine trying to figure out the algorithms that caused prizes to appear and how the behaviour changed across the game levels. We didn’t see it as piracy, as arcade games and home computers were at that time seen as being completely unrelated industries – it was more in the spirit of gaining ideas from another industry for application into ours.

Another game that we wrote was Penetrator (Melbourne House, 1981). Phil was the clear lead on that game while I worked on some pieces of it, and I think Kerryn may have worked on it a bit too.  It was a copy of the arcade game Scramble (Konami, 1981). Because of the speed (or lack thereof) of the processors at the time, we had to ensure that each separate path through the game took the same amount of time; even a difference of one “tstate” (processor state) between one path of an “if-then-else” to another would interfere with smooth motion, so we spent significant time calculating (by hand) the time taken by each path and choosing different Assembler instructions that would compensate for the differences (and given that “NO-op” took 2 tstates, it was not always easy). Another difficulty was getting the radars to turn smoothly, while handling the variable number of other activities taking place in the game. It took forever to get it “right”.

Figure 6. Screen shot from the game Penetrator

At the beginning we drew the screen bitmaps for all the landscapes on graph paper and then hand-calculated the hexadecimal representations of each byte for the screen buffer, but that became so tedious so quickly that Phil wrote an editor that we could use to create the landscapes. In the end the landscape editor was packaged with the game, as a feature.

Another “pressing” issue for shooter games of the time was that of keyboard debounce. At the time a computer keyboard consisted of an electrical grid, and when a key was pressed the corresponding horizontal and vertical lines would register a “high”. You checked the grid at regular intervals, and if any lines were registering high you used a map of the keyboard layout to identify the key that had been pressed. However, you had to stall for just the right amount of time before re-reading the keyboard; if you waited too long, the game seemed unresponsive, but if you read too quickly, you would read several key presses for each key press that the player intended. While it was possible to use the drivers that came with the keyboard, they did not respond quickly enough to use for interactive games. “Getting it right” was a tedious matter of spending hours fiddling with timings and testing.

Perhaps A Little Too Random

In addition to all the other randomness it exhibited, The Hobbit was also known to crash seemingly randomly. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, The Hobbit was a tough game to test. It was a much bigger game than others of the time. Unlike the other games, it was approximately 40k of hand-coded Assembler[4], as opposed to the commonly used interpreted Basic (a few more advanced games were shipped in compiled Basic). It was written without the benefit of formalized testing practices or automated test suites. The assembly and linking programs we used were also relatively new, and during development, we would find bugs in them. I remember spending hours debugging one time only to discover that the assembler had optimized away a necessary register increment, causing an infinite loop; I had a lot of trouble trying to invent a different coding sequence that prevented the assembler from removing the required increment. Altogether, I took away lessons about not letting your application get too far ahead of the ability of your infrastructure to support it.

Secondly, the game was non-deterministic; it was different every time it was played. It exhibited its own manifestation of chaos theory: small changes in starting conditions (initial game settings, all generated by the random number generator) would lead to large differences in how the game proceeded. Due to the “emergent characters”, we constantly had NPCs interacting in ways that had never been explicitly programmed and tested, or even envisioned. The game could crash because of something that happened in another location that was not visible to the player or to person testing the game, and we might never be able to identify or recreate the sequence of actions that led to it.

It was possible to have an instance of the game that was insoluble, if a key character required to solve a specific puzzle did not survive until needed (often due to having run into a dwarf on the rampage); this was a constraint I was happy to accept, though it frustrated some players. The ability to tell the NPCs what to do also meant that people told them things to do that we hadn’t accounted for. The very generality of the game engine – the physics, the language engine, and the ability for the player to tell characters what to do – led players to interact with the game in ways I’d never thought of, and that were certainly never tested. In some cases, they were things I didn’t realize the game was capable of.

Epilogue

The Hobbit was released in 1982 in Australia and the U.K. Figure 7 shows a typical packaging. It was an instant hit; amongst other awards, it won the Golden Joystick Award for Strategy Game of the Year in 1983, and came second for Best Game of the Year, after Jet-Pac. Penetrator came second in the Golden Joystick Best Arcade Game category, and Melbourne House came second for their Best Software House of the Year, after Jet-Pac’s publishers (“Golden Joystick Awards”). A couple of revisions were published with some improvements, including better graphics. Due to licensing issues it was some time before a U.S. release followed. The book was still covered by copyright and so the right to release had to be negotiated with the copyright holders, which were different in each country. The U.S. copyright holder had other plans for a future game. As a result, future book-based game ideas specifically chose books (such as Sherlock Holmes) that were no longer covered by copyright.

Figure 7. The Hobbit. Game release package.

At the end of 1981, I finished my Bachelor’s degree. We were beginning to discuss using the Sherlock Holmes mysteries as a next games project; I was not sure that the adventure game engine I’d developed was a good fit for the Sherlock style of puzzle solving, although there were definitely aspects that would translate across. However, I was also ready to start something new after a year of coding and debugging in Assembler. I’d proved that my ideas could work, and believed that the result Phil and I had produced was the desired one – an adventure game that solved all my frustrations with Classic Adventure, and in my mind (if not yet in other people’s) met Fred’s target of “the best adventure game ever”.

I interviewed with several major IT vendors, and took a job at IBM, as did Ray. Kerryn took a job in a mining company in Western Australia. Phil stayed on at Melbourne House (later Beam Software), the only member of our university programming team to continue on in the games industry. We eventually all lost touch.

During this time, I was unaware that the game had become a worldwide hit. Immersed in my new career, I lost touch with the nascent games industry. At IBM, I started at the same level as other graduates who had no experience with computers or programming; developing a game in Assembler was not considered professional or relevant experience. Initially I became an expert in the VM operating system (the inspiration and progenitor for VMWare, I’ve heard), which I still admire for the vision, simplicity and coherence of its design, before moving into other technical and consulting position. In late 1991 I left Australia to travel the world. I eventually stopped in Portland, Oregon, with a plan to return to Australia after 2 years – a plan that has been much delayed.

A 3-year stint in a global Digital Media business growth role for IBM U.S. in the early 2000’s brought me back in contact with games developers just as the movie and games industries were moving from proprietary to open-standards based hardware and infrastructure. The differences in development environments, with large teams and sophisticated supporting graphics and physics packages, brought home to me how far the games industry had come. But while I appreciate the physics engines and the quality of graphics that today can fool the eye into believing they are real, the basis of a good game has not changed: simple, compelling ideas still captivate and enchant people, as can be seen in the success of, for example, Angry Birds. I also believe that the constraints of limitations – such as small memories and slow processors – can lead to a level of innovation that less limited resources does not.

And Back Again

As the Internet era developed, I started receiving letters from fans of The Hobbit. The first person I recall tracking me down emailed me with an interview request for his Italian adventure fan-site in 2001, after what he said was a long, long search. The subsequent years made it easier to locate people on the Internet, and the emails became more frequent. At times I get an email a week from people telling me the impact the game had on the course of their lives.

In 2006, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) held an exhibition entitled “Hits of the 80s: Aussie games that rocked the world” (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), featuring The Hobbit. It felt a little like having a museum retrospective while still alive: a moment of truth of how much things have changed, and at the same time how little. The games lab curator, Helen Stuckey, has since written a research paper about the challenge of collecting and exhibiting videogames for a museum audience, using The Hobbit as an example (Stuckey).

In late 2009 I took an education leave of absence from IBM US to study for a Masters/PhD in Computer Science at Portland State University. (IBM and I have since parted company.) When I arrived one of the PhD students, who had played The Hobbit in Mexico as a boy, recognized my name and asked me to present on it. While searching the Internet for graphics for the presentation, I discovered screen shots in many different languages and only then began to realize the worldwide distribution and impact the game had had. Being in a degree program while describing work I’d done during my previous university degree decades before caused many conflicting emotions. I was also amazed at the attendance and interest from the faculty and other students.

In 2012, the 30-year anniversary of the release, several Internet sites and magazines published retrospectives; a couple contacted me for interviews, while others worked solely from published sources. The same year I was contacted by a fan who had been inspired by a bug (“this room is too full for you to enter”) to spend time over the intervening decades in reverse-engineering the machine code into a “game debugger” of the kind I wish we’d had when we originally developed it: Wilderland (“Wilderland: A Hobbit Environment”). It runs the original game code in a Spectrum emulator, while displaying the position and state of objects and NPCs throughout the game. His eventual conclusion was that the location is left over from testing (and I even have a very vague memory of that testing). That a game I spent a year writing part-time could cause such extended devotion is humbling.

In retrospect, I think we came far closer to Fred’s goal of “the best adventure game ever” than we ever imagined we would. The game sold in many countries over many years, and by the late 1980’s had sold over a million copies (DeMaria) – vastly outselling most other games of the time. During one interview, the interviewer told me that in his opinion, The Hobbit transformed the genre of text adventure games, and that it was the last major development of the genre: later games merely refined the advances made. Certainly Beam Software’s games after The Hobbit did not repeat its success.

While many of the publications, particularly at the time of release, focused on the Inglish parser, it is the characters and the richness of the gameplay that most people that contact me focus on. I believe that just as the game would have been less rich without Inglish, putting the Inglish parser on any other adventure game of the time would in no way have resembled the experience of playing The Hobbit, nor would it have had the same impact on the industry or on individuals.

In 2013, the Internet Archive added The Hobbit to its Historical Software Collection[5] – which, in keeping with many other Hobbit-related events, I discovered via a colleague’s email. Late that year, ACMI contacted me to invite me to join the upcoming Play It Again project[6], a game history and preservation project focused on ANZ-written digital games in the 1980s. That contact led to this paper.

As I complete this retrospective – and my PhD – I was again struck again by the power a few simple ideas can have, especially when combined with each other. It’s my favorite form of innovation. In the words of one fan, written 30 years after the game’s release, “I can see what Megler was striving toward: a truly living, dynamic story where anything can happen and where you have to deal with circumstances as they come, on the fly. It’s a staggeringly ambitious, visionary thing to be attempting.” (Maher) A game that’s a fitting metaphor for life.

Disclaimer

This paper is written about events 35 years ago, as accurately as I can remember. With that gap in time, necessarily some errors will have crept in; I take full responsibility for them.

References

Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. The Hobbit: Guide to Middle-Earth. 1985.

Australian Centre for the Moving Image. “Hits of the 80s: Aussie Games That Rocked the World.” N.p., May 2007. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Crowther, Will. Colossal Cave. CRL, 1976. Print.

DeMaria, Rusel Wilson, Johnny L. High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games. Berkeley, Cal.: McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2002. Print.

Golden Joystick Awards. Computer and Video Games Mar. 1984 : 15. Print.

Letters: Gollum’s Riddle. Micro Adventurer Mar. 1984 : 5. Print.

Maher, Jimmy. “The Hobbit.” The Digital Antiquarian. N.p., Nov. 2012. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Mitchell, Phil, and Veronika Megler. Penetrator. Melbourne, Australia: Beam Software / Melbourne House, 1981. Web. <Described in: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0003649>.

—. The Hobbit. Melbourne, Australia: Beam Software / Melbourne House, 1981. Web. <Described in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_%28video_game%29>.

Stuckey, Helen. “Exhibiting The Hobbit: A Tale of Memories and Microcomputers.” History of Games International Conference Proceedings. Ed. Carl Therrien, Henry Lowood, and Martin Picard. Montreal: Kinephanos, 2014. Print.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again,. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Print.

Wilderland: A Hobbit Environment. N.p., 2012. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Notes:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIPO

[2] http://solearther.tumblr.com/post/38456362341/thorin-sits-down-and-starts-singing-about-gold

[3] http://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/

[4] An analysis by the Wilderland project (“Wilderland: A Hobbit Environment”) shows the following code breakdown: game engine and game, 36%; text-engine for input and output, the dictionary, the graphics-engine, and the parser 22%, graphics data 25%; character set (3%), buffers (8%), and 6% as yet unidentified.

[5] https://archive.org/details/The_Hobbit_v1.0_1982_Melbourne_House

[6] https://www.acmi.net.au/collections-research/research-projects/play-it-again/

Bio

Veronika M. Megler now works for Amazon Web Services in the U.S. as a Senior Consultant in Big Data and Analytics. She recently completed her PhD in Computer Science at Portland State University, working with Dr. David Maier in the emerging field of “Smarter Planet” and big data. Her dissertation research enables Information-Retrieval-style search over scientific data archives. Prior to her PhD, she helped clients of IBM U.S. and Australia adopt a wide variety of emerging technologies. She has published more than 20 industry technical papers and 10 research papers on applications of emerging technologies to industry problems, and holds two patents, including one on her dissertation research. Her interests include applications of emerging technologies, big data and analytics, scientific information management and spatio-temporal data. Ms. Megler was in the last year of her B.Sc. studies at Melbourne University when she co-wrote The Hobbit. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be reached at vmegler@gmail.com.

Abstract: Studies of digital manuscripts generally focus on the technical capabilities of collecting institutions, digital storage and preservation, recovery of corrupted or out-dated material, and provision of access. The potential content of future, digital or part-digital, collections, and their capacity to support sustained scholarly research, has been comparatively neglected by scholars and archival institutions alike. In response to this shortcoming, this paper presents a study into the potential content of future collections of poetry manuscripts and their capacity to support research into the process of composition. To predict this capacity, this paper compares a study of compositional process, using handwritten and typewritten manuscripts, with a small-scale survey of early-career poets’ compositional habits. The manuscript study used the draft manuscripts of three poems by the poet Alan Gould and three by the poet Chris Mansell to describe each poet’s compositional habits, while the survey component of the project obtained information about the drafting practices of 12 students of creative writing and poetry at the University of Canberra. This study identified five attributes of the manuscript collections necessary to support research into compositional process: the quantity of information; the completeness of information; the sequence of drafts; the preservation of material as it was created; and the availability of contextualising material such as letters. The survey showed that the majority of these attributes were only partially displayed by young writers’ draft manuscripts, but also indicated these writers’ interests in increasing and preserving the research value of their manuscripts. While the scale of this project is niche, the results are transferrable to the extent that they indicate the diversity of manuscript collections currently being created, and emphasise the importance of archival institutions adopting a more active advocacy role in encouraging writers to create and maintain comprehensive and well-organised collections of digital manuscripts.

Introduction

‘Multiple, bastard, sequestered… uncouth script, black letter type’ (Nielson, 1993: 55): these are attributes of the handwritten literary manuscripts found in research libraries and other archival institutions. The relative complexity and, in some cases, inaccessibility of manuscripts to the casual reader is for the researcher an intrinsic part of these manuscripts’ value. The prominence of certain terms over others, the myriad revisions, the format of the work on the page and even the punctuation enable exploration of the creative and compositional process of writers. Such research is able to describe the genesis and the development of a particular work, and can even offer insights into the life, personality and psychology of literary figures. In the age of computers that are portable and affordable, there arises a concern that the attributes of these manuscripts that make them so useful for research may not be retained in future manuscript collections that are wholly or partially digital: digitally generated files may be corrupted or not retained, or may not contain the same kinds of information as handwritten manuscripts. This article explores how writers’ practices are changing, and the implications that this might have for researchers. Identifying connections between format and content, this research demarcates the responsibilities of both writers and collecting institutions in preserving valuable research material in a digital environment.

Background and Existing Research

Archival institutions are on the cusp of digital collecting, with institutions just now beginning to collect digital manuscripts and manuscript collections, and to provide research access to these collections. In recognition of this, scholars and archivists have begun exploring the practicalities and requirements involved in collecting this material, caring for it, and making it accessible to the public. Questions of technical capability of institutions, digital storage and preservation practices and standards, recovering corrupted material, and delivering content on- and off-site, are hugely important to continuing to uphold existing archival standards, and have accordingly garnered significant attention. They are a response to the everyday demands of this changing climate, and in many ways represent a transferral of traditional archival practices—acquisition, care, and access—over to a new, digital environment.

In his article on digital research material, David Zeidberg (1999) sketches a brief outline of some of the issues that libraries and other collecting agencies would need to address as ‘born-digital’ material—documents, websites, emails, ebooks, and other items created and accessed almost exclusively on computers—becomes an increasingly larger part of the material that society produces. Zeidberg’s insights are particularly relevant because he raises the issue of digital collection material with respect to the researchers’ needs. In advocating for greater attention to be focused on issues such as the authentication, preservation and accessibility of digital documents, there is nothing pioneering in his predictions: these, along with intellectual property, are central issues canvased in the majority of literature in the field of digital library material (Graham, 1998; Guercio, 2001; Hodge & Anderson, 2007; Zhou, 2010; Heidorn, 2011). This preoccupation with the technological issues associated with the management of digital collection material is not surprising, considering that these are practical issues that need to be addressed for appropriate infrastructure and policy to be developed to integrate this material into collections. Alongside these concerns, however, Zeidberg also raised the issue of the quality of the material that would be provided to the researcher, in terms of a comparison between handwritten manuscript drafts and their digitally created equivalents. Specifically, Zeidberg mentions concerns regarding preservation of versions and revisions and, through giving an example of a pivotal change of wording in a letter written by George III, observes: ‘Were George III to have had access to a word processor for composing his letters and documents, would we have ever seen this change or have had the opportunity to interpret the feelings behind the words? We probably would only see the final version, if even that were preserved.’ Unfortunately, he does not pursue this line of enquiry further. While there are other resources in the field that express the objective of exploring users’ research and their experiences, these are generally based on assessment of technological rather than content-based concerns (Hedstrom, Lee, Olson, & Lampe, 2006; Qayyum, 2008).

A complementary viewpoint to Zeidberg’s is that of Roy Rosenzweig (2003), which asserts the importance of the role that the creator of digital documents holds in the archival process. Rosenzweig of course reiterates the importance of authentication, preservation, and intellectual property issues, but also highlights the importance of encouraging individuals and organisations to take a more active approach in creating and maintaining their own collections of digital material as they are created. While Rosenzweig’s support for ‘grassroots’ style archival practices is advocated to mitigate against technical collection issues—mainly, the difficulty of access and preservation for a decades-old collection of digital documents, compared to a physical collection of the same age—the message also resonates with collection issues surrounding the quality of the research material produced. In the terms of Zeidberg’s hypothetical computer-literate George III, a well-regulated system of individual archival practice might have meant that both the original, and the amended, versions of the letter were saved to the hard drive and could be later transferred to an archive.

The British Library’s Digital Lives research project, led by Williams, Dean, Rowlands & John (2008), presents a stark contrast to the largely technologically-focused articles that make up the majority of those within this discipline. These researchers investigated the ways in which people create their own personal digital collections: their interactions with computers, the collection of documents that they create, how this collection is managed and used, and the way that this compares to the person’s storage and use of physical documents. By interviewing a range of people in different professions and age groups, this project collected valuable data about the material that might be entering institutions’ digital collections over the coming decades, and the ways that this material will already be organised. Some of the insights that this study provides were encouraging, particularly in relation to the quality concerns raised by Zeidberg: there was evidence of successive computer drafts being preserved, or even of drafts being printed for editing by hand.

The considerations canvased in each of these articles provide a general guide for a range of the issues that will need to be addressed as digital collections achieve more prominence within the archival structure. But this research is predominantly institutional in outlook: concerns centre on technological and infrastructural requirements for the storage, preservation and accessibility of digital items. When the researcher is referenced in these works, it is not primarily their use of the material for research which is addressed, as much as their access to that material. In approaching the considerations of digital collection management from the perspective of the researcher, this paper will therefore be able to provide better insight into the way that this material will be used – not just accessed – and the ways in which this use can best be facilitated by institutions and individuals alike.

Research Design and Data Collection

Recognising the strengths and limitations of the research conducted to date in this field, this article investigates the question: “How can we ensure that information about writers’ compositional process is preserved as writers migrate from physical to digital manuscript production?”

This question can be broken down into two distinct lines of enquiry. The first explores the insights that a researcher can gain into compositional process when comparing and analysing wholly physical collections of manuscript drafts of a literary work—the traditional manuscript collections incidentally created by writers as part of their practice, and subsequently collected by libraries and archives and made available for scholarly research. This initial line of enquiry relates to the theories and methods underpinning manuscript research as it is currently undertaken, asking how meaning is inscribed and discovered in manuscript collections. The second line of enquiry examines the partially- or wholly-digital manuscript collections that are currently being created by writers, and the extent to which these collections will offer similar insights into the writer’s compositional process.

Rather than positing an opposition between hardcopy and digital manuscript collections, this research seeks to identify the extent to which existing manuscript research—currently constructed with almost sole reference to physical manuscripts—maps onto a contemporary, hybrid situation, and to identify challenges that this may pose, and actions that can be taken, to ensure that researchers are supported. This article is framed by this focus on existing research collections, as it offers a productive and pragmatic means of investigating this particular aspect of digital manuscript collecting, but this does not diminish the significance and value of digital manuscript collections. Digital collections pose the challenges that this research identifies, but they also support research methodologies and provide important and unique material that paper-based collections cannot. The relationship between physical and digital collections is complex, collaborative and ongoing, and this article exploits one particular aspect of this relationship to explore the connection between format and content, and support the work of collection managers and researchers.

In order to explore these issues, the handwritten and typewritten manuscript drafts for a number of different poems were analysed and compared according to the methodology outlined by contemporary manuscript researchers such as Bushell (2003) and Davies (2008), and the process of composition of each poem was described. This initial research was then self-reflexively analysed to identify which of the various attributes of the collections being studied were necessary to form an understanding of the writers’ composition. Finally, a survey was distributed to a group of emerging writers to gauge the extent to which the attributes that informed the initial manuscript research are likely to be present in the collections of manuscripts that will enter archival institutions in the future. It also asked for respondents’ opinions on the possibility of creating research collections, and their receptivity to libraries’ encouragement of good archival practice. This survey emulated the work undertaken by Williams et al (2008) as part of the British Library’s Digital Lives project, but was re-designed to specifically address those attributes identified in the earlier stages of this research. The following is a brief outline of the specific methods used in this research:

Stage One: Initial Selection of Manuscripts

Following consultation with the manuscript librarians at the National Library of Australia, three poems each by Alan Gould and Chris Mansell were chosen for the initial manuscript analysis. These poets and poems were selected because they satisfied the following criteria:

• The collections of drafts for each poem were considered to be complete, and were held in full at the National Library of Australia (in Gould’s and Mansell’s papers, MS 6635 and MS 7904).
• The collections of drafts for each poem demonstrated a range of different compositional techniques.
• The drafts were all created by hand or using a typewriter (no digital technologies were used).
• Although writing at similar times, each poet has a distinctive and contrasting style.
• Each poet was locally-based and available for interview to confirm the findings of the initial manuscript research.

Stage Two: Research into Compositional Process

The manuscripts for the poems chosen were then analysed to determine the process whereby each poem was composed. This was undertaken as follows:

• Each draft was photographed and transcribed to provide better access in the analytical phases (see de Biasi, 2004; Bushell, 2003; and Davies, 2008)
• A chronology of drafts was established (as per Bushell, 2003; Davies, 2008; mostly already completed by the National Library of Australia)
• The changes within each manuscript draft and between subsequent drafts were listed and described. Changes that were identified and recorded included changes on the scale of individual words, larger changes such as the addition of a new theme or idea, and changes to the structure or arrangement of the poem. These changes correspond to the different levels of intention that Bushell (2003) describes.
• These changes were then studied to determine patterns, building up a descriptive narrative of the composition of the poems. The compositional processes behind the different poems were compared with one another to describe each poet’s working habits and compositional style.
• Finally, brief interviews were undertaken with each of the poets to confirm that these descriptions were consistent with their practice.

Stage Three: Identifying the Important Attributes

After this initial research was conducted, the important attributes of the draft manuscripts that contributed information about each poem’s composition were identified. This involved linking the statements about composition which were already made back to the concrete evidence that supported them, and relied heavily on the detailed descriptive work undertaken as part of the initial manuscript research.

Stage Four: Survey

The fourth stage of this research comprised the distribution of a survey to a group of emerging writers. This survey asked about writing practices and the storage of drafts, and was designed to determine to what extent those important attributes identified in the previous stages of research would still be present in the partially- or wholly-digital manuscript collections that will be available to researchers in the future. This survey was designed in recognition of the emphasis that other researchers (like Rosenzweig, 2003, and Williams et al, 2008) place on the role of the creator in ensuring digital manuscript collections are created and managed in a manner which ensures their future viability for scholarly research. The survey was administered to the creative writing cohort at the University of Canberra, and was similar to that conducted by Williams et al (2008), but with a focus on questions related to creative writing. The survey covered:

• The extent to which composition is undertaken on the computer (or other devices).
• The extent of computer skills and formal training.
• The creation of different drafts of documents.
• The filing, storage, and deleting of digitally-created and hardcopy drafts.
• The backing up and archiving of digitally-created and hardcopy drafts.
• Writers’ opinions about the possibility of creating research collections, and receptivity to libraries’ encouragement of good archival practice.

The results of the survey were then collated and compared with the data from previous stages of the research, and a series of recommendations were drafted that could potentially be distributed to writers, offering simple suggestions to promote the future research value of their future archives.

Findings and Recommendations

The research value of future manuscript collections will be determined by the presence or absence of those attributes of individual manuscripts and manuscript collections that were identified in the initial stages of this research project. These attributes can be collected together under five general traits that, when present, will assist detailed manuscript analysis to yield optimal results. These are: the quantity of information; the completeness of information; the sequence of drafts; the preservation of material as it was created; and the availability of contextualising material such as letters or creative stimuli. The following section of this paper connects each of these traits to the findings of this research project, and suggests some strategies that writers could use to ensure these traits are maintained in their collections of drafts. Practicing these strategies is the preserve of writers, but as this article demonstrates, ensuring writers’ practices incorporate these strategies is a challenge for collecting institutions to address. Proactive institutional intervention into writers’ storage becomes increasingly important as the permanence and fixity of draft material decline.

Quantity

The first of these attributes is the quantity of information present: both the quantity of drafts, and the quantity of revisions contained within each draft. The two manuscript collections studied demonstrated this quantity of information in different ways. Chris Mansell made fewer drafts of her poems, but each draft contained myriad revisions and re-revisions. Alan Gould created less closely-annotated drafts, but the number of drafts he created—up to 20 drafts per poem—meant that these sets of drafts were each equally able to reveal the compositional process of their respective authors.

Half of the writers who responded to the survey indicated they do generally create a similar number or more drafts writing on the computer. It can therefore be hoped that this quantity of drafts would be as useful to researchers as copious handwritten revisions. Equally, all respondents indicated that some of their drafting is always done with pen and paper, particularly plans and early drafts. The problem here is therefore also one of keeping drafts of different formats together, and putting these into a sequence. Keeping this in mind, it is important that  when working on the computer writers frequently save new drafts, ideally whenever changes are made to their work, and/or use ‘Track Changes’ or a similar program or function which preserves any altered or deleted information. Writers should also be careful to retain any drafts that are printed or transferred to a tablet or another computer to be revised.

Completeness

The second of these attributes is the completeness of information present: all drafts exist and are available for use, and all information is included in these drafts (nothing has been erased, destroyed or otherwise made illegible). This attribute of manuscript collections is connected to the researcher’s confidence in making conclusions about the progressive development of a poem from the manuscript drafts. With pen and paper writers might cross out, white-out or erase words, but these each leave a trace. With the computer, it is impossible to know what has been typed and then deleted. As the majority of survey respondents indicate they create some drafts by hand, this issue is perhaps not as severe as it could be, but on the flipside, half of writers admit they are at present unlikely to save a separate draft every time they make changes to their poems. To ensure collections are as complete as possible, writers should be encouraged to save separate drafts whenever changes are made and/or use track changes or a similar function, as per the previous recommendation.

It is equally important that no drafts are missing from the collection. As such, writers should make an effort to save all drafts of each poem in the same location, and to choose locations for saving drafts using some kind of system. Where any of these measures is not possible, or not taken, writers would ideally record any incompleteness in their collection (for example by keeping a log of their drafting practices, or writing a comment on a draft to indicate that it was preceded by a different draft in another location or format, or to indicate that parts of it were deleted).

Sequence

The third of these attributes is that the sequence of drafts can be reconstructed: there is sufficient information within the drafts, or the drafts are numbered or ordered by the writer, so as to demonstrate the sequence in which they were created. Gould’s manuscript drafts were able to be ordered through a close examination of the phrasing and development of ideas in each draft. This process was possible because of the completeness of the collection of drafts, with many new elements introduced first as an amendment to the previous draft, and then incorporated into the body of the work in subsequent versions. Mansell ordered, numbered and stapled together her earlier drafts, which meant this careful sequencing was only necessary with her later versions.

While we can encourage writers to retain relatively complete information to assist researchers to sequence their drafts (as per the previous point) it is also important that writers include sufficient information with their drafts to assist researchers to determine their order of writing, whether in the title or content of the document, as numbers, dates, or other descriptions, and comprehending handwritten and tablet-created documents as well as drafts created on the computer.

Format

The fourth of these attribute is that drafts are kept in the format in which they are created: This refers to the fact that a typed copy of a handwritten draft would be considered a separate and later draft to the original handwritten draft. The responses to the surveys indicated that a number of drafts are still handwritten, and that drafts are also written on tablets and other electronic devices, and are also often printed from the computer to be marked up by hand. It was an interesting and informative aspect of Gould’s and Mansell’s manuscripts that different drafts were written by hand, written with a typewriter, or included handwritten notes, revisions and additions on typewritten pages; different formats presented different content, but equally the choice of format hinted at the poet’s beliefs about the readiness of the poem to be typed up, or their difficulties with certain sections evident in a decision to return to handwriting.

Recognising this, it is important that handwritten and tablet-created drafts are retained in a format that preserves all contextualising information from the original draft. With handwritten drafts this is likely to be as simple as keeping the originals or scanning them to the computer; with drafts created on a tablet or other relatively short-lived electronic device, writers should ensure they use an application which allows documents to be exported from the device in a format readable on other devices (e.g. as an image or PDF document).

Supplementary Material

The fifth and final attribute is that supplementary material which inspired or influenced the work or otherwise provides context for the work is kept. It was important to the interpretation of the stimulus and development of Mansell’s poem ‘Goodbye Blue’ that the words to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Chelsea Hotel’ were included, as hastily written out by Mansell, in the collection of drafts. Other scholars also note the importance of including similar stimuli in manuscript collections; for example, Kidder’s (1980) analysis of EE Cummings’ poem ‘I am a little church’ was entirely dependent on his discovery of a photograph of the church which inspired Cummings’ reflections.

Other manuscript analysis has used correspondence or personal musings as contextualising information into a poet’s state of mind or inspiration, or to qualify their assumptions, in a similar manner to the interviews conducted with each of the poets as part of this research project. Encouraging writers to keep copies of relevant email correspondence or blog posts about their writing, as well as saving or noting any stimulus to their work alongside their drafts, would assist with this.

Survey Results: Further Discussion

The survey results indicated that poetic manuscript collections entering archival institutions in the future will be diverse and complex, often including both digital and physical manuscripts created on and accessed with a range of different devices. Every writer who responded said that they write both by hand and on the computer, and several of the writers also use their tablet or mobile phone for their writing. Not a single writer used just one format to create their drafts. We might infer that, as the range of technological devices increases, the diversity of different draft documents increases also. Hence, rather than addressing a situation where manuscripts are becoming bland and shallow, a far greater variety of different documents are being included in collections. As such, these collections have the potential to display equal or greater research value to their predecessors, but equally, gaps in collections caused by the ease of overwriting or deleting drafts and the potential for technological failures means information about the writers’ processes could be irretrievably lost.

Two thirds of writers surveyed indicated they would be encouraged by the prospect of future research potential to improve their archival practices, with multiple respondents commenting that it was something to look forward to in their careers as writers. Those who said this would not encourage them to create and keep more drafts gave two reasons. The first reason was that they did not believe their material was of a high enough standard: this implies that either they do not intend to become professional writers (and as such from a literary research perspective their manuscripts will be of limited use), or that when their writing does reach this standard they may then become open to advice in this area. The second reason was that they would not want to make draft documents available for researchers, as they would prefer the final version to stand alone as a single artistic unit. There is little that researchers can do to influence this kind of opinion, other than hope that, like in the case of Patrick White[1], threats to burn all manuscript material are hollow.

Conclusion

Writers’ practices are changing, and along with this the kinds of manuscripts that they are creating. Through combining an analysis of physical manuscripts with an exploration into contemporary writing practices, this research project identified changes in writing practices which are likely to present a problem, and detailed ways in which these might be mitigated.

The findings from this project indicate the receptivity of writers to improving the research quality of their drafts, and support more general arguments that other researchers (such as Rosenzweig, 2003) have made about creators needing to take more responsibility for the ongoing development and maintenance of their collections in an increasingly ‘ephemeral’ digital environment.

These findings indicate the necessity for archivists and librarians to advocate for creators using better practices to create and manage their drafts years before they are even considered for inclusion in manuscript archives, and the possibility for this advocacy to have a real impact of the research quality of future manuscript collections.

Finally, these findings indicate a broader need for all of us to take a proactive approach to ensuring that the incredible research value of our current manuscript collections is carried through to those collections entering archives in the future: to think about the ways in which format and content are inextricably linked, and to work productively alongside content creators to respond to the challenges and embrace the opportunities of a digital environment.

Works Cited

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Rosenzweig, Roy. “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era.” The American Historical Review 108.3 (2003): 735-762. Print.

Williams, Pete, Katrina Dean, Ian Rowlands and Jeremy Leighton John. “Digital Lives: Report of Interviews with the Creators of Personal Digital Collections.” Ariadne 55 (2008): n. pag. Web. 7 Mar 2016.

Zeidberg, David S. “The Archival View of Technology: Resources for the Scholar of the Future.” Library Trends 47.4 (1999): 796-806. Print.

Zhou, Yongli. “Are Your Digital Documents Web Friendly?: Making Scanned Documents Web Accessible.” Information Technology & Libraries 29.3 (2010): 151-160. Print.

Notes

[1] See Patrick White’s 1977 letter to the then Director General of the National Library of Australia Dr George Chandler, held in the NLA collection (number MS 8469) or available for download through the NLA ‘Media Zone’ website: http://www.nla.gov.au/media/Patrick-White/

Bio:

Millicent Weber is a PhD candidate in the Centre for the Book at Monash University, Melbourne. Her PhD research forms part of the Australian Research Council Discovery project ‘Performing Authorship in the Digital Literary Sphere’, and investigates audience experience at literary festivals. Millicent has worked with manuscript collections at the National Library of Australia and at the University of Melbourne Archives. Millicent’s honours project, completed at the University of Canberra, investigated the value of digital manuscript collections and the challenges that they pose for researchers and collection managers. millicent.weber@monash.edu

Themed Issue: Born Digital Cultural Heritage

Edited by Angela Ndalianis & Melanie Swalwell

Introduction: Born Digital Heritage – Angela Ndalianis & Melanie Swalwell

1. It Is What It Is, Not What It Was: Making Born Digital Heritage – Henry Lowood
2. Defining The Experience: George Poonhkin Khut’s Distillery: Waveforming, 2012 – Amanda Pagliarino & George Poonkhin Khut
3. There and Back Again: A Case History of Writing The Hobbit – Veronika Megler
4. Participatory Historians in Digital Cultural Heritage Process: Monumentalization of the First Finnish Commercial Computer Game – Jaakko Suominen and Anna Sivula
5. Retaining Traces of Composition in Digital Manuscript Collections: a Case for Institutional Proactivity – Millicent Weber

Abstract:  George Poonkhin Khut’s sensory artwork, Distillery: Waveforming 2012, was the winner of the 2012 National New Media Art Award. This immersive installation artwork is a biofeedback, controlled interactive that utilises the prototype iPad application ‘BrightHearts’. Khut has an interest in the continued development of the ‘BrightHearts’ app to the point of making it available as a download from iTunes App Store to be used in conjunction with specialised pulse-sensing hardware.  The configuration of Distillery: Waveforming presented in 2012 at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, incorporated Apple iPad 4^th generation devices running the ‘BrightHearts’ app supported by Mac mini computers that processed data and mapped sound and visuals that were fed back to users as animations on the iPads. At the conclusion of the exhibition the artwork was acquired into the Queensland Art Gallery collection.  The Curator of Contemporary Australian Art requested that the acquisition ensure that the artwork was captured in perpetuity in its prototype state.  The iPad devices underwent jailbreaks to safeguard their independent operation and management, and to allow for the permanent installation of non-expiring copies of the ‘BrightHearts’ app.  Source code for the ‘BrightHearts’ app was also archived into the collection. This paper describes the development of the artwork and the issues that were addressed in the acquisition and archiving of an iPad artwork

Figure 1. George Poonkhin Khut, Australia b.1969, Distillery: Waveforming 2012, Custom software and custom heart rate monitor on iPad and Mac mini signal analysis software: Angelo Fraietta and Tuan M Vu; visual effects software: Jason McDermott, Greg Turner; electronics and design: Frank Maguire; video portraits: Julia Charles, Installed dimensions variable, The National New Media Art Award 2012. Purchased 2012 with funds from the Queensland Government. Image: Mark Sherwood

George Poonhkin Khut’s digital artwork Distillery: Waveforming is a body-focused, controlled, interactive experience. The artwork was acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in 2012 and has been the subject of an ongoing dialogue between the artist and the Gallery, through the Head of Conservation and Registration, regarding its long-term preservation.  At the heart of the artwork is an individual, human experience with certain intrinsic elements combining to create this experience. In their endeavour to provide a sound future plan for Distillery: Waveforming they have questioned ‘the experience’ from their individual perspectives – that of the artist and the collecting institution.

Distillery: Waveforming is both an independent artwork and an affiliated outcome of Khut’s long running work with heart rate biofeedback. This unusual duality plays a significant role in the ways in which the artist and the institution perceive the artwork, its preservation and future installations. Since the artwork’s acquisition into the QAGOMA collection the artist has remained involved and interested in the Gallery’s management of Distillery: Waveforming. Khut’s progress in his work on the biofeedback project has seen him make significant advances in software development, allowing him to release the iTunes application BrightHearts that was in-development at the time that Distillery: Waveforming was created. These advances in the biofeedback project provide current context to the dialogue and continue to shape the opinions of both artist and institution. Through this collaborative process QAGOMA has been able to build an extensive resource for the long-term preservation of Distillery: Waveforming.

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND: BIOFEEDBACK IN ART AND MEDICINE

George Poonhkin Khut’s biofeedback artwork Distillery: Waveforming was the winning entry in the 2012 National New Media Award (NNMA) held at the Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA 2012). The artwork entered the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art collection at the conclusion of the exhibition. The curator of Contemporary Australian Art requested that the artwork be acquired to accurately reflect its display in the NNMA exhibition – that is as a prototype.

In 2011 when Khut was invited to enter the NNMA he was working as the Artist in Residence at the Children’s Hospital Westmead. In this residency Khut and his research colleagues commenced the BrightHearts Project that aimed ‘to assess the potential of small, portable biofeedback-based interactive artworks to mediate the perception and performance of the body in paediatric care: as experienced by children undergoing painful recurrent procedures’ (Khut et.al 2011).

Apple iPads loaded with games were already in use for diversion and distraction purposes during painful procedures at the Children’s Hospital Westmead. Khut chose to adapt his work for iPad technology for the BrightHearts Project based on this ‘diversional’ precedent and the excellent optical qualities of the iPad display (Khut 2014). In realising Distillery: Waveforming Khut channelled years of artistic practice in biofeedback and body-focused interactivity in the development of a cross-disciplinary artwork at the core of which was the prototype BrightHearts application (app) for Apple iPad.

When Distillery: Waveforming was displayed in the NNMA exhibition, from August to November 2012, the BrightHearts app was still in-development under a short-term Apple Developer licence. At this point in the provisioning, the prototype app generated the visuals on the iPad in response to a multilayered array of messages transmitted from a laptop or desktop computer over a network connection. This approach enable Khut to quickly prototype a variety of visualisation ideas by adjusting parameters on the desktop computer, without needing to compile and install the app on to the iPad each time. More importantly, at the time of its development – this networked approach also enabled him to incorporate live heart rate sensor data in a way that was not supported by the Apple operating system (iOS) at the time (before the introduction of the Bluetooth 4.0 wireless standard), and to continue his work with complex signal analysis, mapping and sonification algorithms that have been central to his work with body-focussed interactions since 2003. Essentially Distillery: Waveforming and the trial therapeutic devices at the Children’s Hospital Westmead were operating as ensembles that included iPads loaded with the prototype BrightHearts app, data collection devices, and desktop/laptop computers and network routing systems.

DISTILLERY: WAVEFORMING

Acquiring Distillery: Waveforming to reflect its status as a prototype was a curatorial imperative. Khut describes his approach to the long-running biofeedback project as ‘iterative’ and in this regard the artwork is an incremental representation of Khut’s artistic practice and a model demonstration of the developmental BrightHearts app for touch screen devices (Khut and Muller 2005). In the future Distillery: Waveforming will become a legacy artwork intrinsically linked to past and future iterations in the biofeedback project.

Distillery: Waveforming derives from Khut’s earlier work on BrightHearts that commenced in 2011 and his Cardiomorphologies series from 2004-2007. The mandala-like visuals were initially developed for Cardiomorphologies v.1 by John Tonkin using Java programming which Khut controlled via Cycling’74’s Max (version 4.5) application, a popular visual programming language for Apple and Windows computers. In 2005 the original visualisation software was expanded upon by Greg Turner for Cardiomorphologies v.2 using visuals generated from within the Max application. Turner used the C++ programming language to develop ‘Fireball’ a specialised graphic module (known in the Max programing environment as an ‘object’) – that enabled Khut to control the visuals with messages to each layer, for example, drawing a red coloured ring, the width of the screen, with a thickness of 20 pixels, and a green circle with a gradient, with a diameter of 120 pixels (Khut 2014; Pagliarino 2015, pp. 68-69).

Then in 2011 Jason McDermott, a multi-disciplinary designer working in the area of information visualisation and architecture, was engaged to re-write Greg Turner’s ‘Fireball’ visualisation software to enable it to run on hand-held technologies with touch sensitive controls. Using the open source C++ library openFrameworks with Apple’s Xcode (version 4) McDermott redesigned and expanded the potential of the software, developing BrightHearts as an iOS 5 mobile operating system application (McDermott 2013).

Development of the app continued when Khut received the NNMA prize worth AUS$75,000 and in April 2014 the BrightHearts app was released into the iTunes store. Heart rate data acquisition and processing is now integrated into the application software and the only external device that is required in conjunction with the app is a Bluetooth 4.0 heart rate monitor that captures the real-time heart rate data. The app is categorised as a Health and Fitness product that can be used to assist with relaxation and body awareness (iTunes 2014).

This history of development, change, modification and repurposing creates a landscape in which Distillery: Waveforming is an important new media artwork. As a legacy artwork the Gallery aims to maintain the component parts and software in their original form and function for as long as possible. Technologies change at such a rapid rate that the artwork will date in the years to come to reflect, quite evidently, an artwork of 2012.  Perhaps future users will consider what are at present beautifully rich and transcendent animations as rudimentary and the touch screen navigation amusing and unsophisticated. Perhaps future users will recapture the sense of appeal that early touch screen devices inspired in consumers. However, it is not the intention of the Gallery to create a sense of nostalgia but to offer insights into the balance between art, technology and science at this fixed point in time.  As a legacy the artwork will be an authentic installation and will offer an unambiguous window into Khut’s interdisciplinary artistic practice.

