Untitled

Hiermit erkläre ich an Eides statt, dass ich diese Masterarbeit selbstständig verfasst und keine
anderen als die angegebenen Quellen und Hilfsmittel benutzt habe. Die Stellen meiner Arbeit, die
dem Wortlaut oder dem Sinn nach anderen Werken und Quellen, einschließlich der Quellen aus
dem Internet, entnommen sind, habe ich in jedem Fall unter Angabe der Quelle als Entlehnung
kenntlich gemacht. Dasselbe gilt sinngemäß für Tabellen, Karten und Abbildungen. Diese Arbeit
habe ich in gleicher oder ähnlicher Form oder auszugsweise nicht im Rahmen einer anderen
Prüfung eingereicht.
Ich versichere zudem, dass der Text der elektronischen Fassung mit dem Text der vorgelegten
Druckfassung identisch ist.
Köln, 12.01.2015
Friederike Danebrock
Contents
1 Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Outlining the project: A Penny Dreadful for the 21st century........................................... 1
1.2 The pleasures of story: A note on terminology................................................................ 5
2 “A taste in a certain kind of literature” – Penny Dreadful and 19th century’s “bad
books”.............................................................................................................................. 9
2.1 Corruptive reading – penny fiction of the 19th century.................................................... 9
2.2 Seductive reading – the pleasures of serial fiction............................................................ 14
2.3 “You have to risk rejection” – seduction and transgression in Penny Dreadful............ 16
3 “Creatures of perpetual resurrection” – fiction, repetition, variation............................. 20
3.1 Frankenstein’s creature on stage – London’s Grand Guignol in Penny Dreadful.......... 21
3.2 Textual reiteration: intertextuality, adaptation, narrative narcissism.............................. 23
3.3 Fiction as resurrection: repetition and renewal.................................................................. 28
4 “In trouble with Dad” – Transgressive fathers, transgressive daughters in Penny
Dreadful.......................................................................................................................... 31
4.1 “The season of Peter’s inadequate beard” – The sins of the father... ......................... 33
4.2 ...will be visited upon the daughter...................................................................................... 43
5 “A kind of fluctuating rhythm” – serial narration beyond the pleasure principle.......... 51
5.1 “Freud’s own masterplot” – Beyond the Pleasure Principle and (serial) narrative.............. 51
5.2 (Beyond) The pleasure principle: pleasure, repetition, (dis)comfort.............................. 59
5.3 To be continued: narrative, understanding, affect........................................................... 63
Works cited......................................................................................................................... 67
1 Introduction
1.1 Outlining the project: A Penny Dreadful for the 21st century
Set in Victorian London of 1891, the series Penny Dreadful introduces in its first season central
characters Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) and Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), who are
fighting their way through a so-called demimonde of supernatural beings and events to rescue
Mina, Sir Malcolm’s daughter and Vanessa’s best friend, from the grasp of a vampire. Mina
Harker and the vampire, well-known from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, are not the only literary
figures the audience meets along the way: in fact, Vanessa and Sir Malcom also encounter Van
Helsing (from the same text), Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and his creature (from
Mary Shelley’s work), as well as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney). Vanessa appears
to have supernatural abilities, being in touch with the spirit world – a condition that frequently
puts her in the position of psychiatric patient and hysteric, as her trances are regarded as a
medical condition (or, alternatively, as a sensational social event). Only towards the end of
season 1 and after Vanessa has undergone various facets of psychiatric treatment do her
companions definitively settle on a supernatural explanation for her state, rather than
considering her mentally ill or a clever actress. Over the course of the first season, the series
follows Vanessa and Sir Malcolm as they recruit allies for their mission of rescuing Mina,
Victor Frankenstein as he gets in trouble with his creature, the creature as he gets in trouble at
London’s Grand Guignol theatre, Vanessa as she gets in trouble with Dorian Gray (and vice
versa), and several other narrative strands concerning the hunt for the vampiric kidnapper and
the embroilments the characters get involved in. Written by John Logan (also known for
example for his screenplays for Gladiator, Aviator or the latest James Bond film, Skyfall), the
first season, containing 8 episodes, ran on Showtime in May and June 2014; the second
season, containing 10 episodes, is announced for 2015.
Penny Dreadful is one – though certainly not the only – of the numerous widely
watched, read, and discussed serial fictions to emerge during the past years which offers
particularly productive links to a general discussion of the serial format itself. We find these
links in the way in which the series negotiates its own genealogy as popular serial (horror or
Gothic) fiction, a tendency that becomes apparent already in the series’ title Penny Dreadful, but
which we can also detect in the narrative’s more general engagement with the art of fiction as
such, through its employment of literary classics as well as the motif of the theatre. These
characteristics clearly point to a self-conscious and self-reflective interest of the series.1 There
Frank Kelleter attests to “serial aesthetics” a distinct capacity for self-reflection (die “ausgeprägte[] Fähigkeit serieller
Ästhetik, Variationen durch Autoreflexion zu erzeugen”; Kelleter 32) and talks about the “knowledge” the serial format
1
1
is also a strong psychoanalytic background and perspective detectable in Penny Dreadful. The
series uses psychoanalysis – the concepts, issues and ways of reasoning it provides – as one of
its main resources for characters, their background and relations to each other. The main
aspects of Penny Dreadful to be discussed are thus: the purpose and effect of the label it uses
(“penny dreadful”), its techniques of doubling and repetition, and its psychoanalytical
perspective on individual character.
By using the label “penny dreadful,” that is by naming itself after the lurid serial horror
stories popular in the 19th century, the series styles itself as trashy, but hard to resist, and thus
as a ‘guilty pleasure’ for its audience to give in to. As chapter 2 will discuss, this conceptual
link between fiction and forbidden cravings is common in 19th century perspectives on the
allure of penny fiction, but can also be detected in contemporary discussion of the appeal of
serial narratives. Penny Dreadful presents itself as guilty pleasure not only by invoking a specific
tradition of narrative fiction but also by casting all of its main characters as either giving in to
illicit cravings or tempting others to do so, thus making the depiction of seduction and
transgression its trademark.
Penny Dreadful operates repetitively on several levels. It is a repetitive narrative in the
sense that it adapts literary classics and thus repeats figures and other elements from its source
materials. At the same time, it marks all fiction as repetitive by definition: in relation to the
theatre performances at the Grand Guignol that we witness in the series, it emphasises the
ability of fiction to continually ‘resurrect,’ that is, to repeat its figures. As chapter 3 will argue,
we are dealing here not with repetition as exact replication, but with a form of repetition that
allows similarity as well as difference. As it turns out, there is good reason to examine this kind
of repetition more closely, as it is also characteristic of the serial format in general.
The framework used in Penny Dreadful to explain the characters to us, in particular as
their back stories are revealed, is decidedly psychoanalytic. Psychoanalysis is thus presented to
us as a resource for understanding the development of human individuals. The idea of
people’s “hidden depths” (which for example Vanessa claims Ethan to have, see PD 1
00:26:39) 2 pervades the series and is clearly related to the concept of the unconscious, yet
there are also more specific parallels to particular psychoanalytic terms such as hysteria, which
are discussed in more detail in chapter 4.
It is, quite appropriately, a text by Sigmund Freud that has been claimed to contain the
“masterplot” (Brooks 90) of all narrative. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud presents a
has “of its own rules and conditions” (das “Wissen serieller Formen um ihre eigenen Regeln und Bedingungen”; 12).
2 All quotes from the series and the production blogs, which are added as special features to the DVD, are taken
from: Penny Dreadful. Season 1. Created by John Logan. Produced by John Logan, Pippa Harris, and Sam Mendes.
Perf. Eva Green, Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett, Harry Treadaway, Reeve Carney. DVD. Showtime, 2014. All
text references to the series will be given in the text in the following format: (PD, episode number, time code) or
(PD, production blog number and title, time code).
2
comprehensive psychoanalytic understanding of life as such, prompted by the question of the
psychical purposes of repetition and the link between repetition and the pleasure principle. We
thus find that Freud’s text treats precisely those aspects that stand out so characteristically
about Penny Dreadful: it is a psychoanalytic approach concerned with repetition and (guilty)
pleasure (considering that pleasure and guilt are seldom far from each other in psychoanalytic
thinking). It is the phenomenon of repetition that leads Freud to claim that life (psychic and
organic) is determined both by the pleasure principle and by the death drive, and that it is
through the opposing influences of libidinal or life drives on the one and the death drive on
the other hand that the lengthy course of human life comes about: the life drives urging for
prolongation, the death drive urging for closure, the living organism adhering to both by
continually proceeding towards death – but on the longest route possible. These
characteristics are what causes Peter Brooks to examine Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a
“template for narrative plot” (Rickard and Schweizer 106), as he finds them to determine
narrative just as they determine organic life according to Freud: narrative lives off the desire
that its beginning initiates: the desire to go on reading (or watching) to see how events will
turn out. Paradoxically, this forward-moving impulse is, ultimately, a desire for reaching the
closure of the narrative – we want to go on reading (or watching) because we want to know
how the story ends. We reach this ending, however, not on the shortest route possible, but on
the longest, or at least on a route that delays our arrival substantially: every story demands at
least some complications, twists and turns, or else there would be little to narrate. Our interest
and investment in narrative thus stems from the desire for prolongation as well as the desire
for closure, and the bulk of the narrative comes into being precisely because the interaction of
the two motivates us to take a detour – to delay, but not to lose interest in the ending.
Chapter 5 will examine this Freudian “masterplot” and its implications for serial
narrative. It stands to reason that the dynamic force that narrative generates becomes
particularly effective when we deal with serial stories, as they highlight precisely those
functions that engender this force in the first place: serial narrative emphasises the delay, the
postponement of the ending in its rhythm of interruption and return and thus leaves a lot of
room for the opposed forces of continuance and closure to play out their ‘conflict.’ In the
alternation between interruption and return, both the desire to proceed to the end and the
desire to do part of it all over again come to the fore – at work in all narrative, but not always
this obviously.3
Kelleter’s analysis makes clear that even though the opportunities for a careful dramaturgy of closure are limited
for popular serial narratives – they have to continue as long as the audience is interested, and to end as soon as
the audience loses interest – the ending still has an important role to play for the dynamics of the series: series
conceptualise themselves in anticipation of an ending and thus a unity that is always one step ahead and out of
reach (“Was … als Dynamik seriellen Erzählens bezeichnet wird, hat viel damit zu tun, wie jede Serie zwischen einer vermuteten
3
3
In Freud’s account, a return to death, to the equilibrium of the inanimate is a profound
impulse that is part of the make-up of all living beings, death being “grounded in the very
essence of organic life” – a notion that he refers to as “discomfiting,” opposed as it is to
“people’s customary way of seeing things” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 175-6). We might
locate the appeal of serial narratives exclusively in their endlessness, the fact that they provide
“an endless dream world in which we can keep losing ourselves” (Frye 169). If we adopt
Brooks’ Freudian model for narrative, though, we have to conclude that the appeal of serial
stories lies in their cessation as well as in their duration. A narrative death drive – is this a
notion as “discomfiting” as Freud’s actual death drive?
It certainly has disconcerting potential, as will be discussed in chapter 5, since it
exposes the paradoxical demands that we make on narrative entertainment: it suggests that we
want to immerse ourselves in narrative, but also, simultaneously, want to bereave ourselves of
this source of enjoyment. There seems to be a kind of ‘gratification of loss’ provided by serial
narrative that disturbs distinctions between ‘easy’ and ‘diffcult’ texts – those providing
affirmation and gratification, and those challenging our demands by not fulfilling them or
showing them to be unfulfillable. There might be many and more serial narratives around
whose contents appear stereotyped and intellectually unchallenging to us but which
nevertheless demand us to enter into a complex affective pattern of rushing-forward/pullingback that can, if we look closely, reveal to us that many texts are able to fulfill functions only
seemingly opposed: they can give us what we want and deny it at the same time; they can make
us think and enjoy ourselves simultaneously.
While more clearly needs to be said on the matter than can be included in this paper,
the last parts of chapter 5 present, as an outlook, some preliminary suggestions concerning the
consequences of assuming serial narratives to be such paradoxical ‘hybrids’: gratifying and
disturbing, offering plenty and causing lack. One issue that definitely requires further
discussion is the question of the transformation of the serial format in connection to current
broadcasting trends. Do fictions like Netflix’s House of Cards (2013-present), of which
complete seasons were released simultaneously, circumvent the pattern of interruption and
return? Does this eliminate the “discomfiting” element from popular serial narrative?
In the examination of Penny Dreadful as showcasing the workings of serial narrative,
some aspects of the series have to be left aside, such as the issue of technological and
scientific development of the late 19th century, an issue that resurfaces several times in the
series, mainly but not only in connection to Frankenstein’s attempts to create human life from
Gesamtstruktur und ihren konkreten Einzelkomponenten oszilliert. Anders als werkästhetisch orientierte Produktions- und
Rezeptionspraxen entwerfen sich populäre Serien auf ein stetig entlagertes Ganzes hin, das den Zusammenhang seiner Teile
ermöglicht, ohne ihn zu dominieren”; Kelleter 27, emphasis in original).
4
technological means. Also, Vanessa’s condition will in this paper receive more attention as
medical condition than as supernatural occurrence. Even though the audience will guess from
very early on that we are actually dealing with the latter in Vanessa’s case – the supernatural is,
after all, firmly established as part of Penny Dreadful’s fictional universe right from the
beginning – the characters treat Vanessa as psychiatrical case for a very long time. As late as
episode 7, the characters come up with psychological explanations for her state, and it is only
towards the end of this second-to-last episode that we hear a character say that Vanessa is
possessed. Even though in the specific case of Vanessa’s ‘hysteria,’ the psychological point of
view turns out to be mistaken, it is nevertheless, due to the opinions of the characters,
remarkably prominent.
The particular narrative examined here is a television series, that is, a narrative told
through an audio-visual medium and intended for commercial success. This is currently a
highly successful and popular, probably the most popular, way to deliver serial narratives. The
approach presented in this paper, however, gives more weight to the story than to the medial
conditions under which it is conveyed. The desire to know how the story ends, the sudden
impression of lack or disappointment when the narrative is interrupted: these occur for the
written word just as well as for the moving picture. The following account therefore hopefully
does not preclude productive applications and adjustments to other forms of serial narrative
or artwork; it is, however, limited to those occurrences of seriality that narrate some kind of
story – that is, to those that make us want to know ‘how things will continue’ in the next
instalment and how they will turn out in the end.
1.2 The pleasures of story: A note on terminology
This analysis frequently relies on an intuitive, largely pretheoretical understanding of ‘story.’
While this leads to a somewhat fuzzy concept of the object of study, this need not be regarded
as a disadvantage: a phenomenon as widespread, historically and culturally, as telling stories
can easily suffer from hermetic definitions of its forms or purposes. In any case, however, it is
clear that ‘story’ is closely related to ‘narrative’ and ‘plot,’ two terms at least as difficult to
handle (as Marie-Laure Ryan puts it, “few words have enjoyed so much use and suffered so
much abuse as narrative” in the past fifteen years; see 22). ‘Plot’ is understood by Peter Brooks
as “an embracing concept for the design and intention of narrative [...] a structuring operation
elicited by, and made necessary by, those meanings that develop through succession and time”
(12), where the latter (“meanings that develop through succession and time”) corresponds to
‘narrative’: “narratives raison d’être [,] is of and in time [...] messages that are developed
through temporal succession [...] a form of understanding and explanation” (10). This
5
corresponds to the Aristotelian understanding of plot, or mythos, as “the combination of the
incidents, or things done in the story” (qtd. in Brooks 10). Plots, however, “are not simply
organizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goal-oriented and forward-moving”
(Brooks 12). Thus in Brooks’ account it is plot which incites our interest in the story, and
narrative which enables us to understand it. This view is compatible with a common
theoretical understanding of narrative as an account of individuated existents undergoing (at
least some) non-habitual transformations, so that a sequence of events is established with a
temporal dimension and a causal (or some other kind of) link between the single events.4
To some degree however, the use of the term ‘narrative’ is, in this context, also
supposed to derive naturally from the consequences of understanding Freud’s model, as
Brooks does, as a model of narrative texts: narrative is understood here as both the activity
that forms and the artefact which emerges from the force field of interaction between the
opposing forces of continuance and closure. Accordingly, serial narrative – this is the
understanding that this paper would like to arrive at – would be an activity/artefact drawing
particularly strongly on this force field, thus developing distinctive dynamics which determine
the pace and shape of the plot (for instance plot twists, cliffhangers, and side-stories in tune
with the structure of episodes and seasons) and exert a remarkable attraction on its audience.
In order to be able to do so, a serial narrative text anticipates and facilitates, as Frank Kelleter
puts it, its own simultaneous repetition and innovation in a text not yet existing (see 26).
Seriality is less a matter of dividing a work into segments, but, as Sabine Sielke has argued,
more a matter of evolution, as elements ‘grow’ out of preceding elements, so that seriality is a
kind of “remembering forward” (Sielke 390) operating recursively.5
If we can “conceive of the reading of plot as a form of desire that carries us forward,
onward, through the text” (Brooks 37), how are we to conceptualise this “desire” that
motivates our reading (and viewing) activity? Brooks usefully sums up the spirit of the
Freudian understanding of desire:
Freud’s concept of sexuality, and of libido […] is really based on the notion that
human desire comes into being from its very origin predicated on lack,
severance and prohibition. As determined by the “law” of “castration,” desire is
always inhabited by lack, and by its very nature never fulfillable, always driven by
4
A similar definition can for example be found in Ryan (see 28-31). Then again, this kind of understanding calls
for an explication of the category of ‘event,’ which is again no straightforward matter (see, for example, Hühn)
and goes to show the complications entailed in definitions of terms such as ‘story’ which appear, intuitively and
pretheoretically, easy to apply.
5 This concerns those serial narratives that present overarching plot lines from one instalment to the next more
directly than those which close off their story lines in one episode (that is, it concerns serials more directly than
series). However, as it appears that currently, most serial narratives have at least a few overarching lines of action,
the distinction is of reduced importance.
6
unconscious scenarios of impossible fulfillment. (Rickard and Schweizer 109)6
To desire thus means to wish for a unity that one can never have (because ‘what we really
want’ is both unknown and forbidden to us): desire is a state of lack. Serial narrative with its
alternation of interruption and return, gratification and loss, and its emphasis on postponing
the ending certainly manages particularly well the “narrative desire” (Brooks 37) evoked by
plot, as it imposes upon its audience a particularly pronounced state of lack which it, as it
were, ‘challenges’ us to endure in waiting for the next instalment, or waiting through all
instalments for the final resolution. If chapter 5 claims an ‘affective challenge’ of this kind for
serial narrative, then the term ‘affect’ is supposed to include visceral and emotional
components alike.7 The final outlook of this paper further proposes that serial narrative
supports the view that the effect of stories can transcend conceptual boundaries not only
between bodily and emotional reaction, but also between emotional and intellectual
engagement.
Roland Barthes describes how frequently, “pleasure is championed against
intellectuality … the old reactionary myth of heart against head, sensation against reasoning,
(warm) ‘life’ against (cold) ‘abstraction” or how, in an opposite move, “knowledge, method,
commitment, combat, are drawn up against ‘mere delectation’” (22-3) – in both cases, affect
(heart, sensation, warmth, delectation) ending up as opposed to thought and aligned with
pleasure. “On both sides” we find “this peculiar idea that pleasure is simple, which is why it is
championed or disdained” (23; emphasis in original). The idea of ‘pleasure’ will in fact turn up
repeatedly in the following account – in connection to seduction, transgression, guilt, and
repetition, in connection to Freud’s pleasure principle (which is charged with keeping tension
in the psyche as low as possible), and finally, as technical term from Barthes’ dichotomy of
pleasure versus bliss (plaisir versus jouissance).8 Even for Barthes, however, ‘pleasure’ – as well
as its counterpart bliss – as term and as concept stays slippery: “terminologically, there is
6
The interview that John S. Rickard and Harold Schweizer conduct with Peter Brooks is a very useful addition to
Brooks’ Reading for the Plot, a work which will become of central concern in chapter 5. Among other things,
Brooks is asked in this interview to comment on his psychoanalytical model of narrative and its supposed
universality in the context of feminist and postcolonial studies. The questions that Brooks’ approach in Reading for
the Plot provokes automatically become relevant for this paper’s approach as well: how universal can we assume
this understanding of the ‘psychology of narrative’ to be, culturally, geographically, historically? As valid as these
questions are, their scope is too broad to discuss them in this paper. Brooks’ interview is, however, a good
starting point in this regard.
7 In fact, some approaches in affect theory insist on interlocking the two dimensions (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
for example, “records the intuition that a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions ...
[a] double meaning, tactile plus emotional”; 17) even while others insist on keeping emotion and affect separate
(for a preliminary overview, see for example Burgess 290-7). It appears only appropriate to assume an
interconnection of this kind for the effect of narrative fiction, given that it may provoke all kinds of engagement,
from sharing a character’s grief or fear to having sweaty palms and biting one’s nails in suspense.
8 See Richard Howard’s “Note on the Text” of Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text, which highlights the pitfalls of
translating Barthes’ terminology into English.
7
always a vacillation – I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision;
[…] the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible” (4). In this
paper, except where pleasure is used explicitly as technical term (as Freud’s ‘reduction of
excitation’ or Barthes ‘text of pleasure’ as ‘comforting text avoiding disturbance’), it is
supposed to denote that resolutely individual experience, familiar but hardly describable, that
Barthes refers to when he employs pleasure as general term rather than as opposition to the
discomfort of bliss – thus supporting Barthes’ view that pleasure is anything but ‘simple’ or
‘easy’:
Pleasure […] is not a naïve residue; it does not depend on a logic of
understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and
asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any ideolect.
Something neuter? It is obvious that the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not
because it is immoral but because it is atopic. (23; emphasis in orginal)
8
2 “A taste in a certain kind of literature” – Penny Dreadful and 19th
century’s “bad books”
No sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to jump on you:
the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman: futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either idle or vain, a class
notion or an illusion.9
It’s fine it is, somebody’s killed every week, and it’s only a penny.10
Victor Frankenstein is animating dead bodies in a back room of his squalid apartment, driven
by the desire for absolute knowledge; Ethan Chandler is haunted by a mysterious past;
Malcolm Murray cannot quit the search for the source of the Nile, even at the price of the
lives of his comrades; and Vanessa Ives lets down her guard with Dorian Gray and promptly
falls under the spell of demonic forces. Everybody has their secret, Penny Dreadful seems to tell
us, and somehow they are all dirty. Seduction and transgression are welded together
conceptually by the series in order to seduce the audience to give in to the temptations of
‘forbidden’ fiction – fiction that is lurid in subject matter and low in moral standards, as the
label “penny dreadful” signalises. Resonating with discourses past and present that discuss the
attracting force fiction can exercise on its audience, Penny Dreadful characterises ‘seduction’ as
the livelihood of serial entertainment.
2.1 Corruptive reading – penny fiction of the 19th century
Even though, as one reviewer points out, John Logan’s television series is a “million dollar”
rather than a penny dreadful, given the “lavish budget and look of the show” (Lawson n.p.),
there is good reason not to downplay the connection that the show’s title establishes. As
source materials go, the series does in fact make use of what have become literary classics
rather than actual 19th century penny instalments, inspiring one critic to call Penny Dreadful a
“bookish thriller for the post-literate age” (Lawson n.p.).
11
These ‘highbrow’ tendencies,
however, are complemented by a taste for the excessive and trashy. Even while citing the
literary canon as inspiration, Logan also claims to present a contemporary version of 19th
century’s popular horror fiction: “It was the first time that the mass media was able to bring
horror into people’s living rooms,” Logan explains in answer to the question “What is a Penny
Dreadful?” (PD Production blog #1). “And I thought, that’s exactly what I’m doing with
Barthes 57.
Wild Boys of London 1864-6, qtd. in Springhall 172.
11 In addition to Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and Dracula, Logan lists as his literary inspiration texts such as The
Island of Doctor Moreau, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The War of the Worlds (see PD Production
blog #2 “Literary Roots” 00:00:00-20).
9
10
9
television. What I’m writing is a penny dreadful” (00:01:32-45). Reviews pick up on this
combination of sophisticated aspirations and vulgarity: “it’s all excessive, and sometimes the
excess becomes repellent” (Bianco n.p.); “as long as the show continues to balance the overthe-top with the subtle, it should be worth the ride” (Genzlinger n.p.); or, commenting on
Brona’s obscure pornographic encounter with Dorian Gray in the second episode:
At times, the dialogue of Penny Dreadful crosses over into the Truly Dreadful.