In its presentation in the NNMA exhibition Distillery: Waveforming was configured of five iPad devices running the prototype BrightHearts app that were built into a long, shallow, tilled table at which participants sat on low stools to interact with the artwork. Specifications set by the artist allow the Gallery to modify the configuration for smaller displays of no fewer than three stations in future installations. However it is necessary that the ambiance of the installation space affect a sense of calm and contemplation by utilising low light levels, soft dark colours and discrete use of technology. In the original installation the spatial arrangement situated participants in front of three video portraits of the artwork in use (Fig 1). Distillery: Waveforming is a composite artwork incorporating the iPad devices loaded with the prototype BrightHearts app, external data collection and processing equipment and video portraits displayed on monitors. The combined hardware and software systems include:

• Five Apple iPads (3^rd generation) operating on the iOS 5.1.1 operating system, with retina display high resolution (2,048 x 1,536 pixels at 264 ppi) and dual-core Apple A5X chip

Loaded with:

• BrightHearts app (in-development)
• Cydia – a software application that enables the user to search for and install applications on jailbroken iOS devices
• Activator app – a jailbreak application launcher for mobile devices
• IncarcerApp – an application that disables the home button and effectively locks on the BrightHearts app when in use, preventing the user from inadvertently exiting the app

• Five heart rate sensors incorporating Nonin PureSat Pulse Oximeters (ear clip type) sensors, a Nonin OEM III Pulse Oximetry circuits and Aduino Pro Mini 328 microcomputers, running specially written code (OemPulseFrank.pde) to receive the pulse data from the pulse oximeter sensors – and relay this to the MacMini’s via a USB-serial connection.
• Five Mac minis 5.2, 2.5 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB RAM, 10.7.5 (OSX Lion) operating system

Running:

• Max6 application (Cycling74, 2012)
• Custom written scripts running from OSX ‘Terminal’ utility, that receive pulse data from the sensors via USB port and pass this along to Max6

• One 5.0 GHz network router that transmits control data from the Max6 software on the Mac minis to the corresponding iPads.
• Three digital portraits displayed on 40” LCD / LED monitors hung in portrait orientation
• Video portrait files include MPEG-4, QuickTime ProRes and AVC file formats
• Five headband-style stereo headsets

The prototype BrightHearts app for Distillery: Waveforming was written for Apple iPad (3^rd gen) models running iOS 5.1.1. It was written under a short-term Apple Developer licence that allowed for provisioning and testing of the app on multiple devices. The licencing arrangement for the app expired in July 2013, nine months after the artwork was acquired by into the collection. A key aspect of archiving this artwork was the need to gain control of the app and in advance of the expiration the Gallery implemented an archiving strategy that was developed through consultation between the conservator, curator and the artist who was in contact with the software developer.

The most challenging aspect of the acquisition for the collecting institution was the long-term management of the proprietary technology and software. At the time of acquisition the prototype BrightHearts app was capable of performing a function with external support but did not have status as an independent Apple-approved application. In fact, its completion and approval was still one and half years away. It was also important for the iPad operating system to be locked down to iOS 5.1.1 as the prototype BrightHearts app for Distillery: Waveforming will only launch in this version. Through a consultative process it was agreed that to administer the artwork as an authentic prototype it was necessary to increase the end user control of the technology and software.  This was achieved through jailbreaking the iPad devices and loading a non-expiring copy of the prototype BrightHearts app on the iPads (Pagliarino 2015).

MAINTAINING AN AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE

Distillery: Waveforming has been acquired with the intention of maintaining authenticity and as such the Gallery has archived a full complement of digital files for the artwork. Included in this is source code for compiling the BrightHearts application with Xcode and source code for compiling the pulse-sensing Arduino microcontrollers for which Khut owns both copyrights (Khut 2012).

In conventional object-oriented programming source code, a programming sequence in readable text, outlines the steps that are necessary to compile software and make it function as intended, for example an app for an iPad. The source code has to be interpreted or compiled by a programmer in order to create the necessary machine code, for example Xcode if the work is developed for Apple OSX. Acquiring source code is thought to be a means of future-proofing digital artworks (Collin and Perrin 2013, p.52). This is undeniable as without the source code there is very little that can be used as a structural guide. However, Laforet et al. (2010, p.27) questions whether source code can really act as a safety net for software artworks in an age where there is a strong commercial imperative driving the development of digital technologies at the expense of the conservation of data.  The success of source code to future-proof artworks relies on accurate interpretation and, in the context of an authentic experience, a complete lack of bias towards alternate or more efficient ways of programming the software to run an artwork as it was intended.

In cases where an artwork was developed using a suite of applications and programming languages, documenting source code becomes a complicated task in comparison to artworks where the source code is contained entirely within a single object-oriented programming environment. The programing for Distillery: Waveforming is distributed across three operating systems and four programming languages: Arduino for the sensor hardware; Objective C and iOS5 (via Xcode 4) for the BrightHearts app; OSX for the desktop computer that operates as a terminal emulator, running sensor data routing and analysis processes; and most significantly  Max,  the visual programing application that is used to perform the core analysis, mapping and sonification processes between the incoming heart rate data and the outgoing messages controlling the appearance of the various layers of the iPad visuals and sounds. Laforet et al. confirms that the difficulties faced with software artworks created by individual programmers are that:

These projects are relatively small efforts, putting the work created with it in a very fragile position. Unlike more popular software and languages, they are not backed up by an industry or a community demanding stability. The software only works under very specific conditions at a very specific time. Migrating such a work is a tremendous task, likely to involve the porting of a jungle of obscure libraries and frameworks. (Laforet et al. 2010, p. 29)

The complexity of combining multiple source codes from various programming platforms to work within one artwork significantly increases the risk of error in interpretation. In the case of Distillery: Waveforming it seems highly unlikely that source code alone would be sufficient to recreate the artwork in future. Khut has recognised this and has considered alternate bespoke and existing documentation systems for both Distillery: Waveforming and BrighHearts for the purpose of preservation and representation.

Visually the prototype BrightHearts app consists of 22 individually controlled graphic layers. Each layer is comprised of a single polygon that can be drawn as a solid shape or a ring, the edges of the shape can be blurred and the colour can be varied according to hue, saturation, alpha & value (brightness). The layers are then blended using an ‘additive’ compositing process, so that the layers interact with one another, for example a combination of overlapping red, green and blue shapes would produce white. This additive blending is a crucial aspect of the work’s visual aesthetic.

While the visuals are rendered on the iPad by the app developed by Jason McDermott, using Xcode and the openFrameworks libraries, the actual moment-by-moment instructions regarding what shapes are to be drawn, colour, size brightness etc. are all sent from the Max document.

The Max document, the top level ‘patch’ as it is referred to in the Max programming environment, is the heart of the work: the primary mediating layer between the sensor and display hardware that determines how changes in heart rate will control the appearance and sound of the work. It consists of an input section that receives sensor data, an analysis section that generates statistics from the heart rate measurements, and mapping layers that map these statistics to the various audio and graphic variables of colour, shape, volume etc.

The modular design methods used in the Max programming environment allow for the creation of modular units of code referred to as ‘abstractions’ and ‘bpatchers’, that can be re-used in multiple instances to process many variables using a very simple set of instructions. The programming for Distillery: Waveforming makes extensive use of these modules, which are stored as discreet ‘.maxpat’ files within the Max folder on the Mac mini computer. These modules are used for many of the repetitive statistical processes used to analyse the participant’s heart rate, as well as the mappings used to create the highly layered visuals and sounds that are central to the aesthetic of Distillery: Waveforming.

In the analysis section of the programming, changes in average heart rate are calculated over different time frames: the average rate of the last four heart beats, the average rate of the last sixteen heart beats, then thirty-two heart beats and so on, as well as information about the direction of these changes, enabling the work to track when the participant’s heart rate is starting to increase or decrease.

Within Max, the twenty-two graphic layers of visuals used in the prototype BrightHearts app, are each controlled by a corresponding ‘bpatcher’ layer-control module. Each of these ‘bpatcher’ modules contain 107 variables that determine how the parameters of all the layers are controlled. That is what aspect of the participant’s heart rate patterning it responds to and how these changes are mapped to variables such as diameter and colour of the layer in question.

Each layer-control module is comprised of sixteen sub-modules responsible for specific aspects of each layer’s appearance such as diameter, hue, saturation, and shape-type. In the programming of the layer-control modules the boxes of numbers visible in each module describe how incoming data relating to heart rate is mapped to the behaviour of the layer, in this case its diameter, and what statistical information it will respond to such as a running average of the last thirty-two heart beats, a normalised and interpolated waveform representing breath-related variations in heart rate, or the pulse of each heartbeat (Fig 2).

Figure 2: Four of the twenty-two layer-control mapping modules in Max – used to control the shapes drawn on the iPad by the BrightHearts (prototype) app.

All of these variables, controlling the appearance of each layer, are stored and recalled using a table of preset values describing which statistics each layer and variable responds to and how it interprets this input. These numbers are adjusted by the artist to produce the desired mapping and dynamic range and then stored in the .json file and recalled as presets. The information contained in this table is stored as a ‘preset file’ in a .json xml format file that is read when the Max document is launched. These preset files document the precise mapping and scaling settings that determine the appearance and behaviour of each layer of the artwork. Together these layered behaviours and the preset values that describe them produce the final interactive visual aesthetic of the artwork.

Figure 3: Example of one section of the .json ‘preset’ file containing preset data that is read by each of the graphics mapping modules – in this example showing all the parameters used to control the behaviour of the diameter  for Layer 15.

For the artist, these preset tables are of central importance for documenting the appearance and interactive behaviour of the artwork for future interpretations, since it is these values that determine how the work responds to changes in the participant’s heart rate.

Strategies for hardware independent migration and reinterpretation

Khut has begun the process of documenting and describing the interactive principles and behaviour of the artwork independent from current technologies to enable the work to be recreated in the future, based on the Variable Media Network approaches set out by Ippolito (2003a).

For creators working in ephemeral formats who want posterity to experience their work more directly than through second-hand documentation or anecdote, the variable media paradigm encourages creators to define their work independently from medium so that the work can be translated once its current medium is obsolete.
This requires creators to envision acceptable forms their work might take in new mediums, and to pass on guidelines for recasting work in a new form once the original has expired.

Variable Media Network, Definition – Ippolito, 2003b

For Khut, the essence of the artwork that would need to be preserved and recreated, independent of the specific technologies currently used, is the experience of having one’s breathing, nervous system, pulse and heart rate patterning represented in real time in an interactive audio visual experience, and the various optical and kinaesthetic sensations and correlations that are experienced during this interaction.

Taking an experience-centred approach it is not the source code as much as the experience of the visuals and sounds changing in response to the live heart rate data that is most essential to recreating the artwork. The aesthetic experience of interacting with the artwork, and the maner in which it responds to changes in heart rate initiated through slow breathing and relaxation is crucial to its authenticity.

The schematic approach: an open ‘score’ for reinterpretation

The simplest approach to documentation for future reinterpretation is the use of a very flexible set of instructions outlining the core interactive form and behaviour of the artwork. This approach leaves many aspects of the artwork’s appearance open to interpretation. Essentially what is preserved is the basic nature of the transformation – from breath, pulse and nervous system to colour, diameter, shape and sound. Such an approach would comprise the following instructions:

The visuals and sounds have been designed to respond to two forms of interaction:
1) gradual decreases in heart rate caused by a general increase in the participants ‘parasympathetic’ nervous system activity that can be initiated through conscious relaxation of muscles in the face, neck, shoulders and arms,

2) breath-related variations in heart rate known as ‘respiratory sinus arrhythmia’ whereby slow inhalation causes an increase in heart rate, and slow exhalation causes a decrease in heart rate.

The result being a wave-like (sine) oscillation in heart rate to which the work owes its name (wave forming).

Table 1: showing relationship of key mappings in Distillery Waveforming heart rate controlled artwork. Table 1 lists the key heart rate variables and their mapping to the main visual and sonic representations. The most basic recreation of the work according to the scheme laid out in this table would still require instructions for obtaining and generating the modulation sources from the heart rate data: the algorithms that scale and interpolate the heart rate data and translate these beat-by-beat messages into smooth, continuous control signals.

The translation approach: calibration tools and resources

A second, more precise approach for reinterpretation provides a set of documents to help future developers interpret and translate the original code and .json preset data to provide an aesthetic experience more closely aligned to the artwork at the time it was acquired by QAGOMA (Fig 3). This information is contained in a set of calibration images and accompanying tables that provide a crucial link for reinterpretations of the artwork, allowing future programmers to determine how values stored in the original preset files relate to the appearance of each of the work’s 22 graphic layers. Many aspects of the prototype BrightHearts app’s interpretation of these messages are not linear in their response and it can be seen that the gradients for each shape blend differently according to hue (Fig 4). It is hoped that these calibration images will help future programmers to compare how their own code interprets the messages stored in the preset files, against the behaviour and appearance of original prototype BrightHearts iPad app.

Figure 4: Example of one of the calibration images and accompanying tables describing how the messages from the Max software are interpreted by the visualisation software of the BrightHearts (prototype) App on the iPad.

Summary of documentation strategy for future translation

Table 2 – George Khut’s documentation strategy for “Distillery: Waveforming”

Conclusions

For Khut, Distillery: Waveforming is foremost an experiential artwork and therefore his ideas about documentation focus on capturing its functionality and the aesthetics of the interaction. Khut sees the fundamental element of Distillery: Waveforming to be something other than the source code and the technical hardware: namely the mappings between breath and relaxation-mediated changes in heart rate and the appearance of the sounds and visuals, and how these mappings give form to the subject’s experience of interactions between their breath, heart rate and autonomic nervous system.

The modular Max patch programming and the presets in the .json file form, for the artist, the compositional heart of Distillery: Waveforming. This programming draws the visuals in response to the real time heart rate data: the key to the artwork. By further documenting the interactive principles independent from the current technology, drawing on approaches proposed in the Variable Media Questionnaire, Khut has developed reference documents that allow for the translation of the original preset data and calibration for future interpretations of the visualisation software.  In this way Khut can describe the artwork with greater clarity in a non-vernacular, opening up opportunities for the artwork to be recreated in alternate modes.

As an artwork in the QAGOMA collection, Distillery: Waveforming sets a precedent as the first prototype-artwork to be acquired. Technology-based digital artworks are prone to being superseded at a rapid pace and attempting to manage even the medium-term future for such artworks is perplexing. To gain the assistance of the artist at the time of acquisition is constructive and very beneficial, but to secure the commitment of the artist to engage in collaborative, long-term conservation strategies is extraordinary and this has resulted in the Gallery acquiring an unparalleled archival resource (Pagliarino 2015, p. 74). Although the Gallery maintains an interest and intention to preserve Distillery: Waveforming in its original developmental state, providing clear evidence of Khut’s ‘iterative’, evolving art practice, the archival resource provides scope to reinterpret the artwork at some point in the future when the original technology no longer functions as intended.

Through this process of defining the experience, the artist and the institution have collaboratively addressed their common and divergent interests in the future care of Distillery: Waveforming. These differing views have created an opportunity to better understand the artwork and its position as an asset within a state collection and a physical, historical link to an ongoing, evolving artistic practice. Khut’s continued interest in the preservation of Distillery: Waveforming and his participation in dialogues about this artwork and other iterations of the biofeedback project have provided the Gallery with an extraordinary reference and flexibility to manage and display the artwork long into the future.

Works Cited

Collin, JD and Perrin, V 2013, ‘Collecting Digital Art: Reflections and Paradoxes – Ten years’ experience at the Espace multimedia gantner’ in Serexhe, Berhnard(Ed.), Digital Art Conservation – Preservation of digital art theory and practice, Germany, ZKM Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

Cycling74, 2012, Max (version 6.0.8) computer software, Walnut, California, Accessed 22 September 2014.

Ippolito, Jon. 2003a, ‘Accomodating the Unpredictable’ in The Variable Media Approach: Permanence through change, Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York, and The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science & Technology, Montreal, pp. 46-53. Accessed 22 September 2014.

Ippoliti, Jon. 2003b, ‘Variable Media Network, Definition’ Accessed 22 September 2014.

iTunes 2014, ‘BrightHearts by Sensorium Health’ viewed 29 August 2014

Khut, George Poonkhin 2014, ‘On Distillery: Waveforming (2012)’ Born Digital and Cultural Heritage conference, Melbourne, Australia, 19-20 June 2014, viewed 29 August 2014

Khut, George Poonkhin 2014, personal communication, interview 5^th September 2014.

Khut, George Poonkhin 2012, Distillery: Waveforming 2012 user’s manual (draft), in the possession of the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.

Khut, George Poonkhin, Morrow, A & Watanabe, MY 2011, ‘The BrightHearts Project: A new approach to the management of procedure-related paediatric anxiety’, Preceding of OzCHI 2011: The Body InDesign.  Design, Culture & Interaction, The Australasian Computer Human Interaction conference, Canberra, Australia, 28-29 November 2011, pp. 17-21.

Khut, George Poonkhin  & Muller, L 2005, ‘Evolving creative practice: a reflection on working with audience experience in Cardiomorphologies’, in Lyndal Jones, Pauline Anastasious, , Rhonda Smithies, Karen Trist,  (Eds.), Vital Signs: creative practice and new media now, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Australia, RMIT Publishing.

Anne Laforet, Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk,  2010, ‘Rock, paper, scissors and floppy disks’, in Annet Dekker (ed.), Archive 2020: Sustainable archiving of born digital cultural content, Virtueel Platform, viewed 4 February 2014, pp.25-36.

McDermott, J 2013, ‘Bright Hearts (2011)’, jmcd, viewed 4 September 2013, <http://www.jasonmcdermott.net/portfolio/bright-hearts>

Pagliarino, Amanda 2015, ‘Life beyond legacy: George Poonhkin Khut’s Distillery: Waveforming’, AICCM Bulletin, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 67-75.

Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, 2012, National New Media Award 2012 – George Poonkhin Khut 2012 NMA winner, QAGOMA, viewed 15 October 2014.

Bios

Amanda PAGLIARINO is Head of Conservation at the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.  Since 2003 she has worked on the conservation of audiovisual and electronic artworks in the Gallery’s collection. Amanda received a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Queensland University of Technology in 1991 and a Bachelor of Applied Science, Conservation of Cultural Material from the University of Canberra in 1995.

George Poonkhin Khut is an artist and interaction-designer working across the fields of electronic art, interaction design and arts-in-health. He lectures in art and interaction design at UNSW Art & Design (University of New South Wales, Faculty of Art  & Design) in Sydney, Australia. Khut’s body-focussed interactive and participatory artworks use bio-sensing technologies to re-frame experiences of embodiment, health and subjectivity. In addition to presenting his works in galleries and museums, George has been developing interactive and participatory art with exhibitions and research projects in hospitals, starting with “The Heart Library Project” at St. Vincent’s Public Hospital in 2009, and more recently with the “BrightHearts” research project – a collaboration with Dr Angie Morrow, Staff Specialist in Brain Injury at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead, Kids Rehab, that is evaluating the efficacy of his interactive artworks as tools for helping to reduce the pain and anxiety experienced by children during painful and anxiety-provoking procedures.

The collection and preservation of the ‘born digital’ has, in recent years, become a growing and significant area of debate. The honeymoon years are over and finally institutions are beginning to give serious consideration to best practice for digital preservation strategies and the establishment of digital collections. Digital technology emerges and disappears with incredible speed, as a once-new piece of hardware or software becomes old and is replaced by the next technological advancement. What happens to: videogame software and hardware of the 1980s and 90s? The web browsers, blogs and social media sites and content they once displayed? The artworks that relied on pre-2000 computers to create art? Are these – amongst many other – digital creations fated to be abandoned, becoming only memories of individual experience? Are they to be collected by institutions as defunct objects? Or are they to be preserved and revived using new digital technology? These are but a few of the serious questions facing collecting institutions. The question of who is responsible for collecting, preserving and historicising born digital cultural heritage is a crucial one, as is the issue of best practice – what are the best ways to preserve and make accessible such born digital heritage?

In June 2014, our “Play It Again”[1] project team ran an international conference on “The Born Digital and Cultural Heritage” that aimed to convene a forum where some of these issues could be discussed. “Play It Again” was a three year project focused on the history and preservation of microcomputer games written in 1980s Australia and New Zealand, but as the first digital preservation project to be funded as research in this part of the world (at least to our knowledge), it also had a broader significance. We tried to use it to raise awareness around some of the threats facing born digital cultural production more broadly, beyond 1980s digital games. Two of the project’s aims were to “Enhance appreciation for the creations of the early digital period” and “To build capacity in both the academic and cultural sectors in the area of digital cultural heritage and the ‘born digital’”, both critical issues internationally. A two-day event held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, the conference’s remit was thus deliberately wider than the focus of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project.

The need for cooperation between different stakeholders – legislative bodies, professionals working in different types of institutions, and the private sector – was a key recommendation of the 2012 “Vancouver Declaration,” a Memory of the World initiative (UNESCO). Born digital artefacts often require multiple sets of expertise, therefore our call for papers invited proposals from researchers and practitioners in a range of disciplines, spheres of practice and institutional contexts concerned with born digital heritage. This included libraries, archives, museums, galleries, moving image institutions, software repositories, universities, and more besides. We wanted to create a space where communication between the different types of professionals dealing with preservation of born digital cultural heritage could take place. Archivists, librarians, conservators, and moving image archivists share many challenges, yet, we suspect, often they attend conferences which are profession based, which enforces a kind of silo-ing of knowledge. Particularly in small countries such as Australia and New Zealand, there’s a need for conversations to take place across professional boundaries, and so we sought to bring people who perhaps don’t normally move in the same circles into contact.

The presentations during the conference ranged in approach from theoretical, to practical, to policy-oriented. We gloried in the range of papers that were presented. There were game histories, reflections on the demoscene, on net.art and other forms of media art, on born digital manuscripts, robots, twitter accounts and website archiving. As well as papers addressing different forms of heritage materials, there were also technical reports on the problems with hacking and patching disk images to get them to emulate, on software migration, and legal papers on copyright protection, and the ‘right to be forgotten’. (Audio of many of the presentations is available here. The variety of presentations made painfully visible the enormous task at hand in addressing born digital cultural heritage.

While Refractory focuses on entertainment media, in this issue we recognise that born digital entertainment media share many of the challenges of non-entertainment objects. Here, we have collected article versions of selected papers from the conference. The topics and subjects are varied – from those looking more broadly at approaches to born digital heritage and the preservation of digital art, to the documentation of and public discourse about early game histories, and to future creative writing practice facilitated through the collection of digital manuscripts.

In his paper “It Is What It Is, Not What It Was: Making Born Digital Heritage” (which was a keynote address), Henry Lowood examines the preservation and collection of digital media in the context of cultural heritage. Lowood is concerned with “the relationship between collections of historical software and archival documentation about that software” and poses the question “Who is interested in historical software and what will they do with it?” He argues that “answers to this fundamental question must continue to drive projects in digital preservation and software history”. Using the examples of ‘The Historian’, ‘The Media Archaeologist’ and ‘The Re-enactor’ his paper raises important questions about the function, purpose and varied approaches to the digital archive. The historian, he states, is interested in the digital archival material in order to interpret, reconstruct and retell its story in history. For the media archaeologist, “media machines are transparent in their operation” and, rather than requiring interpretation, speak of their pastness by making possible the playback of “historical media on historical machines”. Finally, for ‘The Re-enactor’, ‘authenticity’ is a crucial factor for digital preservation; however, the question of authenticity is fraught with debate – on the one hand, the re-enactor at one extreme insists on a “fidelity of play” with the software that engages with technology (hardware and software) in its original state, and at the other extreme is the re-enactor who is willing to forgo the historical machine in favour of emulation and virtualisation that recreates an embodied experience of ‘playing’ with the original software, whether a game or word processing program. In either case, as Lowood explains, “Re-enactment offers a take on born-digital heritage that proposes a commitment to lived experience.”

In their article “Defining The Experience: George Poonhkin Khut’s Distillery: Waveforming, 2012”, Amanda Pagliarino and artist George Poonkhin Khut present an account of Khut’s sensory artwork, Distillery: Waveforming 2012, which uses the prototype iPad application ‘BrightHearts,’ which was acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery. The Curator of Contemporary Australian Art requested that the acquisition “was captured in perpetuity in its prototype state”. The authors explain that this biofeedback artwork is ‘iterative’ and Khut continued to develop the work in other iterations that include updates for the BrightHearts app for touch screen devices. This article describes the development of the artwork and the issues that were addressed in its acquisition, archiving, and the consultations that took place between the artist and the collecting institution. As the writers argue “to secure the commitment of the artist to engage in collaborative, long-term conservation strategies is extraordinary and this has resulted in the Gallery acquiring an unparalleled archival resource” that includes documentation and description of the interactive principles and behaviour of the artwork in its early state and as it evolved in Khut’s art practise. This archival resource will make it possible for the work to be reinterpreted “at some point in the future when the original technology no longer functions as intended”. In this respect, Distillery: Waveforming is understood as a “legacy artwork intrinsically linked to past and future iterations” of Khut’s larger Biofeedback Project.

The next article “There and Back Again: A Case History of Writing The Hobbit” by Veronika Megler focuses on the iconic text adventure game The Hobbit (Melbourne House, 1981), which Megler co-wrote during the final year of her Bachelor of Science degree at Melbourne University. This paper is a case history of the development of the The Hobbit (based on J.R.R.Tolkien’s novel of the same name) into a game that could run on the first generation of home computers that were just beginning to hit the market. Little has been written about the development of the first generation of text-based computer games; this case history provides insight into this developmental period in computer game history. Megler describes the development process, the internal design, and the genesis of the ideas that made The Hobbit unique. She compares the development environment and the resulting game to the state-of-the-art in text adventure games of the time, and wraps up by discussing the game’s legacy and the recent revival of interest in the game.

Jaakko Suominen and Anna Sivula’s article “Participatory Historians in Digital Cultural Heritage Process — Monumentalization of the First Finnish Commercial Computer Game” continues with games, analysing how digital games become cultural heritage. By using examples of changing conceptualisations of the first commercial Finnish computer game, the article examines the amateur and professional historicisation of computer games. The authors argue that the production of cultural heritage is a process of constructing symbolic monuments that are often related to events of change or the beginning of a progressive series of events, and the article presents an account of the formation of games as symbolic cultural monuments within a Finnish context. Whilst many researchers and journalists have claimed that Raharuhtinas (Money Prince 1984) for Commodore 64 was the first Finnish commercial digital game, its status as such is controversial. As the authors explain, “in this paper, we are more interested in public discourse of being the first” and how this relates to the cultural heritage process. The case of the ‘first’ game, it is argued, illuminates how items are selected as building material for digital game cultural heritage.

In “Retaining Traces of Composition in Digital Manuscript Collections: a Case for Institutional Proactivity”, Millicent Weber turns to digital manuscripts, their collection, preservation and digital storage by collecting institutions. Weber argues that libraries, archives and scholars have not addressed the content of future digital or part-digital collections, or their capacity to support sustained scholarly research. This paper examines the potential content of future collections of poetry manuscripts and their capacity to support research into the process of composition. To predict this capacity, the article compares a study of compositional process, using handwritten and typewritten manuscripts, with a small-scale survey of early-career poets’ compositional habits. The draft manuscripts of three poems by the poet Alan Gould and three by the poet Chris Mansell are used to describe each poet’s compositional habits, while the survey component of the project obtained information about the drafting practices of 12 students of creative writing and poetry at the University of Canberra. Weber concludes that the results indicate both the great diversity of manuscript collections currently being created, and the importance of archival institutions adopting an active advocacy role in encouraging writers to create and maintain comprehensive and well-organised collections of digital manuscripts.

The collection and preservation of born digital cultural heritage is of critical importance. In the digital era, “Heritage refers to legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what should be passed from generation to generation because of its significance and value” (UNESCO/PERSIST Content Task Force 16). If we want to ensure that records and works from this era persist, we will need to substantially ramp up our efforts. Cooperation between different stakeholders is critical and the research sector has an important role to play, in undertaking collaborative research with cultural institutions to tackle some of the thornier challenges surrounding the persistence of born digital cultural heritage.

Works cited

UNESCO. “UNESCO/UBC Vancouver Declaration, The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation.” N.p., 2012. Web. 17 Dec. 2012.

UNESCO/PERSIST Content Task Force. “The UNESCO/PERSIST Guidelines for the Selection of Digital Heritage for Long-Term Preservation.” 2016. Web.

[1] The “Play It Again” project received support under the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Projects funding Scheme (project number LP120100218). See our research blog and the “Popular Memory Archive” for more information on the project.

Bios

Associate Professor Melanie Swalwell is a scholar of digital media arts, cultures, and histories. She is the recipient of an ARC Future Fellowship for her project “Creative Micro-computing in Australia, 1976-1992”. Between 2011-15, she was Project Leader and Chief Investigator on the ARC Linkage Project “Play It Again“. In 2009, Melanie was the Nancy Keesing Fellow (State Library of New South Wales). She has authored chapters and articles in both traditional and interactive formats, in such esteemed journals as Convergence, Vectors, and the Journal of Visual Culture. Melanie’s projects include:

• “Creative Micro-computing in Australia, 1976-1992”. Watch the filmhere.
• Australasian Digital Heritage, which gathers together several local digital heritage research projects. Follow us onFacebook & Twitter @ourdigiheritage
• “Play It Again: Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games, for Industry, Community and Research Purposes”, ARC Linkage, 2012-14. Follow us onFacebook & Twitter @AgainPlay, and visit the Popular Memory Archive.

Angela Ndalianis is Professor in Screen Studies at Melbourne University, and the Director of the Transformative Technologies Research Unit (Faculty of Arts). Her research interests include: genre studies, with expertise in the horror and science fiction genres; entertainment media and media histories; the contemporary entertainment industry. Her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (MIT Press 2004), Science Fiction Experiences (New Academia 2010), The Horror Sensorium; Media and the Senses (McFarland 2012) and The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (editor, Routledge 2008). She is currently completing two books: Batman: Myth and Superhero; and Robots and Entertainment Culture. She is also a Fellow of the Futures of Entertainment Network (U.S), and is the Hans Christian Andersen Academy’s Visiting Professor (2015-7), a position also affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark.   

Abstract: The paper deals with the question of how digital games become cultural heritage. By using examples of changing conceptualisations of the first commercial Finnish computer game, the paper illuminates the amateur and professional historicising of computer games. The general theoretical contribution of the paper is in the explanation of cultural heritage processes where contemporary cultural phenomena are historicised and in the illustration of the role of production of monuments in the historicising.

Introduction

Laurajane Smith argues that heritage is not only something material, which merely relates with the past. Rather, it is a process of engagement of contemporaries. According to Smith, heritage is an act of communication, and an act of creating meaning in, and for, the present. At the same time, it signifies cultural identity work, a cultural and social process, which engages with acts of remembering, hence creating ways of understanding the present (Smith 1–2.). The process of defining cultural heritage occurs within game cultures as well. Academically, and in hobbyist communities, and partially within the game industry, cultural heritage debate has roused demands such as that certain digital games have to be saved and preserved ”before it is too late” (e.g. Lowood et al.). In the sense of Laurajane Smith’s ideas, the reason for the preservation is the shared conceptualization that digital games are meaningful and they should be able to pass on to new generations. Digital games are not – yet – in the World Heritage List by UNESCO, but there are already game canons, lists of significant, important, and revolutionary games; collected and conducted by hobbyist communities and semi-officially nominated committees.[1] Even though those debates about the heritage value of game cultures circle around material issues and, in many cases, specific items – digital and non-digital – the debates are part of the process of engagement and communicative identity work described by Smith.

Recognized heritage ought to be preserved, and scholars, as well as game hobbyists, have examined various possibilities for digital game preservation. They have approached that from the perspectives on creation of (museum) collections and archives, documenting and emulation and migration of game software code and so forth, which all can be perceived as ‘heritage work’ or ‘heritage management’ (Smith 2006) for ensuring that valuable items could be transferred for new generations. (See e.g. Swalwell; Heinonen & Reunanen; Guttenbrunner et al.; Barwick et al.. For a critical overview, see Newman.)[2] The discussion of digital game preservation is significant, but it, primarily, lacks serious contemplation regarding one of the key questions that is the focus of this paper: how the game cultural elements are recognized and selected as being worthy of preservation, of becoming elevated to the status of cultural heritage?  Obviously, one simple answer to the question is that particular games and devices have received wide recognition and impact as novelties in their contemporary contexts and therefore their value is somehow self-evident. We argue that there are other reasons to consider: more local and marginal means and, especially, historicized value of something to be the first of its kind. These canonical items of cultural heritage, we call here monuments.

Our primary theoretical concepts in this paper are the above mentioned (cultural) heritage process and monument. The cultural heritage process is observed in light of a case of early Finnish commercial computer games. Instead of being particularly interested in what digital game actually was the earliest production in Finland, we will merely deal with the question of public discourse of firstness and its connections with the cultural heritage process. The emergence of such discourse, representing the past of Finnish game cultures in a precise manner, we argue, is a sign of a particular phase of a cultural heritage process where specific actors have a motivation to discover origins of national game cultures and industry. Thus, we ask here, who is historicizing Finnish commercial computer games? When did the question of the first game emerge? How is the debate related to the process in which digital games become cultural heritage?  The case provides answers to the primary research question: how are certain items selected and transformed to the cultural heritage of digital game culture, particularly in the role of a monument? This article provides a model for comparison on other case examples in different contexts.

The article consists of the following sections: we will begin with an introduction to our essential theoretical concepts based on contemporary academic discussion on cultural heritage. Then, we will illustrate our case and describe public debate about the first, Finnish commercial computer game. In conclusion, we will return to theoretical conceptualizations of historicizing “firsts.”

Cultural heritage, community and monuments

Raiford Guins (108–109) has described the remnants of arcade game machines, such as Pac-Man or Pole Position cabinets, as unintentional monuments. Leaning on Austrian art historian Alois Riegl’s definition (1903), Guins states that even though the machines were monumental in their own age, they were not intended “for deliberate commemoration.” According to Guins, their monument status is new — or what we would contend: newly historicized.

Monuments are the vital elements in the production of cultural heritage.[3] The topical question is how and when an average digital game object is transformed from an ordinary artefact or a commodity to a realm of memory (Nora 626), or, as we prefer, a monument of digital culture.

A monument is a historical artefact that has a specific symbolic value to a certain cultural heritage community, i.e. a group of people who share an understanding of their common history.[4] In the cultural history of games, for instance, the famous and somehow special game devices and games, such as the first coin-op games or home consoles, now presented in museums and private collections, can become monuments to game culture. Such monuments are able to commodified as new products such as retrogames.[5]

Figure 1. Commodore 64 has unintentionally become a monument of the 1980s home computer culture in Finland, as well as in other places. Here is a C-64 advertisement “Liberator” from the first issue of MikroBitti home computer magazine (1/1984) referring to an internationally recognized deliberate monument, the Statue of Liberty. Later on, C-64 was also advertised as “the Computer of the Republic” with e.g. references to Finnish national flag and national romantic famous paintings, due to C-64’s popularity and market dominance.

A monument is an active element in a dynamic network of cultural heritage processes. A monument derives its cultural value and meaning from historical interpretations. A monument, a particular gaming artefact for example, is a link between the different elements of the production of social memories. Things, places, events, and stories are comprised in a monument. (Aronsson 197.)

The monument is historical by nature. The making of a monument requires a historical antecedent. When elements of cultural heritage are selected and thus, cultural heritage produced, the argumentation is grounded on histories. History, in this context, is a representation of the past, based on research and traceable source materials. The value of particular game devices, games and game related practices, is built on the historical representations of them, but the research conducted by professional, trained historians is not the sole source of these representations. Therefore, it is important to ask; who writes the history? The one, who conveys the history and conducts the process of cultural heritage?

As mentioned above, cultural heritage as a concept does not only refer to material or immaterial objects, but to a dynamic process (Smith 44–45; Bortolotto 21–22).  In this circular process, cultural heritage is produced, used, and reproduced. Instead of only consisting of objects, cultural heritage is merely an experience of historical continuum and social participation (Smith 45 and 49–50). Cultural heritage is also an instrument of various sorts of group-identity work, which has several transnational, national and local levels. (Sivula 2015; Sivula & Siro 2015.)

There are several groups, as well as individuals, who are developing their historical identity with digital games: game developers, players, journalists, and collectors, to name a few. On the other hand, there is not any indigenous group of digital culture, who possesses an exclusive right to the cultural heritage of digital games. A heritage community experiences the possession of cultural heritage and thus uses it in identity work and maintains its symbolic value. (Sivula 2010, 29.) According to Pierre Nora, the realms of memory are remnants or symbols of the past, “where [cultural] memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (Nora 1989, 7).

Cultural heritage is an instrument of identity work with the symbols and traces of the past, experience of participation, and shared historical experience. (Sivula 2015.) The identity work is performed by a cultural heritage community, as seen below.

Figure 2. This basic pattern illustrates the three types of identity work of a cultural heritage community. The heritage community shares and is aware of a common history, which values certain traces of the past as historical symbols and/or historical evidence, and experiences participation in a mutual, historical project. (Sivula 2015, 66.)

The researching and interpretation of the past keeps the cultural heritage process active. Further, the practice of researching, interpreting and representing the past can be observed as the three phases of historiographical operation. According to Paul Ricoeur, the three phases are: 1) documentation, 2) explaining and understanding the past and 3) the historical representation of the past. (Ricoeur 169–170, 182–184 and 234–235; Sivula 2006, 44–45). The cultural heritage process begins with an attempt at historicizing the past, selected by a heritage community. A historian, either amateur or a professional, steps through all the three phases of historical operation, until the past is documented, explained and understood, and further represented in the form of a history.

Monuments – tangible or intangible – are the traces of the past, used in the identity work of a cultural heritage community both as documentary, historical evidence, and meaningful, historical symbols. The symbolic and/or evidential value of a monument, as a realm of social memory, is based on history. Written or oral histories are acting as, and used as frame stories, establishing the meaning of cultural heritage. However, when digital game culture is concerned, one is able to find these histories, for example, in game magazines and online forums consisting of feature articles on (developments of) particular games, genre, developers, and devices; or personal memoirs or one’s personal gaming histories. A tangible or intangible monument, in its turn, serves as evidence and thus solidifies the plot and content of heritage communities’ historical self-comprehension. (Sivula 2015, 64–67.)

Histories are, during the cultural heritage process, used in order to highlight some important moments and attach some remnants of the past i.e., monuments, to these highlighted moments of shared history. (Sivula 2015, 66.) Monuments are usually attached to the beginning of the historical story, or to the turning points of the historiographically described process. Monuments are, therefore, often attached to historically important turning points, or to the instance in which a progressive series of events starts to unfold. In Finland, for instance, the Commodore 64, the most popular home computer of the 1980s, is that sort of monument, which signifies the turn towards home computer gaming and the micro computing age and, which, functions as a media technological symbol for a certain generation of people. In Japan, the Nintendo Famicom console has the similar role, and we are able to find a plethora of examples from other countries.

Figure 3. Pelaa! (Play!) Exhibition in Salo Art Museum in Finland in 2009 is an example of how to give new meanings for game cultural objects. Here in the above picture, for example, is the Nokia mobile phone Snake game, and both Nokia cell phone and its Snake game are key objects of Finnish national technology historical frame stories. Photo: Petri Saarikoski.

In the monumentalisation process, the meaning of the object obviously transmutes from its original significance. J. C. Herz (61–62), for instance, richly describes the change in the videogaming context in her famous popular book on videogame history, Joystick Nation. In her work she portrays an early coin-op videogame exhibition at the American Museum of the Moving Images, where game cabinets’ new displacement has illuminated and underlined their novel contextualization. The machines were not situated as close to each other as they would have been in arcades, where their placement catalysed an aesthetic elevation in the author’s mind: “They are privileged with space, like statues or really expensive clothing, and thus become Design Objects. And this is when you realize, for the first time, that these cabinets, apart from containing your favourite videogames, are really just goddam beautiful.”

There is plethora of games that are not actively played anymore. Some of them have already been forgotten, but some of them, nonetheless, have the potential to become monuments of digital culture. The cultural heritage potential of a game appears, most often, to be rested on the argument of being “the first” or being a “historical turning point.”

Figure 4. “Now it’s time to put the Finlandia hymn [composed by “the greatest composer of Finland” (Wikipedia) Jean Sibelius] on a record player, because the first, Finnish game has conquered the world”. Niko Nirvi’s review of Sanxion (programmed by Stavros Fasoulas, published by Thalamus in 1986) in MikroBitti 12/1986, 72, illustrates how contemporaries are able to historicize games in a way that affects later historical writing.

Debate on the first Finnish commercial computer game

There are never ending debates in different fields regarding what was the first of a particular type of invention, technology, media form, or something else. This debate has already been recognized earlier, for example, by computer historians. The history of computer games and videogames is not an exception. The debate on what is the first video game or computer game has mainly been international – or essentially, US oriented. One is able to find variations of this discussion from almost every videogame history book or textbook of game studies, which repeat stories and report new findings related to American Tennis for Two, Spacewar!, Pong and so on.  When the national and local digital game historical representations of the past have begun to emerge, the similar debate has achieved domestic dimensions and bloomed as national versions. This has happened in Finland as well, mainly within computer and game hobbyist communities and in online discussion forums and publications.

Computer scientist and historian John A. N. Lee (57) provides several reasons for the “common desire to be associated with firsts” within the history of computing. On the one hand, it is certainly desirable to become recognized in history as an inventor or a founder or discoverer of some sort of historical origins of the important phenomenon. On the other hand, other reasons can be economic: “Unique firsts do have a place in the identification of the owners of intellectual property rights with respect claims on patents, copyrights, and such.” Lee notes critically that in many cases, it is difficult to define something as being the first and continues further: “Everyone likes firsts but the attraction is for fame and fortune rather than downstream usefulness—firsts are better left to the Guinness Book of Records than being the subject of endless, meaningless arguments in scholarly journals.” (See also Haigh)

Overall, the discussion about the first digital game in Finland has primarily dealt with the issue of the first Finnish commercial computer game publication and not the very first Finnish (digital) game ever produced, perhaps because the publication is less difficult to master: before commercial publications there was a quite uncertain phase of non-commercial amateur game projects, a period of producing and playing of games with mainframe and mini computers (Saarikoski 264). Some studies dealing with earlier developments, at least partially, have appeared (see e.g. Saarikoski; Paju; Saarikoski & Suominen), as well as studies pondering questions of the earliest computers and microcomputers in Finland (e.g. Suominen 2003; Saarikoski 2004; Paju).

Even though the question of the earliest Finnish commercial computer game release seems rather straightforward from the first sight, it is much more complicated than that. Basically, we can challenge all of the elements of the question: what does “Finnish” mean? And what do we signify with “a computer” game’ or with a “commercial?”

Let’s now trace the tracks and marks regarding the online debate of the first commercial computer game in Finland using Google search as a helper. It appears that there are only a few hits with the keywords “first Finnish computer game” or “first Finnish video game” (during the process of writing first manuscript of the paper in Spring 2014). However, for example, the Dome.fi-site, which has focused on forms of popular culture, such as television, cinema and games; consists of various articles and discussions about the issue. Jukka O. Kauppinen, a pioneering game journalist and one of the key persons researching the historicisation of digital gaming in Finland (Suominen 2011; Suominen et al. 2015), published, along with with Miikka Lehtonen and Teemu Viemerö, an article about the early years of the Finnish game industry and the “first Finnish games” on the 1st of December 2013. The authors opened their article with a summary introduction and referred to an antecedent text handling the 30-year anniversary exhibition about the Finnish game industry. The exhibition had been had been organized for the DigiExpo2013 fair by the association of Finnish game importers, FIGMA. Game distributer firms trace their history from the establishment of Petri Lehmuskoski’s company, Toptronics, in 1983. In the article, Kauppinen and his colleagues stated that not only importing, but also the production of the first commercial games began in Finland 30 years before prior (Viemerö et al. 1.12.2013.).

The above-mentioned writers noted that the company Amersoft was probably the first game publisher in Finland. They looked through the company’s different phases by introducing its, as well as some other publishers’ early releases. They discussed the following games: Joe the Whizz Kid (1985), RahaRuhtinas (1984, Amersoft), Sanxion (1986), Uuno Turhapuro muuttaa maalle (1986, Amersoft), Painterboy (1986), Delta (1987), Quedex (1987), Octapolis (1987), and Netherworld (1988). About Amersoft, they wrote:

The book publisher Amersoft was probably the first Finnish game publisher whose contribution to domestic game field was very significant. The best knowledge available suggests that that the first domestic commercially published game was RahaRuhtinas [“Money Prince”], which came out in 1984 which was a pseudo-3D graphic implemented adventure. Little information remains about the game’s aims or storyline for future generations, however, the Finnish adventure game was, according to some recollections, quite functional and entertaining (Viemerö et al. 1.11.2013).

Figure 5. Raharuhtinas represented in the Dome online magazine article 1st of December 2013.

Quite obvious sources in tracing popular knowledge of game cultural histories are main social media platforms, particularly Wikipedia and also game historical vlogs on YouTube. In the winter 2013–2014, Finnish Wikipedia’s chronological list of Finnish games stated that RahaRuhtinas was the first game (Wikipedia: Suomen videopelialan historia 30.11.2013).  Wikipedia referred to another of Jukka O. Kauppinen’s articles, published on June 27, 2011. The article was titled “Is this the first Finnish game ever” There, Kauppinen noted that “who knows how long the search for the first Finnish commercial computer game has lasted, and there has not been a definitive answer to the question so far. Although there are several good candidates.” Kauppinen first mentioned the Yleisurheilu (Track and field sports) game for Commodore 64, released in 1985 by Amersoft and stated that RahaRuhtinas had an even earlier release date. He continued: “According to some claims, there are some older Vic-20 games as well, but it seems that one cannot find quite now very exact evidence about them” (Kauppinen 27.6.2011.) In his article, Kauppinen also referred to a discussion that occurred in April 2011, in MuroBBS online discussion forum. However, Raharuhtinas was not actually mentioned there, only more recent commercial games and older non-commercial games (MuroBBS 14.4.2011). Obviously, it is worthwhile to follow article links and references and trace their mutual connections and cross-references in an ongoing loop bouncing between Wikipedia entries, online articles, and message boards.

Information dealing with Amersoft and Raharuhtinas became more specified in 2013 and in spring 2014. In autumn 2013, game historians, hobbyists and collectors Markku Reunanen, Mikko Heinonen and Manu Pärssinen, published an article about the history of Finnish games in Finnish Yearbook of Game Studies (Pelitutkimuksen vuosikirja 2013). Their article was based on their database of Finnish games published at the Videogames.fi site. They claimed: “So far the oldest finding is an adventure game Raharuhtinas, programmed by Simo Ojaniemi and published by Amersoft in the year 1984.” On the 14^th of December 2013, however, Videogames.fi was updated and a new game appeared. The site alleged that the first game, also programmed by Simo Ojaniemi, was called Mehulinja (Juice line), not Raharuhtinas: “[Mehulinja] requires a VIC-1211 Super Expander extension. According to our current information, Mehulinja is the first commercially published computer game. The game won I came-made-won programming contest in 1984.” The example shows how researchers, at least, were careful when claiming something as being the first.

Videogames.fi refers to another website called Sinivalkoinen pelikirja (http://sinivalkoinenpelikirja.com/) (Blue-white game book [colours referring to the Finnish national flag]), which has published a review of the Mehulinja game on 22 March, 2013. The Sinivalkoinen pelikirja site was connected to an ongoing book project, a chronicle about Finnish game history. The book was published in spring 2014. On the one hand, the book, written by journalist Juho Kuorikoski and based on the website, claimed that RahaRuhtinas is “as far as we know, the first commercial Finnish game for Commodore 64.” Kuorikoski mentioned three “small games” programmed by Simo Ojaniemi for VIC-20 published in the same year: Mehulinja, Herkkusuu (Sweet Tooth) and Myyräjahti (Vole Hunt) (Kuorikoski 12). On the other hand, he declares that Raharuhtinas was the first Finnish game released (20) and that Yleisurheilu was only “one candidate for being the first Finnish game ever.” (25). That variation proves the uncertainty of the first.[6]

Figure 6. Mehulinja entry on sinivalkoinenpelikirja.com website.

Similar updating of the information has happened on a YouTube channel by alias AlarikRetro. He published a video review – another type of history – of Raharuhtinas on December 1th, 2013 and remarked that the game was the first Finnish release. Only a few days later, the 14^th of December, he included an edit, in which he refers to the Videogames.fi site and states that actually Mehulinja was the first (AlarikRetro 8.12.2013 and AlarikRetro 27.12.2013) There are similar debates on other hobbyist sites.

In sum, the question of the first game has not been verified, although though it has received some emerging interest. Then, in July 2014, a novel turn took place, when Manu Pärssinen and Markku Reunanen discovered a new, an older candidate, which might have been the first commercial computer game in Finland. That was called Chesmac, a game programmed by Raimo Suonio in 1979 for the Telmac 1800 home computer. According to Suonio, the game, released by computer retailer Topdata, sold 104 copies. Pärssinen and Reunanen published several documents related to game, such as scanned photos of the game’s manual and an interview with the programmer (Pärssinen & Reunanen 28.7.2014). The news of this new first was circulated in online magazines as well as in newspapers (Kauppinen 28.7.2014; Berschewsky 28.7.2014). In the end, the leading Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, published an interview with the programmer Raimo Suonio (Jokinen 10.8.2014). Thus, the history of Finnish commercial game releases turned out to be at least five years longer than previously thought and has garnered, for the first time, major public coverage in Finland. It therefore appears that the discussion amongst hobbyists and researcher-hobbyists has emerged and strengthened during last few years.[7]

We would argue that such interest in discussing and representing the past was not only related to collecting of games, or sort of hobbyist retrogaming boom, but also to international emerging interest towards digital game preservation, exhibitions, and a turn towards the research of national and local aspects of games and game cultures (See also English blog writing on the history of Finnish digital games: Skäpädi Pöy 28.8.2013). This shift was also connected to the organization and recognition of the Finnish game industry.  It is a sign of legitimization and institutionalization processes of digital games in society.

Figure 7. Helsingin Sanomat titled their interview as “Raimo Suonio, a pioneer of Finnish game developers. […] developed the first commercial computer game in Finland.” In the photo, Suonio holds his old Telmac 1800 computer.

When Chesmac, Mehulinja, Raharuhtinas and other games were published in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the game industry was an undeveloped field internationally. Historical understanding or awareness was not established, not even among game developers and players. The establishment of Finnish computer hobbyist and game oriented publications from the mid-1980s, created the needed public space for the creation and construction of historical understanding amongst hobbyists and players (see Saarikoski 2004; Suominen 2011). The press created hero stories about the earliest Finnish game designer individuals and occasionally introduced the first releases in a certain genre (first adventure game etc.) (Saarikoski 2004, 264), or underlined the historical importance of some new releases (such as the Sanxion game, published in 1986). Amersoft, however, had a somewhat marginal role in the early magazines, even though some of its publications were reviewed and it had advertised it products, primarily books, but also some games. These early computer hobbyist magazines and game magazines later on, including the above mentioned hero stories – which usually revealed histories of individual programmers or game designers as computer users, gamers and developers, have acted as sources when the interest towards the early phases of Finnish game industry has been emerged since the early 2000s.

In the beginning of the 2000s, new interest towards development of the Finnish game industry and education emerged. This was due to several, interconnected reasons. International success stories such as with the Max Payne (2001) PC-game, developed by Finnish company Remedy, raised interest towards the game industry. Importantly, it was situated in the international trend of new cultural and creative industries. Likewise, the triumph of cell phone corporation Nokia created an information and communication technological boom which, in its minor part, focused on mobile game software development.

Several game industry and education reports were published. Even though they mostly referred to the national history of game industry (typically excluding non-digital games, for example) very cursory, they articulated the more general trend, which with was related to the production of game historical narrative: the significant branch of industry had its roots. However, the origin story of game developers themselves did not mention Chesmac, Mehulinja, Raharuhtinas or some other early games but was fastened to so-called demoscene phenomenon due to the fact that some key persons of the focal firms, like Remedy and Housemarque, which had their background in the late 1980s and early 1990s demoscene (on demoscene’s role in the Nordic game industry, see Jørgensen et al. 2015). The demoscene origin story was introduced in the interviews of firm personnel in computer and game magazines and newspapers in the late 1990s. Later on, it has growth as a myth which has been repeated in publications as well as in the interviews of early game developers (e.g. Niipola 51–62; Kuorikoski 36–38).

But as we have argued, the primary “boom of the first” has started to emerge in last few years. It has mixed ingredients from new success stories of Finnish game industry, post-Nokia context, establishment of retrogaming, anniversaries as well as “awakenings” of memory organizations and researchers on questions of game history and preservation. What has happened? Who uses history, for what and why?

The First Game is both a piece of historical evidence and a symbol

We argue that cultural heritage process of digital games has reached a new phase, and the Finnish heritage community of digital games is actively involved in a new kind of identity work. The institutionalization of this new type of heritage has begun. The cultural heritage process of digital gaming can be observed in the context of the different levels of the cultures of history.

Oral and written histories are produced in three different fields. First, there is the academic field of history-cultural activities consisting of academic rules, refereed publications and academically trained researchers with doctoral degrees. Histories are based on the source criticism and supplementary rules of academic research. Secondly, there is a field of the public, which consists of politically controlled and publicly funded processes of cultural heritage with less strict academic control, but much more discussions on and monetary involvement. The institutionalization of cultural heritage takes often place on the second level of the cultures of history. It is conducted with political decisions, and there is not a specific means of control for the credibility of a frame story. The third field is the field of amateurs; such as individuals and groups of hobbyists, even families, selecting meaningful things from the more or less authentic remains of their pasts. The amateur is permitted to choose whatsoever (elements of) heritage and use any kind of frame stories as arguments, without an obligation to put the arguments to the test of any kind. The three fields of cultural heritage are interrelated.  Amateurs are often extremely active in the second field of cultures of history. An amateur may find academic research useful as a frame story that gives meaning to one’s own cultural heritage of her/his own.  An academic researcher or a politician may also be an enthusiastic amateur, and an academic researcher often uses the academic competences for to promote the cultural heritage process and consolidate the cultural heritage value of the historical remnants of her own hobby.  (Sivula 2013, 163; Aronsson 43.)

The case we described above shows that the first game historians were not usually “proper” professional historians, but more likely historically oriented amateurs. The active heritage community, in our case, consisted of the hobbyists.

It seems to be quite common, that the historicisation of a new culture begins among the community or groups of the amateur historians, involved in the historical process themselves. (Cf. history of computing and Lee 1996.) Because of this involvement, we refer to them as participatory historians. Amateur popular historians use often specific period-related concepts as metaphors or rhetorical elements.[9] Accurate or not, the amateur historian has already marked the turning points of the story, when an academic professional historian begins the research work. The preliminary plot of historical narrative, suggesting the argument for valuable cultural heritage, is often constructed by the amateurs.

The plot of history has, at least, a beginning and an end, and a change in between them. The emplotment of a history consists of the defining of the origins of the historicized phenomenon’s life cycle, marking some turning points of the process and constructing the end of the presentation. In the presentations of the history of digital gaming, there have been some international discussions on, what actually was the first game.  The battles of what came first are common in the discussions on the phenomena that are not yet historicized, however they can continue after that as well. Historian of an incomplete process is strongly interested in the beginnings of the process and the origins of the phenomenon.

Either the beginning or the end of a historical narrative is usually self-evident. The first and the last fact of a historical series are often chosen from among several options.  The defining of an origin, the beginning of the story, is an act of interpretation. It is, however, not an arbitrary one. The professional historian’s choice must be based on evidence. The interpretations are built in negotiations (Foucault 34; Ricoeur 143–144.) The plot of a written or orally solidified history determines the experienced value of the cultural heritage. The original game is experienced to be historically more valuable than the successor or a copy.

According to Michel Foucault, the past was an irregular chaos of events, and an oral or written history organizes these events. (Foucault 34–35.)  History gives comprehensibility to the past and solidifies the connections of separate events, building series of events and building the sense and sensibility of time and temporality. The oral or written, amateur or professional history, as a frame story of the cultural heritage process, solidifies the symbolic function of a monument.

There are some regular phases in every cultural heritage process. In our case, the digital game is originally used, functioning and experienced as a game. In the new context, though, it is defined in the historical frame story, it begins to be used and experienced as cultural heritage, either as a tool for to build the temporal identity of a heritage community, e.g. group of players, or as a tool of building the public image or other communicative activity of an enterprise or other corporation. Likewise, it could be used by the state or international organizations. For these goals they use all the other institutionalized cultural resources, such as education or cultural production. In the cultural heritage process, the use, function and experience of the game, all change. The public or private heritage community has either active or more or less subconscious goal of increasing the symbolic value of the game. The game with increased symbolic value, cultural heritage value, can still be played, although it might represent outdated technology and design.

When public resources and the academic field of history culture are involved in the cultural heritage process, the histories used as frame stories are most often based on academic, professional research. The interpretations pass the normal academic quality control. In the field of amateurs and in the private field the rules are different, but in many cases academic sub-contractors are hired for to produce the frame story.

When an object, e.g. a digital game, is identified as a symbol or evidence of the history shared by a group of the digital cultural heritage community, it receives a new social function. It is no longer only a game, but a monument or a place of memory. It is used, either with a playful sense of retro or in the more serious feeling of the memorizing the past, in commemorative rituals. It becomes a tool of identity work. (See also Heineman) Sooner or later, it may be rejected, changed, found to be useless or be replaced with another, more accurate tool, e.g. what we have learned with the changing definition of the first commercial computer game in Finland. Or the community, whose identity tool the cultural heritage was, may disband and move on (Bohman 17–23; Sivula 2013, 161–164).

Conclusion

Digital game culture is a unique field of contemporary culture, and a very interesting one at that. Our case study opens a view to the historiographical operations of participatory historians. Our case aids us in understanding the strengths and weaknesses, risks and opportunities of the historiographical practice related to monuments. It helps to develop the methodology of analysing the historiographical operations, historicizing the contemporary culture. To be critical, we ought to know, how the monument of the first digital game was erected.

In most cases of the production of new monuments, the role of the amateur field has been essential. The production of monuments is a part of historiographical operations and it is clearly located in the documentary and representative phases of the model of historiographical operation, presented by Paul Ricoeur.

The right to choose a monument of digital game culture cannot be monopolized by either academics or amateurs. In our case, both academics and computer game hobbyists were active, selecting objects that they considered worth of preserving and creating monuments of Finnish game culture. In the case of the cultural heritage process of Finnish computer games, the academic field of history culture is closely and continuously interacting with the history-cultural field of amateurs. Many actors of the academic field do have a position in the field of amateurs as well. In other words: there are many computer game hobbyists among the academic researchers of the history of digital culture. The historiographical operation of digital games produces plethora of monuments.

The question of what was the first game becomes important in the phase of representation of historiographical operation. That is the phase where the plot of history is created. The question of what came first is often already answered, even before a professional historian gets an opportunity to make any conclusions.

We can conclude that there are some preconditions for a reliable definition of the firstness, when concerned with digital games. All the concurrent definitions must be observed critically, paying attention to the goals and needs of inventors of the monuments.

First, there is the contemporary definition. A chronicling actor has a motive to spot and articulate a new field, turning point or a milestone. The actor wishes to claim that something important, even revolutionary has happened. We must notice who is acting and why.

Second, there is a retrospective definition. Usually, it is connected to a situation and phase where certain field of actions is the subject of reformation and re-definition. Need for birth stories and origin stories, when legitimizing a need for a cultural industry and several organizations related to it, has taken place. It this case as well, economy and politics have certain role in the process. There is a supply of and demand for money.

Third, there is a specified retrospective definition. That happens, for example, when celebrating anniversaries. In Finland and within digital game cultures, this sort of definition has not happened until recent years and celebrations of the 30th anniversary of commercial game development and digital game importing businesses.

The knowledge related to what is first might become more exact, although this is not necessary. A contemporary definition of what has been the first do not occur, if phenomenon does not feel like significant for contemporaries – if they don’t comprehend that they are living “historical moments.” With the Finnish case, it was not until the publication of “the first Finnish adventure game”, a release of specific popular genre, was the rhetoric of first actually launched. Another option is that they do not comprehend something as being first: this question applies to what is Finnish, what is a game and what is commercial? Because definitions of all of the three aspects are controversial, it is difficult to define something as first Finnish commercial game publication.

The question of what is the first, functions on at least two levels: on one hand, it can deal with the particular first (first game ever), but essentially there are difficulties, and in many cases, that are not necessary to define. On the other hand, questions regarding firstness are connected to larger turning points and they are less difficult to outline: there is, for example, no doubt that that Commodore 64 was the first popular home computer in Finland and the first popular computer gaming device available.

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to the Kone Foundation for funding the Kotitietokoneiden aika ja teknologisen harrastuskulttuurin perintö [Home Computer Era and the Heritage of Technological Hobby Culture] project, and the Academy of Finland for funding Ludification and the Emergence of Playful Culture (decision #275421). In addition, we thank the two anonymous referees for their useful comments.

 

Works Cited

Interviews

Reunanen, Markku 5.3.2014, Facebook chat with Jaakko Suominen.

Magazines and newspapers

Digitoday 2007

Kauppalehti 2009

MikroBitti 1984–1986

Poke&Peek 1983–1984

Online articles, videos and discussion forums (retrieved 13 June 2014)

Alarik: “RahaRuhtinas (C64)” Alarik – muistoista näytölle 27.12.2013.

AlarikRetro: “RahaRuhtinas (C64): Videoarvostelu” YouTube-video, published 8.12.2013.

Berschewsky, Tapio: “30 vuotta ennen Angry Birdsiä – Tämä on ensimmäinen kaupallinen suomalaispeli. Ilta-Sanomat Online” Ilta-Sanomat Online 28.7.2014.

Heinonen, Mikko: “Suomipelien kronikka” V2.fi 6.12.2009.

Jokinen, Pauli: “Raimo Suonio on Suomen pelintekijöiden pioneeri.” Helsingin Sanomat 10.8.2014.

Kauppinen, Jukka O.: “Onko tämä ensimmäinen suomalainen peli ikinä?” Dome.fi 27.6.2011.

Kauppinen, Jukka O.: “Suomalainen peliala 30 vuotta? Ehei, uusi löytö ajoittaa ensimmäisen kaupallisen suomipelin vuoteen 1979!” Dome.fi 28.7.2014.

MuroBBS discussion forum, chain: “Ensimmäinen Suomalainen videopeli?”, started 14.4.2011 at 19:26.

Pärssinen, Manu & Reunanen, Markku: “Ensimmäinen suomalainen tietokonepeli.” V2.fi 28.7.2014.

Rautanen, Niila T.: C= inside, Finnish Commodore Archive.

Sinivalkoinenpelikirja.com

Skäpädi Pöy: “A History of Finnish Games, Part 1” FRGCB (Finnish Retro Game Comparison Blog) 28.8.2013.

Suomen Pelinkehittäjät Ry: “Suomen pelialan lyhyt historiikki” 3.10.2011.

Videogames.fi

Viemerö, Teemu – Lehtonen, Miikka –Kauppinen, Jukka O.: “Suomalaisen pelialan varhaiset vuodet ja ensimmäiset suomalaiset pelit” Dome.fi 1.11.2013.

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Whalen, Zack & Taylor, Laurie N. 2008. “Playing the Past. An Introduction.” Playing the Past. History and Nostalgia in Video Games. Zack Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor (Eds.) Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1–15.

Notes

[1] See, for example, The Game Canon proposed for the Library of Congress, consisting of games such as Spacewar!, Tetris and Doom and selected by a committee comprising game historian Henry Lowood, game designers Warren Spector, Steve Meretzky and Matteo Bittanti, as well as blogger Christopher Grant.

[2] We thank referee number two for giving us information on some more recent software preservation projects: Preserving Virtual Worlds Final Report (2010); Preserving.Exe. Toward a National Strategy for Software Preservation (2013); Emulation & Virtualization as Preservation Strategies (2015); Software Preservation Network Proposal (2015).

[3] The constructionistically oriented researchers of heritagization, e.g. Laurajane Smith, do not use the concept of monument in the sense we do. From the point of view of the historicization of a tangible or intangible object, the concept of monument is useful.

[4] The specific group, working with its identity in the process of cultural heritage, can be named as cultural heritage community.

[5] The line between the artifacts/monuments and commodities becomes less clear when old devices and game software are bought and sold at Internet auction sites. Various music videos, works of art, books and new editions and revisions of old game products– in some degree commercials as well – are also commodities of the cultures of history (Author 2 & Author 1 2004). (See Suominen 2008; 2012.)

[6] In a Facebook chat discussion with Jaakko Suominen, Markku Reunanen explains background of the rewriting the history of the first. According to Reunanen, they received new information while they browsed online Finnish Commodore archive maintained by a hobbyist Niila T. Rautanen (Rautanen: Commodore Archive). Rautanen has gathered games, screen shots, some information and for example scanned early Poke&Peek Commodore magazines, published by the Finnish Commodore importer. The magazines proved to be an important source of information. Amersoft had released several games in 1984, and according to Reunanen, mentioned publication order of 1984 releases in Videogames.fi, was based on mainly to reasoning. VIC-20 computer was simpler than Commodore 64 and the popularity of VIC was decreasing in 1984. Reunanen states that Raharuhtinas for Commodore 64 represent “more advanced programming” and Mehulinja had won an earlier VIC-20 programming contest. (Reunanen 5.3.2014, FB-chat.)

[7] In addition to Jukka O. Kauppinen, Mikko Heinonen from Pelikonepeijoonit collector community, started in the 1990s, has specifically contributed to discussion. For example, he published “for honor of Finnish Independence Day,” “A Chronicle of Finnish Games” in 6 December 2009, where he divided the history into “prehistory,” “middle ages,” and “modern times” (Heinonen 6.12.2009) and started his “prehistory” from Amersoft publications and claiming wrongly that Yleisurheilu was published in 1986. The association of Finnish Game Developers, for their part, published on their website “A Short history of Finnish game industry” in October 2011 where they alleged that Sanxion by Stavros Fasoulas, published for Commodore 1986 was the first Finnish commercial game (Suomen Pelinkehittäjät Ry 3.10.2011). Actually, the particular game was the first larger international Finnish computer game hit, released by the British company, Thalamus, but not the first.

[8] The situation has partially changed after that, however, mainly because the introduction of Finnish Museum of Games project. The Museum, partially based on a crowd funding project, will be opened in January 2017 (http://suomenpelimuseo.fi/in-english/).

[9] That is why, for instance, in the above mentioned case, a journalist has applied terms such as “pre-history”, “middle-ages” and “modern times” to game historical representations.

Bios

Jaakko Suominen has a PhD in Cultural History and is Professor of Digital Culture at University of Turku, Finland. With a focus on cultural history of media and information technologies, Suominen has studied computers and popular media, internet, social media, digital games, and theoretical and methodological aspects of the study of digital culture. He has lead several multi-disciplinary research projects and has over 100 scholarly publications.

Anna Sivula has a PhD in History and is a Professor of Cultural Heritage at University of Turku, Finland. Sivula has studied theoretical, methodological and cultural aspects of cultural heritage process and heritage communities, historiographical operation and historical culture. She has written commissioned histories and led several research projects.

– by Amanda Howell, Stephanie Green, Rikke Schubart and Anita Nell Bech Albertsen

“. . . the best characters are the most complicated ones.”
— John Logan (Qtd. Thomas 2014)

In Season Two of television horror-drama, Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky, 2014-16), Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), American sharpshooter and werewolf, asks Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), a British heiress with supernatural powers and a troubled past, what happens when the monsters inside of them are released? She says: “We’re most who we are. Unrestrained. Ourselves.” Summing up a central concern of the series, she confirms the view of its creator John Logan, that the “greatest horror in Penny Dreadful is the horror of people. . .  the way we interact with one another.” (Calia 2015) Penny Dreadful explores the darkness that exists not only in the physical world but also in the human mind. In it, monstrosity takes the familiar form of witches, werewolves, vampires, the revived and reconfigured undead—Dr. Frankenstein’s monsters—who kill and maim, but the series also routinely explores other, more mundane, forms of cruelty and depravity, while embracing a range of difference. In Penny Dreadful, the most human characters are revealed to be the most monstrous.

Logan, as a gay man, says he feels a “deep kinship” with monsters; used in the series to explore gendered difference, they are linked to troubled, troubling, and alternative identities more generally. Accordingly, Vanessa and Ethan, along with friends like the “joyous fop” Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale) and foes like the seductive villainess, Madame Kali (Helen McCrory), struggle to come to terms with their deviant natures and problematic desires, those demons within and without which shape their worlds. Over its three season run, characters and storylines are developed in challenging and unpredictable ways, making this show one of the most appealing of horror television, and of special interest to feminist audiences. Consequently, when the show was—brutally!—cut short at the close of Season Three with Vanessa’s death, concluded with the words “The End,” frustrated fans complained that storylines were unfinished, that characters were not fully developed, that themes of monstrous identities were hastily patched up rather than completed. We, the authors of this Special Issue on Penny Dreadful, sharing with other fans the sense that there is more to say and do with these characters, return here to examine, revisit, and reflect on its monstrous nature, its dark inventiveness and perspicacity.

The idea for this Special Issue started with a research collaboration funded by a Griffith University and University of Southern Denmark travel scheme. At an initial meeting in Brisbane, Australia, May 2016, we confirmed our shared research interest in the women of screen horror and fantasy and our particular fascination with Penny Dreadful. Our collaborative work started with a themed panel at the Screen conference held in Glasgow, June of the same year, whose presentations are the inspiration and core of this Special Issue. Penny Dreadful epitomizes our interests in female empowerment, extreme embodiment, and the evocative potentialities of the fantastic. While the women of the series are subject to many of the constraints associated with feminine identity in the Victorian era –restrictions of the medical establishment, domestic ideologies, social mores, fashion – they are wrought with contemporary inflections, striving against these limits for self-possession and autonomy in ways that resonate for contemporary viewers. Ironically, while sharing our research and enthusiasm for the series as a site for exploring feminism and women in the fantastic at the Screen conference, the last two episodes of Penny Dreadful were broadcast. The series concluded, shockingly, with Vanessa’s burial, creator Logan responding to outraged fans, that ‘the show was always going to achieve closure with the death of Vanessa’ (Auseillo 2016). But, you can’t keep a good woman down. While Showtime’s series ended with three seasons, Vanessa and Penny Dreadful continue, fittingly enough, both as a comic book series and in the writings of its fans on sites like An Archive of Our Own. This special issue, likewise, is something of a post-mortem and a revival for a series that highlights the longevity, durability, and imperishable appeal of popular narrative, especially varieties of gothic horror fiction. We offer this special issue, pleased that Penny Dreadful continues, multiply transformed, beyond the death of its cancellation.

Logan conceived and wrote Penny Dreadful as a mash-up of characters from the classic Gothic novels, among these Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), to which he added new original characters inspired by these texts, like protagonists Vanessa and Ethan. The title refers to the popular name for cheap serial fiction sold in the 1830s for a penny per weekly issue. The show cleverly interweaves past and present entertainment industries in an assemblage that blends story elements multiply-sourced from literature and other screen fictions with scenes set in the varied amusements of Victorian Britain: the theater, the wax museum, spiritualist séances, funhouse hall of mirrors, illegal rat-baiting clubs, and more. Filmed on location in Dublin, and at Bray’s Ardmore studios, it is set in a Victorian London in 1891, using its setting to evoke a nineteenth century fin de siècle sentiment and ethos. At once highly stylised, but striving for authenticity, its meticulous attention to histories of Victorian popular culture ground its atmospheric and lushly aesthetised fantasy in social realities. The world of Penny Dreadful is at once fantastic yet recognizable as an historical time and place in which tradition and transformation wrestled for dominance. At the same time, it pays homage to the emotional uncertainties of a new millennium. Its exploration of new technologies, its references to mappings and conquests of the physical world, its fascination with monstrous possibilities of science, with genocidal abuses of power, its pervasive mood of doom, and anticipation of apocalypse are only too familiar for its contemporary audiences. This dark and crisis-ridden world is beautifully crafted from elements from the past but speaks to us of ongoing concerns: gender and sexuality, desire and responsibility, power and its abuse; what it means to be human, to be alive, to die, to be transformed.

Attesting to the durable appeal of its source texts, those familiar speculative fictions of early horror and science fiction, Penny Dreadful refits their themes and concerns for contemporary audiences. The overarching plot concerns a small group of four – the explorer Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Vanessa, the doctor Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and the sharpshooter Ethan – who battle supernatural forces. In Season One they combat vampires, seeking them in hidden corners of London; in Season Two they struggle against witches who invade their home and dreams; and in Season Three they face Dracula himself and his army of night creatures. The Devil is involved in all three seasons and the mythology developed by the series refers to Egyptian Gods Amunet and Amun-Ra. Around the central group of characters we find Malcolm’s servant Sembene (Dani Sapani), aristocrat Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), and Frankenstein’s monsters John Clare (Rory Kinnear) and Lily Frankenstein (Billie Piper), as well as witches Evelyn and Joan (Patti LuPone), and the alienist Dr. Seward (also LuPone). Campaigns against evil take place in an in-between world that Vanessa calls the demimonde, where every character, supernatural or not, struggles simultaneously with external violence and inner workings of complex and fractured identities. Some characters are irredeemably evil and ultimately destroyed, but even the central protagonists, a reimagining of Bram Stoker’s ‘Crew of Light’ are torn and tormented characters striving to combat destruction and control their emotions in a never-ending struggle to overcome doubt, loneliness, inner and outer darkness.

In the way that Penny Dreadful uses its multiple texts, drawing on both familiar nineteenth century narratives and their more recent screen iterations, its aesthetic shows the influence of contemporary transmedia storytelling, where the

process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp. This is a very different pleasure than we associate with the closure found in most classically constructed narratives, where we expect to leave the theatre knowing everything that is required to make sense of a particular story. (Jenkins 2007)

Following on from Henry Jenkins’s work in transmedia fictions, this Special Issue can be viewed as the effort of aca-fans to make sense of the rich palimpsest of stories and characters that is Penny Dreadful, bringing to bear their various expertise and ‘encyclopaedic impulses’, interests and investments. While sharing a broad concern with the self-reflexively gendered focus of the series and feminist in spirit, this collection of articles draws on an interdisciplinary mix of scholarly approaches, from sociology and cinema studies and fan studies, to literary theory and queer theory, to Victorian history and cultural studies.

Amanda Howell and Lucy Baker in ‘Mapping the Demimonde’ provide a broad overview of the series viewed through the lens of familiar Victorian characters—the flâneur, explorer, spiritualist medium, and alienist—whose perspectives frame the stories of Penny Dreadful, lending shape to and inflecting the meanings of its narrative spaces. Anita Nell Bech Albertsen, Toby Locke, and Jordan Phillips offer another sort of overview of the series which is concerned specifically with methods of characterisation. Albertsen and Locke show how the construction of complex characters in Penny Dreadful moves beyond any simple or generic definition of monstrosity, to focus on the portrayal of characters such as Vanessa Ives and Ethan Chandler, while Phillips focuses on how the series’ interest in monstrosity effectively queers a range of characters.  Rikke Schubart offers a closer look at Vanessa Ives, using the concept of ‘edgework’ from sports sociology to investigate how her character interrogates and reframes gendered scripts such as the medium, the witch, and the hysteric. Stephanie Green, finally, offers a close reading of Lily Frankenstein as a figure of monstrous manufacture, drawing on the show’s re-imagined Victorian cultural context to identify her in terms of Gothic self-definition as the new ‘New Woman’.

Works Cited

Ausiello, Michael, “Penny Dreadful Not Returning for Season 4, Confirms EP John Logan.” TVLine 20 June, 2016:

Michael Calia, “‘Penny Dreadful Creator John Logan on Witches, the Occult and ‘the Horror of People.” Wall Street Journal May 15 2015

Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” In Confessions of an ACA Fan, The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 22 March 2007.

Thomas, June. “The Thing That Made Me Monstrous to Some People is Also the Thing That Empowered Me”. (Interview with John Logan) Slate. 9 May 2014

~  Amanda Howell and Lucy Baker 

Abstract: This paper uses the perspectives and formative obsessions of familiar figures from nineteenth century pop culture and literature—the flâneur, the explorer, the alienist and the spiritualist medium—as lenses through which to view and the means to map the interlocking narrative worlds of Penny Dreadful. Aimed at understanding how its world is shaped by remediation, by borrowing from and refashioning media of the past, it argues that the notion of the demimonde, described by Vanessa Ives as a ‘half world’ between this one and another, supernatural one, is the master metaphor of the series. Using these historical, literary, stock characters as guide and prompt, the paper surveys the series’ pervasive concern with liminality, its operational aesthetic for building an imaginary nineteenth century world in the interstices between or the collisions of the pop cultural and pop fictional texts it brings together.

mapping is a deceptively simple activity. To map is in one way or another to take the measure of a world. . . . the mappings record is not confined to the archival; it includes the remembered, the imagined, the contemplated. . . . the map is both the spatial embodiment of knowledge and a stimulus to further cognitive engagements. (Cosgrove 1-2)

Do you believe there is a demimonde, Mr. Chandler? A half world between what we know and what we fear. A place in the shadows, rarely seen but deeply felt. Do you believe that? (Vanessa Ives 1.01 “Nightwork”)

Introduction

‘Penny dreadful’ is the pejorative term given to those cheap serial fictions aimed at newly literate working classes of the nineteenth century in Britain, a ‘monster audience of at least three millions’ (Collins 221), positioned despite its size on the edge of Victorian Britain’s leisure cultures. These fringe-dwelling narrative entertainments lend their name to Showtime’s British/American co-production, Penny Dreadful, while their pop fictional and pop cultural milieux, broadly conceived, inspire the premise and settings for the three-season series focused on supernatural adventure. Just as contemporary horror cinema reinvents the kinetic aesthetics and visceral pleasures of the ride and rollercoaster (Ndalianis), the horror television of Penny Dreadful is shaped by remediation, as it borrows from and refashions media of the past. In these terms, its London setting in particular resembles nothing so much as a historically-themed amusement park focused on sharing with both characters and audience the diverse novelties offered by Victorian leisure culture of which cheap serial fiction is only one, particularly evocative, example. From a Wild West display, to an evening’s séance, wax museum, gossima tennis (ping pong) parlour, underground rat-baiting club, a theatre devoted to gory spectacle, and a public lecture illustrated by magic lantern, the series surveys diversions with an emphasis on the exotic and adventurous, the thrilling and forbidden. Appropriate to this amusement park aesthetic, suggestive of a walking tour of the pop cultural past, each season’s action culminates in a violent confrontation in a haunted house: The Grand Guignol of Season One (transferred, miraculously, from Paris to London), the witches’ castle of Season Two, and the dockside lair of Dracula in Season Three.

The work of remediation does not stop here, however: despite the emphasis in Penny Dreadful on collecting and recreating the cheap (and not so cheap) thrills of Victorian popular culture as the basis of verisimilitude, particularly in its urban settings, the parameters of its stories are never bound by the physical world it creates. Characters, tropes, plots drawn from multiple sources in popular literature and popular culture are extended and interwoven in the course of the series, expanded through the memories of characters and open to further development still by knowing readers in the audience. In this respect, the term demimonde (reserved in the nineteenth century to describe the not-quite-respectable edges of high society) refers not just to the liminal social spaces of urban amusement, or even, as in Vanessa Ives’s recasting of the term, only to the dark realms of the supernatural. As a master metaphor for the spaces of Penny Dreadful the notion of the demimonde signals instead a more pervasive concern with the liminality that characterises the series’ operational aesthetic, its methods of shaping its world and its stories in the interstices between or the collisions of the pop cultural and pop fictional texts it brings together.

This paper addresses itself to some of the ways that the varied, in-between narrative spaces of Penny Dreadful are mapped for the audience, specifically by looking at how familiar figures from nineteenth century pop culture—the flâneur, the explorer, the alienist and the spiritualist medium—have shaped the series’ character network and in their distinctive perspectives helped to map its interlocking narrative worlds. The flâneur is that urban man of leisure, the strolling observer characterised by a roving eye and appetite for distraction,  empowered to cross boundaries of class and station, his mobile gaze associated with the diverse pleasures and possibilities of emergent modernity; the explorer is associated with adventure in colonised worlds, crossing oceans and cultures to seek out the dangerous, exotic, and other; the medium and the alienist, despite being associated with what appear to be the diametrically-opposed fields of spiritualism and medical science, share the ability to cross or collapse boundaries of time and space, one by accessing the parallel world of spirits and the other by accessing the hidden world of unconscious memory through the ‘talking cure.’

These figures have the ability to survey spaces of and between this world and that, to take the measure of worlds both known and (collectively) imagined within genres of fantasy and crime, adventure and horror—the stuff of the penny dreadfuls themselves. We come to know the world Penny Dreadful creates primarily through characters drawn from an array of Victorian fictions, their perspectives shaping the series’ ‘spatial embodiment’ of the Victorian scene. Accordingly, the discussion to follow offers an overview of some of the ways Penny Dreadful maps for audiences an imaginary nineteenth century world shaped by its diverse source texts and the multiple perspectives of its ensemble cast.

Penny Dreadful as complex television

[T]here is comparatively little experimentation in terms of innovative spatial storytelling, so if we were to predict where another wave of narrative innovation might come, we might look to how serial storytelling plays with space. (Mittell  275)

In its multiple, interwoven narratives and narrative worlds, self-reflexive and historically-conscious Penny Dreadful is an example of what Jason Mittell calls “complex television,” exemplifying a contemporary tendency toward a “more self-conscious mode of storytelling than is typically found within conventional television narration” (41). As such, it offers a double layer of pleasures: engagement with the world of narrative fiction and engagement with the way that the narrative fiction is constructed. As a nod to its origins in formulaic pop and pulp fictions of the past, there is a quest that centralises action for each season: the search for Mina Murray/Harker (Olivia Llewellyn), daughter of Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) in the first season, the pursuit of Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) by the Devil (represented by various actors) in season two and by his brother Dracula (Christian Carmargo) in season three. These quests are echoed by sub-plots in which the Creature re-named John Clare (Rory Kinnear) and his creator Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) both seek their bride in the female monster Lily Frankenstein (Billie Piper), who, like Vanessa Ives, pursues her own quest, refusing her role as narrative object of male seekers and lovers. The quest narratives of Vanessa and Lily are very different—in the grand Manichaean schemes that characterise the series’ larger story arcs, one seeks to stop the apocalypse the other to enkindle it—but both are determined to remake themselves as subjects of their own narratives  (as indeed are the witch antagonists, Evelyn and Hecate).

These interwoven quests keep the serialised narrative moving forward, but the series also has what might be better described as a multi-nodal structure, owing to the way that its varied source texts are stitched together. The most obvious and best known of these are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers /Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). These are combined with the varied contributions from gothic tales of werewolves, penny serials like James Malcolm Rymer’s and Thomas Peckett Prest’s Varney the Vampyre  (1845-47), mid-nineteenth century dime Westerns, popular tales of exploration and colonisation, and folklore such as stories of “skinwalkers” held by North American First Peoples. In the way it uses and embroiders on the stories and characters of no-longer-copyrighted literary fictions, myth, and folklore, Penny Dreadful persistently reminds the audience that the public domain is not just a negative space—a space where there are authors and inventors, but no owners—but also a space of shared memory and engagement, open to adaptation, transformation, and audaciously entrepreneurial repurposing. Positioned “always in the middle, between things, interbeing” in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome (27), Penny Dreadful functions as an intersectional text as it continues the narratives of genres and specific works that circle around each other, back and forth through time and space. We perceive, track or map them largely through those characters who serve as their representatives in Penny Dreadful, characters shaped in part by the readers’ experience, memory, perceptions of precursor texts.

These characters, remade and reworked from their originary texts, are the stuff of what Henry Jenkins, in his 2007 discussion of transmedia storytelling, describes as a type of anti-capitalist corporate folklore, each iteration adding to an ever-expanding archive created and curated over time by multiple readers and writers across diverse media. In this respect, Penny Dreadful fits the definition of what Abigail Derecho, in her theorisation of fan fiction as artistic practice, refers to as “archontic literature” (61). Relevant to the way that familiar Victorian narratives and characters are used in Penny Dreadful is Derecho’s observations concerning the way that archontic literature—the array of continuations, sequels, spinoffs, remediations, fan fictions—use the play of similitude and difference to explore “potentialities within the originary texts” (74). These ‘potentialities’ within source texts produce the series’ characteristic play of proximity and distance, the familiar and strange, in its imagining of the Victorian world—varied plateaus of understanding and engagement offering each viewer something of an individualised journey through the reimagined spaces, times, and genres. The familiar characters and tropes that are the focus of this discussion highlight the series’ use of its source texts to engage with concerns shared by its imagined Victorian world and the contemporary world of the Penny Dreadful audience: the challenges of urban modernity, family life, nationalism and colonialism, sex and gender roles.

Accordingly, in Penny Dreadful there is a diegetic emphasis on the work of interpretation and reading and mapping that mirrors the extra-diegetic activity required of the audience, as each character carries or pursues his or her story from the past, reflecting and bidding viewers to reflect on how it might be utilised in the present and perhaps reconfigured in the future. For instance, the once marginal literary figure, the bride of Frankenstein’s monster, moves from the fringes of literature to the centre of the Penny Dreadful world, both remembered and re-membered. Then there is the narrative trajectory of Dr. Frankenstein’s friend, Dr. Jekyll (Shazad Latif), which −once he inherits the title of Lord Hyde upon his father’s death  −rests entirely within the imagination of the knowing viewer alert to possibilities offered by this allusion to and reconfiguration of the source text’s representations of monstrosity and class difference, in terms of race and Britain’s colonialist history.

The Flâneur’s Roving Eye: mobility, modernity, and the possibilities of urban space

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world. . . . we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life.. . . . He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call “modernity,” for want of a better term . . . .  the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. (Baudelaire “The Painter of Modern Life”)

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLÂNEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. . . . Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. (Wilde, “de Profundis”)

The perspective offered on urban spaces of Penny Dreadful owes much to the nineteenth century notion of the flâneur, that mobile seeker after urban views and scenes. Chief among characters who play this role is Dorian Gray, through whom the series engages with “potentialities” of Wilde’s source text in regard to the decadent appeal Victorian London’s popular culture and more broadly still the possibilities it offers for queering the series’ view of that urban space. Everywhere and in some respects nowhere in the ensemble performances of the series, omnipresent yet distanced, Gray with his mobile gaze and sensation-seeking offers access to London entertainments both high and low. In the way Gray, like Baudelaire’s “Painter of Modern Life,” connects diverse spaces and experiences, he reflects the flâneur’s role as a “living bodily site on which vision, movement, and sensation pre-cinematically came together” (Charney 1998, 75). But he also functions as an agent of modernity—a catalyst, sparking change in characters and storylines when he takes the role of an “urban-observer-artist who is not a detached voyeur but rather interacts with the city in what is almost a symbiotic relationship, feeding off the city that he creates from its own fragments” (Parsons 2000, 36), as he pursues his desire for sensation and diversion.

The pursuit of excitement, of decadent self-indulgence, makes Gray a conduit to the perverse, dangerous, and forbidden for other characters whose depths and desires he helps to reveal along with the possibilities of the urban scene: he meets ailing prostitute Brona Croft (Billie Piper), the mysterious heiress Vanessa Ives, and American sharpshooter Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) in quick succession in season one and has erotic encounters with all three, sparking strong affective responses in each. He and the world-weary consumptive prostitute Brona unexpectedly revel in her imminent death when she coughs blood on him during a pornographic photo shoot (“Séance” 1.02). His rhetorical question, “I’ve never fucked a dying creature before. Do you feel things more deeply, I wonder?” speaks not just to his decadent sensation-seeking but likewise the basis of her re-creation from the tragic Brona Croft into Lily Frankenstein, whose narrative trajectory from undead bride to vengeful immortal is rooted in recollected feeling, Brona’s experience of poverty, pain, and loss. After a night of gorily flamboyant theatricals at the Grand Guignol, blood-sport, bar fighting, absinthe, and Wagner, Dorian Gray’s seductive charms bring Ethan Chandler’s inner animal that much closer to the surface in a scene that evokes troubling memories and ends in an evocative kiss (“Demimonde” 1.04). And, Vanessa Ives re-encounters her Demon when she climaxes during a sexual encounter with Gray (“What Death Can Join Together” 1.06). Bearing out the lessons of Wilde’s source text (echoed in turn, by Wilde’s own reflections in De Profundis at the end of his two-year imprisonment under the Labouchere Amendment [1885] for “gross indecency”), encounters with Dorian Gray as the embodiment of urban modernity are never dull, but can prove dangerous to moral life.

In his more murderous proclivities, Dorian Gray recalls Wilde’s dark vision of a character whose privileged access to the varied diversions of the city and decadent appetites destroy those around him while corrupting his soul. Wilde’s prison letter De Profundis, on the other hand, offers a different vision of the flâneur as one whose desires and sensation seeking ultimately render him vulnerable. Penny Dreadful takes a certain delight in reclaiming the transgressively queer desires that landed Wilde in prison for its Dorian Gray, particularly in its characterisation of his relationship with Angelique (Jonny Beauchamp) and his dalliance with Chandler. But it also registers the potential vulnerability of the urban wanderer, according the mobile gaze of the flâneur to various characters less empowered than Gray, those whose bodily autonomy is never assured, always at risk as a consequence of their social position.