When Gray tells the drifter, ‘I’ve never fucked a dying creature,’ you can almost
hear Oscar Wilde clawing his way out of his grave. Which may well be the plot
of Episode 3. (Lidz n.p.)
By labelling itself ‘penny fiction,’ the series appears to announce in a quasi-warning the ‘lower’
parts in its mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, thus drawing legitimisation of its more
sensationalist and effect-seeking moments from its connection to a tradition of narrative
fiction that is known for its “highy stylized ‘sex and violence’” themes (see Springhall 161).
The “mass market for cheap reading matter, created in the 1830s through weekly serial
publication” and “accelerated by the new rotary printing presses, cheap manufactured paper,
improved transport and rising literacy” saw the proliferation of stories which featured “an
accessible version of gothic for the English common reader” (ibid. 160). George W.M.
Reynolds’ highly successful works from the 1840s and 50s, for example, set in shady
metropolitan milieus, exchange “city houses for Gothic castles, slum cellars for dungeons, and
financial extortioners for the evil count or mad monk” (Springhall 162). Penny fictions such as
The Wild Boys of London follow the adventures of a gang of street urchins while what Springhall
calls ‘women-in-peril-dreadfuls’ depict lower-class damsels in distress harassed by aristocratic
villains (see 163-6).
Sentiments concerning these publications were strong, in particular as the texts were
aimed at and read predominantly by young adults – not only by lower-class adolescents,
moreover, but just as well by those of the middle and lower middle-classes (see Springhall
173). Journalist James Greenwood, in his 1869 collection The Seven Curses of London, which
discusses what Greenwood regards as the main problem areas of the city’s social life
(neglected children, juvenile thieves, and the like), includes a lengthy discussion of several
penny fictions:
[...] I have before me half a dozen of these penny weekly numbers of “thrilling
romance,” addressed to boys, and circulated entirely among them – and girls. [...]
If I am asked, Is the poison each of these papers contains so cunningly disguised
10
and mixed with harmless-seeming ingredients, that a boy of shrewd intelligence
and decent mind might be betrayed by its insidious seductiveness? (101-2)
And even though Greenwood concludes that those fictions are in fact not “subtle” (102)
enough to ensnare this hypothetical adolescent, the case is not finished for him yet. He goes
on to discuss in detail the contents of the examples he has collected, pointing out that the
publisher’s “first and foremost reliance is on lewdness,” with the “glorification of robbers and
cut-throats” being “subservient” to this focus (102), concluding:
Which of us can say that his children are safe from the contamination? [...] Let us
for a moment picture to ourselves our fright and bewilderment if we discovered
that our little boys were feasting off this deadly fruit in the secrecy of their
chambers! [...] Granted, my dear sir, that your young Jack, or my twelve-years-old
Robert, have minds too pure either to seek out or crave after literature of the sort
in question, but not unfrequently it is found without seeking. It is a contagious
disease, just as cholera and typhus and the plague are contagious [...]. (104-6).12
How much of Greenwood’s reasoning concerning penny fiction as an actual encourager of
juvenile lower-class crime in Victorian London is accurate might be debatable – he is,
however, not alone in his concerns: his contemporary Henry Mayhew (by some critics referred
to as a “pioneer of city ethnography,” see the chapter of this title in Linder) in his London
Labour and the London Poor investigations from the 1850s and 60s lists penny fiction as one of
the causes of the “vagabondism of the young” (alongside rough treatment by parents and
authoritative institutions):
The causes from which the vagabondism of the young indirectly proceeds are:–
[...] 3. Bad books, which act like the bad companions in depraving the taste, and
teaching the youth to consider that approvable which to all rightly constituted
minds is morally loathsome. 4. Bad amusements – as penny-theatres, where the
scenes and characters described in the bad books are represented in still more
attractive form. Mr. Ainsworth’s “Bookwood,” with Dick Turpin “in his habit as
he lived in,” is now in the course of being performed nightly at one of the East12
Greenwood does not only criticise the contents of the fictions and their effects, but also the various incentives
publishers make use of to advance their publications on the market, such as promising daggers as prizes to those
who buy the most numbers (“The daring length these open encouragers of boy highwaymen and Tyburn Dicks
will go to serve their villainous ends is amazing”; 102).
11
end saloons. (379)
Examples such as these illustrate how the “pleasure press” (Mountjoy qtd. in Jacobs 325) was
conceived of as both powerful and corruptive – Greenwood might claim that ‘decent’
adolescents are resistant to its lures but cannot help returning to the frightful scenario of them
giving in to temptation, and while Mayhew’s words might be more sober, he refers to the
same combination of attraction and corruption.
The vogue of penny fiction constitutes an important aspect in the historical
development of commercially successful serial fiction. The value of “macabre and exciting
fair” (Springhall 160) ensured success on a market of fiction which had only recently begun to
thrive on the combined effects of advancements in the printing industry13 and the discovery of
the appeal of serial fiction proper.14 From the late 17th and early 18th centuries onwards, partissue publication had served to reduce production costs and increase availability and thus been
conditioned from its beginnings by economical considerations. Early serial forms of
publication did not concern fiction exclusively but non-fiction content to at least the same
degree. In the first half of the 19th century, however, notably with the publishing of Charles
Dicken’s The Pickwick Papers in 1836, part-issue publication had become a method used
specifically for the publishing of original fiction (see Hagedorn 29). Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères
de Paris in the early 1840s was, according to Roger Hagedorn, a significant influence on British
penny fiction and also the main initiator of an international heyday of serial fiction published
in newspapers and magazines that lasted up until World War I (see 30-1; also Springhall 162).
In the developments that followed throughout the 20th century (from newspaper instalments
to comic strip serials to film, then radio, then television serials, as Hagedorn’s article describes
in detail), serial fiction has always been intricately linked to economic considerations and has
very often served as marketing instrument precisely because of its potential, feared by Mayhew
and contemporaries, to exert such a remarkable pull on its audience (“when media industries
decide to target a new sector of the population in order to expand their market share, they
have consistently turned to serials as a solution”; Hagedorn 41). In recent years, there has been
another turn in the development of serial fiction, in particular on television: “Since the turn of
the century serial television drama has become increasingly associated with quality” as notable
television shows “are used to entice an international ‘quality’ audience to invest in longrunning serialized dramas, flattering their intelligence and distinctive taste codes” (Dhoest 1).
Such as the advent of machine presses to replace hand pressmen (see Jacobs 336).
London of the mid-19th century in particular stands out in this context due to its remarkably lively print
culture (see Jabos 329).
13
14
12
Interestingly, Penny Dreadful in fact connects to both traditions: television as
manipulative entertainment as well as television’s new role of providing intellectually
stimulating fare (and reviving literary classics – Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Picture of Dorian
Gray are available in Showtime’s online store in the “Penny Dreadful Collection Book
Bundle”). A certain ‘clash of cultures’ is already detectable, however, in the context of 19th
century penny entertainment – both in printed stories as well as equivalent theatrical
productions (as mentioned for example by Mayhew, see above) – which frequently, as Edward
Jacobs details, was understood as a form of satirical street culture by those who rejected
industrial literacy and the associated institutions and ways of living. As “the historical
coincidence in England between industrialism and popular education gave the English poor at
large good reason” around the middle of the 19th century “to perceive industrial work and
school knowledge as two parts of an inhumane, tyrannical culture that was being forced on
them from above” and taught them lessons “ludicrously remote from the students’ culture,
offering them such ‘useful’ facts as the subclasses of tropical birds,” literacy, associated with
“‘disciplinary’ institutions, such as court, workhouse, police, and government,” became
something to be mocked (Jacobs 327-8). Street culture thus “aggressively [...] transformed
printed literature into a mockery of industrial literacy” (ibid. 334) by, for example, combining
tragic and ‘slapstick’ moments in disregard of literary conventions: penny theatre audiences,
says Jacobs, “demanded deepest tragedy and broadest farce, at the same time” so that “farce
subvert[ed] the effects of the more serious, ‘literary’ mode, laying bare its rhetorical nature”
(333; emphasis in original).
Penny Dreadful clearly does not concern itself with matters of class struggle; however it
does oscillate between, as reviews say, the “over-the-top and the subtle,” the sensationalist
effect of scenes of exorcism and erotic encounters on the one and iconic moments of literary
history such as Victor Frankenstein’s struggle with his creature on the other.15 If the penny
dreadfuls of the 19th century contained “self-parodying dialogue” such as John Springhall gives
us from Wild Boys of London (in which one character explains his preference for penny fiction
because “somebody’s killed every week, and it’s only a penny” and is promptly rebuked by the
hero because he does not read “proper books,” see Springhall 172), so a particular idea of
certain traditions of fictional entertainment – a tradition in which the mixture of the
flamboyant and the self-reflective is quite common – clearly informs Penny Dreadful, even if the
content of the series is not explicitly modelled on concrete elements from actual 19th century
Many contemporary reactions to Wilde’s Dorian Gray, however, were in fact not unsimilar in tone to those
concerning penny bloods, judging the novel as frivolous, morally corruptive and/or of little artistic value (see
Drew ix-x). With this text in particular, Penny Dreadful has found source material which combines the air of ‘high
literary art’ with that of ‘scandalous piece of writing,’ corresponding to the ambivalence between ludicrous and
sophisticated that the series invests in.
15
13
penny fiction. When during one of his short appearances Van Helsing points to a shelf full of
penny bloods – which he allegedly collects for the sake of the few grains of truth concerning
supernatural beings that they supposedly contain – referring to the activities of “a small
percentage of the reading public with a taste in a certain kind of literature” (PD 6 00:29:10-20),
the remark is easily read as an ambiguous statement concerning not only historical penny
fiction but also Penny Dreadful itself. With regard to its namesake, the series appears to take up
a cultural formation rather than actual fictional content – it is the exploitation of the idea of
‘guilty pleasure’ that connects Penny Dreadful to its 19th century ancestors, rather than an
adaptation of plots or characters from specific stories.
2.2 Seductive reading – the pleasures of serial fiction
When reviews greeted the television debut of Penny Dreadful by exclaiming, “Oh dear; another
show to add to our ever-growing guilty-pleasure lists” (Genzlinger n.p.), they seamlessly
inserted themselves into a general discourse surrounding serial narratives. Blogs, feature pages
and pieces of advice for writers and journalists appear to capitalise on the idea of the seductive
force of serial narrative, making generous use of an erotically charged vocabulary in their
discussion of serial fiction, emphasising either the concept of anticipation or that of
indulgence (depending, apparently, on their own opinion of trends in viewing habits). Some
(claiming that “we sometimes choose delay over immediacy – and small portions over all-youcan-eat binges”) talk about “readers passionately demanding to learn how the story ends,” “the
anticipatory pleasure that can come from the simple act of waiting” or “the agony of time-bound
suspense, leaving you waiting and wanting” (Garber n.p.; emphasis added); they refer to the
“delicious sense of enforced waiting” and deliver statements such as “to me, the three most
beautiful words in the English language are not ‘I love you.’ They are ‘to be continued’”
(French n.p.). Others employ the metaphor of ‘binge watching’ with all the allusions to
cheerfully sinful gluttony that the expression implies: “It’s time to loosen your belt, open wide
and gorge on episode after episode at one sitting, like competitive eaters downing hot dogs at
the July 4 Nathan’s contest” or, alternatively, “you need to slow down and stop gobbling your
TV” (Poniewozik n.p.; emphasis added). Some combine both concepts: “there is something
wonderful about gluttonously devouring a novel in one sitting. But there is something just as
special (or agonizing) as [sic] waiting for the next installment of a riveting story … Love it or
hate it, the serial format enhances that awesome sense of anticipation” (Rodale n.p.; emphasis
added).
In all these passages, there is an erotic or sensual undertone that parallels the reactions
to penny fictions in the 19th century which describe that particular kind of serial fiction as a
14
“deadly fruit” – with its “insidious seductiveness” and its “first and foremost ... reliance on
lewdness” – that adolescents are “feasting off,” offered by publishers pursuing “villainous
ends.” Even though in the contemporary examples, we do not find the same kind of open
moralisation as we find in Mayhew’s or Greenwood’s words, there are still some residues of
moral judgement to be detected: the concept of binge-watching, the impression that we
“gorge” on serial fiction, is based on the idea that there is a ‘proper’ pattern of consumption
which is transgressed in some kind of excess. Concepts of temptation and transgression, selfrestrain and indulgence thus frequently pervade discussions of serial fiction even today,
particularly in popular discourse outside the academia. From this viewpoint, the audience of
serial fiction appears as governed alternately by urges and the control of those urges. We
might therefore see expressed in the popular discourse16 concerning serial fiction the idea, as it
were, of a ‘pleasure principle’ of serial narrative in the context of which serial fiction appears
as an urge or a temptation (a “guilty pleasure”) that we either give in to or not.