For instance, in stark contrast to Gray’s mobile gaze is that of John Clare who is also known as ‘Caliban’ or ‘the Creature’, whose jealous surveillance of first the Doctor and then Lily Frankenstein carries him through the alley-ways of the city, even as his search for employment and human comfort lands him first at the Grand Guignol (“Resurrection” 1.03), then the even more dubious entertainments of the Putney Family Waxworks (“Fresh Hell” 2.01), and causes him to seek respite in the underground dwellings of London’s homeless and impoverished where Vanessa and Sir Malcolm work in a soup kitchen (“Verbis Diablo” 2.02). Clare’s physical difference keeps him to the shadows, literally: from him we get a view of the alleyways, the back-stages, the hidden corners of the city, often alternate views of the same varied haunts frequented by Dorian Gray. Despite being himself a creature of modernity, of industrial manufacture, Clare refuses the cityscape that Gray embraces. Instead he turns inward and back in time to the ethical and aesthetic frameworks of Romantic poetry to find meaning in a world he experiences as utterly hostile, a source of continual anxiety and pain. Through Clare we have a very different perspective of London, the flip side of the flâneur overwhelmed by “the chaotic and bewildering environment of. . . rapid industrializing and growing cities of the nineteenth century” (Parsons 19). Unemployed, displaced, and monstrous, he too often finds himself not a subject of the urban scene like Gray but rather—like the prostitutes who eke out precarious livings on the street—its object.

That Clare is always in danger of becoming an urban spectacle himself is confirmed by the gruesome end to his brief career at Putney’s. Clare’s role recalls the unhappy travels of the monster in Shelley’s source text but also provides an opportunity for the series to explore its interest in othering Victorian England, made explicitly queer in regard to the gregarious and cosmopolitan Egyptologist Professor Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale) who provides another alternative view of its urban space, giving entry to the secret and inaccessible corners of the British Museum when he and Ethan Chandler stage a ‘heist’(“Verbis Diablo” 2.02), having previously shared his particular corner of society with Sir Malcolm and Vanessa (“Séance” 1.02). Being both secretly Jewish and a closeted homosexual who performs heterosexual Christianity in order to protect himself, he is yet another figure in which the urbanity and mobility of the flâneur is wedded inextricably to vulnerability at a time when the penalty for sodomy was life in prison.

As is made clear by Gray’s involvement with both Angelique and Brona/Lily, similarly vulnerable and challenging is the prostitute who, like the flâneur, is a quintessentially urban, mobile figure. She is at once an object of desire, offering visual pleasure, a commodity in a burgeoning culture of leisure-time diversion. But she is also a threat to male authority, the challenging public spectacle of undomesticated female sexuality: in “the same moment that prostitutes reaffirmed the privilege and power of the flâneur”  by offering the possibility of commodified sex on demand ‘the mobility of prostitutes provided cause for concern’ (Hubbard 324-25). In this respect, the prostitute has the potential to reshape the experience of the urban space she moves through, a potential explored and exploited most fully by Lily Frankenstein. Significantly, once Lily begins in earnest to retaliate against male dominance of the streets, remaking the prostitute’s role as a challenging but quintessentially vulnerable urban wanderer by turning the tables on male sexual violence, Gray all but withdraws from his peripatetic ways, even as his home is transformed from a site of reclusive decadence into a bright haven for mistreated women. When confronted concerning his altered attitude to the social experiment he initially supported, Dorian Gray explains to Lily Frankenstein that, once again, he is bored:

I’ve lived through so many revolutions, you see, it’s all so familiar to me. The wild eyes and zealous ardour, the irresponsibility, and the clatter. The noise of it all, Lily. From the tumbrils on the way to the guillotine to the roaring mobs sacking the temples of Byzantium. So much noise in anarchy. And in the end it’s all so disappointing. (“The Ebb Tide” 3.07)

As season three progresses, in fact, Gray appears increasingly static. His engagement with modernity is for his own amusement, one disrupted by Lily’s transformative tendencies and aims. At the end, his gaze is no longer that of restless modernity but instead that of a “perfect, unchanging portrait” of himself, finally appearing as just another beautiful addition to the blue gallery (Dorian Gray in “Blessed Dark” 3.09). He rejects Lily’s vision of a transformed urban modernity when its novelty gives way to sameness in the eyes of the urban wanderer who is also a jaded immortal. But even—or perhaps especially— in his fickleness, he personifies the modern sensation- and entertainment-seeking public.

Explorers: paternalism, colonialism, tales of adventure

Most of the local natives have been run off, or captured by the Germans and the Belgians for the rubber and ivory trade, for slaves in all but name. What romance I saw in Africa is done for me, the land is tainted now beyond repair, and I want to be quit of the filthy place. What then? Are there no fresh wonders left? No worlds yet to conquer? (Sir Malcolm Murray “The Day Tennyson Died” 3.01)

In the first two seasons of Penny Dreadful, an oversized map of the Nile dominates the main parlour of the London residence of Sir Malcolm Murray, reminder of his past as an explorer and adventurer. The world whose measure it takes offers an apt metaphor for the series itself, being as it is poised on the edge of history and fantasy: it is an archival record based on eyewitness accounts of mid nineteenth century expeditions to discover the source of the Nile by the likes of Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone and Richard Burton, but also one that evokes the adventure genre more broadly, one of the favourites of cheap fiction.

In the way that it uses explorers and the trope of exploration to build and expand its narrative worlds, Penny Dreadful engages with the concerns of the subgenre of late Victorian fiction scholars have labelled “Imperial Gothic” (Warwick; Brantlinger). A key figure in exploring these concerns in the series is Sir Malcolm Murray whose narrative is dominated by his journeys into Africa, the stories of adventure interwoven with revelations of his myriad failures as a father and husband. The horrors of his domestic dereliction, neglect, and abuse are highlighted at the climaxes of both Seasons One and Two, even as the map overlooks the scene of a new family of sorts, which forms and reforms itself to pursue his daughter Mina, then later to save his illegitimate daughter Vanessa, then to save Sir Malcolm himself. Sir Malcolm’s rather ignominious, sometimes strikingly anti-heroic history illustrates a key concern of Imperial Gothic, that there has been a “diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism” (Warwick 338). And, through the changing figure of Sir Malcolm Murray-as-explorer, Penny Dreadful addresses what Stephen Arata points out as one of the key cultural contexts of horror in Stoker’s Dracula, a sense of the “decline of Britain as a world power” and how “the increasing unrest in British colonies and possessions” all “combined to erode Victorian confidence in the inevitability of British progress and hegemony” (622). More pervasively, Penny Dreadful confirms in its varied engagements with the figure of the explorer the link that Patrick Brantlinger observes in Imperial Gothic between the lure of the primitive and exotic on the one hand and the appeal of the occult on the other (Arata 624; Brantlinger  228-29).

This twinned fascination with the primitive/exotic and with the occult shapes the season three courtship by and characterisation of zoologist Dr. Sweet (Christian Camargo), who is ultimately revealed to be the most recent persona of Dracula. His characterisation makes clear the link between colonial exploration, death and destruction, his courtship of Vanessa Ives turning on his interest in collecting dangerous beings and his longing to explore dark and dangerous places abroad—and the intimation that he regards her as both of these things. In this way, Dr. Sweet, as would-be explorer, taps into key tropes of the Imperial Gothic, just as Sir Malcolm does, wherein the danger and excitement of that exploration is gendered: the dark, ‘feminine’, ‘non-rational’  space of Africa is presented as “one of the last mysterious places left on earth” (Warwick 340), a formulation that will be echoed in turn by Sigmund Freud’s characterisation of female sexuality as “the dark continent.” Vanessa Ives appears intrigued by Dr. Sweet’s implicit acceptance of her otherness, her kinship, for instance, to the Omdurman  or Death Stalker scorpion. After bonding over a shared interest in dangerous creatures, death and taxidermy, the consummation of their affair surrounded by corpses and relics, aestheticised death on display in the Natural History Museum of London, echoes Vanessa’s teenaged seduction of Mina’s fiancé, closing the circle, linking her past and present, the beginning and end of the series.

Ultimately Dracula/Sweet, with his growing army of Night Creatures, offers his own zoological spin on what Stephen Arata identifies in Dracula as a fear of “reverse colonisation” (623-24) engaging fears of degeneration and decadence that are part of the Imperial Gothic in his characterisation of those ‘night creatures”’ on display in his museum and those awaiting his command in the dockside lair, with their common claim on sympathy. As Alexandra Warwick observes in regard to this notion of reverse colonisation,

During the course of the nineteenth century, the very poor and socially marginal had become increasingly gothicized. Their world is a mysterious labyrinth that exists alongside the life of middle class, its effects leaking out in uncontainable ways. By the end of the nineteenth century anthropology provided ways of seeing the underclass as belonging almost to a separate and more primitive form of existence. The philanthropist William Booth’s nonfictional text In Darkest London (1890) demonstrates this in clearest of ways…with the East End sharing all the “othered” qualities of its distant territories. (340-41).

The street people who are also Dracula’s night creatures, those “broken and shunned creatures” figure the Imperial Gothic fear of the primitive and the regressed. Ultimately they carry the ability to other, to regress, all of London once the poison fog descends at the end of season three, when humans are animalised, reduced to carcasses to be bled dry in “The Blessed Dark” (3.09).

While Vanessa Ives and Dr. Sweet explore their shared fascination with the exotic and dangerous, Sir Malcolm first disavows his ties to Africa—replaying a disgust with corporatized exploitation of its mineral wealth which has stripped away any romance it once held—only to have his wanderlust rekindled. When Kaetenay (Wes Studi), a “Chiricahua Apache by birth and rite” rescues him in the East African settlement of Zanzibar, he sets Sir Malcolm off on another journey, to save the wayward werewolf Ethan Chandler (“The Day Tennyson Died” 3.01). Thus the imaginary frontier of Africa is replaced by an equally fantastic representation of America. Kaetenay, as native informant and guide offers, like the flâneur, a mobile perspective on the West, while like Vanessa he also serves as a spiritualist medium for visions. Figuring in this respect another sort of connection between the exotic/primitive/colonised portions of the world and the occult/supernatural, Kaetenay propels the narrative from the urban slums of the repeatedly-colonised Zanzibar in Africa to the open spaces and sparse cities of the Wild West, back again to London, reasserting through his visions that London is no longer primarily an industrial or urban space but a space of transformation, a spiritual realm. Like Vanessa Ives and her mentor Joan Clayton (Patti LuPone), Kaetenay is an explorer of the spiritual landscape beneath the physical one. And, for Kaetenay like Clayton this is signalled by a privileged relationship with nature. Different in this respect from colonisers like Murray—or even a collector like Sweet—nature is not intimidating, nor is it to be conquered, nor captured as a trophy, only understood and cohabitated with. In his mystery and mobility, Kaetenay is both guide for the resolutely unmagical Sir Malcolm and supernatural father for Ethan Chandler. And, as the last of a tribe systematically extinguished by America’s conquering of its frontier, he is a relic of a different sort of apocalypse than that faced by Londoners, a link between that experience of genocidal violence and that which threatens darkest London at the conclusion of the series.

The connection between the exotic and the supernatural that underpins those anxieties animating the Imperial Gothic is tied to difference more generally in Penny Dreadful. Like Professor Lyle and Lily/Brona, Vanessa, Dr Sweet and Kaetenay all confirm the series’ investment in seeing the Victorian era differently—or more precisely, for using its richly detailed setting and its familiar narratives of adventure and horror and mystery for a spectacular staging of difference, whether it’s the queering of urban culture or the critical reassessment of the Victorian cult of domesticity/true womanhood. It is an aesthetic and narrative investment that is, in some respects, strikingly at odds with—at the same time that it is also enabled by – the frame-story’s dualist insistence on good and evil, light and dark, so typical of the formulaic narrative worlds of the penny dreadful, also colonialist narratives of dark continents and dangerous primitives. The series’ stagings of difference qualify the purity of evil and good, emphasizing instead the mixed composition of characters. Their difference sets them apart from the mainstream within the series’ Victorian milieu and is fundamental to their appeal and authority as narrative agents.

Given its investment in difference, Penny Dreadful is, in some respects, metatextually subversive in its engagement with familiar genres of discovery and colonialism. However, in spite of this impulse toward subversion, it is ultimately the core group of men from the main character group who survive at the end of season three. Vanessa Ives, despite her importance as an explorer of psychological and spiritual landscapes makes a final sacrifice of her death. Spiritualist counterparts Kaetenay and Joan are both dead by the end, while Lily/Brona is disempowered and abandoned. While Dr Seward and Catriona Hartdegen survive, the alienist and the vampire hunting thanatologist are returned to unobserved sites of origin. The resplendently othered and individualised Professor Lyle has left for warmer and more hospitable climes, while Mina has long since been laid to rest. And so, the series finishes with what could appear to be an affirmation of paternity and colonialist masculinity in the survival of Sir Malcolm and his adopted son Ethan. They have the last word, their final conversation an epilogue of sorts to the series:

Sir Malcolm: Never have I so wanted to run away. On some hunt or expedition to Africa, India. Anywhere but here.

Ethan: Will you?

Sir Malcolm: No. I must find my life without her. Miss Ives was the last link to who I was. I must find out who I am yet going to be. Oh, I will miss her to my bones. Will you stay, Ethan?

Ethan: You’re my family.

(both recline against the wall in Vanessa’s previous bedroom, staring at her bed in the dusklight) (“The Blessed Dark” 3.08)

There is the hint here of perhaps further adventures to be undertaken by the adoptive father (though he denies it) and son, bound in grief and loss. That said, the scene also emphasises the importance of death, both real and metaphorical, to the series in the way that it is represented through key characters as a liminal space of alterity and possibility. In this way the series explores the ongoing potential and appeal of the undead offered by Stoker’s source text and its many adaptations. Thus the spaces of the museum—both public and private—with their displays of exotic corpses are not just a testament to the achievements of explorers like Sir Malcolm but are privileged and eroticised as gateways to the supernatural, to other stories and other worlds, while being linked more generally to the potentialities of death-as-transformation that persist as point of fascination Penny Dreadful shares with its gothic source texts.

The alienist and the spiritualist medium: talking cures, visions, and stories across time and space

. . . . like spirits, spinsters were culturally perceived as threatening and transitional, moving across borders and hovering between worlds, liminal bodies existing on the fringes of a society they threatened with their very liminality. The circumvention of Victorian heteronormative sexuality is performed by [Georgiana] Houghton through her role as spinster, which enables her to engage in reproductivities outside of those of the Victorian marriage contract, as she birthed spirits through her séances . . . .  (Williams 10-11)

hysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences (Breuer and Freud)

From the mid nineteenth century onward, the spiritualist movement was a part of popular Victorian culture, particularly attractive to women—like well-known medium and artist Georgiana Houghton—perhaps because it offered  “possibilities for attention, opportunity, and status denied elsewhere” also “a means of circumventing rigid nineteenth-century class and gender norms” (Owen 4). Penny Dreadful engages with  spiritualism especially through the character of Vanessa Ives, whose abilities as seer make her an agent of focalisation and conduit to other worlds and times, first vividly in evidence when she upstages Madame Kali (Helen McRory) at an evening salon in home of Professor Lyle (“Séance,” 1.02). Although the scene is set for Kali’s spiritualist performance, Ives, suddenly possessed, engages with the past of adventurer Sir Malcolm Murray, channelling the voice of his son who died during their expedition in Africa, also relaying secret knowledges in the voice of a vengeful spirit who berates the famous adventurer for his sexual escapades. The scene connects London to darkest Africa, the salon’s exotic supernatural spectacle to less salubrious images of colonial exploration, all insects and dysentery, Sir Malcolm’s failures as father and husband twinned with colonial exploration as a summary portrait of male privilege abused. In the spectacle that Vanessa Ives makes of herself, the scene registers the appeal and disruptive potential of the female medium in the Victorian and Edwardian era spiritualist movement as one who could “invade and upturn the domestic havens of respectable gentlemen and their obedient wives through the subversive and often highly-sexualised séances” (Williams 9). Spaces of the past and present, public and private, sacred and profane throughout the series continue to clash in the performances of Vanessa Ives.

Positioned between multiple narrative worlds, Ives reveals and gives access to—via memories accessed through hypnosis and letter writing, also through her native emotional acuity and acquired knowledge demonic language—the spatial, temporal, and thematic connections between stories and story worlds. She is both a spiritualist medium and also a conduit for the mediumistic work of the alienist in Season Three. Specifically, Mina Murray and much of Stoker’s Dracula exist in an alternate dimension that in season one is accessed almost entirely through her visions (“Resurrection” 1.03; “Closer than Sisters” 1.05) and tarot reading (“What Death Can Join Together” 1.06). In Season Two, we only come to understand the work of the three witches through Vanessa Ives’s own memories of her retreat to the rural remoteness of Ballentree Moor where she studies with Joan Clayton (“Nightcomers” 2.03). In season three Dracula enters the diegesis in the guise of charming zoologist, Dr. Sweet, but we only discover his backstory, when Ives, on the advice of Professor Lyle, seeks the help of an American alienist, Dr. Seward (Patti Lupone), to deal with her deep depression following the departures of Ethan Chandler and Sir Malcolm Murray at the end of season two. Her hypnotic state allows her to access not just memories of her struggle with Victorian treatments for mental illness during her incarceration at the Banning Clinic (“A Blade of Grass” 3.04 ), but also her contact with the supernatural, the contest between brothers Lucifer and Dracula (Rory Kinnear). Seward, like Clayton is represented as an empowering figure for Vanessa Ives, one who illuminates a potentially dangerous path to greater knowledge, through dark magic and the scarcely less harrowing possibilities of the unconscious mind. Through the backstory of the clinic we see Ives’s similarities to Lily Frankenstein, the connections between their stories as characters who struggle against the normalising spectre of womanhood, a struggle inflected by but surpassing class difference. Ives’s experiences in the clinic—like Lily’s in Dr. Jekyll’s lab where Dr. Frankenstein plans to restore his beloved to a Victorian feminine ideal by removing much of what makes her herself— expose the institutional and technological control of bodies and minds by medical and scientific establishments, control to which Victorian women are shown to be particularly vulnerable.

The recollected space of the Banning Clinic is punctured by Dr Seward’s hypnosis of Vanessa Ives in a way that links the work of the medium to that of the alienist, both having the power to recur to a troubled past, to explore and reveal secret histories of a ‘dark continent’. By exposing the Clinic’s abusive treatment of an unruly woman—torture and persecution in the guise of care with the aim of restoring normalcy—and by changing Dr. Seward’s gender from its originary text in Dracula, the series undertakes an explicitly feminist intervention into the all-male environment of the Victorian medical establishment. And along the way, it dramatically alters the gendered dynamic of early experiments with the talking cure like those recorded by Breuer and Freud in Studies in Hysteria. As a restaging of these late nineteenth century histories of psychoanalytic exploration, Seward’s theraputic sessions with Ives are linked to the series’ ongoing interest in offering counter-narratives of Victorian culture, even as they valorise those qualities in Vanessa Ives punished at the Banning Clinic. Just as Professor Lyle attests to recovering his sense of identity, of being offered by Dr Seward the opportunity become “resplendently himself,” Seward similarly offers Ives a greater sense of purpose and self, effectively attempting through the talking cure effectively to change her story. The Doctor attempts reformulate her self-representation as the object of demonic possession into more nuanced notion of complex psychology, to replace evil with illness. The Creature, Clare, whose past as an orderly and Ives’s guard in the Clinic attempts a similar reformulation, his monstrous unhappiness contextualised by the story of his kindness and humanity to Ives and the family he left behind.

The use of the same actress to portray both Joan Clayton, cut-wife – witch and midwife, abortionist and healer—and her descendant Dr Seward explicitly links their functions within the Penny Dreadful universe. Both the witch and the alienist through their ministrations to women offer alternative perspectives on the worlds of the series, attempting (with mixed results) to help the women to challenge their social restrictions, offering freedom from reproductive coercion and the psychological manifestations of control—thus the opportunity to change women’s place in and the trajectory of narrowly proscribed gendered narratives. As the cut-wife/ abortionist, Joan Clayton works to offer women options within the gendered limitations of Victorian culture, to change their stories by allowing those regarded as fallen women to reclaim their place in the home. As the healer and the witch Clayton also forces the universe to bend to her will; like her descendent Seward, she reshapes space and time, not by tapping into unconscious memory through hypnosis but instead through witchcraft. Dr. Seward works through the new science of psychoanalysis, but that said she is not beyond weaponising her skills, for instance against Renfield, her assistant, after he becomes a victim/acolyte of Dracula, provoking guilt and shame to draw out of him the strange tale of Dracula, information crucial to their fight. In Professor Lyle’s salon, Vanessa uses her role as medium and her sensational account of the Sir Malcolm’s past as an active condemnation of masculine entitlement and wrong-doing.  Similarly, Dr Seward’s role as alienist, her delving into Vanessa’s past, is used to condemn the doctors of Banning Clinic, also Renfield’s weakness of character, while supporting her patient’s intuition and experience by accessing hidden spaces of her traumatic memory.

While a number of minor characters are new creations, Vanessa is the only major character not obviously based upon a previous work. That said, she is clearly inspired by both the challenging female sexualities of Dracula (his hungry, lustful brides) and its varied engagements with that figure of gendered promise and threat, the New Woman (figured especially in what Stoker’s novel, unlike Penny Dreadful, represents as a rather stoic and resourceful figure of Mina Harker). Vanessa’s dramatic shifts between sacred and profane, blessed and cursed, make her in some respects the personification of the bifurcated roles allotted to and the limited scope of Victorian femininity evident in Stoker’s work, as she is both the fallen woman and the angel in the home. In her role as narrative conduit, Vanessa emphasises the way that promising and problematic femininity, once held in thrall by the supernatural seductions of Dracula, is viewed by Stoker in terms of both supernatural empowerment and also mental and moral illness. More broadly, as a single woman—the defiantly unconventional spinster heiress, Miss Ives—Vanessa represents a figure that, like the prostitute, troubles the Victorian model of female heteronormative sexuality bound to the home (Logan 198-99; Krandis 199, 3). She is a figure that, at the same time she enables multiple narratives and connects multiple narrative spaces, also, like Brona Croft/Lily Frankenstein, works against the narrative trajectories which situate the woman solely as the object of male desire, of male quest. Vanessa is pursued but resists pursuit, and in the end chooses her own path of destruction to thwart Dracula’s plans.

Conclusion

In the remediated world of Penny Dreadful, popular fictions of the Victorian era are repurposed, compositing a new reality from multiple texts. Tapping into both the original texts and their potentialities, it is a world where the remembered and the imagined, the actual and the desired, are given narrative and spatial representation. The viewer, prompted to draw on memory and knowledge of the same texts, extends the stories and their spaces further still. By way of surveying this complex world, this discussion has focused specifically on how figures drawn from Victorian popular culture—the flâneur, the explorer, the alienist and the spiritualist medium—have shaped the series’ character network and through their work of focalisation, also its narratives and spaces.

Through remediation and multi-perspectival narration, Penny Dreadful offers an example of complex television, a variation on the multi-dimensional world. It is not as extreme in this respect as, say, Lost which plays with alternate realities; but it is clearly an experiment in “spatial storytelling” (Mittel 275). In the way that it narrativizes and spatializes the relationship between one text and another—one form of amusement and another—the series can be usefully understood in terms of the contemporary trend of transmedia storytelling. The source texts of the series, like the myriad public amusements that make up the London setting of the series, are imagined as spaces that extend beyond the screen, each a site of nascent storylines in the manner of transmedia franchise properties where each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. One could watch and comprehend Penny Dreadful without having read the works by Shelley, Stevenson, Wilde, Verne, and Stoker—but it would be a limited comprehension of only part of The Penny Dreadful universe, which we understand both to reinvent but also to co-exist alongside these originary texts.

Our discussion has focused on how popular, familiar character types anchor this hermeneutic project. Penny Dreadful pays homage to the dominant narratives with the typical aspirational world views conjured by the most celebratory accounts of the flâneur-as-observer, the conquests of the explorer, the other-worldly sensitivities of the spiritualist medium, and the scientific certainties of the alienist. Each offers a way of reading the world and access to the new, strange, wonderful, and unseen. But the series also offers counter-narratives related to the urban, exotic, supernatural and psychological adventures conjured by these figures, using its interest in socially marginalised characters and the liminal spaces—including the intersectional spaces when different genres are brought together—to variously queer and critique those dominant narratives. Self-reflexive and historically-conscious in the way it uses its recursive fictions and remediative aesthetic to replay and reframe the enduring pleasures of nineteenth century popular culture and fictions, Penny Dreadful extends the scope of its interwoven narrative worlds through both the character network of its ensemble cast and through its imaginative challenges to its audience. An innovative example of cable programming-as-archontic literature in these terms, it is appropriate, then, that the series would achieve its own sort of immortality, transcending through transformation the deathblow of cancellation, reanimated as comic series written by the series scriptwriters and published through Titan Books (which has already published a prequel), set six months after the television finale. The persistent appeal of the familiar narratives and the durability of the Penny Dreadful characters confirmed, they begin a new life expanded into other transmedia properties.

Works Cited

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Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863). The Painter of Modern Life And other Essays. Translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne,  Phaidon Press, 1964.

Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. Remembering Anna O: A Century of Mystification. Translated by Kirby Olson, Routledge, 1996.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Cornell University Press, 1988

Breuer, Josef and Sigmund Freud. Studies in Hysteria (1895). Translated by Nicola Luckhurst, Penguin Books, 2004.

Charney, Leo. Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift. Duke University Press, 1998.

Collins, Wilkie. “The Unknown Public.” Household Words, vol. XVIII, no. 439, 21 August 1858, pp. 217-222. http://www.djo.org.uk/household-words/volume-xviii

Cosgrove, Denis. “Introduction: Mapping Meaning.” Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove, Reaktion Books, 1999, pp. 1-23.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum, 2004.

Derecho, Abigail. “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, edited by Karen Hellekson, Kristina Busse, McFarland & Co, 2006, pp. 61-78.

Hubbard, Phil. “Women Outdoors: Destabilizing the Public/Private Dichotomy.” A Companion to Feminist Geography, edited by Lise Nelson and Joni Seager, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2005, pp. 322-334.

Jenkins, Henry. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” In Confessions of an ACA Fan, The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins. 22 March 2007.

Logan, Deborah Anna. Fallenness in Victorian Women’s Writing: Marry , Stitch, Die, Or Do Worse. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998.

Mittel, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015.

Ndalianis, Angela. “Dark Rides, Hybrid Machines and the Horror Experience.” In Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, edited by Ian Conrich, 11-26. London: IB Tauris, 2010.

Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room. Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Parsons, Deborah L. Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Warwick, Alexandra. “Imperial Gothic.” In Encylopedia of the Gothic. Edited by William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, 338-342. Oxford and Malden MA: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016.

Williams, Sara. “Introduction.”Evenings at Home in Spiritual Séance (1882),by Georgiana Houghton, edited by Sara Williams, 5-17. Brighton: Victorian Secrets Press, 2013

Wilde, Oscar. “de Profundis” (transcribed from 1913 Methuen & co. edition). e-books@Adelaide. University of Adelaide Library.

Bios:

Dr Amanda Howell, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University, Australia, is a screen scholar especially interested in gender, race, and “body” genres: action, war, horror, and the musical. Her most recent major publication is A Different Tune—Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action (Routledge 2015). Her other publications have appeared in journals such as Camera Obscura, Screening the Past, Genders, and Continuum. She is currently developing a book-length project focused on contemporary art house horror.

Lucy Baker is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences at Griffith University Australia, where she also teaches in cultural and media studies. Her research focuses primarily on the representations of gender in fanworks and adaptations. She is the author of “Girl!Version: The Feminist Framework for Regendered Characters” in the Journal of Fandom Studies (2016), book chapters on the television series Elementary, and has a forthcoming chapter about vampires and domesticity.

Themed Issue: Identity and the Fantastic in Penny Dreadful

Edited by Amanda Howell, Stephanie Green, Rikke Schubart & Anita Nell Bech Albertsen

1. Introduction: Identity and the Fantastic in Penny Dreadful  ~ Amanda Howell, Stephanie Green, Rikke Schubart & Anita Nell Bech Albertsen
2. Mapping the Demimonde: space, place, and the narrational role of the flâneur, explorer, spiritualist medium and alienist in Penny Dreadful~ Amanda Howell & Lucy Baker
3. The Contaminant Web: Complex Characters and Monster Mashups ~ Anita Nell Bech Albertsen
4. Cowboys and Wolf-Men: Ethan Chandler, Transgressive Masculinity, and Depictions of The Monstrous in Penny Dreadful ~ Toby Locke
5. “There Is Something Within Us All”: Queer Desire and Monstrous Bodies in Penny Dreadful ~ Jordan Phillips
6. Vanessa Ives and Edgework as Self-Work ~ Rikke Schubart
7. Lily Frankenstein: The Gothic New Woman in Penny Dreadful ~ Stephanie Green

~ Anita Nell Bech Albertsen

Abstract: This article maps out character complexity in Penny Dreadful by focusing on the intertextuality of monstrous female characters. The aim of this study is twofold. First, it seeks to examine show how mashup characters gain complexity through textual contamination as they are woven into an intertextual cobweb of signification. Secondly, it aims at examining how monstrous characters like Vanessa Ives can be conceived as mashups contaminated by different manifestations of the monstrous-feminine as coined by Barbara Creed. An overarching hypothesis of this study is that interfigural strategies contribute to character complexity of traditional female monsters usually seen in televisual horror-drama.

In the televisual landscape, a horror-drama TV hybrid has emerged in recent years – a sub-genre that stretches from Scream Queens (2015), Hannibal (2013-15), American Horror Story (2011-) to Fear The Walking Dead (2015-) among others. Period horror-drama Penny Dreadful (2014-16) has also contributed to this wave of New Gothic television. Set in the late Victorian era, it makes space for many strong and complex female characters who challenge the traditional Victorian male perception of women and the codes of morality.

By focusing on the intertextuality of (morally) complex female characters, this article – in dialogue with David Greetham’s The Pleasures of Contamination (2010) Brian Richardson’s work on transtextual characters (2010), and Barbara Creed’s well-known book The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) –will examine how characters like Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) can be conceived as mashups “contaminated” by different manifestations of the monstrous-feminine. Penny Dreadful’s mashup characters are woven from an intertextual cobweb which deepens the complexity of horror’s traditional female monsters. This article’s theoretical take on how characters gain complexity and depth through textual contamination draws on a range of well-known media and literary theories, such as Creed’s study and Wolfgang G. Müller’s literature-based theory in “Interfigurality – A Study on the Interdependence of Literary Figures” (1991), to capture new developments in recent horror television, focusing on monstrosity and character complexity and transtextual or mashup characters.

By mapping out character complexity in Penny Dreadful, this article aims to show how hybrid female monsters can be conceived as a locus for an ongoing negotiation of gender in horror, a site where stereotypical gender roles are transgressed and modified, then fed back into the circulation of social patterns. This argument thus challenges the classical conception that female monsters, such as the witch (Vanessa Ives), are entirely monstrous by claiming that supernatural female characters have emerged in contemporary horror which incorporate contradictory traits, such as being powerful yet vulnerable, empowered yet sexualized, possessing magical powers, yet suffering all-too-human doubts.

Using the monstrous-feminine as impetus, Penny Dreadful showcases some of the most complex (and conflicted) female characters in contemporary screen horror-drama, transgressing against more traditional and stereotypical performance of femininity through monstrous figures like protagonist Vanessa Ives and also Hecate Poole (Sarah Greene) and Lily Frankenstein (Billie Piper). Although embodying female empowerment, they are also conflicted figures of pain struggling with (sometimes literal) inner demons of which Vanessa Ives reminds us by saying “The devil is in all of us. That’s what makes us human.” Thereby she pinpoints a feature shared by many monstrous creatures, such as the witch, in contemporary horror: the embedded humanity and ambiguity within the monster itself.

A Contaminant Cobweb of Gothic Stories

Penny Dreadful can be best described as literary mashup, as it embraces heterogeneous cultural and literary sources by merging nineteenth century high and low culture and weaves several mythical literary characters known from the late Victorian era into a new narrative patchwork, evolving and mutating material to fit new times. Thus Penny Dreadful breathes life into a genre – the fantastic – which according Tzvetan Todorov has been bled dry by modern age and in particular by the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis. The series does so by transforming classic texts through the employment of epigonic postmodern storytelling techniques like genre blending and diverse intertextual strategies including the adaptation practice termed ‘contamination.’ According to David Greetham’s The Pleasures of Contamination (2010) this practice occurs when “one mode of discourse . . . leaks into or infects another, so that we experience both at the same time” (1). In Penny Dreadful, creator John Logan demonstrates the practice of intertextual contamination – both at a thematic, an ideological and a narrative structural level – where several narrative elements and famous characters from nineteenth century novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are blended together and through which these myths of gothic fiction ‘contaminate’ each other and the series itself. To further complicate this reading of adaptive and intertextual processes, these Victorian novels are themselves imitations and adaptations. (See Rikke Schubart’s and Toby Locke’s discussions of adaptation elsewhere in this issue).

Such epigonic techniques applied by Penny Dreadful transgress the textual and generic boundaries of the series by combining elements and characteristic traits of several text-types into a woven web of signification. In the opening credits, this method of intertextuality and hybridity appears to be represented by the image of a spider spinning a web. A similar method also serves as an underlying principle when language creator David J. Peterson constructs the artificial language Verbis Diablo for the series, the “devils tongue” spoken by anyone touched by the Devil. This language is not original, but a pastiche made up of several languages (Arabic, Middle Egyptian, Attic Greek, Latin, Farsi etc.). Peterson combined grammar as well as pieces of multiple words from many different languages in order to produce new ones, including portmanteau words,[1] through a process of linguistic and semantic blending.

Penny Dreadful makes numerous references to British literature (William Shakespeare, John Clare, William Blake, William Wordsworth among others)[2] and also to horrific popular culture, of the nineteenth Century (Putney’s Family Waxworks – a gruesome version of Tussaud’s Wax Museum, Grand Guignol’s naturalistic horror theatre, press sensationalism, Victorian snuff theatre shows, spiritualist séances). Numerous intertextual references are rattling around inside the series’ storylines, their meaning shaped by strategies of quotation, plagiarism, pastiche, and allusion, all of which create an interrelationship between texts, adding layers of depth to Penny Dreadful and its characters by drawing on the viewers’ prior cultural knowledge.

Through its title and its imitations, plagiarism, and adaptation of popular texts and culture, the television series lives up to the reputation of the penny dreadfuls in the nineteenth-century. This publishing phenomenon was popular serial literature printed at a low cost and this literature was designed to shock and awe a mass audience by focusing on the sensational, adventure, horror, crime, and the supernatural. These genres also merge together into one hybrid form in Logan’s television series, creating a new work that appeals to (post)modern audiences with lurid tales of crime, transgressive sexuality, and the supernatural.

On an ideological level, Penny Dreadful furthermore adapts a multitude of ideas by synthesizing Christian theology, elements from Egyptian mythology, and nineteenth century spiritualism and imperialism. This remixing of ideas reflects postmodernism and the perspective that our traditions and their cultural content can be reimagined by taking material and merging it into a new original creation. In that sense, the series is a playful game of layering meaning into a contaminant cobweb of signification.

Postmodern Monster Mashup – Lucifer did not Fall Alone

In Penny Dreadful diverse characters from different literary works and traditions are brought together in a new fictional context and in this new constellation of characters each of them are changed. If re-used characters from several pre-texts are considered as organic parts of the subsequent narrative, the perception of them necessarily changes as the narrative itself generates change. Simultaneously, the mashup impregnates the original texts with meaning blurring the line between original creation and adapted material. By this mode of signification Penny Dreadful aligns with postmodernism in particular through its promiscuity and playful blending, also its collapse of the distinction between high art and mass/popular culture.

The only characters who are Logan’s own creation and don’t obviously originate directly from source texts are Ethan Chandler and protagonist Vanessa Ives (although articles elsewhere in this issue, by Locke, Amanda Howell and Lucy Baker offer insights into the literary origins of both). Throughout all three seasons of the series the main plotline focuses on Vanessa’s inner battle between faith versus religious despair as she wrestles with her inner demons – literally, as Lucifer (so it appears for two seasons) is haunting her and desires her as his bride. He believes she is the reincarnation of the mother of all evil, the Egyptian primordial goddess Amunet (meaning ‘the female hidden one’), the consort of the god Amun-Ra (a.k.a. the Dragon, Dracula and Dr. Alexander Sweet), who, if conjoined together, will plunge the world into eternal darkness. A number of subplots are interwoven into this main storyline about Vanessa’s battle and each subplot is related to different antagonists in each season of Penny Dreadful. In the first season the antagonist is a master vampire with different nests of vampires, and in the second season the series brings a villainous antagonist, the witch Evelyn Poole and her coven, the nightcomers. Nonetheless, the primary antagonist that seem to go throughout all three seasons is finally revealed in the third, at first disguised in human form as zoologist and director at the London Natural History Museum, Dr. Alexander Sweet, who befriends Vanessa in an attempt to manipulate her and in the end: seduce her. However, his true nature as Dracula is exposed in “Predators Far and Near” (3.02).

Logan reimagines and develops Bram Stoker’s original character as the brother of Lucifer expelled from Heaven, a fallen angel in his own right – contributing to a complex cosmology that blends a great deal of mythological source material – Egyptian and Christian mythologies interwoven with classical gothic elements. Within the storyworld of Penny Dreadful this cosmology is presented through, among other things, The Verbis Diablo, used on eleventh century relics inscribed by Brother Gregory– what Mr. Lyle refers to as “the memoirs of the Devil” (2.04). By deciphering the satanic memoirs the group led by Malcolm Murray learns that while Lucifer is a demon of spiritual essence who feeds on the souls of the dead in Hell, his brother Dracula is by contrast a demon of the flesh who fell to Earth, where he was cursed to feed on the blood of the living by night. As eternal rivals for ascension to the heavenly throne, they both quest for Vanessa in her incarnation as the mother of all evil. A prophecy says she is needed in order to complete the apocalypse where both are released from their bondage allowing them to reconquer Heaven: “And so will the Darkness reign on Earth, in Heaven, everlasting. And so comes the Apocalypse” (2.08).

For two seasons viewers were under the impression that Lucifer was the only one vying for Vanessa’s soul, but in the final season Vanessa is courted by Dracula from outside, while continuing to be haunted by Lucifer within. What’s particularly fascinating about this supernatural merged Dracula-Amun-Ra-demon-character is that a higher level of ambiguity and humanity is embedded within him than is usually seen in horror. For example, he wants Vanessa to reciprocate his romantic feelings. He is truly in love with her. Adding to his humanity, he is extremely powerful, yet he is not all powerful because he needs Vanessa to complete his masterplan and he has been patiently waiting 2000 years for this plan to be fulfilled. Although he is a mashup character from traditional figures of relatively uncomplicated evil such as Dracula and the Devil, Dr. Sweet, as indicated by his name, is a more morally ambiguous character, one who deconstructs the boundaries between monstrous and human, between supernatural and mundane.

When disparate characters are blended and new creations (mashups) arise, the original characters interpenetrate one another so that audience recognizes and experiences each of them simultaneously. They are furthermore contaminated by a history of adaptations in literature, film and television that have transformed figures like Dracula over time and turned them into vehicles of cultural transmission. Paradoxically, mashup characters also trigger the opposite effect of familiarity – that is alienation – when original characters are re-introduced in an unfamiliar (merged) way that deviates from conventionalized representations. In other words, despite being shaped by intertextual strategies such as appropriation, mashup characters also create originality through deviation or what Russian Formalist Victor Shklovsky calls defamiliarization.[3] This aesthetic effect he defines as art’s capacity to de-automatize habit and convention by investing the familiar with strangeness in order to revitalize that which has become too familiar. Similarly, mashup characters are forcing audience to see mythical figures from a different and more complex perspective.

In all three seasons of Penny Dreadful monstrosity is a theme closely interwoven with motifs like doubt, repression, guilt, transgressive sexual desires, and not the least, with the confluence of good and evil that runs through the veins of many characters. This makes it postmodern in that sense that it stresses the equalization and levelling out the symbolic hierarchy between good and evil. Instead, as the episode title “Good and Evil Braided Be” (3.03) suggests, each character is simultaneously good and evil. This is what– among other things –makes characters in Penny Dreadful complex and morally ambiguous.

Lucifer (light bringer) and Lupus Dei (the wolf of God) are the most prominent traditional figures of ambiguity depicted in the series. Whereas Lucifer is a fallen angel (of light) expelled from Heaven and cast down to Earth, Lupus Dei brings about good by means of evil acts. As suggested by Ethan Chandler himself “We have claws for a reason” (2.07) indicating that there might be a higher (godly) purpose to his monstrous acts and nature. This is confirmed by The Verbis Diablo relics where “the Wolf of God” is mentioned as a long-fated protector of Vanessa and as such he turns out to be the key player in the battle against Lucifer and Dracula for her soul.[4]

Dark Shadows and Human Complexity

Penny Dreadful’s thematic structure is characterized by a sort of confluent duality which is formulated in the second season teaser by each character in turn declaring that “There is no light without darkness. No courage without fear. No pleasure without pain. No salvation without sin. No life without death.” In other words, each character in the ensemble, assisting the adventurer Malcolm Murray in the search for his missing daughter Mina, is characterized by conjoined concepts: light-darkness (Vanessa Ives), courage-fear (Ethan Chandler), pleasure-pain (Dorian Gray), salvation-sin (Malcolm Murray) and life-death (Victor Frankenstein); accordingly, they depict ambiguous personality traits. Not only does this dualism resonate deeply with the Victorian idea of man’s dual nature – i.e. his sinister alter ego – but also with the debates of that time about the plurality of human consciousness and moral behavior, because moral concerns received special attention in the Victorian era as a consequence of people losing their religious beliefs.

The dichotomy between good and evil, light and darkness, is integral to Vanessa’s character. Simultaneously she is a practitioner of Catholicism, skepticism and pagan witchcraft: her catholic rituals often cross the line into other spiritual practices like clairvoyance and witchcraft; while she is praying she both makes the sign of the cross and draws her protective talisman, a scorpion, with her own blood, an allusion to Egyptian mythology. Much of the series has been devoted to the tension between Vanessa and her faith and eventually by the end of second season, her loss of faith – which is the ultimate consequence of her suffering in God’s absence. Vanessa’s psychological dilemma seems to capture the zeitgeist of the fin de siècle at the threshold to the modern era, which is the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology.[5] In a state of religious despair Vanessa frequently seeks out her friend John Clare (Rory Kinnear) alias The Creature, whom she meets as they volunteer together in the cholera dungeon, for comforting debates on theology and poetry as they tend to the afflicted. He, on the other hand, seems to impersonate modernity and the rise of the new man emancipated from the chains of religion, because – as he explains Vanessa in “Verbis Diablo” (2.02) – “I believe in this world and those creatures that fill it. That has always been enough for me. Look around you. Sacred mysteries at every turn.” He presents a critique of religion that echoes the thoughts of German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach from Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), where he emphasizes that religion deprives man of temporal life by promising him eternal life and by teaching him to trust in God’s help it takes away man’s trust in his own powers. In other words, truth is considered profane according to John Clare. When asked if he truly doesn’t believe in heaven, John Clare answers by quoting four lines from William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence (1863) “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.” In other words, by celebrating the worldly and profane instead of eternity John Claire has no fear of hellfire as most Christians. He and other pagans “can be who they are, good or ill as their nature dictates. We have no fear of God, so we are accountable to no one but each other” (2.02). Thereby he unfolds secularism and anthropology as moral narratives of modernity, according to which the creature of modernity knows itself to be the true agent of its actions, in contrast to people of the Victorian era who displace their own agency onto gods, demons, and so forth.

Intertextually contaminated by late Victorian literature and its exploration into the duality of human mind and into mankind’s choice to do moral and immoral acts, the series Penny Dreadful dwells on the shadow side of the human psyche associated with evil, repression, and demonization of the other self, i.e. the doppelgänger. Thus, on a thematic level, Penny Dreadful owes a lot to Stevenson’s portrayal of Dr. Jekyll’s struggle between his dual personalities of the honorable Henry Jekyll and his evil double Edward Hyde in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In contrast to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stevenson’s monster is not created by stitched-together body parts, but rather emerges from the dark side of the human personality – a sinister alter ego. This thematic resemblance between Stevenson’s work and Penny Dreadful is intertextually hinted by quotation in third season’s character-driven flashback episode “A Blade of Grass” (3.04) where the caring orderly (The Creature before his transformation) at the Banning asylum reads Stevenson’s poem for children “My Shadow” (1885) to Vanessa, while she is institutionalized, and shadows of beasts appear on the wall of her padded cell when she wrestles with her demons. Appropriately enough, Stevenson’s poem is about the dual nature of man – not unlike Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde which takes duality of man even further by literally splitting the consciousness of Dr. Jekyll into two: a decent side suppressing desires that runs contrary to the restraints of society and an amoral side that seeks to gratify instincts. In Penny Dreadful and in Stevenson’s book the exploration of the idea of duality and its metaphor of light and dark is also a commentary on the duality of British society in the Victorian era. Even London itself has a dual nature in Penny Dreadful with its respectable streets side-by-side with crooked alleys and sinister areas. with blood-splattered theaters and underground private clubs where aristocratic gentlemen indulge in criminal behaviour (illegal dog fights) and macabre sexual proclivities such as snuff theatre shows.

Women of Complexity

In the course of the eighteenth century the concept of individuality in characterization in literature gained central importance and consequently character types were rejected as non-realistic, at least in high culture. Since then, the construction of character complexity through increased humanization and enrichment has been an ideal to strive for. This ideal is also emphasized by narrative theory, for example in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction , where she proposes three axes to categorize literary characters in terms of the story: “complexity [one or more character traits], development [static vs. dynamic], penetration into the ‘inner life’ [the availability and details of mental life information]” (Rimmon-Kenan 41). Since interiority in visual media is a restricted area of access, viewers must use their cognitive mind-reading ability to infer characters’ beliefs and morality on basis of exterior clues including appearance, utterances, behavior and how other characters act towards and talk to them. Individual characters are given psychological depth, individuality, and complexity “mostly through (often conflict-laden) interaction with other characters. As spectators, we observe their behavior, errors, and twists and turns” (Trohler 468). The ideal of a representation of individuality can thus be approached by using a constellation of traits that “stands in apparent contrast to each other, or of which some are surprising to find in combination with the others” (Eder et al. 39).

This also applies to the style of characterization of Penny Dreadful. Vanessa Ives is contradictory in so many ways. She seems more terrified of happiness, conformity and normality – which she initially strives for – than of the darkness and its creatures haunting her. Eventually she rejects normality in the second season episode “And They Were Enemies” when confronted with Evelyn Poole’s Vanessa-fetish-doll possessed by the Devil (2.10). Through this demonized (hence distorted and fraudulent) self-image, the Devil asks Vanessa to face herself. He tempts her with a deep longing of hers by showing her the conventional life she could have – one that involves marrying Ethan and having adorable children – in exchange for her soul when she dies of old age. Already having given up on the possibility of being normal, Vanessa out-duels her look-alike doll by asking it: “You offer me a normal life. Why do you think I want that anymore? I know what I am. Do you?” and while chanting in verbis diablo she finishes the doll off by cracking its face open while saying “Beloved. Know your master!” (2.10). Thereby she releases the scorpions within the doll, her true nature, realizing what her struggle will be: to come to terms with the darkness in her.

In regards to characterization, one of the most captivating things about Penny Dreadful is how patiently it deepens the complexity of its characters by grounding them psychologically through flashback episodes. They provide a swift summary in which prior happenings leading up to the current point in story are recounted in order to fill in crucial backstory of its protagonist whose inward development is of crucial importance. As far as Vanessa Ives goes, her character is complex, meaning she is complicated and contradictory in so many ways. She has a variety of ambiguous and multiple traits to her personality – that undergoes important changes as the plot of the series unfolds. However, the various characters in Penny Dreadful are not grasped as having the same ‘degree of fullness,’ as E.M. Forster already recognized in Aspects of the Novel from 1927 with his distinction between flat and round characters. Considering how Rimmon-Kenan defines the character as a “network of character-traits” (Rimmon-Kenan 59) a round character’s complexity and psychological depth can be achieved by implementing several paradoxical attributes to it. Paradoxicality is what Evelyn Poole is lacking as character and therefore she is not grasped as having the same degree of fullness or psychological depth as Vanessa, Lily and John Clare/The Creature. This quote from Forster also supports the importance of complex characters acting in ways that challenge viewers’ expectations “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is flat pretending to be round” (Forster 231) In Forster’s conception, round characters cannot be summed up in a single phrase, as they are highly developed and complex, meaning they show a full range of emotions and have a variety of traits and different sides to their personalities that may create conflict in their character. In contrast, flat characters are schematically reduced and immediately recognizable on account of some few distinct traits. They are constructed around a single idea or quality and therefore identical with caricatures, types, and stereotypes.

As character Vanessa is highly developed, dynamic, and complex, capable of unexpected and surprising behavior as demonstrated in the two-part finale of Season Three, including episodes 8 and 9: “Perpetual Night” and “The Blessed Dark.” Many viewers and critics were surprised by Vanessa’s choice of embracing perpetual darkness in the form of Dracula, and they were struck by disbelief about her eventually choosing death rather than the Apocalypse. However, those viewers seem to have ignored Vanessa’s previous choices to consciously act evil – for instance by seducing her best friend’s fiancé on the evening before their wedding in “Closer Than Sisters” (1.05) and later by chanting a spell from Joan Clayton’s book Verbis Diablo to have Sir Geoffrey’s dogs kill him in retaliation for his burning of Clayton. In other words, not unlike other characters in Penny Dreadful, Vanessa is both good and evil, and she makes a choice in second season to abandon her faith in God, and later in third season to embrace her dark destiny as well as her evil nature. After abandoning her faith, Vanessa experiences like many other characters in Penny Dreadful the downside of modernity as described by existentialism – that is, the loneliness which is an unavoidable condition of humanity in a world without God. “So we walk alone” (2.10), Ethan declares in his letter to Vanessa, emphasizing that loneliness is the only villain that nobody can defeat in the series’ storyworld.

Plots can be operationalized as story events that make it difficult to predict how a protagonist will behave, but Vanessa’s inner conflict between good and evil place viewers in a position of predicting how she might choose to act. Her unexpected and surprising behavior prompts viewers to reconcile her actions with their understanding of her basic dispositions. Considering Vanessa’s long-term inner struggle, her heart-wrecking loneliness after her loss of faith, and her longing for love and companionship, it wasn’t really such a surprise that she eventually gave in to Dracula, as this seems to be a perfectly logical emotional choice. Furthermore, death seems to be a logical conclusion for Vanessa’s moral choices – for instance in “A Blade of Grass” (3.04) where she tries to starve herself to death at the Banning’s asylum, and in “Possession” (1.07) where she asks Ethan to end her life when the moment is right.

But after all, did Vanessa give in to Dracula? When embracing him by saying she was accepting herself rather than accepting him she chose herself over him. Thus, she alone is master of her fate, and without her faith this act of choosing herself simultaneously situates every Heaven and every Hell on Earth; or, as coined by Vanessa herself in the final episode, “Fear not old prophecies. We defy them. We make our own Heaven and our own Hell.” Thereby she is – similar to the human being in modernity – condemned to her own freedom, leaving her with the decision of right and wrong. Metaphorically speaking, similar to any autonomous existence Vanessa is emancipated from the chains of religion and must thus be the governor of her moral life and face her inner darkness. And in the end, she eventually demonstrates her ambivalence about the evil inside her by using her own death to subvert her previously choice of the apocalypse and thereby saving Earth from perpetual darkness. Thus, despite being a character of repression Vanessa Ives is actually empowered throughout the series as her storyline takes shape, gradually developing her from being a tortured institutionalized deviant, unwillingly possessed by the Devil and tormented by witches into a woman who personifies female empowerment. In other words, Penny Dreadful subverts the traditional woman-in-peril storyline when Vanessa surrenders to Dracula and simultaneously declares “I accept… myself” (3.07). Thereby she finally accepts her dual nature and finds her own subjective truth: the very same thing that makes her monstrous also empowers her and makes her who she is.

Something Borrowed – Intertextual characterization

In his article “Interfigurality” (1991) Wolfgang G. Müller presents a widely applicable theory of transtextual characters showing how literary characters gain depth and resonance by sharing elements with characters in other works. Accordingly, ‘interfigurality’ refers to the intertextual fragments of characters or to intertextual markers manifesting through characters. Müller’s theory could also be used to analyze the complex characterization in visual narratives such as Penny Dreadful and the series’ pastiche-like combination of original characters from very diverse pre-texts to new creations (mashup characters). Additionally, the series is based on character combinations, where familiar figures from different pre-texts are brought together and made to interact with each other. According to Müller, the clearest type of interfigural reference is contributed by the names of characters related. Names are also the most obvious device of relating characters of several heterogeneous sources in Penny Dreadful. As mentioned earlier, Dr. Alexander Sweet, for example, is a contamination of three different mythical figures: Dracula, the Devil and the Egyptian god Amun-Ra. Now Dr. Sweet cannot be simply interpreted as an amalgamation of these three mythic figures, as Dracula is the primary model for Dr. Sweet, whereas the other two figures seem subordinate to Dracula/Dr. Sweet. Braided together with these two figures Dracula/Dr. Sweet is not only provided with backstory. Simultaneously, he is woven into a bigger mythology surrounding the Devil and Amun-Ra contributing to build up Penny Dreadful’s own fictional world and complex mythology. Such mashups of re-used characters can be considered as an extreme type of interfigurality, in Müller’s conception, which emerges “whenever a literary figure is extricated from its original fictional context and inserted into a new fictional context” (107). In other words, mashups can be considered as a deviation technique meant to undermine original figures – meaning that characters re-emerging in later works are more than just duplicates as they are “marked by a characteristic tension between similarity and dissimilarity with their models from the pre-texts” (Müller 109).

Mashup characters share several attributes, prominent traits, and large and complex story elements (such as fragments of storyworlds and environments) with diverse characters in other works. Through John Logan’s intertextual characterization, i.e. the intertextual links manifesting through blending characters, he plays with audience’s prior cultural knowledge, adding complexity and psychological depth to each of the series’ mashup characters by absorbing them “into the formal and ideological structure of his own product, putting [them] into his own uses” (Müller 107). Accordingly, a mashup character’s degree of complexity depends on it being recognized by viewers as something familiar and antecedent. In other words it should be considered as a re-used slightly distorted character where names provide clues for further interfigural links, encouraging viewers’ memory to make connections between different characters and different stories. Thus, intertextual characterization is rooted in cognitive processes of the viewer and, therefore, the mashup character is not just a bundle of traits based on different textual data. They are also mental constructions based on viewers’ knowledge and previous experiences of other texts and characters from which mashups draw much of their appeal and content.

This also applies to the monstrous dimension of Penny Dreadful‘s female characters. In Monstrous-Feminine Barbara Creed unfolds a psychological reading of female monsters and focuses her analysis on seven faces or manifestations of female monstrosity in horror films, where monstrosity is produced at the border:

… between human and inhuman, man and beast … in others the borders are between the normal and the supernatural, good and evil . . . or the monstrous is produced at the border which separates those who take up their proper gender roles from those who do not . . . or the border between normal and abnormal sexual desire (Creed 11).

Creed’s theory is formulated in reference to Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection which refers to what threatens life and therefore “must be radically excluded” (Creed 11) – that is the distortions of the feminine created from subconscious male fears. Creed outlines such misogynist fantasies about female monstrosity – faces of female monstrosity – as the archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator. These archetypical representations of the monstrous feminine simply form a catalogue of typical horror-film iconography, and due to the reductionism of such categories they might seem rather insufficient for dealing with the complex female characters in Penny Dreadful. Acknowledging that complex characters rarely fit into firm categories as the monstrous feminine, both Vanessa and Lily are, however, essentially reminiscent of pastiche-like combinations of Creed’s seven guises of the monstrous feminine, adding an archetypical dimension and further depth to these characters. They are complex, multidimensional and have morally ambiguous character traits and therefore capable of surprising and culturally subversive behavior. Yet, they tend to be innovative variations of well-known (stereotypical) character types. Furthermore, as a merged character Vanessa is woven into an intertextual cobweb that adds layers and depth to her personality. Besides her gift of being a clairvoyant and a medium, both Evelyn Poole and the Ferdinand Lyle believe Vanessa is the reincarnation of the ancient Egyptian goddess Amunet (1.02). However, given the fact that Vanessa’s sigil, the scorpion, in Egyptian mythology belongs to the Goddess of protection named Serket, originally the deification of the scorpion, Penny Dreadful takes certain liberties with Egyptian mythology by merging the lore surrounding Serket and Amunet into one character.

To further the mystery surrounding Vanessa’s character it is revealed in second season that she is also a powerful witch and if there is one monstrous role that belongs entirely to women in horror it would be that of the witch. This character is a focal point in horror and fantasy where it has been attributed stereotypical traits and thereby turned into a stock character – partly because of frequent use in popular media fictions. In many cases, stereotypical media stock characters owe their existence to few influential works, and in horror the representation of the witch consistently foregrounds her sexual nature, her supernatural powers, and her being closer to nature than men (see Rikke Schubart’s discussion of Vanessa as witch in this issue). According to Creed, the witch is defined as an abject figure in that she “sets out to unsettle boundaries between the rational and irrational, symbolic and imaginary. Her evil powers are seen as part of her ‘feminine’ nature.” (Creed 76). The complexity of Vanessa’s character is not only caused by characterization but also by her merged and interfigural nature. She is intertextually contaminated by several archetypes of female monstrosity – including “the possessed monster” and “the witch.” Thus, what characterizes the witch in Penny Dreadful is a playful subversion of key aspects of the witch trope that appears by merging it with other iconic character’s and archetypes of the monstrous-feminine – such as “the monstrous mother” and “deadly castrator” – as impersonated by Evelyn Poole, who also merges many traditional witch tropes such as “the enchantress,”“the diabolic priestess,” and “the child-hurting villain.”

Revolt of the Monstrous-Feminine

In Monstrous-Feminine Creed challenges the mythical patriarchal view that women terrify because they are castrated. Instead she argues fear of the feminine arises due to castration anxiety. Thus, as emphasized by Creed the concept of border is also essential to the construction of the characters’ monstrosity in Penny Dreadful where that which crosses or threatens to cross the border is abject – in the Kristevan sense of the word. Many female characters, including Vanessa Ives, Lily Frankenstein, Dr. Florence Seward, Joan Clayton, and Catriona Hartdegen, can be perceived as distortions of the Victorian ideal of womanhood. They all fight social restraints imposed upon them by a male-dominated society, as when Lily – after her resurrection, empowerment and vendetta against men – escapes Victor Frankenstein’s plans to domesticate her by turning her “into a proper woman” (3.07). By “proper woman” he means a tamed, obedient, and silenced woman who loves him but has no independent thoughts or impulses, basically destroying Lily and through medical treatment reducing her to a controllable thing.

In a sense, both Lily and Vanessa are victims of a male-dominated medical discourse and as characters they allude to the way deviant women were treated in the nineteenth century. The flashback episode “A Blade of Grass” (3.04) contains an embedded narrative about Vanessa’s five-month institutionalization in an insane asylum. The framing narrative takes place entirely in Dr. Florence Seward’s office, where Vanessa under hypnosis recalls her first encounter with Dracula in her padded cell where she undergoes all sorts of horrific medical practices of the nineteenth century such as isolation, hydrotherapy, lobotomy and the use of gags, strait-jackets, and forced feeding. Vanessa insists she is being tortured through these practices which the orderly calls science and Vanessa believes is meant to make her “normal, like all other women you know. Compliant. Obedient. A cog in the social machine.” What Vanessa critically calls torture is in her opinion social control of women, manifested by the asylum, over female deviance and it has stripped away her identity and purpose by refusing to see her as a subject. According to Vanessa, conformity is forced onto women who deviate from the cultural norm in terms of role, sexual orientation, demeanor, and so on.

The character Vanessa hides almost endless complexity. She seems smooth on the surface visualizing the Victorian ideal of the domestic and socially restricted woman. First of all, she embodies the ideal of submissive womanhood by being a ward under a male guardian (Sir Malcolm Murray) and secondly through her Victorian clothing, such as her tight-lacing and high-necked dresses, that clearly perfects a message of willingness to conform to submissive pattern and to repress her sexuality. However, Vanessa’s inner demons lurk beneath this surface of equanimity and they are released every time she gives in to her true sexual nature liberating herself from social restrictions.

In the episode “Possession” (1.07) Vanessa’s recurrent episodes of demonic possession return triggered by her falling for libertine Dorian Gray, which unleashes her dark side during sex with him. By constantly drawing connections between feminine desire, sexuality, aberrant feminine behavior, bodily vulnerability, and abjection this episode aligns with one of the archetypical representations of the monstrous feminine as coined by Creed, that is, woman as possessed monster. This episode’s portrayal of Vanessa as a possession victim belongs to the lineage of dual personality horror figures and it owes a lot to The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973). Both as demonic possessed and as medium Vanessa is regularly invaded by another personality which according to Creed is abject as the “boundary between self and other has been transgressed” (ibid.). In her states of possession Vanessa is aggressive and violent, has supernatural strength, and is capable of telekinesis and levitation. She speaks with a hoarsely mocking, guttural, and malicious voice, crawls around like an animal, leaps up onto the ceiling and utters obscenities. She also directs her rage at the most taboo sexual desires of men, for example when she asks Malcolm about pornographic necrophilia: “There is a brisk trade of photographs of dead woman, did you know that?” (1.07).

Despite the combined endless efforts of Malcolm, Ethan, Victor and Sembene, Vanessa is possessed for weeks. As much as this frustrates the men, Vanessa’s battle against her inner demons is hers to fight, hers alone. Therefore “Possessions” seems, in terms of gender roles, to be an exploration of female monstrosity and the inability of patriarchal order to control the woman those perversities is expressed through a rebellious body which is transformed into a playground for bodily filth – for instance her hair hangs in a greasy tangle and her skin erupts in sores. The graphic display of a rebellious body is central to the construction of the abject in “Possession,” in particular through signs of bodily excretion like spittle, blood, urine, and sweat – filth that stains Vanessa’s clothes and bedlinen. As possessed body, Vanessa is monstrous because she breaks major taboos. Thus, she is abject by disturbing the paternal symbolic which is govern by “identity, system and order” (Creed 1993 37), that serves to establish and maintain a proper self and body.

Vanessa’s recurrent episodes of possession are consistently linked to her deepest desires and sexuality – as some sort of psychosexual hysteria caused by guilt brought to the surface by unrestrained sexual activity, which is how Dr. Frankenstein interprets her possession. As revealed in the flashback episode “Closer Than Sisters,”(1.05) a major cause of Vanessa’s possessions is her mother. Vanessa becomes susceptible to evil in her early adolescence when she spies on her mother, who is fornicating with Malcolm. Rather than being repulsed by their adultery, she enjoys watching them and simultaneously an evil presence ignites within her.

Engaging with Morally Ambiguous Characters

Multifaceted narratives like Penny Dreadful are constructed to encourage viewers to empathize with morally ambiguous character, because the series’ style of characterization sets up oppositions then fades black and white into greyscale areas of morality, presenting a multifaceted vision of people and the world, which resonate with postmodern audiences and cultural norms beyond a good-and-evil dichotomy.

Vanessa Ives is an example of one of those highly individualized complex characters, “who resist abstraction and generalization, and whose motivation is not susceptible to rigid ethical interpretation” (Scholes et al. 101). When viewers respond to and evaluate morally ambiguous characters, the question of right or wrong cannot be put so easily to their actions because such characters’ behavior and/or beliefs seem to complicate viewers’ common sense concepts of good. Vanessa, for example, has a built-in tension as there is always the question whether her evil nature will be able to take over, causing her to fail her quest. Although Vanessa may behave in morally questionable ways the negative effects on viewers’ moral judgements of these characters may be diminished by character motivation. In a 2013 study “What makes Characters’ Bad Behaviors Acceptable?” Maja Krakowiak and Mina Tsay-Vogel (empirically) tested how character motivation and a story’s outcome influence how viewers’ perceive characters. Their findings suggest that many viewers may even sympathize with characters acting morally ambiguous, because “they are able to excuse these actions through the process of moral disengagement” (Krakowiak & Tsay-Vogel 180). The process of moral disengagement may be facilitated if certain cues are present in a narrative. For example, it can be easier to excuse an immoral action if the character’s motivation is altruistic rather than selfish or if the immoral act produces a positive rather than negative outcome. This also applies to Vanessa, who in the final episode makes an altruistic sacrifice so that everyone else can live.

Penny Dreadful’s Victorian period setting and female characters reflects the beginning of social changes that led to redefining gender relation questioning the foundation of paternalistic society in an attempt to consolidate women’s rights. Similar to contemporary television series such as Game of Thrones (2011-present), the series takes part of a growing trend of strong female characters revolting against social norms and masculine supremacy. Both series present some of the most compelling and interesting female characters on screen where plot and complex characters blur the line between good and evil, reflecting changing social ideas about modern women and their roles. In both television series female characters are shaped in contradictory ways by gender norms of today’s culture and contemporary mythologized ideas about the past in such a way that today’s gender roles are remade through the depiction of an inherently misogynistic past. In both series there is an underlying narrative of moral ambiguity and female empowerment that touches common ground and resonates deeply with modern audiences reflecting moral complexity as a modern human condition.

Works Cited

Blake, William. “Auguries of Innocence” (1863).

Cardwell, Sarah. Adaptation revisited. Manchester UP, 2002.

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Illustrated by John Tenniel, Macmillan and Co, 1872.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine. Routledge, 1993.

Eder, Jens, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider. “Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction.” Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, edited by Eder, Jens, et al., Walter de Gruyter, 2010, pp. 3-66.

Fludernik, Monika. An Introduction to Narratology. Routledge, 2009.

Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel and Related Writing (1927). Edward Arnold, 1974.

—. “Flat and round characters” (1927). The Theory of the Novel, edited by Philip Stevick, The Free Press, 1967, pp. 223-231.

Greetham, David. Pleasures of Contamination: Evidence, Text, and Voice in Textual Studies. Indiana University Press, 2010.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006.

Huxley, Thomas Henry. The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study (1886). Kessinger Publishing, 2004.

Krakowiak, Maja & Tsay-Vogel, Mina. “What Makes Characters’ Bad Behaviors Acceptable? The Effects of Character Motivation and Outcome on Perceptions, Character Liking, and Moral Disengagement.” Mass Communication and Society, vol. 16, no. 2 2013, pp. 179-199.

Mackie, J.L. “Evil and Omnipotence.” Mind, vol. 64, no. 254, pp. 200–212.

Müller, Wolgang G. “Interfigurality – A Study on the Interdependence of Literary Figures.” Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich Plett, Walter de Gruyter, 1991.

“Penny Dreadful Season 2 Warns the Devil is in All of Us.” YouTube. Posted March 31 2015.   Accessed 30 March 2017.

Richardson, Brian. “Transtextual Characters.” Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, edited by Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, Ralf Schneider,Walter de Gruyter, 2010, pp. 527-41.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (1983). Routledge, 2002.

Herbert Schlossberg. Conflict and Crisis in the Religious Life of Late Victorian England (2009). Transaction Publishers, 2009.

Scholes, Robert, James Phelan, Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative (1966). Oxford University Press, 2006.

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique” (1917). Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 1998.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Cornell UP, 1975.

Trohler, Margrit. “Multiple Protagonist Films: A Transcultural Everyday Practice.” Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, edited by Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, Ralf Schneider,Walter de Gruyter, 2010, pp. 459-477.

Wordsworth, William. Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807). D. Lothrop and Co., 1884.

Notes

[1] “Portmanteau” refers to a linguistic blend of words in which multiple words – both their sounds and the meanings of its components – are combined into a new word. An example of a portmanteau word would be brunch which is a contraction of breakfast and lunch. This linguistic technique of combining words in various ways is also used in Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking-Glass (1871) where Humpty-Dumpty explains to Alice what “mimsy” means. “Mimsy” means miserable and flimsy which are packed up into one word.

[2] There are many literary references in Penny Dreadful. For example, episode “Resurrection” (1.03) opens with Victor Frankenstein contemplating on the brutality of mortality, quoting lines from Wordsworth’s poem Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807) referring to the way modernity (modern science) has corrupted the romantic ideal of beauty. This is hinted by Frankenstein’s creation Caliban alias the Creature when he equates himself with the age of industry asking Frankenstein: “Did you not know that’s what you were creating? The modern age? Did you really imagine that your modern creation would hold the values of Keats and Wordsworth? We are men of iron and mechanization now … were you really so naïve to imagine that we’d see eternity in a daffodil?” (1.03).

[3] Victor Shklovsky introduced this concept in his seminal essay “Art as Technique” from 1917.

[4]Being God’s creatures both Lucifer and Lupus Dei personate the problem of evil which is an argument against the existence of God. This problem is related to the traditional conception of God as all-knowing, all-good-willed, and all-powerful which implies that if God Exists then he knows how to, wants to, and is able to prevent evil and all suffering. Evil and suffering, though, are parts of the world around us and thus there is no such God. There are many different philosophical answers to this problem but none of these are entirely satisfactory alone – one of them is presented by John Mackie in “Evil and Omnipotence” (1955).

[5] A similar point has been made by Thomas Henry Huxley in his 1886 essay “The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study” where he argued that the proper use of theology was as a subject to be studied by science within the realm of anthropology, which itself he considered a subdivision of biology. For further reading on English religion in the Victorian period, please see Herbert Schlossberg: Conflict and Crisis in the Religious Life of Late Victorian England (2009).

Bio: Anita Nell Bech Albertsen is an Associate Professor of Danish Literature at the University of Southern Denmark where she has taught courses in Danish literature, Literary theory, Media studies and Creative Writing. Her research interests include narrative theory, e.g. text world theory, anti-narration, and cognitive theory. In 2007 she was a visiting scholar at Project Narrative, Ohio State University, working under the auspices of Professor David Herman – on a PhD thesis on cognitive theory, phenomenology and anti-narration (published in Danish 2010). Her recent publications include Danish articles on televisual documentaries and narrative theory.

~ Tobias Locke

Abstract: Penny Dreadful’s commercial and critical success stems from its transformative adaptation of the Gothic literary canon that precipitated it, and its willingness to use that adaptation as a vehicle for contemporary discourse. While previous and current scholarly literature has linked Penny Dreadful with theories of adaptation, there has little focus yet on the active role the series’ characters play in this process. As admixtures of canonical and semi-original creations, Penny Dreadful’s principal characters are a driving force behind its adaptation of the Gothic, and act as powerful instances of cultural criticism, as exemplified in the character of Ethan Chandler. As a textual hybrid who inhabits multiple Gothic character archetypes simultaneously, Ethan is uniquely positioned to act as the series’ cultural critique of ideologies surrounding Victorian and contemporary masculinity.

Introduction

The year is 1891, around late September. Some nights past, a nest of vampires was slain in an abattoir beneath an East End opium den, but the London public is more concerned with a mother and child dismembered in a tenement some blocks over, not far from the garret where Victor Frankenstein assembles his latest creature. The Whitechapel crowds whisper amongst themselves: “Is it the Ripper come back?” and newspapers stoke public excitement with sensationalist headlines. One can only imagine the coverage if they knew the killer was a werewolf. Meanwhile, in the sedate mansions of Westminster, an African explorer and a medium discuss the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and Dorian Gray expands his private pornography collection (Logan Penny Dreadful 1.01 “Night Work”, 1.02 “Séance”).

This smorgasbord of the Victorian Gothic, as reimagined by screenwriter John Logan, comprises the narrative foundations of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which over the course of three seasons garnered critical acclaim and a voracious international fandom. Much of its success came from the way it reimagined rather than outright adapted its source texts: “If its literature were a song,” writes Slayton , “Penny Dreadful is an addictive remix instead of a cover that loses the potency and point” of the original. Slayton’s distinction is critical: despite Penny Dreadful’s appropriation of characters, themes, and narrative elements originating from archetypal Gothic texts – Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray  – showrunner John Logan was more interested in using these precursor texts as “provocation” for the series’ own narrative than making Penny Dreadful a straightforward adaptation (Wightman). Rather than faithfully re-presenting the Gothic canon on the small screen, Penny Dreadful acted as an admixture of its source material that destabilized the patrilineal relationship between adaptation and adapted text to favor the adaptation. This destabilizing comes from the series’ deliberately “un-naming” of its precursor texts, a means of creative development first articulated by Bloom (10). By refusing to situate itself as “descended” from any single text, Penny Dreadful freed itself of the expected “adherence to plot or character development” that constitutes direct adaptation; instead, the series situated its precursors in purely “generic terms: the penny dreadful, that which is, by its nature, derivative and second hand” (Poore 70-71). This deliberately obfuscated and self-reflexive relationship to its literary precursors and allowed John Logan the creative freedom re-present some of the Gothic’s “iconic characters in a new way” (Logan “Inside Penny Dreadful”). Even when canonical characters like Victor Frankenstein appeared in-narrative, they were ‘bespoke’ hybrids formed from their originals and other (occasionally disparate) Victorian Gothic archetypes, “calculatedly anachronistic” creations cut from a “vaguely familiar” cloth (Logan “Penny Dreadful: A New Narrative”; Poore 73). This allowed Penny Dreadful to sidestep what critic Joanna Russ terms “generic decadence,” whereby genre stories become “petrified collections of rituals, with all freshness and conviction gone” (49). More importantly for this discussion, the hybridity of the show’s characters situates them amidst one of the Gothic’s principal discursive archetypes: the abhuman, through which Gothic media demarcates or interrogates the ideological division between the human and monstrous. It is how Penny Dreadful’s characters function in the latter sense that will guide the focus of this paper, which pays particular attention to the character of Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett).

In this discussion, due emphasis is placed on John Logan’s original characters, around which the series’ “central spine” was built (Logan “Penny Dreadful: A New Narrative”). Previous scholarship has almost exclusively prioritised Penny Dreadful’s heroine, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), whom Logan constructed as the series’ centrepiece (“Penny Dreadful: A New Narrative”): a haunted young woman scarred both by the constraints of her society and an all-too-tangible inner darkness that demands violently destructive or sexual self-expression. Penny Dreadful uses Vanessa as a pointed deconstruction of Gothic femininity by presenting her as a “character whose sexuality plays out along traditionally male story markers” and fulfills a narrative role more akin to the Byronic hero than the Gothic heroine (Poore 73; Valentine). Vanessa is bold, inquisitive, and passionate, which encourages her rebellion “against the theological [and] social patterns of [her] day” and exposes her to a world of demons and supernatural darkness, precipitating the series’ core conflict (Gosling and Logan 123). Vanessa-as-Byronic-figure is able to critique the lassitude and domesticated feminine purity of the traditional Gothic heroine, not only by her agency in the series’ narrative, but by existing as a fully realised and flawed character in her own right (Poore 73; Luckhurst xxii).

This paper does not aim to dispute these findings – Vanessa Ives is a central vehicle for analysing Penny Dreadful’s self-reflexive relationship to the Gothic – but it expands them, by applying the same analysis to another of the series’ original characters: Ethan Chandler. Like Vanessa, Ethan’s character embodies multiple generic archetypes: the gunslinger cowboy of Western fiction, the tortured and introspective Gothic/Romantic hero, and the changeling victim/victimizer of the werewolf. Unlike Vanessa, who exists outside of convention from the series’ outset (be it going gloveless at a dinner party or later seeking the help of an alienist), Ethan is initially depicted in conventional, even generic terms, as a rugged and rebellious trigger man, and only reveals his hybrid identity through a series of transformative moments throughout Penny Dreadful’s first season. These transformative instances complicate his previous characterisation, and positions Ethan, like Vanessa, as a critique of the gendered ideologies inherent in the archetypes he performs: specifically the bodily mastery and patriarchal dependency of the cowboy and the egotism of the Romantic hero. The revelation of Ethan’s “morphic varability” as a werewolf undermines the bodily mastery of the cowboy and Romantic hero, and positions Ethan, like most of the series’ cast-, as an ‘outsider,’ someone who, by their actions, ideology, or existence, threatens societal norms (Hurley 1996 3-4). However, Ethan-as-werewolf also emphasizes the individual introspection and sublime connection to nature inherent to the cowboy and Romantic hero archetypes; his abhuman state foregrounds Ethan’s part in Penny Dreadful’s central “reframing of the monster narrative” and associated cultural critique (Thomas; Hurley 2012 198). This self-reflexive and transformative relationship with character archetype typifies the show’s relationship to its precursor texts and the wider Gothic genre, and is fundamental to our understanding of its success in adapting the Gothic for the twenty-first century.

Lover, Liar, Lycanthrope – Ethan Chandler and Character Archetype

Despite my earlier description of Penny Dreadful’s central characters as “original,” there exists a more accurate descriptor – what Poore terms a ‘bespoke’ character. “Bespoke” characters, he claims, are “calculatedly anachronistic reflections” of character archetypes from Penny Dreadful’s precursor texts: figures pieced together from a traditionally Gothic pattern, but with an explicitly “modern” sensibility (73). The “vaguely familiar” nature of these bespoke characters allows John Logan to guide the audience to expect particular narrative outcomes, while affording him the creative freedom to meet or subvert these expectations to a greater degree than he could with Penny Dreadful’s canonical characters (“Penny Dreadful: A New Narrative”). This methodology is what Logan uses when he first introduces the audience to Ethan, in the third scene of Penny Dreadful’s pilot. The opening titles and preceding scenes firmly establish the show as high Gothic Victoriana, with images of blood-filled teacups and scarab beetles, East End tenants being torn apart by unidentified assailants, and introducing us to Vanessa Ives as she fends off a nightly demonic visitation ( 1.01, “Night Work”). This makes our introduction to Ethan Chandler all the more tonally jarring: we snap to a scene of light and colour, gunfire and brass bands as he swaggers through a sharpshooting exhibit in a Wild West show. Ethan is dressed as a caricature of the “gunfighters of the old American West, such as Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody” (Sinha-Roy): long flowing curls, a sheriff’s star, buckskins, cowboy hat, and a moustache so extravagant it covers his entire mouth as he recounts General Custer’s last stand against the Sioux at Little Bighorn (which he claims to have survived), all the while juggling horseshoes in the air with shots from his pistols. While Ethan certainly entertains the crowd (with Vanessa a steely-eyed exception), the sheer extravagance of his routine makes it come off as the kind of weary almost-parody that denotes decadent genre (Russ 49-50); Ethan himself can barely suppress a sigh as he wraps up his tale of pluck and daring.

The only hint we get that there might be a genuine cowboy beneath all the greasepaint is when Ethan, in an impromptu finale, shoots the feathers off a lady’s hat, cheekily winking at the riotous applause and earning a wry smile from Vanessa. We cut to him enthusiastically copulating with the woman whose hat he shot; afterward, in the midst of tearing off his stage moustache (to reveal another underneath), he tells his conquest that while she’s made his visit “truly memorable,” the “peripatetic” life of a theatrical is calling him away, just as the lure of the wild open ranges would call cowboys away from their sweethearts (Aronson and Kimmel 188). Even here, when we begin to see Ethan as a genuine gunslinger, there’s a self-awareness present; instead of being despondent, his partner merely asks if he’d like to know her name before he departs – indicating both are somewhat aware their encounter is all part of the show. By the time we move to the next scene, the show expects us to have a clear impression of Ethan’s character: a “brash, cocky American” gunslinger “who survives on his wits as much as his frequently-drawn guns” and “has a tentative relationship with the right side of the law,” despite the hint of performativity underpinning his roguish charm (Gosling and Logan 18). Yet Logan uses Ethan’s next scene to complicate his inhabiting the cowboy archetype, by pitting him against Vanessa and her uncanny powers of perception. Seated across from Vanessa, Ethan’s flirtatious Western drawl becomes less a part of his character than “a mask of on-stage bravado” (Gosling and Logan 19); she asks for his help with some “night work,” he responds with flirtation, leading her to bluntly query whether Ethan’s shooting ability and Western pluck are “a tall tale as well.” Ethan responds lackadaisically – “What do you think?” – and Vanessa ripostes with the following:

Expensive watch, but thread-bare jacket. Sentimental about the money you used to have. Your eye is steady but your left hand tremors, that’s the drink, so you keep it below the table hoping I won’t notice. You’ve a contusion healing on your other hand, the result of a recent brawl with a jealous husband, no doubt. Your boots are good quality leather but have been re-soled more than once…I see a man who has been accustomed to wealth but has given himself to excess and the unbridled pleasures of youth…A man much more complicated than he likes to appear. ( 1.01, “Night Work”)

Ethan’s response to her analysis is telling – he maintains his Western cockiness at first, but as she continues, becomes visibly uncomfortable, before staging his first transformative moment, revealing a steely calm as he asks if Vanessa means to have him murder someone. He attempts to cover this ruthlessness by reverting to his cowboy persona when he accepts the offer – “One smile and I say yes” – but it doesn’t take, and Ethan is left contemplative and half-in shadow, a picture of Romantic moral ambiguity.

In the next few scenes, as Ethan joins Vanessa and Sir Malcolm Murray in their vampire hunt, Penny Dreadful moves into the realm of an oblique Dracula adaptation (Slayton). Through our awareness of Dracula as one of Penny Dreadful’s source texts, and the vague familiarity inherent in Ethan’s characterization, we are guided to assume Ethan will “echo” Stoker’s Quincey Morris as the brash and romantic “muscle” of Penny Dreadful’s burgeoning “band of heroes” (Crow; Logan “Penny Dreadful: A New Narrative”). This expectation, which has been echoed by most television critics, is not unreasonable: like Quincey, Ethan is the outsider in both a geographical (an American in London) and generic sense (a cowboy in a Gothic narrative); he enters the realm of the supernatural in pursuit of a haunted female figure (Vanessa Ives or Lucy Westenra/Mina Harker), and most importantly, his American brashness acts as a powerful symbol of modernity amidst Gothic antiquity and superstition. Quincey’s moral fortitude and worldliness prove instrumental in holding the “band of heroes” together in the face of the vampiric threat, and essential to defeating Dracula, who meets his end courtesy of Quincey’s “very Texan Bowie knife”; furthermore, as namesake to Jonathan and Mina’s son, Quincey represents the American-led future of the 20^th century (Crow, emphasis original; Stoker 162, 350-51). Logan seems to echo this American-as-modern mindset through Ethan by creating him specifically as the contemporary American audience’s “eyes into the story,” assuming an American character would be easier for audiences to follow into the ‘alien landscape’ of Victorian London and its supernatural demimonde (Gosling and Logan 20; Logan “Inside Penny Dreadful”).

However, a cowboy cannot survive in a Gothic world: Quincey dies at Dracula’s hands (Stoker 350), and the “guts and glory” of the archetypal cowboy cannot be sustained in the face of supernatural terror: Ethan flees the demimonde, despite his fascination with Vanessa, and her enigmatic claims that he seeks to escape a curse similar to her own ( 1.01, “Night Work”; Aronson and Kimmel 188). When Ethan returns in the second episode of the series, however, Logan stages another transformative moment: the episode opens with Ethan ‘standing alone, disoriented and bemused, on the cold, wind-swept shores of the Thames. Gone is the confidence and strength of the archetype’ that Ethan initially embodied; instead we see a tortured ambivalence that ‘makes Ethan, just for a moment, as alone in his strangeness as Vanessa is in hers, or as Frankenstein in his terrible knowledge’ (Gosling and Logan 19; 1.02, “Séance”). This expands on the hints of Romanticism we saw in the pilot, and integrates Ethan further into the show’s developing narrative cosmology.

If Penny Dreadful were a Dracula adaptation, this transformation would be (at least perceived as) a deviation from its source; rather, it reveals new patterns and connections inherent in the cowboy archetype that created both Quincey and Ethan. The archetypal cowboy is a wanderer, “unconstrained by the demands of civilized life” (Aronson and Kimmel 188). Expand upon the individualistic moral code and rebellious mystique of the cowboy, and conflate his quest for a personal form of “justice” with a quest for individual understanding or redemption, and the result will mirror the brooding egotism and existential angst of Romantic heroes from earlier Gothic fiction (Aronson and Kimmel 122-3). Thus, Ethan-as-Romantic hero is less deviation from and more expansion of his original gunslinger characterisation, allowing his character to move beyond merely echoing Quincey Morris as a cowboy in a Gothic novel, and develop a more active role in Penny Dreadful’s emergent narrative.

Furthermore, Ethan’s Romantic elements add depth and nuance to his character as he echoes Quincey Morris later throughout the series, most notably in the second-to-last episode of the first season, when Vanessa suffers a violent demonic possession. This episode acts as another oblique Dracula adaptation: Ethan, Frankenstein, Sembene, and Sir Malcolm’s four-week vigil at Vanessa’s bedside echoes the gathering of van Helsing, Quincey, Arthur Holmwood, and Jack Seward to prevent Lucy Westenra’s death from the vampire’s attacks (Stoker 104-52) and later, to save Mina Harker from vampiric infection. Subsequently, Ethan moves into an approximation of Quincey’s role throughout the episode as both watchman and moral centre of the group, and like Quincey, is the one to first offer Vanessa the option of a ‘clean’ death before she succumbs to her monstrosity ( 1.07 “Possession”; Stoker 305). “Unlike Quincey, Ethan grapples with the ethical quandary of either killing Vanessa, or letting her live and prolonging her suffering, bringing him into conflict with Sir Malcolm, who, echoing van Helsing with Mina, attempts to use Vanessa to track down the remaining vampires in London. Furthermore, in an extended bout of introspection, Ethan laments Vanessa’s position as outcast between worlds, comparing it to the Americanising of Native American children, who are ultimately outcast from either world. Ethan’s soliloquy not only castigates British and American colonialist ideology through a supernatural lens, but also acts as a self-reflexive criticism of his own archetypal position as a cowboy who tamed the Western frontier to serve white American expansion (Aronson and Kimmel 188; 1.07, “Possession”). As we later learn, it was Ethan’s role in the Indian Wars and the wholesale slaughter of Native peoples that shaped his Romantic introspection and moral crisis, and that rather than a cowboy’s sense of honor, it is a Romantic desire for atonement that drives Ethan to commit to protecting Vanessa from the supernatural forces that hunt her: “You will not die while I am here. You will not surrender while I live. If I have one goddamn purpose in my cursed life, it’s that” ( 2.07, “Little Scorpion”). The visual and narrative context around this dialogue – which echoes a similar declaration of fealty from Quincey to Mina Harker (Stoker 305) – firmly establishes Ethan-as-Romantic-hero over Ethan-as-cowboy: surrounded by nature, Ethan rejects Vanessa’s fatalistic belief that her struggle will never with a rebellious statement of individualist strength (both hers and his, which is how they overcame her previous possession), but it is the following exchange that solidifies Ethan as a Romantic figure while again complicating his character:

Vanessa: You are one man.

Ethan: More than that, and you know it. We are not like others.

We have claws for a reason’ ( 2.07 “Little Scorpion”)

This exchange refers to the third archetype that Ethan embodies throughout Penny Dreadful, an archetype I have up to now ignored in my analysis: the werewolf. The revelation of Ethan-as-werewolf complicates my heretofore-argued position of Ethan as a Romantic hero playing the cowboy by adapting portions of both characterizations into a transformed hybrid narrative: we become aware of Ethan’s lycanthropy in the closing scenes of the first season, and this transformative moment hinges upon Ethan simultaneously inhabiting the cowboy and Romantic hero archetypes. As a cowboy, he is on the run from a pair of Pinkerton agents, but this Western narrative is given a Romantic bent, as Ethan is hunted for a Gothic-seeming, deliberately obscured crime, the nature of which, and Ethan’s accompanying guilt for, necessitated his self-imposed exile in London. However, when cornered by the Pinkertons, Ethan responds with neither a cowboy’s gun-blazing defiance nor a Romantic hero’s fatalism: the bones shift under his skin, revealing a clawed, yellow-eyed wolf-man, who dismembers the Pinkerton agents and everyone else in the vicinity, as the camera tilts up to a mist-shrouded full moon (1.08, “Grand Guignol”).