Following this logic, all serial fiction wants to ‘seduce’ its audience to ‘give in’ to its
‘temptations’ (be this in the anticipatory or in the ‘binge pattern’) – certainly an obvious claim
in particular for fictions produced by an acquisitive industry, such as television. Penny Dreadful,
however, signals this intention in a particularly direct way as it makes (immoral) seduction an
explicit theme reflected in many plot aspects, character constellations, and pieces of dialogue
as well as in the period atmosphere of the 1890s which saw, among other things, the
beginnings of psychoanalysis. There are therefore two principal ways in which Penny Dreadful
performs a self-stylisation as “guilty pleasure”: One consists in alluding to earlier forms of
serial narration (the original penny dreadfuls) which were notorious for their (supposedly)
corruptive lure and thus labeling itself as ‘addictive pulp fiction’ – the career of quality
television notwithstanding, a series like Penny Dreadful does deal to a great degree in the same
fare (“highly stylized ‘sex and violence’”) as its popular precursors. The other consists in
depicting seduction on a plot level. This focus on seduction in Penny Dreadful consists in more
than the obligatory romantic lines of plot or sex scenes (even though the age rating of the
series is certainly part of it), as the series does not only depict seduction, but also reflect on it
and casts all kinds of relations and processes as processes of seduction which are not
necessarily so by definition. We find, therefore, the (intended) ‘external’ effect of the fiction
on its audience paralleled in the (intended) ‘internal’ effect of the characters on each other.
The passages quoted in this chapter from contemporary and Victorian reactions to serial fiction are only
snippets of this discourse – the fact, however, that they are quite alike in tone and vocabulary gives us good
reason to assume that we might find many more representatives of their kind in a more comprehensive search.
16
15
2.3 “You have to risk rejection” – seduction and transgression in Penny Dreadful
The basic plot line of season one consists in Sir Malcom’s and Vanessa’s mission to rescue
Mina from the grasp of the vampire who is keeping her prisoner, and their efforts to recruit
allies to help them in this task. This recruitment is presented less as an act of negotiation but
rather as one of seduction. The first candidate is Ethan Chandler, an American stranded in
London and earning his keep as the gunslinger of a Wild West show, who is of interest to
Malcolm and Vanessa due to his dexterity in handling weapons. When Vanessa teases him
about the flaws in the dramatic composition of his show, he tells her: “You gotta leave them
wanting more – as we say in show business” (PD 1 00:08:43-5). While this is certainly not a
surprising insight concerning the entertainment industry, it is one of several utterances that
specifically offer a double reading, both as dialogue between the characters and as a selfreflective statement indicating Penny Dreadful’s intention to, literally, ‘leave its audience wanting
more,’ linking the “show business” that both the series and its character Ethan are involved in
to the concept of erotic desire. Further interaction between Ethan and Vanessa continues to
draw on the same metaphors. On the morning after the trio’s (Vanessa, Malcolm, and Ethan)
first expedition into London’s demonic underworld and opium dens, Vanessa tries to
persuade Ethan to permanently join their mission. “A wise man would walk away from this
house and make a concerted effort to forget everything that occurred last night,” she tells
Ethan, yet when he asks her whether this is supposed to be a warning, she corrects him: “It’s
an invitation.” As he refuses to participate further, she points him to her tarot deck and asks
him to pick a card. The one he picks promptly turns out to be “The Lovers.” After Ethan has
left, Sir Malcolm asks Vanessa: “Was he tempted?” and she returns, “Intrigued, I would say”
(see PD 1 00:26:17-29:01): joining the fight against supernatural forces is, in Penny Dreadful, not
presented as a matter of, for example, heroics or necessity – it is a matter of seduction, of
being “tempted,” “intrigued,” and “wanting more,” a tactic that supposedly works well on
Ethan as he is, according to Vanessa, a man who “has given himself to excess” (PD 2
00:09:34), that is, who has a hard time resisting temptations of all kinds.
The same principle operates on Sir Malcolm’s second desired ally – the scientifically
ambitious yet poor doctor of medicine, Victor Frankenstein. Inviting him to his “Explorer’s
Club,” Malcolm reacts to Frankenstein’s remark “I wasn’t going to come” by saying,
But you couldn’t resist... When you see a river you must follow it to its source – no
matter the perils, no matter those comrades that fall along the way. You must know
how things work, you must unlock... You are dissatisfied always... (PD 1 00:36:10-32)
16
The penniless doctor is of course offered payment by Sir Malcom, but Malcolm’s wording
suggests that when Frankenstein joins the quest, it is out of the quasi-erotic desire (“you are
dissatisfied always”) for knowledge rather than money.17 Malcolm takes no chances, though:
Just in case knowledge is not the only thing Victor Frankenstein is interested in, he also orders
Vanessa to “unbutton the top of [her] dress” when Victor first comes to call at their house
(PD 2 00:12:16-8).
Both Victor and Ethan also have practical reasons for joining the quest: they both
need the money Sir Malcolm pays them, Victor for the supplies he needs to create a
companion for his first creature, Ethan for his companion Brona’s medical treatment (which,
however, we never really see her receiving). However, when Malcolm prompts the two to
pledge themselves officially to the quest, it is mysteries (i.e., the desirable knowledge it promises)
rather than money that he uses as incentive: “Give us your assent, Mr. Chandler, or leave this
company and its mysteries behind” (see PD 3 00:41:22-42:45).
‘Seduction proper’ begins from the second episode onward, when Vanessa Ives and
Dorian Gray meet for the first time at a party (see PD 2 00:25:45-28:07; Dorian, according to
his own judgement, never says ‘no’ to an invitation). While at the beginning, the dialogue
tends to the – rather stereotypical – suggestion that Vanessa is in need of ‘sexual liberation,’18
over the progress of the first season the roles of seducer and seduced become more flexible
between the two (in particular as Vanessa’s past and her struggle against the forces of demonic
possession are revealed). Their dialogue makes such blatant use of sexual innuendo that it
verges on the ludicrous, yet in its blatancy it also serves to develop the tone and atmosphere
of temptation into a trademark of the series – a temptation, moreover, into the forbidden
and/or dangerous (and thus a “guilty pleasure”), as Dorian’s and Vanessa’s visit to Crermone
Gardens in episode 4 suggests: as Dorian prompts Vanessa to let herself be absorbed by the
sensual impressions of a flower he has shown her and describing them back to him, she
appears to become lost as in an erotic encounter (with closed eyes describing the flower as
“something of the jungle” which calls out to her, saying “touch me”) – only to be informed
that the plant she has admired is called “deadly nightshade” and quite poisonous. “It’s the
Knowledge as irresistible, as addictive also appears in Sir Malcolm’s musings about the search for the source of
the Nile, which has occupied him during his many expeditions: the “scientific value is negligible, of course, but
it’s a sort of fever,” he explains (see PD 4 00:23:20-3). The desire behind the Nile quest is of course not for
discovery alone, but to at least the same degree for the public acclaim. However this can hardly be an incentive
for Frankenstein to join the quest for Mina, given that it is mostly a secret affair. Knowledge can obviously be
attractive for its own sake, personal fame not included.
18 When Vanessa and Dorian meet for the first time, the two – rather anachronistically, given the Victorian
setting – introduce themselves to each other and move into an intimate personal conversation without much ado.
Dorian assesses Vanessa: “You are the only woman in this house not wearing gloves. Your hands want to touch,
yet your head wants to appraise. Your heart is torn between the two.” The fact that he moves in close to take this
ungloved hand into his own suggests that he does in fact regard the touching part as the more important one of
the two options.
17
17
adder beneath the rose, isn’t it?” Dorian reflects. “All of this. They can seem so enticing and
luxurious yet within, there’s a dark thing waiting” (PD 4 00:09:30-10:53).
Much of this discourse of seduction – describing matters erotic as well as those not
strictly speaking erotic (such as the pursuit of knowledge) alike in the same vocabulary of
desire – is centred on the figure of Vanessa. Since, as Sir Malcolm explains with regard to
Vanessa’s supernatural sensitivity, “her gifts make her vulnerable – they also make
her...desirable” (PD 3 00:32:29-32), she serves as “bait” (PD 3 00:43:21) in the hunt for the
captured Mina. Malcolm explains to Vanessa: “it’s possible the creature we seek doesn’t want
her [Mina]. He wants you” (PD 3 00:43:02-7). Dorian toasts to her as “the most mysterious
thing in London – Miss Vanessa Ives” (PD 4 00:49:35-40). In the context of the back story
concerning Vanessa’s and Sir Malcolm’s shared past, Vanessa both exerts and experiences
seductive forces: most importantly, it is suggested that Vanessa seducing Mina’s fiancé is the
engine of the story, the crucial event without which none of the present events would take
place.19 This is not the only fatal act of seduction, though, that Vanessa is involved in. Her
sleeping with Dorian is depicted as an act of excessive and also transgressive passion (another
tribute to the idea of “guilty pleasure”) which ends up triggering Vanessa’s demonic
possession: it is depicted as excessive in the sense that it disables Vanessa’s control over her
supernatural affliction; it is depicted as transgressive in the sense that it contains mild
sadomasochistic elements which presumably are supposed to suggest that passion, here,
borders on the violent (Dorian asks her beforehand what were to happen if she were to
abandon her “poise” and Vanessa tells him: “there are things within us all that can never be
unleashed ... it would consume us,” thus marking their encounter as forbidden and its
outcome as harmful) (PD 6 00:32:00-30, 00:41:48-43:10, 00:43:55-45:15).20
In addition, the relation between Vanessa and Dorian also reflects on seduction’s
reverse side. When Dorian asks for permission to kiss her, Vanessa tells him: “Don’t ask
permission [...] You must risk rejection” (PD 6 00:32:38-50). This is another instance in which
seduction is not merely depicted, but also commented on (similar to Ethan’s remark on the
“show business”): Vanessa’s request appears generic rather than particular (indicating that
‘proper’ seduction in general includes the risk of being rejected). In the last episode of season
one, the issue of rejection is linked to the theme of the transgressive and forbidden, on which
the series capitalises.21 Vanessa refuses to see Dorian any longer, explaining: “It’s too
dangerous [...] Between us there’s a rare connection, I won’t deny it. But that very intimacy
“But for my transgression, would any of this have occurred?” Vanessa asks Sir Malcolm, rhetorically (PD 1
00:42:50-2).
20
The explosiveness and thus danger of their encounter is emphasised by the fact that in between the scenes with
Vanessa and Dorian we watch Malcolm, Ethan and Sembene fight and kill a ship full of vampires, which ends in
the ship going up in a fire.
21 The slogan on the DVD is “These is some thing within us all.”
19
18
released something unhealthy in me, something I cannot allow [...] Poor Dorian, you’ve never
known this feeling before have you [...] it’s rejection” (PD 8 00:21:24-22:10).
After Vanessa’s “poise” has crumbled due to her affair with Dorian and she is taken
over again by supernatural forces, she switches into the role of ‘seductive madwoman,’ teasing
Sir Malcolm, who is watching over her as she recovers from an attack, on the ‘perverse’ erotic
effect of her state:
To be beautiful is to be almost dead, isn’t it. The lassitude of the perfect woman. The
languid ease [...] anaemic, pale as ivory and weak as a kitten. There’s a brisk trade for
photographs of dead women, did you know that? (PD 7 00:02:27-53)
This connection of the seductive with the forbidden shows a clear parallel to 19th century
penny fiction and the ‘deadly fruits,’ as Mayhew calls them, that it supposedly offers. Remarks
such as these also foreground the extent to which constellations of seduction are marked as
illicit and transgressive in Penny Dreadful. This shows itself most obviously in the figure of
Dorian, who is presented as the incarnation of excess, decadence, and sexual transgression:
arranging living pornographic tableaux in his home (see PD 4 00:02:00-30) or letting himself
be photographed as he sleeps with a prostitute. This prostitute is Brona; when Dorian finds
out that she is fatally ill, this only heightens his interest: “I’ve never fucked a dying creature,” is
what he tells her, a scene quite obviously meant to scandalise the audience (see PD 2 00:18:0021:22). Dorian can fulfil this role particularly well as, in contrast to Oscar Wilde’s novel, no
external influence is working on him (or at least, we have not met anyone like Lord Henry yet
by the end of season 1): he is only seducer, never seduced.
As these examples show – figuring the main quest of the series as something into
which the characters are ‘tempted’; the mannered way in which the attraction between
Vanessa and Dorian is staged; the concept of ‘temptation into the forbidden’ that is
emphasised throughout the series – Penny Dreadful does not only depict, but purposefully
foreground seduction (more specifically, fatal seduction). In doing so, it harks back to that
tradition of popular serial fiction which is already named in the show’s title, and thus reveals a
high degree of consciousness of its own genealogy and mechanisms as product of the
entertainment industry (which ‘seduces’ its audience and ‘risks rejection’ on the crowded
market of serial fiction). The focus on desire and (secret) transgressive impulses also licenses a
psychoanalytic perspective which resonates with the period atmosphere of the 1890s and finds
further expression in the back stories of the characters, which will be examined in more detail
in chapter 4.
19
3 “Creatures of perpetual resurrection” – fiction, repetition, variation
I thought wouldn’t it be fun if I took the inspiration of these three classic books and started mixing, melding
these stories into one sort of new narrative?22
Of course in our version, Caliban eats Prospero.23
Penny Dreadful engages in several forms of repetition: whether we want to call it revisiting,
rereading, rewriting, or resurrecting, the series does in one way or the other re-present its
literary sources as well as the period of the late 19th century. While some elements make it into
the series as repetitions in a narrow sense, without being subjected to significant changes in
comparison to earlier occurrences, others have clearly experienced greater variation, even
though the link to earlier forms is still recognisable. ‘Elements’ here refers to characters, plot
lines, and historical contexts alike: Penny Dreadful repeats and reworks figures from literary
history just as well as, for instance, the origins of Freudian psychoanalysis in the treatment of
hysteria.
While generally, reading has come to mostly mean rereading anyway in the context of
postmodern theory, as Christopher Canon points out (see 404), some texts are certainly more
explicitly repetitive than others. Penny Dreadful is openly, even ostentatiously, recycling earlier
texts and contexts and thus foregrounds repetition as its own characteristic mode of action.
This ‘repetitive mode’ does not consist in simple copying, though, but rather in a form of
“repetition with variation” – which is precisely what has been singled out as the typical modus
operandi of serial narratives (see for example Kelleter’s term “variierende Wiederholung”; 11).24
Repetition also figures prominently in Freud’s account in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which
libidinous urges to continue and prolong the course of life are in conflict with the pull towards
closure and equilibrium that the death drive exerts, and in which repetition is the phenomenon
that puts Freud on the track of the death drive in the first place.
In much the same way as seduction, repetition is both an aspect of the content as well
as trademark of the series Penny Dreadful as a whole. If the depiction of acts of seduction can
be read as implicitly self-reflective, an allusion to the mechanisms of the series as a whole, so
can the series’ depiction of fiction and/as entertainment: like the Grand Guignol, so Penny
Dreadful, is a possible way of reading those parts of the series revolving around Caliban at the
22
John Logan, PD Production Blog #2 “Literary roots” 00:01:06-18.
Vincent Brand, director of the troupe at the Grand Guignol, PD 3 00:20:39-41.
24 Dominik Maeder points out “repetition with variation” (differente Wiederholung) as structural link between
psychoanalytic treatment and serial narration, which serves to emphasise the relevance of psychoanalytic
frameworks to understanding the structure of serial narrative (and vice versa; see Maeder 94-95).
23
20
infamous theatre of horror, which Penny Dreadful transports from Paris to 1890s London.25
And so Frankenstein’s creature is the figure that grants access to a specific aspect of the series’
structure which, just like the motif of seduction, strengthens the link to psychoanalysis and
thus further supports attempts at mapping serial structure and psychoanalytic models onto
each other.
3.1 Frankenstein’s creature on stage – London’s Grand Guignol in Penny Dreadful
Tellingly, Penny Dreadful names the theatre in which significant parts of the action take place
“Grand Guignol,” the name of the infamous Parisian and later also London establishment.
While “Montmartre’s theatre of horror and eroticism” (Hand and Wilson 7), the ‘original’
Parisian Grand Guignol, lasted longer and offered entertainment even a little more spectacular
and gruesome than its more short-lived London offshoot, both theatres basically dealt in the
same fare (which today would probably be referred to as ‘sex and crime’), so that the name
“Grand Guignol” can well be employed as a signature term for ‘indecent but enjoyable’
entertainment. “Where disembowellings and throat-slittings were nightly events on the stage
of the Parisian Grand Guignol, at the Little Theatre a poisoning or a strangulation was
generally preferable,” Hand and Wilson claim (3), nicely characterising the sort of play
audiences were confronted with at either of the two houses. Even the ‘tamer’ London version
of the Grand Guignol was sufficient to both generate large success and scandalise the press
and public – posters announcing plays, for example, were banned from the London
Underground (see Hand and Wilson 3).
Gripping, but a little offensive to good taste: this is a fitting tradition of entertainment
for Penny Dreadful to set itself in. As Frankenstein’s creature is rescued from London’s gutter
by theatrical director Vincent Brand, whose troupe is playing at the Grand Guignol, named
“Caliban” and employed as a stage hand, the theatre business and this theatre in particular take
up a central role in Penny Dreadful. The first scene we see that is set inside the theatre is a close
shot on a screaming young woman who has her throat cut, an action that is interrupted by
somebody complaining, “Oi, oi, oi! Who’s on the blood pump?” The camera zooms out and
we find that we are in the middle of rehearsals for another one of the “little blood plays” that
the theatre stages (PD 3 00:19:13-35). “Our fare is mayhem and malice with all the ingenious
gore we can device” (PD 3 00:19:37-43), Brand explains to the newly employed Caliban (and
to the audience of Penny Dreadful, presumably) a tradition of popular entertainment analogous
While the Grand Guignol was established in Paris in 1897 and lasted until 1962, its London offshoot was
established only in 1920 to last until 1922 (see Hand and Wilson 16-7).
25
21
to that of printed penny literature.26 “Ingenious gore” is certainly also the fare of Penny
Dreadful, or at least a significant part of it – the series is not shy in showing (aestheticised)
blood and gore,27 and the production blogs accompanying the first season as published on
DVD make clear the “ingenious” care with which the series created all of its sets, costumes,
and props. Again, thus, we find here that the series situates itself in a specific tradition of
fiction or of the entertainment business – not only implicitly, as most works of fiction do to at
least a certain degree through the use of elements attributable to genres or traditions, but quite
explicitly, as well, by thematising those traditions of fiction on content level.
At the same time, the parts of Penny Dreadful which are situated at the theatre offer an
opportunity for the series to explore the mechanisms of the making of fiction – both in its
technicality and materiality and in its ‘metaphysical’ aspects. As Ethan and Brona visit one of
the performances, and Caliban works his job as stage hand, the series can switch between
showing scenes of the play in a mise-en-abyme-like28 structure, the reaction of the audience, and
the backstage bustle necessary to stage the play with all its effects. For every effect on stage
(thunder, explosions, a rising moon...) we see Caliban working the respective machinery
behind the scenes (shaking an oversize tin sheet, for example, to create the sound of a storm).
The acting on the Grand Guignol stage is wooden and mannered, the characters and puns
ostentatiously stereotypical, so that the whole affair appears very much like a camp
performance that the audience, and Brona in particular, is enjoying thoroughly.
29
We see
Caliban clandestinely attaching the infamous “blood pump” to the main actress’s leg through a
trap door so that she can be killed in an appropriately bloody way by a wolf-like beast as her
older colleague leaves the stages, swearing as soon as he has stepped out of sight of the
audience, “my knees can’t take this fucking play!” While the actress is still dying on stage,
blood in ridiculous amounts flowing over her face, a backstage voice announces: “Ladies and
26
For more detail on the theatrical versions of penny fiction see Jacobs.
A good example would be the scenes in which Caliban is shown killing Victor’s second creature Proteus,
threatening his creator, and then recapitulating the horrible circumstances of his own birth (PD 3 00:06:06-09:30).
28
While we find here a (visual) narrative embedded in another (visual) narrative where the two narratives are not
the same but at least bear similarities to each other (in tone, tradition, and alignment, as is this paper’s central
claim about Penny Dreadful and 19th century penny fiction), it is up to discussion whether this constitutes mise en
abyme in a strict sense. The confusing and subversive effect of mixing diegetic levels, suggested by Genette and
discussed in many recent attempts to grasp mise en abyme and metalepsis (see for example Pier; Cohn) is certainly
not very strong in this case. For a differentiating discussion of metalepsis and mise en abyme see for example Cohn.
For purposes here, suffice to say that including scenes from Grand Guignol performances in the television series
achieves a doubling effect, not necessarily forcing, but inviting us to parallel the series and the plays, or to
understand the latter as progenitor of the former. The creators of the series clearly support such a view – as John
Logan puts it in one of the production blogs: “In 1891 in Victorian society, there was no television, there was no
radio, there certainly wasn’t any cinema, so what did Victorians do? They read penny dreadfuls – or they went to
the theatre” (PD Production blog # 6 “The Grand Guignol” 00:00:00-16).
29 Director Brand has earlier expressed his dislike for the ‘vogue of realism,’ mourning the demise of ‘proper’
theatricality: “Shakespeare […] That was my stock in trade when there was a value placed upon the ineffable and
the exalted. […] Ah, but that was many seasons ago. Times have changed.” He adds, with a visible shudder:
“Nowadays it’s all Ibsen” (PD 3 00:17:24-18:55).
27
22
gentlemen, the next act will begin in 15 minutes!” (see PD 4 00:28:45-36:12).30 The switches
between onstage and offstage moments, perspectives ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the play (the
bloody death of the young heroine of the play, for example, and the mechanical device that
makes this stage event possible), foreground the artifice behind visual narratives; by
combining several aspects of a visual narrative – production, performance, reception – Penny
Dreadful hints at the conditions of existence of (visual, but by extension all) fiction as such.
Caliban explicitly reflects on these processes: “Could there have been a more
appropriate place for me?” he asks in a voiceover as his time at the theatre is recapitulated
while he tells his creator about it. “Night after night, the players died gruesomely and then
came back to life again for the next show. They were undying, like me – creatures of perpetual
resurrection” (PD 3 00:21:35-52). To illustrate this claim, the same actress whose throat we
already saw being cut is shown to be shot to excited squeals from the audience, only to
moments later rise and receive her applause gracefully (PD 3 00:21:51-22:14). Caliban here
singles out precisely the act of repetition as characteristic of fiction; a characteristic that is
particularly relevant for serial fiction generally, and for Penny Dreadful specifically, as it is a
series that follows the principle of “repetition with variation” on both the levels of structure
and content.
3.2 Textual reiteration: intertextuality, adaptation, narrative narcissism
What the Grand Guignol does with its actors, or the plays staged do with their characters,
Penny Dreadful – and many other fictions – does with its literary sources and the figures they
contain: They “die gruesomely” only to come “back to life again” with the remaking that
fictions like Penny Dreadful undertake of them; they and their stories are “resurrected” for the
duration of the series – they are repeated and at the same time transformed. Victor
Frankenstein, his creature, and Dorian Gray stand out most obviously as adapted figures;
Dracula is clearly also a source, but the adaptation is less straightforward and the figures are
less prominent.31 The series includes Frankenstein, the creature/Caliban, and Dorian as iconic
literary figures; however, it both re-presents parts of the ‘original’ plots that those figures were
included in, as well as involving them into new story lines. The Victor Frankenstein of the
series, for example, flees from his creature after it has come to life and is pressed later on to
create a female companion by the creature threatening to turn his happiest moment into
30
Edward Jacobs describes anticlimactic moments of precisely this kind – he discusses, for example, food
vendors appearing on stage during death scenes – as frequent occurrences in penny theatre, and regards them as
an aspect of the satirical potential of those plays (see Jacobs 333).
31
Van Helsing appears as an expert on vampires and advisor to Victor Frankenstein; Mina Harker is a young
woman in the grasp of a vampire; but there is no clearly identifiable Count Dracula, and compared to Frankenstein
and Dorian Gray, considerably fewer aspects of the content of the novel are taken over.