Ethan-as-werewolf serves as an archetypal meeting point that brings his cowboy and Romantic hero elements into a cohesive whole: like the cowboy, the classical werewolf is a violent lone wanderer; like the Romantic hero, he is set apart from the rest of humanity due to a hidden sin or “curse” that causes anxiety, introspection, or a fatalistic belief in one’s own damnation, and all of these elements form a critical part of Ethan’s characterization (Gosling and Logan 20). Interestingly, Ethan-as-werewolf also emphasizes the connection to wildness, to nature as opposed to civilization, that is implicit in both the cowboy and Romantic hero, although this Logan only references this obliquely, such as in the visual framing of Ethan’s declaration to Vanessa, where they are situated in a natural arch of greenery ( 2.07, “Little Scorpion”).

However, the reveal of Ethan-as-werewolf, and its subsequent impact upon the other archetypes he performs in Penny Dreadful’s narrative, is more interesting if we examine how it makes Ethan an extension of John Logan’s “creative goal” for the series – exploring humanity through depictions of the monstrous (Gosling and Logan 15). If we examine Ethan’s hybrid characterisation through this lens, it becomes apparent that Ethan, like Vanessa, acts as a critique of the masculine ideologies that his cowboy- and Romantic hero-selves embody. As with Vanessa, Ethan’s ability to present this sort of gendered critique is entirely dependent upon his hybrid identity – both as a ‘bespoke’ echo of Penny Dreadful’s textual canon, but more importantly, as an extension of the Gothic abhuman.

Abhuman Humanity – Ethan as Wolf-Man

The abhuman is an almost omnipresent Gothic entity, apparent in texts as far back as Frankenstein, but was formally defined by Hurley (1996 3-4) as “a not-quite human subject, characterised by its morphic variability, continually in danger of becoming not itself, becoming [O]ther”; a liminal body that exists between disparate states such as living and dead, human and animal, or between binary expressions of gender (Hurley 2012 190). Arguably, both Ethan and Vanessa exemplify this condition of being: Vanessa due to her connection to the spiritual world, “masculine” (i.e active and dominant) expressions of sexuality, and the physical and emotional exertions that accompany possession; Ethan due to his lycanthropy and the associated loss of emotional and bodily control that results in a violent physical metamorphosis.

The physical and emotional transformations that the abhuman state enacts causes the traditional Gothic narrative to cast it as the ‘ruination of the human subject’ and, by that token, a powerful source of horror – Frankenstein’s Creature or Mr. Hyde, for instance, are presented as repugnant figures that parasitically consume and ultimately destroy their human counterparts (Hurley 1996 3). The abhuman is terrifying for the ways it is not human, rather than identifiable for the ways it is. However, in a later analysis, Hurley notes that the abhuman, if presented sympathetically, allows Gothic narratives to ‘critique the cultural norms which the monster violates’, emphasizing the human aspect of the abhuman to effect social commentary (2012 198). Penny Dreadful’s depictions of the abhuman serve the latter purpose, in order to perform “a reframing of the monster narrative…onto the feelings of the outcasts rather than the majority” that critiques normative ideas of identity, sex, and gender (Thomas).

While Vanessa and Lily carry the gender critique of the series, and Frankenstein’s Creature interrogates general notions of the outsider, Ethan-as-abhuman acts as a critique of heteronormative (traditionally “manly”) conceptions of masculinity and patrilineal inheritance, which have been present in the Gothic since its inception (Brinks 11). Brinks raises the intriguing question: “if a male subject can be inhabited, displaced, or self-alienated, even temporarily, by uncanny forces that unleash, precipitate, or coincide with effeminzing effects, in what sense does he possess a masculine identity?” (12) This query is directly applicable to Ethan: his abhuman identity displaces and transforms the masculine identities he embodies as cowboy and Romantic hero. This liminal identity and its accompanying physiological metamorphosis causes Ethan to lose his ‘“volition” and rationality, qualities which are traditionally the special prerogative of the masculine subject”; Ethan-as-werewolf is “Thing” rather than man, “a mere body without self-identity or violition” beyond carnal desire, making him (by Victorian standards, at least) an “imperfect” or feminized male subject – a fact John Logan and actor Josh Hartnett confirm in a public interview, where Ethan’s lycanthropy was metaphorically linked to the menstrual cycle and described as being rooted in “emotional”  (i.e. feminine) rather than physical (masculine) power (Hurley 1996 144-5; Wightman). This metaphoric conflation solidifies Ethan-as-abhuman as an example of  ‘failed’ Gothic masculinity, which is explored in various ways through the series’ interwoven narrative strands (Brinks 11-2; Hurley 1996 144-5).

Throughout the first season, as the audience is given hints to Ethan’s abhuman identity, they coincide with moments where he embodies non-traditional (i.e. emotionally-driven and community-oriented) masculinity: Ethan first demonstrates his power through preternatural communion with a pack of wolves at London Zoo; later, his repressed memories of his lycanthropy prompt a homosexual encounter with Dorian Gray; most tellingly, his ‘official’ revelation as a werewolf in the first season finale is rooted in his grief for a lost loved one ( 1.03, “Resurrection”, 1.04, “Demimonde”, 1.08, “Grand Guignol”). This coincidence continues throughout the second season as Ethan’s lycanthropy becomes more apparent. Rather than a physical protector, he acts as an emotional support to Vanessa, and is emasculated by her when confronting the supernatural threats of that season: it is Vanessa’s knowledge of the Verbis Diablo and its occult power that enables her to drive away witches, enact revenge on Sir Geoffrey Hawkes, and ultimately overcome Evelyn Poole, the season’s antagonist ( 2.01, “Fresh Hell”, 2.07, “Little Scorpion”, 2.10, “And They Were Enemies”). In all of these instances, Ethan’s abhuman power is ancillary to Vanessa’s own abhuman state, and the associated ‘inappropriately aggressive femininity [that requires] as object an effeminized version of masculinity’ to offset it, which Ethan (and arguably, most of the male cast) provides (Hurley 1996 143).

Ethan’s seemingly inverted masculinity enables the series to portray social fears of individual or social degeneration evident in fin-de-siècle Gothic texts, which reviewers claim is echoed in contemporary Gothic media’s preoccupation with notions of monstrous identity and gendered domestic insecurity (Sarner; Buzzwell; Valentine). The werewolf figures as a key symbol that both the Victorian and contemporary Gothics use to negotiate these concerns, and understanding how this symbolism (especially surrounding gender) has persisted and altered from the Victorian to the contemporary Gothic will help formalise Ethan’s situation as part of Penny Dreadful’s gender commentary.

Victorian depictions of the werewolf, and more generally of the abhuman/monstrous body, were based around a process of “identity formation by negative definition” that involved juxtaposing the Anglo middle-class male (the de facto Victorian example of a ‘stable’ human identity) against an abhuman other, in a process that foreshadowed Kristeva’s theories of abjection (Coudray 2; Hurley 1996; Kristeva). The Victorian werewolf, as an extension of the abhuman, symbolized a ‘process of degeneration as imprinted in the psyche, and seeping outward to become imprinted on the body’, disrupting a stable self/Other binary through the hybridizing of human and animal, gradually giving rise to the figure of the bipedal wolf-man that Ethan becomes in Penny Dreadful (Coudray 12-4). The abhuman is a fundamentally changeling representation of its audience’s conception of the Other – sexual, national or otherwise; consequently, Victorian depictions of the werewolf operated fairly equally as a male or female archetype, as the werewolf’s metaphoric purpose was to act as a signifier of general difference, transgressive gender performance, or moral and physical disintegration (Six and Thompson 238-9; Coudray 6, 10, 12-4). Examining Ethan-as-werewolf in this light situates him as a “failed” or transgressive instance of the Victorian masculine figure, in keeping with Penny Dreadful’s textual roots, yet this reading is complicated when we overlay contemporary conceptions of the werewolf archetype onto this analysis. While the contemporary werewolf shares broad metaphoric similarities with its Victorian predecessor, humanised portrayals of lycanthropy in media such as Twilight (although this trend extends to the early 1990s, if not earlier) have re-symbolised and increasingly gendered the werewolf archetype. Contemporary depictions of lycanthropy portray it as almost exclusively masculine – to the point that female werewolves are “rare or aberrant” – and heterosexual: the werewolf’s abhumanity is now linked to “male aggression and [the] uncontrolled, unprovoked violence” that lies beneath masculine interaction and the male identity, with the wolf a pseudo-Jungian Shadow that must be dominated by the human male (McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 41-4). Alternatively, the contemporary werewolf acts as allegory for heterosexual adolescence: the (typically male) protagonist in a werewolf narrative is forced to “grow up” and achieve social, sexual, and/or emotional success through displays of supernatural dominance and self-determination, which has most recently been depicted in MTV’s adaptation of Teen Wolf (Pappademas; Schell 112-15).

With this reading in mind, Ethan-as-werewolf should re-align with the heteronormative masculinity implicit in the cowboy or Romantic hero archetypes he performs, yet as a werewolf/abhuman, Ethan is presented as an in- or subverted masculinity more in keeping with Victorian conceptions of the abhuman. Thus, Logan situates Ethan’s character as a deliberate critique of Victorian heteronormative masculinity, using the series’ historical setting and characterization to provide “a cultural criticism of the nineteenth century from the perspective of the twenty-first,”  a relatively traditional means of discourse in historical fantasy that is more interesting for the ways that it in turn reflects upon twenty-first century conceptions of masculinity (Poore 73). The moments of inverted or “failed” masculinity that reveal Ethan’s lycanthropy in the first season should not be read as failings but rather as representations that develop an alternate, and arguably healthier, masculine identity, which in turn re-symbolises his abhuman shapeshifting as an opportunity “to step beyond or resist more stereotypical or traditional depictions of male-female roles [and] inhabit a new space” (McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 41). Ethan’s encounter with the wolf pack presents an idea of masculinity rooted in the fraternal and communal rather than ideas of individual dominance; his encounter with Dorian re-symbolises Penny Dreadful’s imagining of the werewolf as a metaphor for sexual fluidity, capable of expressing tenderness and intimacy as much as violence and aggression.

These transformative moments mean that by the time Ethan’s abhuman nature is fully realized at the end of the first season, John Logan was able to re-symbolise Ethan-as-werewolf as a masculine symbol–yes–but as a symbol of protectiveness, loyalty, and empathy, rather than a narrow caricature of violent dominance. Ethan-as-abhuman is not made less masculine by his abhumanity, but rather uses it throughout the series as a source of strength to overcome the demons that plague him, be that supernaturally or emotionally. Part of this re-symbolisation arises from Penny Dreadful’s relationship with its source material – its generic rather than specific relation to its precursor texts means that Gothic archetypes such as the werewolf can be examined from an alternate perspective. It is worth noting, that at least in Ethan’s case, the word ‘werewolf’ is never used to describe him in-narrative:  his lycanthropic state is either described as “the wolf,” or more specifically as Lupus Dei (lit. “Wolf of God”) – a supernatural protector, whose identity in Penny Dreadful’s narrative cosmology is built around the altered masculine ideology Ethan-as-werewolf espouses ( “Fresh Hell”, 2.07, “Little Scorpion”, 2.09, “And Hell Itself My Only Foe”).  This process is key to understanding Penny Dreadful’s success in transforming the Gothic: it re-creates its predecessors in a way that destabilizes the preconceptions and ideologies attached to them. Despite presenting us seemingly familiar Gothic characters in a familiarly Gothic space, Penny Dreadful, rather than retreading a well-worn path, disrupts and re-shapes his ‘bespoke’ characters in a way that forces audiences to re-examine them and their relationships to their predecessors, and give some thought to what exactly is so ‘monstrous’ about these terrifying figures.

Works Cited

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Bloom, Harold. The Anatomy of Influence – Literature as a Way of Life. Yale University Press, 2011.

Brinks, Ellen. Gothic Masculinity: Effemincacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism. Bucknell University Press, 2003.

Buzzwell, Greg. “Gothic Fiction in the Victorian Fin De Siècle: Mutating Bodies and Disturbed Minds.” Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians.  2014. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/gothic-fiction-in-the-victorian-fin-de-siecle

Coudray, Chantal Bourgault du. “Upright Citizens on All Fours: Nineteenth-Century Identity and the Image of the Werewolf.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts vol. 24 no. 1, 2002,  pp. 1-16.

Crow, David. “Penny Dreadful: A Twisted Reflection of the Dracula Story.” Den of Geek 31 October  2014. http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/penny-dreadful/236850/penny-dreadful-a-twisted-reflection-of-the-dracula-story

Gosling, Sharon, and John Logan. The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful. Titan Books, 2015.

Hurley, Kelly. “British Gothic Fiction, 1885-1930.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, Cambridge University Press, 2012. pp. 189-207.

—. The Gothic Body – Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Victorian Fin-De-Siècle. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Print.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez,  Columbia University Press, 1982. Print.

Logan, John. “Inside Penny Dreadful.” 10 May 2014. Web.

—.Penny Dreadful. Television program. Showtime, United States, 2014-2016.

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McMahon-Coleman, Kimberley, and Roslyn Weaver. “Wolf Boys and Wolf Girls: Shapeshifting and Gender Politics.” Werewolves and Other Shapeshifters in Popular Culture: A Thematic Analysis of Recent Depictions. McFarland & Company Inc., 2012. pp. 41-67.

Pappademas, Alex. “We Are All Teenage Werewolves.” The New York Times20 May  2011. ww.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/magazine/we-are-all-teenage-werewolves.html

Poore, Benjamin. “The Transformed Beast: Penny Dreadful, Adaptation, and the Gothic.” Victorianographies vol 6 no. 1, 2016, pp. 62-81.

Russ, Joanna. “The Wearing out of Genre Materials.” College English  vol. 33 no. 1, 1971,  pp. 46-54.

Sarner, Lauren. “Why Is the Gothic Having a Comeback Right Now?” Inverse 2015. https://www.inverse.com/article/6795-why-is-the-gothic-having-a-comeback-right-now

Schell, Heather. “The Big Bad Wolf: Masculinity and Genetics in Popular Culture.” Literature and Medicine  vol 26 no. 1, 2007, pp. 109-25.

Sinha-Roy, Piya. “Actor Hartnett Takes on Mystery and Monsters in ‘Penny Dreadful’.” Reuters 2014. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-television-pennydreadful-idUSKBN0DR0PO20140511

Six, Abigail Lee, and Hannah Thompson. “From Hideous to Hedonist: The Changing Face of the Nineteenth-Century Monster.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. Edited by Mittman, Asa Simon and Peter J. Dendle, Ashgate Publishing, 2012. pp. 237-56.

Slayton, Nicholas. “How Penny Dreadful Reanimated the Gothic-Horror Genre.” The Atlantic 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/a-good-fright-is-hard-to-find/373597/

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print.

Thomas, June. “’The Thing That Made Me Monstrous to Some People Is Also the Thing That Empowered Me’.” Slate 2014. http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/05/09/penny_dreadful_s_john_logan_why_a_gay_writer_feels_a_kinship_with_frankenstein.html

Valentine, Genevieve. “10 Reasons You Need to Be Watching Penny Dreadful.” io9 2014. http://io9.gizmodo.com/10-reasons-you-need-to-be-watching-penny-dreadful-1585906220?IR=T

Wightman, Catriona. “Penny Dreadful’s Comic-Con 2014 Panel: As It Happened.” Digital Spy 2014. http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/ustv/news/a586320/penny-dreadfuls-comic-con-2014-panel-as-it-happened/.

Bio: Tobias Locke (b. 1995) is a current doctoral candidate at Griffith University’s School of Humanities, specializing in contemporary and Neo-Victorian Gothic fiction. He blames Penny Dreadful for this, and looks forward to enacting revenge by writing extensively about it. This is his first publication.

~ Jordan Phillips

Abstract: It has been said that we live in a time of monsters. Within the horror genre, these monsters commonly take the form of the creatures you would find in ancient mythologies or Gothic literatures; however, they have also been allegorically aligned with LGBT or Queer persons. John Logan’s queer horror series Penny Dreadful (2014-present) presents a nuanced and somewhat paradoxical portrayal of queer bodies within a horror text. The main characters are predominantly based on those of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction (Victor Frankenstein and his Monster, Dorian Gray, among others), and thus act both as a contemporary commentary on socio-cultural attitudes towards queerness, and a retrospective commentary on the state of queer politics within Victorian-era London. While the series does examine queer anxieties within Victorian times, it is my contention that the series is principally concerned with anxieties within the gay community from the last thirty years or so (1980s onwards). These points of unease are largely explored through the queer desires and monstrous bodies of its non-heterosexual characters, with their monstrously queer bodies acting as sites of transformative evolution or devolution. Within Penny Dreadful, queerness and monstrosity are often conflated (both literally and symbolically), meaning that the cultural categories of man/monster and human/non-human are unfixed. By close textual analysis of characters such as Ethan Chandler, AKA the Wolfman, and Dorian Gray, this paper will attempt to pinpoint these rhetorical slippages and analyse their meaning in relation to issues of cultural unease regarding queerness within both contemporary society and the Victorian era.

Introduction

Since the earliest days of the moving image, the figure of the monster has been implemented as a way in which to mobilise ideological tensions and socio-cultural anxieties connected to particular time periods and historical moments. Within the horror genre (the monster’s native milieu), these ideological messages are mainly constructed and transmitted through the performance of the abject body and its sexually transgressive desires, both of which have been critically understood by some as an allegorical conduit for queerness – that is, non-heterosexual or non-normative desire (Benshoff 1997). As marginalised social groups fought arduously for social recognition, the fictional monster was on a parallel path, prowling in the shadows, acting as a narrative locum tenens for the depoliticised and the demonised. Harry M. Benshoff (1997) postulates that some of the most sociologically and cinematically significant readings of the monstrous body are coterminous with that of the queer body – that is, those which consider themselves to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise non-heterosexual or non-normative. Benshoff historicises queer monstrosity as a largely disparaging paradigm, with queer bodies and desires being either symbolically annihilated or manifested metaphorically through the monster, ultimately resulting in heterosexist and phobic depictions of queerness. More recently, however, the queer monster has found a more nuanced and progressive domicile in the form of John Logan’s Neo-Victorian horror television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016). Throughout this paper, I will interrogate the series’ depictions of performative queer desires and monstrous bodies by making use of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s (1996) monster theory in conjunction with Judith Butler’s (1990; 1993) theories of gendered performance, in order to analyse the extratextual and intratextual positioning of Penny Dreadful’s queer characters. By doing so, I aim to examine issues of cultural unease regarding queerness within the Victorian era, and how Logan’s series utilises its period setting in order to narrativise queer anxieties in the 21st century.

Theories of Queerness and Monstrosity

The horror genre can be broadly defined by the structural relationship between normality and abnormality – or, the normative and the monstrous (Wood 2002). The rhetorical slippages between the ontology of the human and that of the monster has fostered scholastic attention in relation to the monstrous body as a conceit for postmodern racial, gender, and sexual politics. Within Penny Dreadful, the interstice between normality and abnormality, between humanity and monstrosity, is performative. On the whole, horror is inherently performative in nature. Just when we think we have become inoculated to the virus-like popularity of horror, another strain presents itself and performs the social, political, and cultural dread imbricated within its particular time period. In this sense, horror is concerned with “dressing up” – that is, wearing the disguise of cultural terror in order to play out ghastly narratives within the creative quarantine of the often fantastical horror genre. To use Judith Butler’s (1990) example of identity-as-performance, horror is akin to the concept of drag – that is, performing gender identity through the reversal of gendered social roles i.e., hair, clothing, make-up. Horror, however, dresses up social unease and anxiety through the artifice of monstrosity and fear.

The unfixed, grotesque nature of these anti-normative bodies and desires invites a queer reading – that is, one which aims to deconstruct and dislocate culturally prescribed binarisms such as man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual from their hegemonic, heteronormative positioning (Turner 2000). Butler defines the concept of “performativity” as a tool in the study of identity formation and ritual-making in society. For Butler, “Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularised and constrained repetition of norms… This iterability implies that ‘performance’ is not a singular ‘act’ or event, but a ritualised production…” (1993 95). While Butler refers to identity (chiefly through the construct of gender), I instrument her theories as a way in which to anatomise the performance of queer monstrosity within Penny Dreadful i.e., how monstrosity may be concealed by performing as something else (human), and how the series literalises the performance of uncontrollable, transformative monstrosity to queer identity. Moreover, in his book Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996), Jeffrey Jerome Cohen posits the monstrous body as a potent metaphor for the so-called “cultural body,” suggesting that monsters are a way in which to read the culture from which they antecede: “The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place” (1996 vii). It is my contention that the monstrous bodies within Penny Dreadful act as totems for socio-cultural anxiety and unease within contemporary society, under the guise of moralistic and puritanical Victorian belief systems and ideologies.

Penny Dreadful and its Queer Characters

Penny Dreadful is predominantly based on characters and plots adapted from nineteenth-century Gothic fiction, most notably Victor Frankenstein and his monster from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Dorian Gray from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Mina Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The series also features cinematic characters which were directly inspired from the works of Gothic literature i.e., the Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man from the 1935 and 1941 films of the same names. The series is inherently anachronistic in nature, being produced in the second decade of the 21st century and set during Victorian era London circa 1891. This dichotomy works to actualise the series’ political potential, giving voices to marginalised characters who have been historically disenfranchised – both in Gothic literature and the society which it mirrors. Logan’s Neo-Victorian series breathes new life into real-world issues which were embryotic in the Victorian era e.g., the deconstruction of socially entrenched gender binaries. Industrialisation brought about a crisis of masculinity due to the new working woman. Anxieties began to emerge over male feminisation and the perception of effeminacy being equated with homosexuality (McGunnigle 2005). While original Gothic tales have their villains embody the repressed anxieties and undesirable sexualities of the heroes and their society, Neo-Victorian texts emphasise the dual role of both the hero and the villain within their characters. This slippage of roles (both gender and character roles) is the creative and queer nexus of Penny Dreadful.

Scholars of teratology commonly examine the monster through its relationship with bodies that are seen as non-monstrous or normative. The monstrous Other is a liminal figure who represents the disruption of socially administered categories and the destruction of culturally constructed boundaries such as man/woman, good/evil, and heterosexual/homosexual (Halberstam 1995 27). However, as scholars such as Miller (2011) and Elliott-Smith (2016) have elucidated, the figure of the queer monster has undergone a cultural evolution since its conception as a totem of essentialising Otherness, and now has the potential to symbolise universalising Sameness. It is within this incongruous space where the reimagined Gothic characters of Penny Dreadful are narratively situated.

Penny Dreadful’s protagonists are a motley band of supernaturally-endowed deviants who ostensibly protect those they love from even more monstrous threats than themselves. The “heroes” in this series are monsters themselves. Monstrosity, including queer monstrosity, is not explicitly synonymous with evil. The series’ creator and sole writer, John Logan, is no stranger to queer, camp, or horror. His writing credits include cult films such as Bats (1999) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). Logan, has commented upon the series’ queer inflection, articulating that his own experiences growing up as a gay man in 1970s New York served as an impetus for this correlation. Logan expresses that he always felt a connection to the closeted monster, and that the ways in which the series’ characters address the secrets within themselves ultimately defines who they are. Logan embraces this Otherness and implements its queer charge in order to narrativise the struggles and anxieties he has felt within his own life through the textual lens of these reimagined Gothic characters. Logan articulates that, “… the thing that made me alien and different and monstrous to some people is also the thing that empowered me…” (Thomas 2014). Logan also comments that he does not believe in the Manichean binaries of good and evil or hero and villain, opting instead for a more ontologically and moralistically fluid approach to his monsters. While I do not wish to predicate the entirety of my argument on the, widely contested, concept of auteur theory, I do in fact suggest that Logan’s own personal alignment with monstrosity and Otherness informs the series’ queer sensibility, and that his authorial intent is perhaps too potent to be overlooked entirely.

Textual and Extratextual Analysis

One of the key narrative drivers in Logan’s series is that of desire (or, to be more concise, queer desire). Many of the characters are portrayed as polysexual and do not conform to the compulsory heterosexuality commonly associated with traditional horror texts. Equating queerness with monstrosity creates a complex dialogue in regards to the historicity of Otherness. On one hand, queerness is intrinsically Other. There are those, like Logan, who welcome the association with the abnormal, the divergent, and the monstrous. However, there are those who would repel such associations, avowing that queerness and Otherness are socially constructed and are only as non-normative and as monstrous as the dominant social position (in this case, white, male heterosexuality) recognises them to be. Although this discursive polarity may seemingly convolute Penny Dreadful’s status as a queer artefact, it is within this very polarity wherein queer readings find their discursive power. Queer is fundamentally mobile. To conflate queerness with one particular genre, ideology, or any fixed positionality would undermine and destabilise the mutability and fluidity of queerness.

Logan’s series deploys a rhetorically ambiguous stance in relation to queerness. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) speaks of two views in relation to sexual identity and desire: the minoritising view and the universalising view. Queer people, like monsters, can exist in the minoritising shadows and seek to accrue political power through the solidification of Otherness; or, they can present their monstrosity unashamedly and reject their secretive, closeted existence, thereby harnessing the discursive power of universal Sameness. For Wood (2002 27), Otherness is representative of what white, heterosexual bourgeois ideology, “… cannot recognise or accept but must deal with… by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself.” Otherness can be projected as essentially different, or it may be converted into an assimilatory production of Sameness. Through both extratextual materials and intratextual characterisations, Logan creates an ambiguous dialogue in regards to queer bodies and desire by simultaneously suggesting that these characters’ bodies and desires are both monstrous and normative, Other and Same, hero and villain. Extratextual (in this case, any text that is not strictly within the episodic diegesis of Penny Dreadful) conditions greatly affect the rhetorical positioning of a text and its characters. In the case of Penny Dreadful, its status as an artifact of queerness is affected by its extratextual and paratextual scaffolding. Cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall (cited in Benshoff 1997) have indicated, discourses do not exist vacuously and are subject to multiple sites of reception which, in turn, allows for the active negotiation of textual subjectivities. In terms of the so-called “New Golden Age of Television” (2000-present), digital extratextual materials are a key component of television programming, with some suggesting that these texts are significant in the manufacturing of characterisation within the intratextual diegesis (Brookey and Westerfelhaus cited in King 2010). While I do not wish to imply that these extratextual materials (the series’ opening credit sequence and the promotional materials used to market the series) are unitarily responsible for the monstrous and queer positioning of the series’ characters, I would ascertain that they operate in tandem with Penny Dreadful’s intratextual narrative in order to establish an omnipresent sense of Otherness and monstrosity, and that this was a conscious decision by the series creator which moves beyond the realm of authorial expressivity.

The contrast between monstrosity and humanity is made consciously evident in the series’ opening credits sequence, with the characters being juxtaposed with images of animals and other deathly signifiers. Ethan Chandler AKA the Wolf Man (portrayed by Josh Hartnett) is analogised with the wolf and the serpent, whereas Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney) is compared with the spider and its prey. This first image suggests darkness over light, alluding to the characters’ dark, unholy desires. The last shot, however, sees the creature of the bat going forth into the light, implying a more virtuous side to the night-dwellers. The sequence plays with chiaroscuro as a way of symbolising the balance between Otherness and Sameness, a boundary which Logan’s monsters tread lightly between. The fear of humanity and monstrosity coinciding had taken root in Victorian society after the release of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. The post-Darwinian panic of ontological miscegenation is represented here though the performance of queer monstrosity, most notably through the desires of Ethan Chandler and Dorian Gray. This binary is also strongly present in the promotional materials for the series, in which the characters (some of whom are distinctly human) are positioned as intrinsically monstrous and Other. While these extratextual characterisations are consistent with Logan’s personal adoption of Otherness, they simultaneously carry a charge of Sameness in relation to monstrous bodies and queer desires.

“There is some thing within us all.” This ominous slogan played a significant part in the paratextual promotional posters (and was later introduced into the narrative proper) of Penny Dreadful’s first season. However, the ideology lurking behind this refrain is one which undulates ubiquitously throughout the series’ story and character arcs. The idea that there is some thing, something Other, something monstrous, is the thematic lynchpin of Penny Dreadful’s intradiegetic narrative. This ideology paradoxically suggests that we all have the potential to be the minoritising queer monster, but also positions Logan’s series as a more universalising narrative of queer monstrosity. These extratextual materials blur the boundaries between monster and human, normative and non-normative, and hero and villain. The monster-human duality of these characters is a preconceived paradigm, it is not one which they have thrust upon them by outside forces decoding their behaviours and actions. The promotional slogan for Penny Dreadful’s second season (“The Devil is in all of us”) is decidedly less runic in terms of the characters’ moral compasses and transgressive desires. The unidentified “thing” which resides within the characters has now been given a satanic marker, further solidifying their resonance with monstrosity and Otherness.

The promotional trailer for the series’ second season is a frenetic and lubricious sequence which displays the human-monster duality of the characters and alludes to the monstrous desires festering beneath their human exteriors. For example, Ethan performs his Sameness, his human side, until the frame dramatically shifts to a distorted image of his Otherness, his monstrous side, the Wolf Man. There is a kind of pageantry tied to these characters, a performative veneer of normativity and humanity. Queer theorists such as Judith Butler reject stable categories and address how human subjects “perform” gender and sexual identity, claiming that gender and sexuality is socially constructed and performative. The culturally constructed categories of monster and queer coalesce as oppositional categories to that of normativity: the abnormal which gives the normal its discursive meaning. The monster is the abject body which is used in order to support the hegemony of the non-monstrous bodies in society, much the same as queer bodies bolster the dominance of heterosexual bodies. Queer monstrosity, then, like gender and sexuality, can be considered to be constructed and performative. While some of Penny Dreadful’s characters reject and entomb their monstrously queer natures, others embrace their Otherness as a fundamental part of who they are. This idea is problematic, however, as the series’ characters represent both the human and the monster in one disruptive, queer body.

As Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) elucidates in the fifth episode of the first season, “There are things within us all that can never be unleashed.” Again, the thing within these characters, their Otherness, is continuously highlighted and carries a queer charge. Ethan is a lycanthrope (à la the Wolf Man) and Vanessa has powerful magical abilities. Both shape-shifters and witches have long been associated with queerness, and their coupling results in a queer reading. Their desires for a relationship, on several occasions, has been deemed infeasible due to their monstrous circumstances. They openly discuss their feelings for one another, but these moments quickly dissolve into discussions of their monstrous Otherness. In episode ten of the second season, Vanessa is shown a vision of an untenable future of normalcy with Ethan. In this alternate history, one without their monstrous conditions, the two live happily in their opulent Victorian home. Dressed all in white, the pair speak adoringly of their two children and bask in the contented glow of their “normal” life. Vanessa understands, however, that this illusion is just that: A mirage of normalcy she will never attain. The children, the human signifier of procreational hetero-normalcy, are the most impracticable in Vanessa’s eyes. It is unknown within the mythos of the series if Ethan’s or Vanessa’s supernatural capabilities would be hereditary, but the inclusion of the two children in the dream sequence heavily implies that Vanessa not only once craved a traditional familial life, but also that she fears that her possible offspring would be genetically predisposed to monstrosity.

Ethan and Vanessa are situationally queered in the sense that they are non-normative and have monstrous bodies, their desires carrying a queer charge in the process. The “thing” which was alluded to in the tagline of the promotional materials yearns to be released. The characters’ monstrous desires build up inside of them until they cannot be contained any longer (Ethan’s lycanthropy and Vanessa’s witch-like powers, respectively). According to Rigby (2006 70-71), within the male-dominated narrative worlds of Gothic literature, “… The women seem to mean the same ‘thing’: They act as conduits through which unacceptable male desires are routed… and, appropriately enough, most of the women suffer the same fate: death”. For Rigby, the thing within Penny Dreadful’s narrative is locatable as femininity or femaleness (which have long been aligned with male homosexuality and queerness). Women are not divorced from their ill-fates within Logan’s Neo-Victorian series, however, with both central female characters meeting their demise at the hands of male characters at various points within the series. The “thing”, whether it be representative of femininity, femaleness, queerness, or a triad of all three, is ultimately banished or eradicated.

Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) is another character whose fluid sexuality creates queer sensibilities within Penny Dreadful. As in the original novel, Dr. Frankenstein creates his “monster” (later dubbed Proteus, portrayed by Alex Price) from parts of other bodies and brings him to life by using electrical power generated by a storm. In Penny Dreadful, the virginal doctor creates life by using both nature and science, without the use of a woman or any kind of “natural” methods of procreation. This parthenogenic, monstrous body symbolises both the uncertainty of modernity and medicine/technology, as well as the doctor’s own queer sexuality. Upon his “birth,” the doctor holds his monster in a caring caress, as a mother does her child. While there are moments of intimacy between the two men, they are often interrupted by the presence of women. For example, Dr. Frankenstein takes the newly born Proteus walking around the streets of Victorian London for the first time. Here they are encountered by Ethan and Brona Croft (Billy Piper) – a prostitute dying of consumption and Ethan’s initial love interest – another non-normative couple. Brona insouciantly flirts with Proteus, much to the chagrin of both Ethan and Dr. Frankenstein. This exchange is indicative of the fragile homosocial/homosexual continuum, a popular trope in Gothic fiction (Sedgwick 1985). Whenever male homosociality verges too close to the homosexual, female characters are interpolated into the narrative in order to diffuse any homosexual signifiers. For Young (cited in Elliott-Smith 2016 106), who draws upon Sedgwick’s work in her analysis of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the female exists as a, “desperate cover-up” and displacement of homoeroticism. While this may seemingly undercut Penny Dreadful’s queer aesthetics, this triangulation of queer desire works to supplement the series’ queer readings rather than hinder them.

As aforementioned, queer is inherently mobile and subversive. If Victor and his monster were in an illicit homosexual union, they would undeniably be a queer couple. However, as soon as their same-sex relationship encroaches the realms of possible exploitation, then their coupling would become problematic. Texts which exploit or sensationalise same-sex partnerships or aesthetics undermine the subversive and political potential of queer, effectively “de-queering” and depoliticising the characters and the social situations which they represent. Later, in a Pygmalion fashion, Victor falls in love with another one of his creations, Lily – a reanimated and renamed Brona. The two eventually consummate their relationship on a stormy night (season 2, episode 5), much like the ones which permitted the births of Frankenstein’s creatures. In this sequence, Victor’s queer sexuality is anthropomorphised by the storm. By engaging in a sexual union with one of his female creations, Victor is succumbing to his compulsory heterosexuality (despite Lily’s body being a decidedly queer one, she is still female). The next day, the storm has passed and Lily has cooked breakfast for her lover in the morning sunlight; their heterosexual coupling is textually reinforced by the ironically domestic mise-en-scene. The “thing” within Frankenstein appears to be his latent heterosexual urges and desires. By presenting Frankenstein’s sexuality as a kind of “queer heterosexuality” (Smith 2000), Penny Dreadful preserves the transgressive and fluid nature of queer. Earlier in the series, Brona articles the in impracticable nature of her sexual relations with men by stating: “You’re fucking a skeleton every night. There’s no future in it for either of us!” Brona’s words here are suggestive of Lee Edelman’s polemical analysis of queer theory, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). For Edelman, queerness disrupts the social Order and derives pleasure in anti-procreative desire (that is, non-heterosexual sex). Due to Brona’s infected, and later monstrous, body, she too is representative of the anti-procreative queer, despite being heterosexual. It is this precise lack of hetero-procreative futurity which positions these reimagined Gothic characters as agents of queer monstrosity.

Early on in the series, the characters are introduced to the concept of the “demimonde,” a midpoint between heaven and hell where dark souls are contained. Etymologically, the term comes from 19th century France and refers to a group of hedonistic people who live on the fringes of respectable society. Vanessa explains to Ethan that the demimonde is, “a half world between what we know and what we fear,” a shadowy realm where some cursed souls are doomed to dwell forever. Ethan, who hitherto believed he was alone in his monstrosity, asks her what would happen if the monsters within them were to be unleashed, to which Vanessa replies, “[then]…, we are most who we are. Unrestrained. Ourselves.” Semantically, demi-monde is a fitting term for our band of sexually transgressive deviants whose supernatural natures Other them from respectable Victorian society. At a syntactic level, however, Logan’s re-appropriation of the supernatural demimonde is symptomatic of the queer monsters’ purgatorial desires. These characters, particularly Ethan and Dorian, are a living personification of the demimonde. Both Ethan’s and Dorian’s literary and cinematic counterparts have been historically aligned with queer monstrosity. Both have a dark and monstrous secret: Ethan’s is his lycanthropy, his monstrosity presenting itself cyclically every full moon, whereas Dorian’s is his portrait where he has stored his monstrous soul, preserving his youthful beauty.

Both Ethan and Dorian go through transformations (symbolic and somatic) which are representative of their monstrously queer performativity. Ethan Chandler performs as the quintessential Southern man. He’s tall, tough, muscular, and slips comfortably into the male protector role within the first few episodes of season 1. Ethan soon begins a relationship with Brona, who later becomes Lily Frankenstein. During this relationship, we begin to see moments of tenderness and femininity in Ethan; he is just as loving and gentle as he is masculine and aggressive. The characters’ monstrous desires build up inside of them until they cannot be contained any longer, in Ethan’s case, the monster within; the burgeoning, bestial presence he so desperately tries to banish. Ethan oscillates between the performance of the Southern gentleman and the monstrous Wolf Man. The latter side haunts Ethan; he knows he cannot control his monstrous body and, when he is transformed, he hunts and kills people across London uncontrollably. In episode 4 of the 1st season, Ethan takes Brona to see a stage play named “The Transformed Man,” a tale that involves lycanthropes and death, both of which resonate deeply with Ethan’s tortured soul, the living demimonde. Ethan later rebukes her company and retires to Dorian Gray’s excessively lavish manor. Dorian regales Ethan of the climactic music from the German operatic drama Tristan and Isolde. Liebestod (which, translated from German literally means “love death”) acts here as a musical signifier of the demimonde, and also the duo’s transgressive, purgatorial desires. In this scene, Ethan’s trauma over his divided Self presents itself by way of mental images tied to his monstrous nature: the cryptic symbols associated to the demimonde, the bloodied bodies of the people he has killed, and his fellow animal: the wolf. Here, Ethan and Dorian’s monstrous bodies are conflated with their queer desires.

Earlier in the episode, Ethan somberly asks Dorian if he wishes he could be someone else, to which Dorian replies, “all the time.” These words carry different inflections to these two men, however. Ethan loathes who he is, his monstrous body, seeing it as a curse he cannot be rid of. He hides his secret to the best of his ability and performs as a regular member of Victorian society, wishing he could be like everyone else. He clings to a universalising view of his monstrosity, hoping to acclimate into the very society that scorns him. Dorian, on the other hand, embraces his monstrous body and queer desires, opting instead for a minoritising viewpoint. Dorian remarks to Ethan: “I suppose we all play parts.” Ethan enquires as to which “part” Dorian plays, to which he replies: “human.” Ethan performs as human because he wishes to be normal, whereas Dorian performs as such simply because he has to, relishing his true nature of difference. Both of their performances are suggestive of the concept of “passing” i.e., a non-heterosexual person trying to pass as heterosexual out of fear of censure. Despite agreeing with Ethan that he too would like to be someone else, he relishes the idea of not being like everyone else. He pontificates, “to be different, to be powerful, is that not a divine gift?”

Over the last few decades or so, there has been a fiercely contested dichotomy raging within the gay community: the homomasculine or “straight-acting” discourse. There are many within the gay community who prescribe to the culturally constructed notion of “manliness” – that is, hard, stoic masculinity that attempts to emulate the dominant heteronormative codes of masculinity, thereby performing as the very systems which dominate them. They reject notions of homoeffeminacy or “femme-acting,” instead choosing to champion a universal discourse of power rather than a minority one (Clarkson 2006). This discourse is reflected within the performance of queer monstrosity within Penny Dreadful, with Ethan epitomising the homomasculine Same, whereas Dorian is totemic of the homoeffeminate Other. Other male characters who embody facets of these dichotomies are Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale), a fey Egyptologist and informant to Ethan and co, and Angelique (Jonny Beauchamp), a transgender courtesan and love interest to Dorian.

The effeminate Lyle enacts the stereotype of the “sissy”, often fawning over Ethan’s charm and muscularity. He has a wife, however, one which we later find out he has implemented as part of his closeted, heterosexual performance. Lyle cryptically speaks of his “condition” (his homosexuality) and harbors a great deal of shame because of this. He and Ethan are two sides of the same coin: One femme-acting, one straight-acting, but both queer and unsure how to channel their non-normative desires. Angelique, on the other hand, is anatomically male but prefers to dress and identify as a woman. The situation is, again, complicated by the presence of Lily. Dorian is attracted to her otherworldly presence and begins to court her, quickly forgetting about the lovelorn Angelique. At a cursory glance, it seems that Dorian is attracted to Lily because he senses the monstrous being within her. However, the fact remains that he leaves (and actually kills) Angelique to be with a biological female companion. As a reanimated creature, Lily is obviously monstrous. Towards the end of the second season, she reveals a demonic demeanour and vows to destroy humanity with Dorian by her side. These two immortal monsters are a problematic couple in terms of queer politics. Dorian killed his queer lover Angelique to be with Lily instead; however, his desire to be with Lily seems to stem from her monstrosity, not her innate femaleness. In this sense, as with Frankenstein and Lily, the heterosexual pairing is equally as queer as the non-heterosexual one.

Conclusion

In summation, Penny Dreadful is somewhat paradoxical and problematic in terms of its depiction of queer desire and monstrous bodies. Logan’s Neo-Victorian series plays with queer monstrosity in ways in which its Victorian progenitors could only have hoped to. Many of the characters are portrayed as polysexual and do not conform to the compulsory heterosexuality widely attributed to their fin de siècle counterparts, creating a rich, yet ambiguous, dialogue in relation to queerness, both within the Victorian society on which it is based and the contemporary society within which it is created. Some of the series’ characters, such as Ethan Chandler, are representative of universalising queerness, performing as normative in the hopes that he can one day escape his perdition as the living demimonde, his bestial side, his transformative body. Others, like Dorian Gray, however, adopt a more minoritising position, embracing his queer desires, his monstrous body, and his place within the shadowy demimonde. The series as a whole is reflective of the homophobic and heterocentric ideals upheld by Victorian society, but is also emblematic of contemporary discourses surrounding queerness and discursive models of power. The series presents its characters as sexually and morally ambiguous, and are a way of reading the Victorian culture from which they were originally bred, and also the contemporaneous one which has seen them adapted them in Logan’s series. Most of Penny Dreadful’s characters have elements of Otherness and Sameness embedded within their extratextual and intratextual DNA, inasmuch that they have both heroic and villainous characteristics, heterosexual and homosexual tendencies, and very human and monstrous desires.

Works Cited

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Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Cohen, Jerome, Jeffrey. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In: Cohen, Jeffrey, Jerome, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, pp. 3-26, 1996.

Clarkson, Jay. “’Everyday Joe’ versus ‘Pissy, Bitchy, Queens’: Gay Masculinity on StraightActing.com.” The Journal of Men’s Studies, Vol. 14, issue 2, pp.191-207, 2006.

Edelman, L. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. USA: Duke University Press, 2004.

Elliott-Smith, Darren. Queer Horror Film and Television: Sexuality and Masculinity at the Margins. New York and London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2016.

King, Sisco Claire. “Un-Queering Horror: Hellbent and the Policing of the ‘‘Gay Slasher’’.” Western Journal of Communication. Vol. 74, issue 3, 2010, pp. 249–268.

McGunnigle, Christopher. “My Own Vampire: The Metamorphosis of the Queer Monster in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Gothic Studies, Vol. 7, issue 2, 2005, pp.172-184.

Miller, S. J., “Assimilation and the Queer Monster.” Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror. Edited by A. Briefel and S. J. Miller. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011, pp. 220-234.

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Rigby, M. Frankenstein and the Queer Gothic. PhD Thesis: Cardiff University, 2006.

Sedgwick, Kosofsky, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Sedgwick, Kosofsky, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Smith, C. “How I Became a Queer Heterosexual.” Edited by C. Thomas. Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. USA: University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. 60-67.

Thomas, June. “’The Thing That Made Me Monstrous to Some People Is Also the Thing That Empowered Me‘.” Slate.com, 9 May. 2014,  Accessed 30 September 2016.

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Bio: Jordan Phillips is a postgraduate researcher, teaching associate, and academic support tutor at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His main areas of interest are sexuality and queerness within the horror genre; fan performance culture and audience reception; and gender and sexual politics within contemporary superhero texts. Jordan is a regular contributor to Critical Studies in Television (Online) and The Big Picture Magazine, and has co-organised/presented queer horror-specific screenings at film festivals. 