23
misery, just as in Shelley’s novel,32 but he also, unlike his literary predecessor, creates a second
creature much more successfully than the first, who goes on to kill his predecessor. Just as
unprecedented with regard to the original novel is the plot revolving around Caliban and the
theatre (even though the general spirit of Frankenstein’s creature being unable to merge into
society and suffering from that fact is retained). Similarly, many aspects of Dorian’s figure are
clearly recognisable as elements from Wilde’s text – most prominently, Dorian’s interest in
“extraordinary thing[s],” as the series calls it (PD 4 00:09:09), and his reflections on their
aesthetics (the series recreates such aspects as Dorian’s interest in perfumes, for example; see
PD 4 00:48:10-35; Wilde 107). On the other hand, there is (at least so far) no Lord Henry nor
a Basil Hallward, and Dorian’s affair with Vanessa is a new addition, bearing little resemblance
to, for example, Dorian’s involvement with Sibyl Vane in Wilde’s novel.
Many theoretical frameworks are concerned with transitions from one text into the
other. Julia Kristeva’s intertextuality comes to mind; she claims that “any text is constructed as
a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66).
Emphasising paradigmatic connections – “each word (text) is an intersection of word [sic]
(texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read” (66) – Kristeva’s analysis suggests that
any given literary text does not only present itself, but simultaneously grants access to
countless other texts. This holds true for all of literature – fictions like Penny Dreadful could
thus be said to stand out not due to a difference in kind, but ‘only’ due to a difference in
degree from other texts which are less obviously, less explicitly repetitive. “Absorption and
transformation” is certainly a very plausible description of the way in which Penny Dreadful
operates on its source materials. Neither would it be wrong to claim that the series adapts
Shelley’s and Wilde’s texts – in particular if one takes into account that from the early 1980s
onwards, more and more critics insisted that many of the texts regarded as literary classics
were “generally circulated cultural memor[ies]” (Ellis qtd in Aragay 20)33 rather than stable,
untouchable reference points. “The literary source” thus needed “no longer be conceived as a
work/original holding within itself a timeless essence which the adaptation/copy must
faithfully reproduce” but could be treated “as a text to be endlessly (re)read and appropriated
in different contexts” (Aragay 22). Considering how Penny Dreadful is received as “a bookish
thriller” (Lawson) and considering the emphasis that is put on the literary sources in the
marketing of the show, it appears that Penny Dreadful depends alike on both the idea of
“sacrosanct” (Aragay 21) original works, and the license to freely vary and copy. The concept
So far, there has been no female character identifiable as Elizabeth Lavenza, but considering Van Helsing’s
fatherly advice to Victor that one day, he will finally fall in love ‘properly’ (see PD 6 00:17:00-43), we might just
encounter a love interest of Frankenstein’s in season 2.
33 See Mireia Aragay’s whole essay for a detailed overview over critical approaches to adaptation from the mid20th century to the early 21st.
32
24
of ‘literary classics’ is not abandoned – rather the opposite – but those sources are
transformed freely and without excuse: “Some of literature’s most terrifying characters,
including Dr. Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and iconic figures from the novel Dracula are
lurking in the darkest corners of Victorian London,” Showtime’s website for the series
announces to advertise the story. “Penny Dreadful is a frightening psychological thriller that
weaves together these classic horror origin stories into a new adult drama” (Showtime). Such a
statement clearly assumes Frankenstein, Dorian Gray and Dracula as “generally circulated cultural
memories” which everybody recognises, while at the same time clearly regarding a rereading
and appropriation to different contexts as an entirely legitimate operation.
We can also refer to the concept of pastiche to describe Penny Dreadful’s approach to its
source materials: while this term generally implies a strong emphasis on form, less on content
– “a work of art that imitates the style, gestures, or forms of an older work” – pastiche
“involves mixing available elements into a new” product (Bowen 1005), which is certainly
what Penny Dreadful does. Just as the products of pastiche, Penny Dreadful does not exhibit any
particular satiric, humorous, or ironic impulses towards its materials, as we would expect of
parody (see Bowen 1005). It clearly does not aim to “unmask dead conventions” (Hutcheon
18) but rather confirms those conventions (of “classic horror origin stories,” as the website
puts it) as very much alive, paying tribute to rather than unmasking them. What does connect
Penny Dreadful’s tribute to the literary canon to parody, however, is its productiveness: in
particular if we encounter parodic impulses in “quotational literature” (“litérature citationelle”) –
and quotational Penny Dreadful certainly is, if not parodic – this “invites [...] a recognition of
literary codes,” as Linda Hutcheon argues (24-5). “Quotations from one text, when inserted
into the context of another, are the same and yet new and different [...] Parody is, therefore, an
exploration of difference and similarity,” Hutcheon claims. “But it is wrong to see the end of
this process as mockery, ridicule, or mere destruction” (25); rather, “forms and conventions
become energizing and freedom-inducing in the light of parody” (50). While Penny Dreadful
thus has no parodic relation to its sources in the sense that in confirms their conventions rather
than challenging them, it does share with parody a relation of both similarity and difference to
the materials it is working on. This relation is made possible in the first place through an act of
repetition or doubling. It is Hutcheon’s more general concept of narrative narcissism which
captures quite adequately what Penny Dreadful does when it repeats its source materials.
This chapter, as well as the previous one, argues for a clearly discernible degree of selfconsciousness in Penny Dreadful, apparent in the way in which the series makes explicit
processes of seduction and of repetition. Self-consciousness has not only been attested to
popular serial fiction, but to narrative in general, in particular to the novel, by Linda
Hutcheon. What Hutcheon refers to as “narcissistic narrative” is “process made visible” (6) –
25
that is, the process of the making of narrative fiction becoming discernible in one way or the
other in the product of narration, as it would for example whenever a narrator addresses a
reader directly to comment on the progress of the narrative.34 Hutcheon is mostly concerned
with the novel as the primary instance of narrative narcissism, but as her study progresses, she
indicates that neither can we encounter self-consciousness only in the novel (even though the
novel stays the main subject of her investigation), nor is it limited to a specific period. She
points out the universality of the phenomenon: “Art has always been ‘illusion,’ and as one
might surmise, it has often, if not always, been self-consciously aware of that ontological
status. This formal narcissism is a broad cultural phenomenon, not limited by art form or even
by period” (17). “Perhaps,” she speculates
in actual fact, it is narrative as a whole, and not just literary narrative, that has
progressed to a process-oriented mode. [...] Perhaps it is even reductive to limit
this formal narcissism to narrative genres alone, for the visual arts and music both
have also shown signs of self-reflectiveness. (7-8)
The “more modern textual self-preoccupation” to be found in 20th century literature differs
only in degree, in “explicitness” and “intensity” from earlier forms of self-consciousness,
Hutcheon suggests (see 18), and it is “narrative in general that is narcissistic” (19). “Can one
really make the distinction between older, more comfortable ‘textes de plaisir’ and modern
difficult ‘textes de jouissance,’ as Roland Barthes suggests” Hutcheon asks.35 “Perhaps each
novel has always had within itself the seeds of a ‘narcissistic’ reading, of an interpretation
which would make it an allegorical or metaphoric exploration of the process of articulating a
literary world” (23).
Certainly, in including the Grand Guignol, an exploration of the process of articulating
such a world takes place in Penny Dreadful – if not a literary in the narrow sense of the word,
but generally, a fictional (as pointed out above, there is no need to limit the concept of
narrative narcissism to the written word). Director Brand tells us about the theatre as business
– about the influence of public taste, about financial aspects, about programme choices when
he lets Caliban go in order to be able to keep the young actress who Caliban, overstepping his
boundaries in an unfortunate attempt to win her affection, has assaulted: “Given half a chance
I’d keep you and sack her, but the public demands the ingénue. I am a slave to the public”
(PD 8 00:18:24-30). Caliban’s job tells us about the theatre as ‘factory’ in which the effect of
Hutcheon discusses various concrete examples of narrative narcissism – see chapter two of her Narcissistic
Narrative, “Modes and Forms of Narrative Narcissism: Introduction of a Typology.”
35 The consequences of this idea will be taken up again, albeit shortly and speculatively, in the conclusion to this
paper with specific regard to current developments in the distribution of serial narratives.
34
26
fiction is brought about, literally manufactured with the help of machinery and manpower.36
Caliban’s musings on immortality as well as the theatre audience’s reaction, in particular
Brona’s,37 shows us precisely this effect brought about by the combined effort of directors,
actors, and stage hands. It is here and elsewhere in Penny Dreadful not so much specifically the
“process of narration” that “invade[s] the fiction’s content” (Hutcheon 11), but rather the
general performance of fiction (as part of which we might count the act of written storytelling
as well as a stage or other visual performance of a story) which is foregrounded – in a double
sense: the effect it performs on its audience (temptation, seduction as discussed in chapter 2),
and the performance of agents which effects the ‘existence’ of the fiction (theatrical stagings).
The scenes at the theatre show what is necessary for and what is possible by virtue of fiction: the
technical-material prerequisites and the performative acts that convey the fiction to the
audience, resulting in ‘immortal’ “beings of fiction” (to borrow a term from Bruno Latour),38
which can in turn be revived, repeated by and for the audience at any time – the latter fact
conveniently illustrated by Penny Dreadful’s own revival of literary protagonists. The “making of
fictive worlds” (Hutcheon 30) is thus certainly thematised by the series. Following Hutcheon’s
analysis, Penny Dreadful would not even have to include these reflections to qualify as
narcissistic text, as Hutcheon includes the category of “covert narcissistic texts” into her
typology. Simply by virtue of including the supernatural as fact does a text hint at its own
status as fiction:
Covert narcissistic texts share with all fantasy literature the ability to force the
reader (not overtly ask him) to create a fictive imaginative world separate from the
empirical one in which he lives. Tolkien’s Middle Earth ... is as real to the reader
as his own world, but it is different, other, a creation of his imagination. Whereas
in overt narcissism the reader is explicitly told that what he is reading is imaginary,
that the referents of the text’s language are fictive, in fantasy (and the covert
forms of narcissism for which it acts as model) the fictiveness of the referents is
axiomatic. (32)
Are we dealing here, then, with ‘normal’ intertextuality, ‘normal’ adaptation, or ‘normal’
The factory-analogy is also suggested by Brand mistaking Caliban for an industrial worker who has been
maimed in a factory accident, who he then transfers from one place of physical labour to another, the theatre
(“That must have been an accident operatic in scope, you poor lamb,” Brand says when he first meets Caliban.
“Industrial, was it? One of those dreadful clanking machines with gears and cogs”; PD 3 00:16:30-48. Ironically,
Brand is not even wrong in assuming Caliban’s appearance to be the result of an accident of technological
manipulation, even though he is clearly not thinking of Victor Frankenstein’s workshop).
37 Brona visits the theatre for the first time. During the play that is staged during episode 4 of Penny Dreadful, we
frequently see her in close shot, leaning forward in her chair, biting her thumb, or clinging to her neighbour (PD
4 00:27:38-28:43 and 00:33:45-35:45).
38 Compare his An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, in particular chapter 9 on “Situating the Beings of Fiction.”
36
27
narrative narcissicm? While this just might have to remain to some degree a question of critical
preferences, it appears evident that in the relation between Penny Dreadful and its literary
sources, we are dealing with some kind of repetition: we re-encounter elements that we have
encountered before, we re-cognise39 those elements as parts of earlier fictions, while at the
same time acknowledging that they have been subjected to some transformation. Because of
this recognisability under transformation, we might also say that those elements are continued
rather than ‘simply’ repeated.
3.3 Fiction as resurrection: repetition and renewal
Continuation rather than repetition, recognisability under transformation – these can be
applied not only to the reworking of literary figures in Penny Dreadful, but also to the
proceeding of serial narratives as such. Frank Kelleter emphasises as a definitive characteristic
of serial stories that “the story at hand homes in on its simultaneous repetition and renewal in
a story not yet available” (In jedem Fall ... richtet sich ein vorliegender Erzähltext auf seine simultane
Wiederholung und Erneuerung in einem noch nicht vorliegenden Erzähltext aus; Kelleter 26): serial
narratives strive to present their audience with new and exciting elements in each instalment, a
vital task for commercially oriented fiction, yet they would not be serial narratives if they did
not also connect back to earlier instalments in partial repetition – of cast and characters, of
central conflicts, in recapitulations of previous events, or simply in the fact that we assume for
serial stories the meaningfulness of details for later resolutions to a degree in which we
otherwise do this maybe only for detective fiction.40 The new and exciting elements are
frequently generated out of earlier elements, so that many of the decisive moments to propel
the narrative forward will be repetitive and innovative at the same time.
This “paradoxical force of innovation” (paradoxe Innovationskraft; Kelleter 26) is not
necessarily paradoxical through and through, if approached from a certain theoretical vantage
point. Sielke has pointed out that if we grasp the phenomenon of seriality in the light of Gilles
Deleuze’s work on difference and repetition, then we are provided with a way of
understanding relations between elements which need not be captured either as exclusively
Compare also Canon’s use of the term as an expression for “the recovery of a knowledge already possessed” in
connection with acts of rereading texts (402-3).
40 A good example for the meaningfulness of details for later events in Penny Dreadful would be the Jack the
Ripper theme that we encounter early in the series – in crime scenes that the characters pass by, newspaper
headlines, and the very first scenes of the series, in which a woman is snatched away through an open window
during a nightly visit to the privy (see for example PD 1 00:00:00-02:56, 00:22:35-23:13, 00:33:00-47; 2 00:01:3045). This reference looms ominously throughout the series, but whose relevance we can only begin to guess at
the very end of season one, when Ethan turns out to be a werewolf who might just have committed those crimes
without even knowing. Peter Brooks points out our habit of reading for significance with regard to the
revelations of the ending: “we read only [...] those markers that, as in the detective story, appear to be clues to the
underlying intentionality of event” (94).
39
28
expressions of identity or exclusively expressions of difference.41 Penny Dreadful is actually
doubly relevant as an example in this regard: it stands to its source materials in precisely such a
relation of similarity-and-difference (as Hutcheon attributes to ‘citational’ texts), and it
expresses this relation in serial form, which itself is characterised by switching between
similarity (or the more narrow concept, identity) and difference, thus again, as in the case of
seduction, exposing its form through its content. Sielke argues for the relevance of Deleuze’s
account because it manages to avoid the dichotomy of identity and difference, a dichotomy
that is simply inadequate to grasp something that is characterised by its processuality and not
by any state that is its outcome (see 389): serial narratives eventually end, finally arriving at a
final state; they are however certainly not defined by this state, but only by this state in relation
to the development through which it was reached in the first place.
Gilles Deleuze’s work on Difference and Repetition advances an understanding in which
repetition does not by definition mean ‘exact reproduction’ or ‘copy.’ Rather, repetition is
distinguished from generality and implies a more ‘organic’ form of reiteration. While generality
implies exchangeability, repetition in fact means non-exchangeability. This repetition is
exemplified in the “apparent paradox of festivals,” which “repeats an ‘unrepeatable’”: the
festival does not copy, it cannot be exchanged for the original event that it celebrates; rather,
the original event “celebrates and repeats in advance” all its following festive returns (an
analogous logic applies to artworks: it is “Monet’s first water lily which repeats all the others”
– and, we might add, Wilde’s Dorian who repeats all future Dorians) (see Deleuze 1–2). In
fact, sameness and variation are two sides of the same coin and inevitably go together: “the
question ‘What difference is there?’ may always be transformed into: ‘What resemblance is
there?’” (ibid. 12). In Deleuze’s analysis, repetition is “a power peculiar to the existent,” (13) to
singularities not governable by the law (as the law can only deal with generalities and
exchangeabilites),42 not a metanarrative category or model nor an analysis of narrative
strategies. However, it is enlightening in the context of serial narrative as it presents us with an
account of repetition that does not oppose repetition to variation and refuses to identify it
with equality and exchangeability. We can actually detect a similar kind of anticipation of
future repetitions in serial narratives as Deleuze posits for festivals and works of art – when
Kelleter claims that serial stories “home[] in on [their] simultaneous repetition and renewal in a
text not yet available,” this expresses precisely the kind of forward-looking anticipation of
“Besondere Bedeutung für die Theoretisierung von Serialität haben meiner Meinung nach die Überlegungen von Deleuze, der
Serialität als eine Kategorie von ‘Wiederholung und Differenz’ gefasst hat. Deleuze versteht Wiederholung als eine Manifestation
von Prozessen und Phänomenen, die sich nicht generalisieren oder subsumieren lassen, sondern durch ihre Insistenz das Moment einer
irreduziblen Eigenheit behaupten. Damit wird Serialität zu einem Konzept, das Beziehungen beschreibbar macht, die nicht
entweder auf Identität oder auf Differenz beruhen” (Sielke 389; emphasis in original).
42 “Repetition […] is by nature transgression or exception, always revealing a singularity opposed to the
particulars subsumed under laws, a universal opposed to the generalities which give rise to laws” (5).
41
29
repetition, where the product of repetition is intimately connected to the ‘original’ yet
nevertheless not exchangeable for it, that we find described by Deleuze.43
Penny Dreadful marks repetition – in the dynamic or organic rather than static sense
described above – as the characteristic modus operandi of fiction. Watching Caliban do his
work at the Grand Guignol exposes the workings of fiction generally. Caliban, when he
reflects on “creatures of perpetual resurrection,” is not talking about a specific play, but rather
reflecting on ‘what theatre does’ in general – and, by extension, all fiction: while Caliban’s
remark might or might not imply a special status for physically tangible theatre performances
in contrast to the text on a novel page, it holds true for any fiction that the “dying” of a
character never precludes their “resurrection” for another viewer, another reader, or a second
viewing, a second reading (or else, how could we reencounter Dorian Gray in the series?).
Penny Dreadful is thus doubly repetitive: as serial narrative, which is always repetitive in a
particular sense (it performs reiteration without copying, repetition which does not exclude
difference); and as self-conscious, adaptive fiction (actively integrating its own genealogy and
generic roots). In the end, repetition takes us (as it does both Deleuze and Hutcheon44) back
to Freud – all the more so if seriality is, as Sielke argues, a principle of evolution and thus a
matter of productive recursion rather than linear progress (see Sielke 394 – the series integrates
old elements into new contexts rather than superseding old elements with new ones). In Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, Freud analyses human drives precisely in terms of evolutionary recursion.
Is there a particular affective dimension to repetition,45 and can it help to elucidate the appeal
of serial fiction? Before approaching this question in chapter 5, a closer look at the relevance
of psychoanalysis to the content of Penny Dreadful in chapter 4 will give us further reason to also
make psychoanalysis the main point of reference in terms of structure.
This is only a snippet of Deleuze’s work on difference and repetition and hardly does its scope justice. The
important point is, however, that Deleuze offers an analysis of repetition which provides more leeway, or is more
complex, than the common-sense idea of repetition as the production of equivalent copies – an analysis in which,
as Joe Hughes puts it, repetition is “a synthetic process” rather than “an equivalence or resemblance of two
instances separated in time” (34). ‘Repetition as synthetic process’ is, read literally, quite a fitting description for
the progress and growth through reiteration and variation which characterises serial narrative.
44
The term by which Hutcheon grasps self-conscious narrative is a psychoanalytical term (“narcissistic”) (see
Hutcheon 1-2). One of the texts that Deleuze refers to is in fact Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He
emphasises the centrality of repetition to Freud’s thought: “the death instinct is discovered, not in connection
with the destructive tendencies, not in connection with aggressivity, but as a result of a direct consideration of
repetition phenomena” (16).
45 Deleuze seems to suggest just that when he says that “[t]he head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the
amorous organ of repetition” (2).
43
30
4 “In trouble with Dad” – Transgressive fathers, transgressive daughters
in Penny Dreadful
Who can tell about such things! Such hidden things. Such secrets we all have, don’t we, Doctor.46
Penny Dreadful is neither the first nor the only television series which can be attested selfconsciousness or the use of a psychoanalytic frame of reference.47 One aspect that stands out
about Penny Dreadful is the way in which the 1890s setting and the theme of hysteria recreate
the historical roots of Freudian psychoanalysis. At the same time, the character constellations
presented invite the application of concepts of a psychoanalytic background. While the history
of hysteria48 in connection to the emergence of psychoanalysis is referred to quite concretely
in its major aspects by the series, the incorporation of other psychoanalytical concepts
happens more freely – the basis for association, however, is clearly given. How else are we to
read Vanessa’s and Sir Malcolm’s back story but in terms of sexual trauma and incestuous
energies?
Involved more or less directly in all of the plot lines which make cases out of the
respective characters is Sir Malcolm. Many of the psychoanalytic understandings that suggest
themselves hinge on this overly present paternal figure. The central role of a (literal or
symbolic) father is thus one of the links between the ‘worlds’ of Penny Dreadful and of
psychoanalysis. Another notion, related to this figure, is that of a relation of desire between
child and parent, a desire coded as illicit by the threat of castration and incest taboo during
development; and also that of a ‘shocking’ discovery, of a sexual nature, in growing up, as well
as the idea of a rivalry between father and son. The most direct reference is certainly to
hysteria, the condition – if it can be called such – from which Vanessa initially appears to
suffer and which served as one of the launch pads for psychoanalysis in the collaborative work
of Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer.
The links offered between psychoanalysis and the story presented by the series are
convenient enough to suspect that character constellations are modelled on psychoanalytic
concepts (be they accurate or approximations), rather than merely being interpretable in terms
of them (even though the latter then follows trivially from the former). That Penny Dreadful
Vanessa to Victor Frankenstein (PD 7 00:10:33-38).
Think, with regard to the former, for example of the soap opera “Invitation to Love” that we see running on
the television screens in people’s homes in Twin Peaks; or, with regard to the latter, of HBO’s series In Treatment,
in which psychotherapy provides the content of the series – as only two of many possible examples.
48 The ‘history of hysteria’ is here supposed to refer to the history of hysteria as it has been written by critical and
popular culture. It needs to be emphasised that the issue is not whether Penny Dreadful is historically accurate in its
depiction of, for example, forms of psychiatric treatment, but rather that it capitalises on the thematic and visual
repertoire that the preoccupation with hysteria provides – both primary: the preoccupation of doctors with
hysteric patients, and secondary: the preoccupation of critics with this preoccupation.
46
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describes itself as “psychological thriller” (Showtime’s Penny Dreadful website) or – even more
to the point – that this label is repeated by reviewers as “psycho-sexual horror series” (Lidz)
confirms the impression that the series uses psychoanalysis as a reservoir of associations. 49
This and the 1890s historical setting make psychoanalysis, Freudian psychoanalysis in
particular, a main frame of reference for the series. ‘1891’ appears as a suitable point in time to
(more or less) plausibly throw together ingredients such as the beginnings of psychoanalysis,
the ‘vogue’ of hysteria, the Grand Guignol, the Jack the Ripper murders, opium dens,
colonialist exploration, galvanism, or body snatching, as well as the series’ literary sources. The
goal is clearly not to accurately represent 1891, but to draw on potential general associations
with the (late) Victorian age, or to speculate on and convey an idea of, in Logan’s words,
“what was in the water in Victorian London.”50 Period film (and, it is unproblematic to add in
this case, television) is always a matter of associative references, as Belén Vidal emphasises, as
“a specific aesthetic takes shape through film’s absorption (or ‘cannibalisation’) of literary,
painterly and photographic references, which have their own genealogy of representations in
film history” (10). This does not only go for visual surface details, which Vidal examines, but
also for assumptions about the ‘reality’ of a certain period (for which, arguably, surface details
are carriers) – they, too, have circulated and developed their own tradition of signification
which can be exploited.51
Considering the connections of Penny Dreadful to issues of psychoanalysis as well as the
series’ self-marketing as being concerned with the unsettling ‘secrets of one’s inner life’ (as the
DVD slogan says, “There is some thing within us all”), Penny Dreadful appears to first and
foremost want to recreate the 1890s as the ‘era of the unconscious’: a period of both immense
repression as well as outbursts of desire, of discovering a frightening inner life within oneself
and others. The idea that most pleasures are guilty pleasures not only connects Penny Dreadful
to its namesake, penny fiction, as discussed in chapter 2, it also incorporates the Freudian
It does not matter so much whether we find accurate depictions of psychoanalytic theory in the series. The
point in question is rather that Penny Dreadful relies on the repercussions and popularisations of psychoanalysis
pervading Western culture. The relation between Vanessa and Sir Malcolm, for example, certainly resonates with
the idea of incestuous energies as source of conflict in parent-child-relations, without it being necessary for the
audience to have precise knowledge about the oedipal complex as described by Freud. Stephen Frosh describes
the diffusion of psychoanalysis in (Western) culture as follows: “the extent to which western culture is permeated
by psychological assumptions, many with their roots in psychoanalysis, is very striking. The idea that childhood
determines or at least strongly influences adulthood [...] The central psychoanalytic notion that we have
unconscious motivations that drive our behaviour and are often not understood by us [...] When people ask of
themselves why they did something [...] they are drawing on what can be called a psychoanalytic ‘discourse’ to
make sense of their social environment. This suggests that culture is ‘saturated’ by psychoanalytic assumptions in
ways that are not obvious because they are so taken-for-granted” (Frosh 5).