~ Rikke Schubart

Abstract: This paper analyzes the witch Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) in ensemble horror series Penny Dreadful (2014–16). Witches have been television material since Bewitched (1964–72), usually in comedy or light drama, and often for teen audiences. Penny Dreadful, however, is a horror-gothic show for adults, and Vanessa a woman plagued by her powers. She is traumatized by earlier sexual escapades and family losses, and now fights evil in late-Victorian London as part of a group led by Sir Malcolm. In this paper, I read Vanessa’s journey to know herself as a form of edgework, which in sociology is a term for when we in our leisure time perform extreme, exciting and dangerous activities that take us beyond the limits of safety. In sport sociology, ‘edgework’ is when participants ‘work’ the edge of danger (Laurendeau, 2008). Whether in sport or fiction, ‘edgework’ can both challenge social rules and facilitate self-growth. This analysis therefore takes an interdisciplinary approach to screen horror as phantasmagorical play (Sutton-Smith, 1997) that enables emotional edgework. 

“Man, know thyself, and you are going to know the Gods.”
~ Egyptian proverb written inside Luxor Temple

Vanessa: “It all began several years ago and far from here. The moors of the West country. I went in search for answers to who I was, to a woman I came to know as the Cut-wife of Ballentree Moore. She was the first witch I ever met.”

Penny Dreadful, “The Nightcomers,” 2.03

In the television horror-drama Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky, 2014–2016), the character Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) speaks verbis diablo, can cast curses, and is called Mother of Evil. Over the show’s three seasons she struggles to understand her powers and know her self. Is she the Devil’s whore? A witch? Or the Mother of Evil? She pursues these questions until she is killed at the end of the series.

In this paper, I read Vanessa’s journey to know herself as edgework, which in sociology is a term for when we in our leisure time do exciting and dangerous activities which can get us killed, like skydiving or BASE jumping. In edgework players do activities from which they learn to manage their emotions, manage their selves, and become more skilled at their choice of edgework. When they “work the edge,” they risk their lives, and they feel more alive than they do in their ordinary and safe lives. The edge takes them to an emotional peak experience, which is desirable, exciting, and dangerous. Edgework is this struggle to reach the peak, live on the edge, and push one’s edge still closer to death. Sociologist Stephen Lyng explains edgework as, “most fundamentally, the problem of negotiating the boundary between chaos and order” (1990 855). Thus, edgework is both physical and exterior and also psychological and interior. So, too, for fictional character Vanessa and for us, the audience, who engage with her. Vanessa faces exterior supernatural forces and her inner demons. We, the audience, face fictional events and our inner demons or, in the words of psychologist Michael Apter, we do self-substitution edgework (2007 66). We use fiction characters to substitute for our selves and do our edgework. Furthermore, edgework is gendered, and the paper will discuss Vanessa’s journey over the three seasons with the stereotypes (or tropes or scripts) of the medium, the witch, and the hysteric.

The journey to know one’s self is not easy or happy. It is an exploration of the darkness in the world and the darkness within. Vanessa’s journey is hazardous and the terrain hostile, but when offered an ordinary life, she refuses. Rather explore the dark than be bound to the light. The goal of such a life journey is not to ‘find’ one’s self. The self is not a pot of gold at the end of the journey; rather, the self unfolds in the process of doing edgework and in the journey as lived life.

The article starts with a brief look at Penny Dreadful and Vanessa. Next, I unfold further the theory of edgework before I examine Vanessa’s journey through the lens of edgework. I then return to the difference between a fiction character’s edgework and the audience’s edgework and, last, speculate how imaginary edgework can be self-work for the audience.

“Vanessa, c’est moi”: Penny Dreadful as Edgework Television

John Logan, creator and writer of Penny Dreadful, referred to Vanessa as “the beating heart of the series” (Ryan May 4, 2016) and at the show’s end said that, “Vanessa Ives, c’est moi,” echoing Gustave Flaubert’s famous words “Bovary, c’est moi” (Ryan June 20, 2016) about his protagonist in Madame Bovary (1856). I take this as a sign that Vanessa is a deeply personal creation and that her life’s journey reflects if not Logan’s own personal journey (this is not an auteur article), then values and themes Logan find important. For Flaubert, at least, Mme Bovary was a treasured artistic progeny and became his creative legacy.

Penny Dreadful is a horror-drama series conceived and written by the American playwright Logan and produced by American TV-network Showtime and English telecommunications company Sky. The plot centers on a group of four people who battle dark forces in Victorian London in 1891: Fifty-year-old explorer Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), about-thirty-year old aristocrat Vanessa who has supernatural powers, American sharpshooter and werewolf Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), and doctor Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway). The show takes its title from so-called penny dreadfuls, cheap serial fiction sold in the 1830ies for a penny per weekly issue, and it uses a mash-up of characters from Gothic novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Around the group we find Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russell Beale), decadent aristocrat Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), and Frankenstein’s creatures John Clare (Rory Kinnear) and resurrected prostitute Brona, now Lily Frankenstein (Billie Piper).

In the first season, Sir Malcolm is searching for his daughter Mina who has been abducted by a vampire. Vanessa Ives first joins him. The Murray and Ives families were once neighbors and Mina and Vanessa once best friends. But when Vanessa was engaged to Mina’s brother Peter, she seduced Mina’s fiancé, which caused a rupture between the families and led to Vanessa’s commitment to a mental clinic, the death of Vanessa’s parents, Peter’s death, Mina’s abduction, and Malcolm’s divorce. At the end of season one, Malcolm forgives Vanessa her “sin” and accepts her as his ward and new daughter. In Season Two the group battles a witch coven, and in Season Three they battle Dracula and the onset of the Apocalypse.

Among the show’s fantastic characters, Vanessa can be said to be the protagonist. She is prominent in publicity material and graces the cover of monthly comic book Penny Dreadful (June 2016–) which continued the story after the show’s end. She is presented as a strong woman: “It’s all about strong women, for me, this show, in spite of all the incredible male characters there are. The core is always going to be a woman,” Logan explained and emphasized Vanessa was “why I started writing it in the first place” (Ryan May 4, 2016). Penny Dreadful was popular with critics, rose from 70 to 83 on Metacritic, and received numerous nominations and won, among others, a Critics’ Choice Television Awards for Most Exciting New Series and a Satellite Awards for best television series and best actress (Green) in 2014, and an IGN Awards for best actress (Green) in 2014. Thus, fans were surprised when season three ended with Vanessa’s death and the words ‘The End.’ After the last episode was aired, Logan explained to fans that midway in writing season two he knew Vanessa should lose her faith and die in season three to regain her faith and be with God. And that it would be “an act of bad faith” (Ryan June 20, 2016) to continue Penny Dreadful without Vanessa. Frustrated fans speculated that the show ended because Showtime, disappointed with ratings, offered Logan a new show to write.[1]

Sidestepping the discussion of why the show ended, we can think of Penny Dreadful as edgework television: it balances on a precarious tightrope with, to one side, dark emotions and a complex intertextual mash-up horror plot and, to the other side, economic demands of commercial television. Penny Dreadful is an example of what Jason Mittell (2015) calls complex television, also known as quality television and literary storytelling due to its complexity of stories and psychological depth of characters.[2] Also, Season Three spends considerable time dealing with Vanessa’s depression. So, whether or not the show was intended to be three seasons, we will read Vanessa as a complex and psychologically deep character, like Mme Bovary.

Edgework, Fiction, Play: “What Games We Will Have Now”

Let us return to edgework and to how Vanessa and her viewers work the edge. Most edgework research I know discusses activities such as risk sports, criminal behavior, running with bulls in Spanish cities, and risky sex. In short, these are activities where players risk physical trauma. How is fiction, then, edgework, if the audience cannot break a leg or lose our life when watching? It is beyond this article to discuss the relation between fiction, engagement, and psychology, however, let me offer two arguments: First, when we are fully engaged with fiction, we experience events and emotions as if they were real.[3] When we watch a horror film we scream when characters scream, and we are happy when characters are happy. Second, we understand that fiction is an as-if world, and that we will not die when characters die. Thus, fiction is an example of what Apter calls a detachment frame; we can detach ourselves from events by telling ourselves they are ‘only’ fiction and cannot hurt us. Psychologically speaking, fiction can be edgework where the audience does high-level and low-level cognitive work, oscillating between experiencing real emotions and telling ourselves that although our fear is real, events are not real.[4]

Another way to look at edgework is as play. Thus, mountaineering and watching horror are different activities, yet, mentally they are both play in the sense that they are voluntary, exciting, and non-instrumental – they are for ‘fun.’[5] When we play, we are in play mode, meaning that we agree with those we play with that what we do is play and not real, and we momentarily exchange the rules of the real world with play rules. To play is ambiguous and paradoxical and can feel more real or ‘serious’ than reality itself. Play is experimental and free, yet bound by certain shared play rules. The player who brings a gun to the football match to take down the opposite team’s players breaks the rules of soccer. Or if a player says he or she doesn’t care about winning a match, the player also breaks the rules. Apter uses watching horror films as an example of edgework (but does not discuss this type of edgework). We can say that audiences treat fiction worlds and fiction characters as play and as as-if events. Thus, we feel real emotions yet know we are safe from physical trauma (but not safe from psychological trauma or being ‘hurt’ by a fiction).

Penny Dreadful is aware of being fiction and leisure time entertainment, and it alludes to its status as play by having characters visit theaters, cabarets, fairs, and wax museums. The first season’s vampires hide at the Theater du Grand Guignol, and the group fights them on the stage in the last episode. And in “What Death Can Join Together,” when Vanessa is possessed during her kinky sex with Dorian, the Devil greets her, “Good evening, my child. I’ve been waiting. What games we will have now” (1.06). Playing with fiction and playing with risks in risk sports are different yet similar activities. The fiction characters are extensions of us, the audience; without our engagement they would not exist, but would be merely words on paper or colors on a canvas. To sum up: fiction characters do substitute edgework, and the audience experiences real emotions in an as-if world.

What, then, is edgework? Edgework is voluntary, dangerous, and exciting. Lyng, who takes the term from gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, uses edgework about the excitement in risk sports like skydiving. The ‘edge’ is the line between order and chaos, life and death: edgework is the management of one’s performance on this edge, and practitioners are ‘edgeworkers.’ Edgework is, on the one hand, an individual and inner psychological experience, but also, on the other hand, a social and skilled activity you do in a world with others. “The ‘edge,’ or boundary line, confronted by the edgeworker can be defined in many different ways: life versus death, consciousness versus unconsciousness, sanity versus insanity, an ordered sense of self and environment versus a disordered self and environment” (857).

Apter expands edgework from risk sports to a variety of activities like fast driving, hooliganism, watching horror movies, committing crimes for fun, or giving a public lecture. Apter also uses the concepts of mental zones. Edgework activities take the player from a safety zone into a danger zone, which is next to the trauma zone. In the safety zone you are safe, in the trauma zone you risk being traumatized or dying, and in the danger zone you ‘work’ to push the edge as close to trauma as possible. Furthermore, Apter explains players use ‘safety frames’ when they do edgework. There are three: the confidence frame (they tell themselves they have the skill to perform the dangerous activity), the safety frame (they tell themselves they are still in the safe zone), and the detachment frame (the player feels psychologically detached from events, either because she feels she is an observer, fantasizes, remembers, or uses fiction). Safety frames give players a psychological experience of being safe, whether they are safe or not.

A paradox in edgework – the same that is often asked about fiction horror – is why we want to risk our lives for fun (in horror, why do audiences voluntary seek out negative emotions). Not all play involves negative emotions, however, many types of play do (you can loose a game or get hurt while playing).[6] The paradox can be addressed on several theoretical levels. On a social level, Lyng explains edgework as a response to over-socialization in modern society. When society is (too) safe, we feel restricted, bored, and lack being challenged. Edgework takes you to the very edge of your abilities. On an evolutionary level, Apter explains risk-seeking behavior as innate; we are naturally born to seek out exciting and dangerous activities, a behavior which is not sex-specific, but varies from individual to individual. Some are more risk-seeking than others, and young more than adults. Risk-taking behavior is adaptive to a group: it is better that one dies on the edge than the entire group, and the individual thus brings valuable information about risks and dangers back to the group.

On a neurological-chemical level, Apter points out edgework is characterized by our simultaneous experience of excitement and anxiety. In terms of neurochemistry, these two emotions are identical: both prepare for a fight-or-flight response to a situation and both start as an adrenaline rush. The difference is in our appraisal of the danger situation: If we think we can manage the situation, we feel excited, and if we don’t think we can, we become anxious. Cognitively speaking, we interpret the adrenaline rush as an emotion of either excitement (we feel safe) or anxiety (we feel fear). The closer we get to trauma, the harder adrenalin kicks in, and the more intense is our experience of excitement. “In other words, one buys excitement with fear, and the greater the cost, the better the product,” says Apter (43). As a mountaineer puts it: “Death is so close. You could let go and make the decision to die. It feels so good” (39).

On an individual-psychological level, finally, edgework is linked to self-work. “I wasn’t thinking at all – I just did what I had to do,” a skydiver explains, “[a]nd after it was over, I felt really alive and pure” (added emphasis, Lyng 1990 860). Lyng says, “[i]n edgework, the ego is called forth in a dramatic way” (860). This urgency makes you feel alive. On the edge there is no time for doubt and we use skills without questioning them. When Vanessa in Season Two suddenly speaks verbis diablo, the Devil’s language, she says it came to her “like an animal instinct” (2.01).

Finally, the self is gendered. In the development of our self, we use what cognitive psychology calls mental schemes, scripts, and stereotypes, which are the socially created ideas we use to know our world and to construct our self. There are schemes for every social role, and gender is a basic scheme we internalize from the age of five.[7] Edgework is gendered, and sociologist Jason Laurendeau (2008) says, “the ways skydivers, freeclimbers, mountaineers, or BASE jumpers, for example, ‘do’ risk are also – and simultaneously, and always already – ways that they negotiate gender” (304). We recall that the drive for excitement-seeking is not sex-specific. Therefore the differences in how players do edgework is a result of cultural learning, not biology. In my discussion of Vanessa’s journey to know herself, I will pay attention to how her edgework is gendered through the use of the scripts of the medium, the witch, and the hysteric.

Season One: Vanessa, the Medium

“I see things sometimes. I am affected by forces beyond our world,” Vanessa tells Ethan in episode three. In season one Vanessa’s script is the medium for the living’s communication with supernatural forces: ghosts, monsters, the Devil and even Egyptian Gods.

The séance held by Ferdinand Lyle at a party (“Séance,” 1.02) is an excellent example of Vanessa’s script and edgework. The séance was a popular Victorian parlour entertainment, and Lyle has invited medium Madam Kali, who appears to be an entertainer rather than a medium.[8] Lyle encourages Vanessa to take a seat at the table: “It will be an adventure!” When Madam Kali (Helen McCrory) summons the spirits, Vanessa is possessed. The well-behaved and elegant Vanessa transforms into a medium and a “possessed woman” who speaks in the tongues of Malcolm’s children Peter (dead in Africa) and Mina (who is missing), and also speaks as what seems an Egyptian God: “Amunet? No, much older.” Vanessa makes quite the spectacle, loosening her hair, bending backwards on top of the dinner table, and next leaves to have sex with a stranger in the street.

As said, we internalize the gender schema at the age of five, and unless we make a conscious effort to not be gendered, our every move, thought, and behavior is performed through a gendered lens. So, too, with edgework. Our choice of an edge, how to work the edge, and how to think of one self when doing edgework, is unconsciously gendered. In her study of gender and edgework, sociologist Jennifer Lois followed a team of voluntary mountain rescue workers for five and a half years. She observed that the women and men used the same meta-narrative about gender that said men were emotionally strong and women weak, and the workers shared a “norm of masculine emotional stoicism” (2001 387).[9] The meta-narrative about gender provided positive scripts for men (male stoicism), but undermined women’s belief in their ability (if stoicism is male, it means women are weaker than men). Male rescue workers were self-confident, and women were anxious and set low expectations. “[W]hen I talked to equally experienced men and women, apprehension still dominated women’s anticipatory feelings . . . and confidence dominated men’s. Furthermore, even when women performed well on missions, it did not seem to boost their confidence for future situations, while conversely, men’s poor performance did not erode theirs” (389). The difference was in anticipation and expectations, however, Lois observed no difference in men and women’s management of their emotions when working the edge.

Returning to Vanessa, we can interpret the supernatural domain as her “edge” and her communication with the supernatural forces as “edgework.” In “Night Work” Vanessa describes the demimonde to Ethan as “a half world between what we know and what we fear. A place in the shadows, rarely seen but deeply felt” (1.01). We can see the demimonde as a version of the danger zone situated between the safe zone, which is our “ordinary” world, and the trauma zone, which would be where vampires, monsters, and Gods reign. The trauma zone is then the ‘other’ side, whereas the demimonde Vanessa describes is a zone where humans and supernatural entities communicate. This half world is open to those who want to enter it. Thus, it is an edge, and if you go over the edge you will be ‘traumatized’: Mina becomes a vampire, the witch who enters a pact with the Devil becomes a Nightcomer in the second season, and when Vanessa gives in to Dracula in Season Three she becomes Mother of Evil. Vanessa the medium, however, works the edge and returns to the ordinary world.

The role as medium is gendered female in Western bourgeois society. Howell and Baker (2017) describe Vanessa as typical of the Victorian medium: “In the spectacle that Vanessa Ives makes of herself, the scene registers the appeal and disruptive potential of the female medium in the Victorian and Edwardian era spiritualist movement as one who could ‘invade and upturn the domestic havens of respectable gentlemen and their obedient wives through the subversive and often highly-sexualised séances’” (Howell and Baker ). The efficiency of social scripts is that we do not invent them; they are already written and ready for us to perform, which Vanessa does when Lyle urges her to the table.

We might imagine the ability to communicate with supernatural forces had nothing to do with one’s sex, yet Victorian society’s script as ‘Medium’ is female. Cognitive psychologist Sandra Bem (1981) says that when a schema (in our case a script) is gendered, it means it “conforms to the culture’s definitions of maleness and femaleness” (355) and it also “teaches that the dichotomy between male and female has extensive and intensive relevance to virtually every aspect of life” (362). In the first season, Vanessa performs as medium – that is, allows supernatural forces to “talk” through her physical body – three times: First at the séance, next in the flashback in episode five when she is committed to Dr Banning’s clinic, and the third time when she is possessed (after she has had sex with Dorian) and the group performs an exorcism on her in episode seven, “Possession.” The situations portrayed here connect supernatural communication with transgressive sexuality: having sex with a stranger in public, seducing one’s best friend’s fiancée, and implications of sado-masochism when Vanessa cuts Dorian with a knife during intercourse.

As we perform social scripts, we also negotiate them. We can follow them, or vary them, or, if we are conscious of them, try to change or reject them. Bem wants us to reject the gender schema because it is a negative schema that restricts women. In Vanessa’s case, her supernatural powers are represented in a script where woman is sexualized, unable to control her desires, and these desires presented as transgressive. Vanessa is also a sexualized spectacle; in her youth, her mother dies from heart attack at the sight of the naked daughter tied to the bed and possessed by the Devil, a spectacle the audience also sees (1.05). The sexual acts are overlaid with negative emotions of jealousy, shame, guilt, and the concept of sin. When Vanessa discovers her mother’s affair with Mina’s father, she starts to pray to the dark and becomes jealous of Mina. “How I envied you. Perhaps even hated you” (1.05). Vanessa’s mother blames the daughter for the social catastrophe: “Have you no shame?” Malcolm, too, accuses Vanessa: “I always thought my traveling would kill my family . . . I never thought it would be a cruel little girl.” When the adult Vanessa recalls this past she is ready to assume her guilt. “Perhaps it was already inside me, this demon” (1.05).

It is clear from episode one, when Ferdinand deciphers the ancient writing on a vampire body, that Vanessa is the object of dark forces that seek to take over the world of the living. However, the events of season one create ambiguity about whether she is predestined to be “the devil’s whore” (as a vampire calls her) or if this is her choice. When Vanessa is back from Banning’s clinic, lobotomized and tied to the bed, the Devil says at her bedside, “you always had a choice. You sought it out and fucked it. You could have shut the door at any time. You still can” (1.05). Is her sexuality her own, or is it manipulated by the Devil? It turns out that Malcolm has used Vanessa’s susceptibility to the dark forces by encouraging her to have an affair with Dorian. Malcolm hoped this would open the door to the demimonde and allow him to contact his daughter Mina. “You are now in a very special place between our world and the other. Perhaps between life and death. Reach out to Mina,” Malcolm asks Vanessa when she is possessed (1.07).

Vanessa’s ‘edge’ is expressed through sexualized encounters with dark forces. The season ends with Vanessa repressing her desire and rejecting Dorian after the exorcism: “Mr. Gray, I’m not the woman you think I am. And with you I am not the woman I want to be” (1.08). The last episode has a “decent” Vanessa, properly dressed and fighting vampires with the three men in the group, thus signaling she is now playing by a modified script. At this point in the series we can call this modified script a version of Mina since, like Mina in Stoker’s novel Dracula, Vanessa is both Medium and vampire hunter. Although Vanessa participates in the vampire battle, the men do most of the killing, and the season ends with Malcolm forgiving Vanessa her sin and making her his ward. In the season’s final scene, Vanessa asks a priest about exorcism. He says, “Now, if you have been touched by the demon it’s like being touched by the backhand of God, makes you sacred in a way, doesn’t it? Makes you unique. There is a glory in suffering. Now here’s my question: Do you really want to be normal?” (1.08).

Season Two: Vanessa, the Witch

Season two turns to the script of the witch which I later in this section differentiate into two subscripts, the Christian witch and the magical witch. Where the medium is a channel of communication and thus object rather than subject of supernatural forces, the witch is an active agent who can control and use supernatural forces. The medium sees where a witch acts. In Season One it is unclear if Vanessa does edgework out of choice (free will) or because it is predestined (“who wants to know they are hunted by the Devil?” 1.02). Season Two casts her journey in different terms: Vanessa is gifted (or cursed) with supernatural powers, but can she learn to master her powers?

The season presents the witch script as a process of learning, and from the opening episode to the finale we follow Vanessa from being unable to control her powers to be able to defeat the Devil and the witch coven. In edgework, too, the player must learn to perform on the edge. Lois divides edgework into four phases: “[P]reparing for the edge, performing on the edge, going over the edge, and extending the edge” (385). To prepare is to train and learn before approaching the edge. To perform is when players work on the edge, use their skills, and experience the adrenaline rush which takes them into a state that creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996 111-113) has called flow, where we are focused, lose sense of time, and perform our best. Edgework is performed in flow. Next, to go over the edge is when players release tension after working the edge and they allow themselves to experience emotions from the adrenaline rush, which might be joy if work went well or guilt if work went badly. To extend the edge, finally, is when players evaluate and assess their performance and emotions and set expectations for future edgework.

Now, as discussed earlier, the “edge” in edgework is both a geographical place – the location of one’s actual edgework whether BASE jumping or battling the Devil – and a mental location. The danger zone is the zone between the safe zone and the trauma zone, and within the danger zone, the edge is the border that touches the trauma zone. The edge is the literal place where you are in danger of being traumatized but are confident you can manage, and it is also where you “touch” trauma yet are confident you can return to the safe zone. One of Lois’ rescue workers, criticized for walking on dangerous cornices, explains, “Well, I wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t safe. It’s not safe for you to be doing it, no, but it’s safe for me because I know what I’m doing” (388). In her study of BASE jumpers, Men on the Edge, anthropologist Caitlin Forsey says, “loss of control, fear, anxiety, dread and discomfort were connected to understandings of risk, as was the need to control the future through careful consideration of the potentially fatal consequences of the sport” (2012 52). Or, as Forsey quotes a BASE jumper, edgework is “taking necessary precautions and then knowingly doing something that could kill you” (52). The sport is a way to manage risk instead of avoiding risk. Laurendeau says BASE jumpers are “courting danger while still maintaining control over themselves, their equipment, their surroundings, and/or their sanity . . . The ‘edge,’ then, is that point at which risk takers are in peril of losing control” (294).

The season opens with Vanessa and Ethan being attacked by witches who try to abduct Vanessa. She defeats them by speaking verbis diablo, the devil’s language, which she did not know she could speak – “words came to me blindly, like an animal instinct. I don’t even know what I said” (2.01). It turns out Madam Kali (the medium in season one) is Evelyn, a powerful witch and head of a coven with four young witches. Evelyn has entered a contract with the Devil to deliver Vanessa to him in exchange for power, youth, and beauty. To fight the coven Vanessa must remember the past. In the flashback episode “The Nightcomers” (2.03) she remembers how many years ago, after Mina’s abduction, she became apprentice to a witch known as the Cut-wife. The Cut-wife, whose name is Joan (Patti LuPone), leaves Vanessa days outside the house before inviting her in. “You’re strong-willed and agile, like the scorpion,” says Joan (2.03), and Vanessa’s sign becomes the red scorpion she draws in her blood. It turns out Evelyn and Joan are sisters, the first using her powers in the service of the Devil, the second using her powers to serve her community.

Joan teaches Vanessa to harness and control her powers. “Why do you want to learn the arts?” “To find out who I am.” “And if the answer you don’t like?” “Better to know who I am.” When Vanessa cannot draw a Tarot card, Joan slaps her hard on the head and tells her to ‘feel’ the cards, to ‘believe’ in her sight. She says “you’ll know” and “you can do better” about interpreting signs. Vanessa then selects a card: ‘The Devil.’ In season one it was unclear if Vanessa invited the Devil in. Season Two removes this doubt: “I learned it. You were born with it,” Joan says about the powers. Joan shows Vanessa how to use plants and herbs for medicine, teaches her the verbis diablo, to cast the Tarot cards, and shows her a book with curses. Joan warns verbis diablo will lead to evil. “If you believe in God, better you pray with all the God in you. Only if all fails, speak the devil’s tongue, but mark me, girl, it’s a seduction and before you blink twice, it’s all you can speak” (2:3).

We can situate the witch narrative in Penny Dreadful by taking a wider look at history and witches. The powers of a witch are believed to be a magical relationship with the world; she can control the weather, kill crops, cause disease, kill and raise the dead, and tell the future. The extent of her magic depends on the intensity of her powers. Edgeworkers, too, report an almost magical ability to manage danger and master the physical world and “speak of a feeling of ‘oneness’ with the object or environment. For example, motorcycle racers and test pilots describe a feeling of ‘being one with their machines,’ a state in which they feel capable of exercising mental control over the machines” (Lyng 1990 861). Joan warns Vanessa against the spells. “Forbidden. The poetry of death. If ever the day comes when my little scorpion is crushed and beaten, if her God deserts her completely, only then does she open it. And on that day, she will never be the same. She will have gone away from God. Forever” (2:03). At the end of episode seven, Vanessa uses spells to kill the local Lord who burnt Joan as a witch and branded Vanessa, and now threatens her again. Ethan is upset, “You’ll never get your soul back,” he says and adds: “Welcome to the night, Vanessa.”

Season Two has only female witches: The sisters Joan and Evelyn, Evelyn’s coven of four young daughters, and Vanessa. The show draws from a Western culture’s belief in witches, which we can divide into two scripts: a Christian witch and a pre-Christian, or magical, witch. Evelyn is in league with the Devil and a Christian witch, whereas Joan uses her skills to serve a community. Joan, thus, is a magic witch. Let us briefly look at historical witch studies. Scottish historian Lizanne Henderson in Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment Scotland, 1670-1740 (2016) examines historical witch trials and witch beliefs. Witches are an old superstition and Henderson points out that not until 1450 did the Church claim that a witch was demonic, that is, in league with the Devil. Between 1450 and 1800, 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft and more than 60,000 executed, most of these women. But before 1450, the term “witch” was used about many practices such as charmer, diviner, sorcerer, magician, necromancer, warlock, and more. The Bible’s Witch of Endor (I Samuel 28:3-25) was for example a necromancer who had “divinatory powers and could raise the dead” (81) and the passage “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18) has kashaph, a Hebrew word that “carried the meaning of magician, sorcerer or diviner, but was not considered diabolical” (81).

Joan is a magical witch who uses her powers for the good of the community and Evelyn is a Christian witch who uses her powers for her own greed and serves the Devil. Next to these historical scripts – the Christian and the pre-Christian witch – there are also several popular culture witch scripts. There is the old evil hag with “bad skin, crooked teeth, foul breath, a cackling laugh and a big nose that has a wart at the end of it” (66) and the young pretty witch we know from Sabrina – The Teenage Witch (ABC, WB, 1996-2003). Also, we find a middle-age witch obsessed with youth in fairy tales like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, William Cottrell).[10] If we ask Henderson what the typical historical witch was like, she was neither old, nor young, nor obsessed with youth. Of women accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1670 and 1740, 78 per cent were married and only two per cent single, and if a common trope is the midwife (Joan’s calling name, Cut-wife, is because she performs abortions), only nine of 4,000 Scottish cases were midwives by occupation. Records show the typical woman accused of witchcraft was ordinary, belonged to the middle class, could be any age, and that accusations started with quotidian quarrels, “reflective predominantly of tensions between women” (84). And although 95 per cent of witches in Scotland were women, on Iceland, in contrast, of 22 executed witches only one was a woman.

In Penny Dreadful Evelyn is the middle-aged witch who has made a deal with the Devil to appear eternally youthful, while Joan is a good and magical witch slowly growing older. By magical I mean that Joan is the kind of witch before they were demonized by the church. What kind of witch, then, is Vanessa? Joan says, “I have never known a Daywalker with such power, truly, I don’t know if your heart is good or bad.” At the end of the season, Vanessa goes alone to Evelyn’s mansion to battle the coven and the Devil. Evelyn creates voodoo dolls with the hearts of murdered babies and the face of whom they represent, and Vanessa faces a doll with her own face and the Devil’s voice. He shows her a nuclear family with Vanessa, Ethan, and two children: “Let me show you what I can give you: to be free of pain. To be normal. To be loved by others. Is that not the aim of all human beings?” Joan had earlier asked if Vanessa would follow in her footsteps and be witch in Ballentree Moore. Vanessa refused (to serve the community) and she also refuses the Devil (her desires). She instead chooses her personal quest, to find Mina. “You selfish bitch, you will never have a happy life,” Joan warns.

“The Nightcomers” ends with Joan’s words ‘be true,’ which we will read as meaning Vanessa must be true to herself. When you are on a journey to know your self, you must stay the course even if a storm is coming. In “And They Were Enemies,” the Devil says: “There is no more powerful inducement than this: Face yourself” (2.10). Vanessa’s sense of self lies in her ability to repel the Devil with his own words, verbis diablo, a gibberish that makes no sense. She refuses to be ‘normal’ and tells the Devil. “You offer me a normal life. Why do you think I want that anymore? I know what I am – do you? . . . Beloved, know your master” (2.10).  Her edgework is to force the Devil back and her powers – her mental edgework – are her ability to manage the adrenalin rush, which edgeworkers experience as a magical unity with one’s environment. They say they feel self-realization, self-actualization, and self-determination and find “a purified and magnified sense of self” (Lyng 860). They feel more alive on the edge than in their everyday lives. This aliveness and strength from the adrenaline rush becomes terrifying rather than purifying when granted a woman. In season two Vanessa learns to use her powers, and she kills a bounty hunter (with a knife) and a Lord (with spells) before overcoming the Devil. Such display of strength is awesome and terrifying. Henderson links the witch trials to society’s fear of women. The witch is an “independent adult woman who does not conform to the male idea of proper female behavior” because she is “assertive . . . [and] does not nurture men or children, nor care for the weak” and “has the power of words – to defend herself or to curse” (77). In a patriarchal world, “the imagery of a rebellious, subversive woman must have seemed incredibly threatening to men and women alike” (77). Henderson reminds us that the rebellious witch script is modern, since the historical witch was no rebel.

Vanessa, thus, enacts a complex and modern witch script: she is desired by the Devil whom she rejects, and she is also asked to be a magical witch, which she rejects too. Thus she takes neither the path of Evelyn or Joan. She learns the power of words to defend herself, and she insists on her own path. We can read Vanessa as a re-authored witch with an eye for modern feminism: a selfish witch choosing to reject the nuclear family as well as the Devil, a witch who, however, is not egocentrical but on her very own journey, and willing to pay the price for stepping off the beaten track.

At the end in Season Two, characters set out on each their life journey. Ethan pleads guilty to his werewolf murders and is arrested, Malcolm travels to Africa, Victor becomes a drug addict, and Vanessa is alone. Losing Ethan, she loses her faith and burns her crucifix. “So we walk alone,” are the season’s last words.

Season Three: Vanessa, the Hysteric

As said, the journey to know oneself is not a merry one. Penny Dreadful is about the encounter with dark forces, and edgework is about facing trauma and possible death, and season three takes us to the perhaps darkest of all places, depression. The first two seasons cast Vanessa as medium and witch and we now come to the script of the hysteric and the setting of the padded cell in the Victorian mental clinic for ‘women’s diseases.’

First episode, “The Day Tennyson Died,” opens with Vanessa having isolated herself for five months in Malcolm’s mansion to dwell on the loss of her faith and of Ethan. The Egyptologist Lyle visits her and recommends an alienist (the Victorian age’s term for a psychoanalyst). Vanessa consults Dr. Seward (Patti LuPone), who tells her to do “something you’ve never done before.” Vanessa visits the Natural History Museum, where she meets museum director Dr. Alexander Sweet (Christian Camargo), who will turn out to be Dracula. Vanessa asks which creatures Dr. Sweet prefers? “The unloved ones. The unvisited ones. The broken and shunned creatures” (3.01). At the end of the episode Vanessa combs her hair and looks in the mirror: “The old monsters have gone. The old curses have echoed to silence and if my immortal soul is lost to me, something yet remains. I remain.” This “I” is a physical entity.

The third season intertwines supernatural forces with clinical depression, faith with flesh, medical treatments with a talking cure. Somewhere in this matrix is the person Vanessa, trying to locate her “self,” whatever such an ephemeral and mythisized thing is. In her sessions with Dr. Seward, Vanessa recovers herself. Dr. Seward tells the patient, “I don’t care about politeness. There are no manners here. If you want to scream like an animal you should. Or cry. Or yell. There are no emotions unwelcome in this room” (3.02). On a date with Dr. Sweet, Vanessa is in a labyrinth of mirrors, where a creature tells her she earlier met the Master in “the white room.” Vanessa therefore asks Dr. Seward to use hypnosis to return her to the Banning clinic, where she spent five months. Dr. Seward warns her: “The emotions can be very raw, I am warning you, are you willing to give yourself over to it?” (3.03). Although she is emotionally fragile after her depression, Vanessa insists: “Can I be more traumatized?”

Banning’s clinic was introduced in season one, where Dr. Banning performed trepanning (drilling a hole through the skull into the brain) on Vanessa. In the late nineteenth century, the historical setting of Penny Dreadful, female hysteria was a common medical diagnosis and women were believed to be of a weaker mind and more emotionally frail than men. Season One presented Vanessa as both a hysteric and possessed. Dr. Banning diagnosed Vanessa’s condition as “hysteria of a psychosexual nature” to be treated with “narcotics and escalating hydrotherapy. Cold water reduces circulation to the brain thereby reducing the metabolism and motor activity. The agitation and mental trauma will slow down and cease,” and if this does not help there are “surgical options” (1.05).

The audience is returned in season three to the Victorian treatment of “women’s disease,” which in Vanessa’s case has supernatural causes. She is also cast as hysteric, scratching her hand repeatedly during sessions which makes Dr. Seward comment on this physical symptom of inner conflict. Also, her isolation and unkept appearance signal mental disturbance. In “A Blade of Grass” Vanessa returns through hypnosis to the clinic. Here, her only visitor is a nurse, played by Rory Kinnear who also plays the creature John Clare, Frankenstein’s male monster. Vanessa laments: “God has forgotten me. He can’t find me here. I’m not Vanessa Ives here. I’m no one. I have no name. No purpose” (3.04). She is scratching the padded walls, attacks the nurse, refuses food and must be force-fed, and her thoughts ruminate about God and the Devil. At one point Dr. Seward is in the cell. “It’s a dissociative break, something like a coma,” Seward explains, “you will come out of it. When you’re at the heart of your trauma. When you’ve found what you’re looking for.” Vanessa then sees the fallen angels Lucifer and Dracula (both played by Kinnear), one wanting her soul, the other her body. Dracula tells her: “You’re powerful. You feel it coiling within you. Become the wolf and the bat and the scorpion. Be truly who you are . . . In this world you will always be shunned for your uniqueness but not with me. They will brand you as a freak and a sorceress” (3.04). Vanessa resists Lucifer and Dracula, levitates in the room and defeats them with verbis diablo (which, paradoxically, in the time-line of the story, means she knew verbis diablo before learning it from Joan).

The role of emotions in edgework is interesting in terms of sex and the gender script. In her observation of how the male and female rescue workers handle emotions, Lois say they interpret emotions differently. On the edge, everyone experiences the so-called adrenaline rush. This is not an emotion proper but a feeling state, which leads to emotions of urgency and fear. Low-level fear improves edgework but high-level fear impedes it. How you handle the adrenaline rush is crucial to your performance on the edge. Lois also observed that the rescue workers’ gendering of emotions – excitement was masculine and anxiety was feminine – led to emotions being considered appropriate and inappropriate. “For example, they believed that emotions such as uncertainty, urgency, fear, upset, vulnerability, and guilt were undesirable because those powerful feelings were potentially disruptive. They could interfere with members’ performance, causing them to sacrifice the efficiency of the mission as well as the safety of other rescuers and the victims” (401).

In a talking cure, the patient must examine his or her emotions. From an emotions research perspective, shame, guilt, and anxiety are not intrinsically feminine or masculine, but are equally innate in both sexes. Further, research in gender and power, e.g. in leadership, shows no sex difference; female leaders, for example, are not more emotional than male leaders, and male leaders not more rational than female leaders.[11] Where there is a difference in behavior, this difference is a result of mindset, stereotyping, and assumptions about gender appropriate behavior. When Dr. Seward tells Vanessa all emotions are welcome, this prompts the patient to open up instead of repressing emotions. At the same time, the emotions Vanessa is about to re-experience are those society deems ‘female,’ unwelcome, and unworthy: guilt, shame, anxiety, and paranoia.

We recall Vanessa’s mother and Malcolm in the first season blamed her for the social consequences of her seduction of Mina’s fiancée. This so-called sin was forgiven at the end of the season, however, guilt remains in her and we now re-visit Vanessa’s trauma, a knot of sexual transgressive behavior (the seduction), sin, and social disgrace resulting in self-punishment, self-blame, shame, anxiety, guilt, and physical reactions (scratching). I understand the trauma as Vanessa’s ‘edge’ in season three and her work with the trauma as her edgework. The show interweaves the scripts of the hysteric with that of the possessed woman and voices a modern feminist critique, expressed in Vanessa’s conversations with her nurse. “It’s science, it’s meant to make you better,” he says and asks her to pretend to be normal so the force-feeding and her treatments stop. Vanessa objects, “It’s meant to make me normal. Like all the other women you know. Compliant, obedient” (3.04). Whatever she is, she cannot be normal. Where the medium is welcome in the Victorian home, the hysteric is banned and isolated. The hysteric needs a cure, and Vanessa was released in her youth after trepanning. In the present, under hypnosis with Dr. Seward, Vanessa returns from the trauma when she knows the name of her adversary: Dracula.

As the season progresses, Vanessa is seduced by Dr. Sweet, and after they make love one night in the museum, she learns he is Dracula. When Dracula promises to love her to the end of time, never to leave her, and to let her be her self, she accepts to be his bride and lets him bite her. “I accept . . . my . . . self,” she says at the end of “Ebb Tide” (3.07), and London falls into the Apocalypse. “This is what I am. I have brought this terrible darkness to the world,” she says in the show’s final episode, “The Blessed Dark” (3.09).

Vanessa’s character expands from the tropes of medium, witch, and hysteric to include the martyr-hero. That is, a hero who sacrifices her or his life in the service of one’s faith. When Dr. Sweet asks whom Vanessa admires, she says Joan of Arc, who died singing, keeping her faith in God: “She heard a voice and believed it. And to believe with confidence is heroic” (3.02). Martyrdom and edgework seem different activities, however, both are voluntary, dangerous, and can take players to the extreme of trauma. We may also not think martyrdom a matter of play, however, play can be as obsessive as faith. Thus, Carl Boenish, the father of BASE jumping, died at the age of 43 when he jumped off a mountain in Norway, recorded by a film crew that was with him.[12] And the film Everest (2015celebrates the death of mountaineer Robert Edwin Hall, who died leading an expedition in 1996. When the group comes to save Vanessa, she begs Ethan to shoot her to end the darkness. At this moment she has become darkness itself and only her death will stop the Apocalypse. We can understand this belief as literal – there are forces of evil ­– but also as a psychological embrace of darkness within – that she is her self when she works the edge and touches trauma.

The third season ends with a visit to her grave. Here are what remains from the original group – Ethan, Malcolm, and Victor – and three characters introduced in the third season: Ethan’s Indian father Kaetenay (Wes Studi), Dr. Seward, and vampire hunter Catriona Hartdegen (Perdita Weeks). The creatures John Clare and Lily are alive and free to write their own life scripts.

Extending the Edge: Free Will and Self-Work

Let us now turn to edgework as self-work. What does it mean “to face yourself,” as the Devil challenges Vanessa to do at the end of Season Two? What do players take from edgework? And what can we, the audience, take from fiction edgework? Until now, we have discussed how Vanessa has prepared for and performed on the edge. I now want to explore the last phases, to ‘go over the edge’ and ‘to extend the edge.’ All four phases of edgework contribute to edgework as self-work, an activity already, simultaneously, and involuntarily also gendered self-work. We will now ask how Vanessa’s edgework is gendered.

We recall Lois found that men and women do edgework differently: Men anticipate the edge with confidence and excitement, women with trepidation and anxiety (2001 386-387). This is because men’s positive expectations are supported by society’s meta-narrative. “Yup. I am a cocky, young, think-I-can-do-it-all kid. I can get out of a situation . . . I perform tremendously under pressure. That’s when I shine at my absolute, top of my game. And I love being put in the hot seat,” says a 28-year-old male rescue worker (387). Women, on the other hand, are undermined by society’s meta-narrative and constantly worry that they will be unable to manage emotions. “I mean, I always second-guess myself in the field. I guess my problem is that I’m always unsure of myself. Like, I’d be afraid that I would do more damage than good, in a way . . . And that’s where my hesitation always comes in” (386).

We can read exterior and interior darkness as Vanessa’s “edge,” which is expressed differently over seasons: As guilt/Satan/vampires, as witchcraft/Satan, and as depression/Dracula. If we look at the four phases, then in the phase of preparation, Vanessa worries, like the female rescue workers, whether she will be strong enough to face evil, if she is worthy of being forgiven past sins, if she is haunted by evil, and if she will ever be happy. Other characters despair too in Penny Dreadful (especially Victor and his creature), however, men do not experience the same amount of shame, anxiety, guilt, and trepidation. In the second phase, performing on the edge, Vanessa’s performance is sexualized, making her an unconsenting spectacle and subject of erotic acts and sexual abuse. Here, male characters’ edgework has the form of traditional “masculine” activities such as battling, fighting, killing, and doing unethical science, rather than having sex.[13] However, when Vanessa confronts evil in the finales of season one and two, she controls her body, her emotions, and her desires, and she is dressed in decent Victorian fashion. In these situations, Vanessa works the edge without anxiety or worry. Yet, edgework is gendered: In the Grand Guignol Theatre Vanessa is the damsel-in-distress to be saved by the men, and in Evelyn’s mansion she almost kisses the voodoo doll, metaphor for the narcissistic desires the Devil promises to fulfill, which she refuses by cracking the doll’s face.

The third phase, to go over the edge, is when players release tension after working the edge and allow the adrenaline rush to become emotions. If edgework goes well, rescue workers hug one another and celebrate, but if a rescue mission fails, men and women cope differently. Female rescue workers cry, but male rescue workers do not allow themselves the “feminine” release of sadness and tears, and instead drink to stop negative emotions. In Penny Dreadful men drink too. Vanessa instead cries to release tension, like the female rescue workers. She cries when she is possessed (1.07), she cries when Ethan leaves her (2.10), and in season three she cries in sessions with Dr. Seward (3.03, 3.04), when Dracula bites her (3.07), and when she begs Ethan to kill her (3.09).

How, then, can we understand Vanessa’s death? Does she work the edge (manage chaos), does she go over the edge (let go of emotions), or does she extend the edge (go beyond existing limits)? The crying Vanessa wears a cream-colored simple dress which looks a bit like a bridal dress, perhaps to signify virtue and her soon-to-be union with God. “This is what I am. And this is what I’ve done. Brought this terrible darkness to the world,” she says (3.09), taking responsibility for the vampire plague. We can see her acceptance to become Dracula’s bride, to embrace inner darkness, and her surrender to death, as neither working the edge nor going over the edge, but instead as letting go. As ceasing her battle with chaos. But edgework is not a mountaineer’s willingness to fall to his death, or a BASE jumper jumping off without a parchute. Edgeworkers report being turned on by the risk of dying and be willing to take this risk. To embrace evil and beg for death is another story; it is not play, but suicide.

We could interpret Vanessa’s death is as martyrdom (like her favorite hero, Joan of Arc), yet this seems out of character compared to Vanessa’s earlier persistance in fighting. Fans complained about the season’s development and, for instance, found it wrong to introduce the action-heroine-like vampire hunter Catriona. A female blogger and film critic commented, “It felt like they [wanted] to introduce a character who could physically protect Vanessa, because Vanessa wasn’t a fighter like that, but Vanessa has her own powers. She doesn’t need a ninja/fencer lady.”[14] Or we could understand Vanessa’s death as an act of free will. Show creator Logan described her death as an expression of control: “[T]he show is about empowerment, and she controls her own destiny. To me, whether you’re male, female, gay, straight, whatever – you control your destiny. You make the choices that are right for your morality and your ethics and your heart, and that’s what she does. She owns her life, and at the end of the day, she owns her death” (my emphasis, Ryan June 20, 2016). Vanessa’s death, then, can be seen as a depressed woman giving in to darkness (suicide), martyrdom (sacrificing her life, like Joan of Arc, for her faith), or free will (freely choosing Dracula/evil as her destiny).

Let us return to why people do edgework. Sociologists explain edgework as an escape from the conventions of a safe and boring life, as a rebellion against social conventions, and as a way to create personal transformation and character development. It is, on the one hand, protest against an over-socialized society which does not let people express their true selves, and, on the other hand, a self-development which late-modern society encourages. Drawing from Beck’s theory of the risk society and Foucault’s thinking of the “govermentality” of bodies, Lyng points to edgework as a paradox intrinsic to modern society where “the risk society and governmentality perspectives may capture two dimensions of the same social order in the late modern period. The paradox of people being both pushed and pulled to edgework practices by opposing institutional imperatives reflects complexities in the contemporary experience of risk that we are just beginning to appreciate” (2005 10). When society is overwhelmingly organized, it leaves little space for our “I,” and edgework re-connects edgeworkers to their “I,” a self where they feel more real and more in control than in their ordinary life.

By choosing death, Vanessa is – if we take Logan’s words at face value – more in control of her own life than by living a “normal” life. She “owns” her death. However, in the line of my argument to see her engagement with darkness as edgework, this is not edgework because it crosses from the edge into the abyss. Arguably, at the moment of her death Vanessa changes from being an edgeworker to becoming a martyr, and perhaps not even a martyr, since a martyr is disinterested. Instead, Vanessa has become Dracula’s bride, Mother of Evil, and Queen of darkness. Perhaps, in fact, Vanessa has become a slave to her nature; her darkness is no longer for her to battle, but to give in and fall victim to. In which case Vanessa is, like the evil queens in fairy tales, destined to die. Or, like Mme Bovary, destined to die by her author’s hand.

Conclusion: Choosing Death and Doing Edgework

Playful engagement with death is expressed from the start of Penny Dreadful when Lyle recognizes the writings on the skin of a dead vampire as text from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Lyle explains to Malcolm that if the Gods Amun-Ra and Amunet were joined, “Amunet would become the Mother of Evil. All light would end and the world would live in darkness,” and adds, “I would not tell Miss Ives this” (1.02). Vanessa is about to become the center of an edgework show where the mythesized nuclear family is a temptation to be rejected and a love story must be played out as tragedy. Her life journey is that of the edgeworker, reaching for the next challenge, and her self-work is that of the risk-taker.

Let us, in conclusion, step back and view edgework in a bigger perspective. Empirical studies show that leisure edgework is popular in rich Western nations and done overwhelmingly by white middle-class men. Today, five per cent of BASE jumpers and twenty per cent of skydivers are female.[15] Laurendeau points out that “willingness to place one’s body ‘in harm’s way’ is . . . one of the central ways in which sport acts as a proving ground for masculinity” (296). Laurendeau underlines that gender is not static, but constructed in our choice of edgework and in how we perform edgework. Risk-regimes are lived as gender-regimes, and play with danger constructs risk as gendered. When men do edgework, they construct a masculinity sustained by society’s meta-narrative about gender. Edgework is a revolt, but this revolt is individualistic, independent, and requires a skilled, fit, and strong body. In short, edgework requires the body of the quintessential male Western hero.

When women do edgework they, too, embody gendered risk-narratives, but without the support of the meta-narrative. Thus, when Rob Hall died in 1996 on Mount Everest he was portrayed a hero in Everest and noone held against him that he left behind a pregnant wife. In contrast, when elite mountaineer Alison Hargreaves died on a climb in 1995, she was described as “an errant, unthinking mother” (Laurendeau 296). When people do edgework, they choose what edge to work and how to work it and, moreover, are viewed differently by society. So, too, with fiction characters. It is only fair to say that several characters in Penny Dreadful risk their lives to battle darkness, however, they embody different scripts, different emotions, and have different journeys. Ethan is cursed with lycantrophy, but not raped by the Devil, and when he cries, his are tears of love, not of traumatic pain like Vanessa’s. Joan of Arc might have sung when she burnt, but Vanessa cries when she dies. Joan and Vanessa’s fates are not parallel. Joan is triumphant and Vanessa heartbroken. Ethan becomes the hero destined to kill his beloved who has surrendered to dark forces (the story also of Wolverine and Jean in X-Men: The Last Stand [2006, Brett Ratner, 2006]). In fact, Ethan’s struggle is the edgework of season three’s finale, and he says, “I have stood at the very edge, I have looked into the abyss. Had I taken one more step I would have fallen. But no matter how far I ran away from God, he was still waiting ahead” (3.09).

Vanessa’s life journey illustrates that women are ambiguously able to take the stage as protagonists in fantastic fiction, yet remain restricted by gendered tropes and scripts that limit their range of action. If Vanessa illustrates a “politics of self-expression, identity and power,” (Owen 1989 240) hers is a conflicted journey. Writing about the Victorian female medium, Alex Owen describes how women then negotiated roles as medium, female hysteric, and wife, daughter, or independent woman, the latter by far the most dangerous. “We are left with the unresolved question of what is meant by a feminist politics, and the problem of how we deal with the crucial issues of power and strategy,” Owen concludes (1989 240). Fantastic fiction can take women beyond the limits of the natural world, however, not beyond a male author’s decision to end their lives or, from a production perspective, beyond the rules of commercial television. If Vanessa’s edgework was too dark for a mainstream audience, she remained popular with critics and fans who protested her end. “I’m done with Showtime. I cancelled my subscription last Friday,” a fan wrote and another lamented, “you let her die in that evil. Shame on you for sure when you could have given it an other ending [sic].”[16]

Vanessa did not manage to extend her edge so she could continue edgework, however, in afterlife she demonstrates that women, too, can work the edge. And if her creator and production company killed her, she is not their property. She belongs to us, the fans. We can use Vanessa to feel and work on our own emotions and life journeys. Thus, “Vanessa, c’est nous.”

Works Cited

Apter, Michael J.. Danger: Our Quest for Excitement. Kindle edition. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007.

Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. “Gender Schema Theory: A Cognitive Account of Sex Typing,” Psychological Review, vol. 88, no. 4, 1981, pp. 354-364.

Cameron, Deborah “Evolution, Language and the Battle of the Sexes: A Feminist Linguist Encounters Evolutionary Psychology,” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 30, no. 86, 2015, pp. 351-358

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.

Fletcher, Robert. “Living on the Edge: The Appeal of Risk Sports for the Professional Middle Class.” Sociology of Sport Journal, vol. 25, 2008, pp. 310-330.

Forsey, Caitlin. Men on the Edge: Taking Risks and Doing Gender Among BASE Jumpers. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2012.

“Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy: Penny Dreadful Wasn’t Supposed to End This Way.” N.n. Wired, 2 July 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/07/geeks-guide-penny-dreadful/ Accessed 1 Feb. 2017.

Henderson, Lizanne. Witchcraft and Folk Belief in the Age of Enlightenment Scotland, 1670-1740. eBook. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Howell, Amanda and Lucy Baker. “Mapping the Demimonde: The Narrative Spaces and Places of Penny Dreadful.” E-journal Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, February, 2017.

Laurendeau, Jason. “‘Gendered Risk Regimes’: A Theoretical Consideration of Edgework and Gender.” Sociology of Sport Journal, vol. 25, no. 3, Sep. 2008, pp. 293-309.

Lois, Jennifer. “Peaks and Valleys: The Gendered Emotional Culture of Edgework.” Gender and Society, vol. 15, no. 3, June 2001, pp. 381-406.

Lyng, Stephen. “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 95, no. 4, January 1990, pp. 851-886.

Lyng, Stephen, ed. Edgework: The Sociology of Risk-Taking. eBook. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in late Victorian England. Cambridge: Virago Press, 1989.

Ryan, Maureen. “‘Penny Dreadful’ Creator Talks Season 3, Vanessa’s Demons and the American West.” Variety, 4 May 2016, http://variety.com/2016/tv/features/penny-dreadful-john-logan-interview-1201766847/ Accessed 12 Jan. 2017.

Ryan, Maureen. “Creator John Logan and Showtime’s David Nevins on the Decision to End ‘Penny Dreadful’.” Variety, 20 June 2016, http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/penny-dreadful-ending-season-3-series-finale-creator-interview-john-logan-david-nevins-1201798946/ Accessed 12 Jan. 2017.

Schubart, Rikke Mastering Fear: Women, Emotions, and Contemporary Horror. NY: Bloomsbury, 2017, forthcoming.

Notes

[1] For angry fans, see online comments to Ryan, “On the Decision to End ‘Penny Dreadful’.” For speculations as to the show’s end as commercial rather than creator-decided, see ”Penny Dreadful Wasn’t Supposed to End This Way,” https://www.wired.com/2016/07/geeks-guide-penny-dreadful/ Accessed 30 Jan. 2017.

[2] For complex storytelling, see Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: NYU Press, 2015); see also Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 58, Fall 2006, pp. 29-40; for fantastic women as complex characters see the introduction in Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik, eds., Women of Ice and Fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements (NY: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 1-17.

[3] For the experience of fiction emotions as real and suspension of belief (not disbelief), see Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 101; for emotions as real, see also Rikke Schubart, Mastering Fear: Women, Emotions, and Contemporary Horror (NY: Bloomsbury, 2017, forthcoming). For discussions of emotions and thoughts in horror, see also the classic study by Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[4] See the introduction in Grodal, Embodied Visions, pp. 3-21.

[5] For horror as mental play fighting and imaginary edgework see Schubart, Mastering Fear.

[6] For an excellent discussion of playing with failure in computer games, see Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), especially chapter 2, “The Paradox of Failure and the Paradox of Tragedy,” pp. 33-45.

[7] For gender schema see Sandra Lipsitz Bem in references; for gender as a negative stereotype see Margaret Shih, Todd L. Pittinsky and Nalini Ambady, “Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance,” Psychological Science, vol. 10, no. 1, Jan. 1999, pp. 80-83; for an excellent study of negative stereotypes, see Claude M. Steele, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us. Kindle edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010).

[8] On Vanessa and the medium, see Amanda Howell and Lucy Baker, “Mapping the Demimonde: The Narrative Spaces and Places of Penny Dreadful” in this issue of e-journal Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media, 2017. See also Alex Owen, The Darkened Room in the references.

[9] The linguistic Deborah Cameron describes the meta-narrative as, “a larger framework into which research findings on male-female differences can be slotted, whether their immediate subject is the differing behavior of men and women in shopping malls or their differing rates of involvement in violent crime . . .” (353). For the meta-narrative, see Deborah Cameron, “Evolution, Language and the Battle of the Sexes: A Feminist Linguist Encounters Evolutionary Psychology,” Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 30, no. 86, 2015, pp. 351-358.

[10] More recent examples of the middle-aged and youth-obsessed witch are Stardust (2007, Matthew Vaughn), Enchanted (2007, Kevin Lima), and The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan).

[11] On the mythologization on sex difference in leadership, see Judith Baxter, The Language of Female Leadership eBook (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 68.

[12] See the documentary Sunshine Superman (2014, Marah Strauch) about Carl Boenish. The failed jump was a repetition of a jump performed successfully the day before, where Boenish and his wife set a world record by jumping off the highest point in BASE jumping history.

[13] Dorian is an exception, because although the character is sexualized, his escapades are not edgework in Penny Dreadful.

[14] Female blogger and film critic Theresa DeLucci quoted in “Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

[15] Five per cent is from Forsey, Men on the Edge, p. 58. Twenty per cent is from Naomi Bolton, “History of Women in Skydiving,” http://www.dropzone.com/news/General/History_of_Women_in_Skydiving_1017.html. Accessed 30 Jan. 2017.

[16] Fans’ comments to the series finale are available online at http://tvseriesfinale.com/tv-show/penny-dreadful-canceled-no-season-four-season-three-end-showtime-series/. Accessed 30 Jan. 2017.

Bio: Associate Professor Rikke Schubart teaches at the Institute for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research explores emotions, gender, and genre in film and television. She has published many studies of horror and action films and about women in films. She also writes fiction. Her books include, Super Bitches and Action Babes: The Female Hero in Popular Cinema, 1970-2006 (McFarland, 2007) and Women of Ice and Fire: Game of Thrones and Multiple Media Engagements (Bloomsbury, 2016).

~ Stephanie Green

Abstract: Techniques such as recursive adaptation, narrative hybridity and ensemble performance are now a tradition in fantasy screen drama, in both cinematic and serial mode, from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) to Agents of Shield (2013), in which several popular culture sources are woven together to create a new evocation of themes, stories and identities. Set in late-Victorian London, the richly awarded TV series Penny Dreadful (2014) alludes to a host of precursor texts from nineteenth century Gothic and sensation fiction. Among the many interesting elements of this finely crafted series is the ways in which it recasts minor or supporting female characters from these stories as powerful leading figures. This discussion will discuss the portrayal of Lily Frankenstein, a crucial minor character, to show how Penny Dreadful portrays transformative female identity through a Gothic redefinition of the late-Victorian New Woman.

She bleeds but doesn’t die. She hungers but cannot love. She seeks companionship but rejects the companion for whom she was made. If the original Victor Frankenstein’s creature was a new Adam forged by early nineteenth century science at the hand of human hubris, monstrously self-liberated from his maker’s control, in Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky 2014–2016) his second successful creation is the recreated Lilith, a ‘new’ woman who asserts; “Never again will I kneel to any man. Now they shall kneel to me” (3.02). As this paper will show, the portrayal of Lily Frankenstein is one among several instances of how Penny Dreadful attempts to portray transformative female identity through a Gothic redefinition of the late-Victorian New Woman.

The New Narrative

Set against a fantastical portrait of late-Victorian London, the richly awarded TV series Penny Dreadful alludes to a host of precursor texts from nineteenth century Gothic and sensation fiction, which remain popular in transmedia forms, from film and television drama to video games. The series features themes and characters that appeared in the ‘penny dreadful’ novelettes of the day, referring directly to techniques of the popular fiction form to which its title refers; such as recursive adaptation, reinvention and narrative hybridity. Among the many fiction sources for the series are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1814), Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1847), Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1895) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). By the third season, extended plot elements, new settings and characters reflect the changing generic flavours of fantasy narrative from the Gothic through to the influence of late nineteenth century American Western frontier fiction. With the Gothic, the Western has been fertile ground for transmedia adaptation, from the novels by James Fenimoore Cooper and Zane Grey to American to mid twentieth century DC and Marvel Western Comics, a form of popular fiction that has been similarly adaptable to new contexts, tastes and social conditions, able to absorb and reanimate already popular story lines.

First published in the 1830s, ‘penny dreadfuls’ were the trash fiction of the nineteenth century, thrillers full of shock, adventure and awe. A penny dreadful installment was cheap at one penny and the story line ever-evolving until the readership faltered (Springhall). Authors cribbed story lines, plagiarized plots and cobbled story lines together from diverse sources and recycled popular stock characters endlessly. Moralists railed against them as having a pernicious influence on the young (Chisolm), but they continued to flourish. According to the celebrated nineteenth century journalist George Sala, who read them voraciously as a boy, they offered

a world of dormant peerages, of murderous baronets, and ladies of title addicted to study of toxicology, of gypsies and brigand-chiefs, men with masks and women with daggers, of stolen children, withered hags, heartless gamesters, nefarious roues, foreign princesses, Jesuit fathers, grave-diggers, resurrection-men, lunatics, and ghosts (148).

Produced by Sam Mendes and John Logan, the television series Penny Dreadful exploits many of the traditional narrative techniques used in Victorian Gothic fiction, reframed as film noir. This is far from a deferential costume drama or a literary recreation. Penny Dreadful takes familiar characters such as Dr Frankenstein and his Creature, the ageless Dorian Gray, and various witches, vampires and monsters and uses them to evoke the idea of a haunted past as a background against which to tell new stories of a world that is, like our own, on the brink of unimaginable change. The settings, costumes, historical references and cultural tropes situate the story largely within the British Fin de Siècle, a period associated with literary and artistic experimentation, sexual decadence, progressivism and the popularization of women’s rights movements. The characters of Penny Dreadful do not think or behave in the same way or hold the same beliefs as their fictional forebears once did, but they represent familiar social and cultural identities and positions from that time. Lee and King regard them as “cultural memes that continue to live in contemporary culture” (2015 n.p.). In various ways, the series engages actively with the discursive elements of its source materials, using the ideas and experiences of the characters as symbolic strands of influence for reweaving meaning and narrative.

Techniques such as recursive adaptation, hybridity and ensemble performance are well established in fantasy screen drama, in both cinematic and serial mode, from 1940s Universal films, to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Stephen Norrington, 2003) to Agents of Shield (Billy Gierhart et al., 2013), in which several popular culture sources are woven together to create a new incarnation of longstanding themes, stories and identities. Hutcheon remarks that we “retell – and show again and interact anew with – stories over and over; in the process, they change with each repetition, and yet they are recognizably the same” (Hutcheon 177). As this paper argues, however, Penny Dreadful takes up key ideas that emerged with force during late-Victorian culture and connects them in ways that reveal underlying connections and disconnections. The evolving genre of transmedia fantasy fiction enables the series to create a new account of lasting issues and anxieties in Western culture; including the use of excessive power, mechanistic control over human creativity, the dangers of enchantment, the sufferings of the Other, and the struggle for women to transcend bodily and domestic confinement as autonomous rational beings.

Recasting Women

Among the many interesting elements of this finely crafted series is the way in which it recasts minor or supporting female characters from these stories as powerful leading figures.  Its depiction of women is broadly coloured by historical conditions in which women lived during the late Victorian period. The series alludes to feminist advocacy for changing social roles at a time when women were excluded from universities, politics and the professions (3.01). Murphy has argued with reference to late Victorian fiction that the figure of the New Woman emerges at moments of cultural anxiety and change (2016). Negotiations over changing attitudes to women went hand in hand with changes in other attitudes and beliefs. Acceptance of investigative science was just beginning to influence public discourse, as reflected in Penny Dreadful in the public lectures on evolution conducted by Christian Camargo’s attractively sinister appearance as Count Dracula in the guise of research scientist Dr Sweet during Season Three. New ways of thinking about selfhood were also becoming important, as is conveyed by the appearance of the character of Dr Seward (Patti LuPone) in Season Three: a revisioning of the character from Stoker’s Dracula. Just as the pages of the historical penny dreadful were peopled with clichés and archetypes – super heroes, mad scientists, magicians, vanquishers and villains – the characters of Penny Dreadful are larger than life, with magical or extra-natural powers that are sometimes beyond their own control. Its women are shown as capable agents of transformation, unconstrained by conventional Victorian social limitations; self-determined, articulate, desiring autonomy, or longevity or control. More interesting than their mere potential to nurture and harm, theirs is nevertheless a compromised power, inflected with darkness, uncertainty and threat.

Lily Frankenstein (Billie Piper), Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Evelyn Poole (Helen McCory) and Hecate Poole (Sarah Greene) are – or become – able to wreak supernatural forces, with powers to defend themselves and/or to control and recruit others. Their potency is, at the same time, limited by their relationship with more powerful male figures in their lives, whether human or inhuman. The witch or ‘nightcomer’ Evelyn Poole aligns herself with a mysterious Demon to achieve longevity and personal power but is destroyed by Vanessa and Ethan (2.09 and 2.10). Although in Seasons One and Two, Vanessa resists dominance by the same satanic figure who seeks to embrace and control her powers, she is consistently depicted as a figure of suffering resistance and recovery. In Season Three her promise as the Gothic New Woman is revealed when she begins to embrace her desire for Dr Sweet aka Count Dracula. She is ultimately portrayed as an acquiescent victim, rather than as an effectual force for good in the world (3.09). The character in Penny Dreadful which most clearly emblematises the Gothic New Woman is Lily Frankenstein. Only Lily expresses her desire for control in political terms: she rejects the idealism of the late-Victorian suffrage campaigners seeking equality with men, to assert a claim for a different kind of female power, literally the creation of a super race of women warriors bent on destroying the male “grasp” (3.01). Lily seizes agency and acts decisively to change her own circumstances and potentially those of others. Hers is a vision of a future in which female dominance is all and, as a force of destruction, she too is doomed to fail.

Lily’s references to a female super race are far from anachronistic post-hoc invention. Just at the time that the New Woman discourse emerged, the feminist Theosophist Frances Swiney was developing her vision of woman’s “cosmic progression” towards supreme being eclipsing all differences between men and women (Robb). Swiney turned the tables on the patriarchal establishment of evolutionary theory, as she saw it, to argue that biologically the male was a defective variant of the human species. A “preacher of the superiority of women” she argued for a new natural law based on the supremacy of woman (Gates 152-157). By the early twentieth century the idea that a woman, or a man, could be ‘made’ better, stronger, brighter, took hold in a new way as the ideas of Francis Galton found fruition in the work of the early twentienth century eugenistic movement with the notion of fostering human evolution through selective breeding (Galton 17 May 1904) – whose ugly implications would be realised with Hitlerian Facism. Lily offers a twist to this narrative – the spawning of a race of superwomen – that fails to bear fruit as the series draws to an end in the last episodes of Season Three and Lily is overcome by the rising power of institutionalised pseudo-science, represented by Dr Jekyll.

Unlike precursor accounts of the female ‘bride’ of Frankenstein’s monster – such as the short-lived female mate in Frankenstein (Shelley 1814/1980) or James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) who are pieced together from ragged human shards and then destroyed due to the reproductive implications of her survival – Lily is portrayed as a new product of industrial manufacture. She is created in the first episode of Season Two by a mixture of design and serendipity as Victor Frankenstein lines up his human-making machine to receive the lightning strike that will animate dead flesh and bones. Whereas his first attempts at animation were stitched together from body parts, this new female creature is made from the body of a whole woman, the consumptive street girl Brona Croft whom we first meet as the lover of toothsome American adventurer Ethan Chandler in Season One (1.02). The scene of Lily’s birth captures the shadow of industrial Gothic that is cast across the series; a dusty dungeon, poorly lit and crammed with gigantic machines of ugly purpose. Here, the birth of Lily reflects the theme of unnatural disorder produced by mechanical technology. As Parker observes, with reference to some of the key texts upon which Penny Dreadful draws – Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde and Dracula – nineteenth century industrial Gothic examines the “eruption of horrific fantasy into the everyday” in order to examine the vision of a brutally mechanized nineteenth century urban society with its institutions of overwhelming cruelty and power (156-159). This theme is further explored in the series, in its various scenes of female entrapment, for example when Vanessa Ives is locked in a Victorian madhouse because of her visions (1.05 and 3.04).

Lily rises from the forge of mechanical creation in perfect form, beautiful, seemingly innocent and born anew without memories of her past, and – as we discover – virtually impervious to destruction. She is manufactured by Victor to supply his first created progeny, the scarred Creature, with a mate to mitigate the burden of his loneliness: a classic allusion to the original story. But Lily recoils from the Creature, her promised husband, who calls himself John Clare after the self-made Romantic poet (1793––1864). Although she models herself on her maker, adopting his accent and politeness, gradually she does remember the brutality and suffering of her past life (2.07). Even more importantly, she realises that she now has supreme strength and power. Creed argues that women in screen drama are confronting not because they are monstrously other but because they are already fully formed and fearfully empowered (Creed 6). The female monster appears as a compelling figure of supernatural power partly because she is already beyond being human. In masculine terms, Creed observes, with reference to Lurie and Williams, the uncastrated female is a ‘freak’ of nature whose sexuality threatens to overwhelm and destroy (Creed 6). Created by men, Lily refuses the modesty of covert sexuality and demands to be seen. She rejects her maker, Victor, and the romantic submission that John Clare proffers. Instead she is bent on revenge against man for the abuse suffered during her former life and conquest over the weak human race, and to make a new and pitiless world. She thus reconfigures the fin de siècle persona of the proto-modern New Woman to embody the far more forceful Gothic New Woman and become the harbinger of a world without men.

The Troubling New Woman

The New Woman of the 1890s emerged in the late nineteenth century as a trope of social and cultural change, one that was at once a sign of new possibility and of frightening upheaval. Within the public sphere, as women’s voices spoke up for female interests and concerns (Ledger 1-10), the New Woman appeared in literary and popular magazines, in novels, short fiction, essays and journalistic discussions of women’s role in society. Often the subject of cartoons, in the popular imagination of the day she was at first the mannish, bespectacled bluestocking, neglectful of wifely duty that was frequently pilloried in Punch (Shapiro) and eventually the sporty, bicycling Amazon (Heilmann 34-35). Her identity went hand in hand with the emergence of the women’s movement, from the 1860s through to late nineteenth century public campaigns for women’s property rights, suffrage, access to higher education, the professions and fashions that freed women from corsetry constraint (Purvis). She reflected the rising importance of female authorship and authority within a fast expanding publishing industry (Palmer ; Easley), and gave a face to the public voice for women’s interests.

On the one hand the New Woman was a triumphal figure – heralding in the new age of female opportunity and independence – and on the other she was regarded by the fierce purveyors of tradition as ‘improper’ and an easy target for marginalisation, fear and ridicule (Pykett). The New Woman sought education, independence and a role in public life. Emerging as the century drew to a close, the New Woman was enmeshed with the popular discourse of the ‘new’ and the cult of decadence with which Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book writers and artists were associated (Ledger 94). Characterised as those who “abandoned the traditional sphere to lead more complex lives” (Nelson  6), she was thus regarded a threat to moral codes and social order, a harbinger of the decay of the phalanx of nineteenth century social institutions that loomed so large in the Victorian Gothic imagination. Wilde’s play Salome and the illustrations for its first published British edition by Aubrey Beardsley encapsulated the terrors and desires surrounded this vision of perfidious feminine desire as she reaches for the dripping severed head of John the Baptist with greedily parted lips. As the Gothic New Woman Lily reanimates Salome’s ambition for revenge and like her is a spectacular object of desire with a voracious appetite to author her own ‘master’ narrative.

References to the New Woman began to emerge in the British and American press at a time when Victorian Gothic sensation fiction, intimations of sexual decadence, urban serial killers and other threats, as the demands of women for access to education and suffrage were characterised by some popular journals. As the satirical periodical Punch so often reminded its readers in various ways, “stern women are alarming” (20 July 1895). At this same moment the promisingly modern character of Mina Harker became famous as Dracula’s victim in Stoker’s classic novel (1897), to be safely settled into domestic matrimony by its conclusion. As Djikstra remarks, “what better surrogates could there be to take the role of the executioner in man’s masochistic fancies?” (374-75). Badged with feminist eccentricity, she was easy for some to dismiss as the inconsequential irritant of a dying century. The New Woman  would have her legacy, however, in the next generation of women and their supporters, including the so-called Sufragettes, who lobbied successfully on the London streets, in town halls and in parliament for access to education and the suffrage (Holton).

The emergence of the Gothic New Woman can be seen as closely associated with the rise of mass print media consumption at the nineteenth century fin de siècle: a sustained cultural moment which contained the “transformation of the generic materials of the text into a motley fusion of speech and writing, recording and transcribing, image and typography” (Wicke  470). Although modes of narrative consumption have evolved and hybridised radically since that time, undoubtedly the diversification and delivery of dramatised narrative via small screen media has expanded its mass audience to achieve a global reach. The metaphor of consumption has special relevance in relation to the Gothic New Woman, as both an embodied figure of gendered difference and a subject of popular culture. The depiction of the late Victorian woman as voracious in her impetus for education, political and professional autonomy, shows the extent to which she was aligned in the public imagination with the personae of female destruction, the Eves, Liliths, Salomes and harpies of western cultural tradition (Djikstra). In Penny Dreadful, however, the New Woman is Gothic not simply because she is associated with destruction but because she is associated with unending change.

The connections between monstrosity, modernity, sexuality and the representation of the New Woman in fin de siècle Britain were rehearsed in the novels of Sarah Grand, George Meredith, Olive Schreiner, Kate Chopin, and in Beardsley’s illustrations of Salome (Cunningham ; Showalter ; Murphy). She had her precursors in the monstrous femme fatale figures of the 1860s and 1870s, Braddon’s Lady Audley, Rosetti’s rampant Lilith with their “outward purity and inward lust” and “seeming self-sufficiency” (Djikstra 374). Reforging her new persona in the furnace of revenge, Lily Frankenstein adopts elements of the New Woman as a figure of triumphal independence and conquest. As the Gothic New Woman, she is darkly independent, seductively resistant to domination, brilliantly articulate, refusing the rules of femininity and feminism in favour of power’s bloodier embrace (2.07). She casts off the demure Victorian mantle of wifehood provided by Victor Frankenstein who dresses her in high necked lace gowns and constraining corsets. In this role she prepares his food and lives as his secret companion. Her wide eyes, girlish smiles and modest glances reinforce his insistence that she is too unformed and ‘unready’ for marriage to the Creature. Even when she turns to him sexually (2.06) Frankenstein refuses the idea that her desire can be for anyone or anything but himself. By now, however, Lily is awake to the memory of her former self. Stifled by the small dwelling where Frankenstein keeps her she seeks a life of her own, drawn back to the night life of the flaneur that she explores with the charming Dorian Gray (2.07). What appears to be a burgeoning story of Lily’s double life as wife and lover is radically and violently overturned when, instead of returning to her wifely abode, she seduces a man at a public house and strangles him in his bed at the moment of climax, a private orgy of sex and death which reveals her new found strength and aggression, contrasts markedly with the oppressive experiences of her previous consumptive existence and unleashes her drive to power (2.07).

Much more than the harbinger of doomful desire or the awkward figure of alterity that Punch depicted when it lampooned the bluestocking women who fought for female suffrage and higher education, Lily Frankenstein is, rather, a new new woman; a Gothic redefinition of the late Victorian persona. Consider the moment when a group of suffrage advocates marches into the London square where Lily and Justine sit at a café. Lily dismisses their efforts as,

so awfully clamorous, all this marching around in public and waving placards. It’s not it. How do you accomplish anything in this life? By craft. By stealth. By poison. By the throat… quietly slit in the dead of the night (3.03).

Remade by men, now Lily remakes herself. She rejects their attempts to romanticise their desire for her and dismisses the bargain they have between them about the purpose of her existence. As she says to John Clare at a key moment: “Shall we wander the pastures and recite your fucking poetry to the fucking cows? You are blind… like all other men” (2:08).

As indicated, Lily is not the only character in Penny Dreadful with whom the theme of new womanist horror resonates: the glamorous sufferings of Vanessa Ives, the dark predations of the witches and the mysterious Dr Seward all reflect the idea of the transformative feminine. But where Vanessa seeks to triumph over supernatural evil and liberate herself from the clutches of the dark master, Lily wants much more than a life of adventure and desire. She is determined to gain control, to establish a new race of superbeings and to destroy all that has gone before. In seeking visceral revenge for the harm she and other women have suffered, however, she takes her ambitions one step too far. She is drawn to Dorian Gray and his search to transcend the dullness of eternal existence through extreme excitation (2:08); but this will be a fatal alliance for her enterprise.

Lily is one of several female characters in the series who might be said to represent the persona of the Gothic New Woman, among them Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) and Hecate Poole (Sarah Greene) but the term applies particularly to Lily because her portrayal unites key tropes of the Victorian fin de siècle: decadent, embodiment of the new age of modern machine manufacture, advocate of visceral female empowerment, above all, a force of change. As a remade woman her reincarnation as Lily – the flower of rebirth – gives her the supernatural strength needed to accomplish dominance over the men who exploited her in her previous life as the prostitute Brona Croft. She is also uncanny because having been created by man she can never die in the usual way, or go back to existence as her former living self. She can only move forward with history, subject to its material conditions just as she also attempts to reshape them. In this sense she seems more human than humanity itself.

Being Supreme

Although the series Penny Dreadful is set at the turn of the nineteenth century in London, Lily Frankenstein’s liberty is not the progressive freedom espoused by late Victorian suffrage reformists. She seeks a far more radical form of transformation. Although created by Victor and the Creature to become ‘a proper woman’, and to serve their own interests, as Season Two draws to its conclusion, it is clear that Lily is determined to choose her own future. In a speech that poses a frightening manifesto for the risen dead, she poses a question to Victor’s first progeny, John Clare, “why do we exist? Why have we been chosen?” and after her first revenge killing (2.07) answers her own question;

We were created to rule, my love. And the blood of mankind will water our garden. We are the conquerors. We are the pure blood. We are steel and sinew, both. We are the next thousand years. We are the dead. (2.08)

At a devastatingly triumphant moment, the final scene of Season Two (2.10) Lily Frankenstein (Billy Piper) dances with Dorian Gray in the ballroom of his London mansion: her exquisite late Victorian gown swings out as the couple circles the room, blood dripping down their backs, leaving a red stream in their wake. As Victor Frankenstein stares at the dancers, appalled by the spectacle of deathless horror, Lily tells Dorian “let him live with what he”s created…, a monster race.”  Together they anticipate a new horror narrative of extreme supremacy (2.10). Two episodes into Season Three and the female monster has become a Superwoman ready to bathe the world in blood to achieve Liberty: the “bitch that must be bedded on a mattress of corpses” (2.08). But the partnership with Dorian also leads Lily to the limit of her possibility. Her greatest obstacle as a force for resistance is, however, that she remains throughout an object of male desire.

The discussion is underpinned by the work of feminist cultural theorists who have interrogated the spectacular representation of the feminine in screen narrative as at once desirable and terrifying. Mulvey observes that the representation of the female body has been framed by “the mythology of the feminine … in which the woman became a phantasm and a symptom” (Mulvey  xiii). Lily is created by Victor Frankenstein precisely out of male desire for possession of a feminine fantasy. Even before her creation, Lily is desired by John Clare as an ideal romantic companion with whom to share long walks and poetic thoughts (2.01). Once she is ‘born’, she is desired by her maker, Victor, who betrays his pact with John Clare (2.08 and 2.09). Victor attempts to clothe Lily in girlish Victorian lace dresses and a tight laced corset so that she can barely breathe (2.04). He tells her that women “wear corsets not to exert themselves. What would they do if they did?” She replies that “they’d take over the world” (2.04). After she leaves Victor, she is desired by Dorian Gray as a source of excitation and shared enterprise. Ultimately, however, Dorian sets her up and then betrays her just as the other figures of male power in her life have done.

In her discussion of the female revenant in fin de siècle writing, Liggins observes that it is often the excessive potency and fluidity of the female body that poses “the greatest threat” (40). For the men who have used Lily, both before and after her reanimation, it is “the spectacle of the aestheticized but horrific dead body of the female” (42) that appears most monstrous. One of the show’s most consistent tropes is its depiction of the human body as pushed to excess – always on the edge of being broken. In various ways, the female characters struggle with the attempt to seek empowerment, whether caused by enchantment, witches and demons that seek to inhabit their minds, or by institutional incursions and restraints. In the scenes in which Vanessa Ives is trapped in one way or another by possession, hallucination, or memory, her thin white body is marked brutally by her sufferings, and her shadow eyes are particularly haunting. Vanessa alludes to her position as a woman whose truth is unable to be heard (3.04); instead she is subjected to the institutionalised discipline of silence and conformity. She survives through mental determination, the force of will over physical suffering, whereas Lily Frankenstein chooses action through violent games and gestures of dominance.

A woman whose own body has been used by countless men and then reanimated in the service of male scientific achievement, Lily inverts the terms in which her body has been put to use, and sets out to instigate a ‘new’ technique of her own. Invoking Salome, she commissions her followers to bring her the severed hand of every man in London they can find (3:06). The focus on spectacular embodiment in particular shows this, for example as Lily Frankenstein first gains control of her own circumstances, testing her physical strength and psychological power and then seizing control over others through seduction and brutality.

These experiments in body technique can be seen, in part, as a manifestation of the hybrid transmedia environment that screen adaptations of the Fantastic mode entail. As characters are remade, recontextualised, relocated, so is their potential for narrative evolution. However, the attempts of Penny Dreadful to remake classic stories of the past and thus to revision the potentialities of its characters for the future are in practice constrained, both by the financial and ideological imperatives of mass screen entertainment. Although powerful, the women of Penny Dreadful repeatedly face visible and invisible forces greater than themselves. The confluence between an ethos of advanced mechanical production and scientific inquiry with the presence of vast and fearsome ancient forces serve to remind the viewer of the shifting dangers and precarious conditions with which its central characters confront the world, making and unmaking themselves as agents, destroyers and victims of powerful forces around them. The stories of Lily, Vanessa and the other female characters in this series seem to be little more than adaptive ways of telling the old story in which the Gothic New Woman must be contained. At the same time, they promise more: whether through sacrifice, determination, strategy, or even through emotional connection. At the end of Season Three, in episode eight Lily reveals her heartbreaking story to Frankenstein and he releases her from the threat of Jekyll’s numbing serum. Like the first Frankenstein’s monster she escapes the grip of her maker, offering the hope of return.

Women of the Future

What possibilities, then, do Lily and Penny Dreadful suggest for the future stories of woman in screen narrative? Schubart argues that the identity of the contemporary female screen hero must be regarded as complex and conflicted (113). Screen drama post-feminism portrays women who seek power and express desire, and refuse to sacrifice a sense of purpose for romance. With Vanessa Ives, several of the female characters in Penny Dreadful show us a similar reframing of the late nineteenth century female persona, as women in possession of autonomy, desire and a personal or supernatural potency that enables them to overcome resistance to male authority and societal expectation. It is the character of Lily Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein’s second successful progeny, created by the dark mysteries of nineteenth century industrial manufacture (2.01), whom speaks most strongly to these themes. A ‘made’ woman who seeks self-determination, she reframes the cultural trope of the nineteenth century new woman for a frighteningly modernist, revolutionary purpose – to seize control of the means of [human] production and take revenge on her exploiters. That she is also portrayed as a mother in her former life further complicates her significance.

Creed argues that “most horror films also construct a border between what Kristeva refers to as ‘the clean and proper body’ and the abject body, or the body which has lost its form” (11). Owing its ‘debt to nature’, the maternal female body is inherently abject as a site of conflicted desire. “The corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border which has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled” (Kristeva qtd in Oliver 231). As a ‘made’ woman, Lily is a supreme object of male desire, a commodity exchanged between men. However, Lily reauthors her own narrative and asserts her subjective will, transcending her status of object to achieve self-determination. Lily’s radical imperative is to overcome the ultimate abjection – death – to show the possibility of a race of women who are able to reproduce without reliance on male or female sexual organs and thus threaten to overtake the means of production. Arguably, she thus promises to overcome the idea of the abject mother, promising a new race of superwomen. Lily is in one sense the epitome of the “body without organs” (Deleuze & Guattari 9-10), in her impulse to appear wholly purposeful yet to break down convention and the mechanism of production and to proliferate her kind. Yet, she is also something more: she is the Gothic New Woman, a figure of triumph and change while yet subjected to abuse and repression, just as the historical new women of the late Victorian era were pilloried for their claims to equality. As the extreme conventionalists of the 1880s asserted, women were (or should be) slaves to their bodies. Their lot in life was to reproduce and to serve the family, not to pursue educational or political aims. Some went so far as to claim that gaining an education would irrevocably change a woman’s body, destroying her ‘femininity’:

it would not be one whit more absurd to affirm that the antlers of the stag, the human beard, and the cock’s comb are effects of education; or that, by putting a girl to the same education as a boy, the female generative organize might be transformed into male organs … women whose ovaries and uterus remain from some cause in a state of complete inaction, approach the forms and habits of men. While woman preserves her sex she will necessarily be feebler than man, and, having her special bodily and mental characters, will have to a certain extent her own sphere of activity; where she has become thoroughly masculine in nature, or hermaphrodite in mind, – when, in fact, she has pretty well divested herself of her sex, – then she may take his ground, and do his work; but she will have lost her feminine attractions, and probably also her chief feminine functions (Maudesley 32).

The series’ writer John Logan commented that the context of the late Victorian period was important for the writing and development of the series Penny Dreadful, with its emerging discourse of Darwinian evolution and its questions about what it mean to be human;

the fact that they were on a cusp of a modern age is why I chose to set it then. I think we’re on the cusp of the same thing now, & it’s frightening & there’s dissonance & there’s excitement about uncharted waters (Radich).

Although Penny Dreadful is undoubtedly a contemporary remaking of Victorian Gothic tropes, its characters and stories speak to a host of twenty-first century screen narratives and perspectives. One of the most intriguing things about Lily as the Gothic New Woman is the way that she brings together themes and tropes currently at work in our contemporary global culture: from the popularization of the revenant or zombie in entertainment culture, and questions of reproductive and ‘nutri-genetic’ control to the framing and production of human tissue for material manufacture at a time when mass bodily destruction has never been greater.

The theme of mass production and consumption has particular resonances with the television series Penny Dreadful. Here layers of historicity are appropriated for compelling story-telling, using techniques such as recursive adaptation to produce contemporary iterations of familiar stories and archetypal characters that resurface time and time again in popular mass consumption. The series offers all the accoutrements of historicist fin de siècle proto-modernity to create a Gothic fantasy account of a past time and place in which women seek to transcend their female limits, whether through self-determination and/or supernatural transformation. Yet, the overriding narrative driver for each of the female characters of Penny Dreadful is uncertainty. They must each face the possibility that what they make of themselves is fuel for the work of others who seek to exploit them. Made by others, yet determined in her goals to become more than her design, Lily’s ambition is, above all, to seize control of the narrative that defines her. Her enterprise is ambitious but seemingly unachievable as the series draws to a close. In the last four episodes of the third and last season, Lily is captured and drugged by Dr Jekyll and Dorian Gray and chained to a chair in the laboratory of the Victorian Lunatic Asylum where Jekyll performs his experiments on the unfortunate.

The confluence between an ethos of advanced mechanical production and scientific inquiry with the presence of vast and fearsome ancient forces serve to remind the viewer of the shifting dangers and precarious conditions with which its central characters confront the world, making and unmaking themselves as agents, destroyers and victims of power. The ambitious predator of a new age of transformation, Lily Frankenstein is the artificially revivified female monster who promises a superhuman triumph: to possess autonomy and power and overcome injustice against women. Like the Promethean creature of Shelley’s original novel (1814/1980), she also reminds us of our own frail humanity, the sacrifice of visionary ideas to petty short-sighted cruelties and the dangers of striving for monstrous perfection.

Works Cited

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Bio: Dr. Stephanie Green is Deputy Head of School (Learning & Teaching) and Program Director for the Graduate Certificate in Creative and Professional Writing program, in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University. Her academic books and journal articles include biography, studies in creative writing, literary and screen culture. Her most recent major publication is The Public Lives of Charlotte and Marie Stopes (2013). As a practicing creative writer, she has published fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction and cultural journalism. Her work has appeared in journals such as Axon, TEXT, Griffith Review, Overland and in a variety of anthologies and collections.