50
Within roughly a ten years’ span, Logan claims, so many of the “essential texts of the horror genre” were
written (among which he counts Dracula, Dorian Gray, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde, The War of the Worlds) that he wondered, “what was in the water in Victorian London to make this
happen?” (PD Production blog #2 “Literary Roots” 00:00:00-20).
51 Straightforward examples for such visual details would be props and costumes; but Vidal’s study actually
captures far more aspects of mise-en-scène, as becomes clear in the book’s introductory chapter.
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suggestion that “we come to be who we are as adults by way of a massive and intricate
repression of those very early, very intense expressions of libidinal (sexual) desire”
(Flitterman-Lewis 204). In the following, the connections mentioned above will be explored in
further detail. They are the main analogies between psychoanalysis and Penny Dreadful in terms
of content; as the next chapter (5) will then argue, to those have to be added fundamental
analogies in terms of structure.
4.1 “The season of Peter’s inadequate beard” – The sins of the father...
We find in Penny Dreadful a father figure of, metaphorically speaking, overwhelming
proportions. Malcolm Murray forms the decisive presence – and absence – not only in his
wife’s and his children’s (Mina’s and Peter’s) life, but also in Vanessa’s, best friend and
neighbour to Mina and Peter, as well as Vanessa’s mother’s.52 Centrality of ‘the paternal’ is
something readily associated with Freudian teachings. However one wants to evaluate this
status – whether one wants to ‘battle’ or ‘save’ psychoanalysis, and depending on one’s own
interpretation of psychoanalysis’s view on ‘the maternal,’ for instance – the place of the father
is certainly a remarkable and particular one in psychoanalysis.53 It is the site of rules, to which,
however, desirous as well as aggressive tendencies also are attached. Freud sums up nicely his
own ‘discovery’ of children’s oedipal struggles in Totem and Taboo, and the general principles
which they are assumed to adhere to:
I reported the “Analysis of the Phobia of a five-year-old Boy” [the case of Little
Hans] [...] After assurances had relieved the boy of his fear of his father, it proved
that he was fighting against wishes whose content was the absence (departure or
death) of the father. He indicated only too plainly that he felt the father to be his
rival for the favour of the mother, upon whom his budding sexual wishes were by
dark premonitions directed. He therefore had the typical attitude of the male child
We nicely find this role pictured for example in those scenes which show a dinner party between the Murray
and the Ives family in celebration of Sir Malcolm’s return from one of his expeditions. Malcolm is clearly the
centre of attention and admiration of every member of the two families as they are enthralled by his stories (see
PD 5 00:07:35-08:47).
53
The relation of feminism and psychoanalysis is complex and notorious; Juliet Mitchell’s classic “Psychoanalysis
and Feminism” is certainly a valuable resource which examines Freud’s (and others’) work in careful detail. She
emphasises the “patriarchal prejudice within psychoanalytic theory, making patriarchy both timeless and
necessary and keeping mothers and matriarchies as pre-Symbolic, pre-history.” Even later schools of
psychoanalysis do not significantly diverge from this: They “consider the mother as important, but not within the
framework of cultural laws. We have a great deal of rich work on mothering, but no place for the mother within
the laws of human order” (xxxv-xxxvi). It should be mentioned, for the sake of completeness, that these points
of critique are not meant as fatal blows to psychoanalysis. In fact, psychoanalysis is employed as a “source of
understanding” for patriarchal circumstances, not as the instance prescribing them (see xxvi and all of Mitchell’s
introduction to her book.)
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to its parents which we call the ‘Oedipus complex’ […] But whoever looks
attentively through the history of little John will also find there abundant proof
that the father was admired as the possessor of large genitals and was feared as
threatening the child’s own genitals. In the Oedipus as well as in the castration
complex the father plays the same role of feared opponent to the infantile sexual
interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is the punishment he
threatens. (“Totem and Taboo” 906-7)
Aggression and rivalry (wishing the father dead as he retains the mother’s favour for himself),
incestuous desire (for one of the parents, here the mother), 54 fear (of being castrated due to
one’s intentions) and hence the establishment of a prohibition or law all turn up in this
description; in addition, we find here and elsewhere mention of admiration and thus a certain
ambivalence.55 These elements, some directly, some with a twist, all turn up in the relations
that develop between Sir Malcolm and the other characters: aggression between Ethan, Victor,
and Malcolm; incestuous impulses between Malcolm and Vanessa; threat of castration and
ambivalent admiration between Malcolm and Peter. The central assumption from which all
these conflicts derive is the special status of the father figure in psychoanalysis from which the
threat of castration originates. There is, in Freud’s accounts of the Oedipus complex, “the
crucial notion that castration bears the transmission of culture” (Mitchell 79) as it is the
instance that can effect rules; what is more, the threat of castration is assumed to at some
point be internalised and transformed so that each human being develops within themselves a
prohibitive or at least judging instance – that of conscience. For as one “overcomes the
libidinous demands by the processes of identification and sublimation,” – the solution to the
Oedipal conflict – there is “the formation of the superego” which is “initially, largely the
internalized father and the culture he represents” (Mitchell 80). “Fear of castration” thus
“leads one to identify with the castrating agent and [...] incorporate him into one’s own
personality as an internal authority-figure, a judging superego whose severe criticisms one is
then endlessly anxious about” (ibid. 81). “As the ego once feared castration from the father, it
now again feels an equivalent threat from the superego that was formed out of an
identification with him” (ibid.) – Mitchell’s words make clear the cluster of ideas joining
This straightforward account becomes more complex and arguably more questionable if one abandons the
focus on male subjects and heterosexuality. This is a decidedly important subject which this paper can
unfortunately not do justice to. Again, Juliet Mitchell’s discussion in Psychoanalysis and Feminism is a useful resource
in this regard (see in particular part I). The purpose here is not to evaluate psychoanalytical teachings but rather
to better single out psychoanalytic concepts which we encounter in popularised form in Penny Dreadful.
55 One of Freud’s other famous cases, the ‘Wolfman,’ also mentions admiration alongside fear (the Wolfman’s
father “had been a much-admired example to him, and […] when asked what he wanted to be he used to answer:
‘A gentleman like my father.’”; “History of an Infatile Neurosis” 215; there is however also “the fear of his
father, which was to dominate his life” from a certain point in pre-school age onwards, “History of an Infantile
Neurosis” 222).
54
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prohibition, rules, and laws, or in any case, judgement, with a paternal instance.
To this cluster, Jacques Lacan adds a linguistic component. The “primordial Law” –
regulating marriage options, prohibiting incest – is “identical to a language order,” for without
systems of naming, regulations of which partners are permissible are in fact not possible.56 It is
therefore “in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function”
(emphasis in original).57 This father whose name is so decisive is not necessarily the actual
father: there is the father’s person, and there is “the figure of the law”; the two are
“identified,” but not necessarily identical. “This conception allows us to clearly distinguish
[…] the unconscious effects of this function from the narcissistic relations, or even real
relations, that the subject has with the image and actions of the person who embodies this
function” (“Function and Field” 230). Here as in Freud, the line of thought proceeds from
fear of punishment for incest to symbolic existence – hinging, for Lacan, on the name of the
father specifically as the basis of this social-cultural-moral life, this existence in interaction
with others for which the “network” (“Function and Field” 231) of the symbolic provides
regulations.
Desire is assumed to be, in its ‘original’ occurrence in early childhood, incestuous in
nature. Sexual formation for Freud really takes place in two shifts, one around three to five
years of age, one in puberty; the latter of which partly repeats what happens in the former (see
“Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex” 591). In the earlier phase, sexual impulse is
directed towards the parents:
The intercourse between the child and its foster-parents is for the former an
inexhaustible source of sexual excitation and gratification of erogenous zones,
especially since the parents—or as a rule the mother—supplies the child with
feelings which originate from her own sexual life; she pats him, kisses him, and
rocks him [...] her tenderness awakens the sexual impulse of her child and
prepares its future intensity. (“Three Contributions” 615)
“The primordial Law is therefore the Law which, in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture
over the reign of nature, the latter being subject to the law of mating. The prohibition of incest is merely the
subjective pivot of that Law,” Lacan explains. Without “names for kinship relations, no power can institute the
order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the thread of lineage through the generations” (“Function
and Field” 229-30).
57 It is in and by what Lacan calls the Symbolic that an individual’s life is determined – by naming and by giving
laws that inform all ideas of proper conduct: “Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total
that they join together those who are going to engender him ‘by bone and flesh’ before he comes into the world;
so total that they bring to his birth … the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make
him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and
beyond his very death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgment, where the
Word absolves his being or condemns it” (“Function and Field” 231).
56
35
Following on the latency period, puberty then takes up these impulses and transforms them:
It would, of course, be most natural for the child to select as the sexual object that
person whom it has loved since childhood with, so to speak, a dampened libido.
But owing to the delay of sexual maturity, time has been gained for the erection
beside the sexual inhibitions of the incest barrier, that moral prescription which
explicitly excludes from object selection the beloved person of infancy, or blood
relations. […] In the phantasies of all persons, the infantile tendencies [...]
reappear, and among them [...] the sexual feeling of the child for the parents.
Usually, this has already been differentiated by sexual attraction, namely, the
attraction of the son for the mother, and of the daughter for the father. (“Three
Contributions” 616-7)
Puberty works towards “overcoming and rejection of these distinctly incestuous phantasies,”
but the “significance of incestuous object-selection” for sexual development – or Freud’s
account of it – is “evident” (“Three Contributions” 617-8). Significantly, the narrative of Penny
Dreadful suggests that the events that set the ball rolling, as it were, take place precisely during
puberty (Vanessa’s, Mina’s, and Peter’s early adolescence, that is). Early adolescence is the
farthest back in time that the series goes, thus we are led to assume these occurrences as the
earliest of real relevance and to establish a link of causality from the events in early puberty to
those in young adulthood (both included in episode 5) to the narrative’s present. In Freudian
spirit, the past occurrences pictured in episode 5 are all connected to sexuality and include
persistent incestuous desires – so persistent, in fact, that they are still alluded to in the relation
between grown-up Vanessa and Sir Malcolm.
The processes described – incestuous desire and the conflict into which it enters with a
paternal instance – is ascribed greater significance by Freud than ‘just’ the development of
modern individuals. Rather, this conflict amounts to, as Lacan calls it, “the inaugural drama of
humanity” (“Situation of Psychoanalysis” 393) in Freud’s account of the prehistoric prototype
of all Oedipal struggles in Totem and Taboo. In the “primal horde” of “Darwinian conception,”
Freud claims, there is “only a violent, jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and
drives away the growing sons.”
One day […] the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus
put an end to the father horde […] [a] memorable, criminal act with which so
many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion [...] we
need only assume that the group of brothers banded together were dominated by
36
the same contradictory feelings towards the father which we can demonstrate as
the content of ambivalence of the father complex in all our children and in
neurotics. They hated the father who stood so powerfully in the way of their
sexual demands and their desire for power, but they also loved and admired him.
After they had satisfied their hate by his removal and had carried out their wish
for identification with him, the suppressed tender impulses had to assert
themselves. This took place in the form of remorse, a sense of guilt was formed
[...]. (“Totem and Taboo” 915-7)
Out of this guilt, the base of social inhibition is formed, barring precisely those two most
prominent wishes of the Oedipal complex (killing the father, possessing the mother):
What the fathers’ presence had formerly prevented they themselves now
prohibited in the psychic situation of ‘subsequent obedience’ [...] They undid their
deed by declaring that the killing of the father substitute, the totem, was not
allowed, and renounced the fruits of their deed by denying themselves the
liberated women. Thus they created the two fundamental taboos of totemism out
of the sense of guilt of the son, and for this very reason these had to correspond with
the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex. [...] Though the brothers had
joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among
the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father […] Thus
there was nothing left for the brothers, if they wanted to live together, but to erect
the incest prohibition [...] through which they all equally renounced the women
whom they desired, and on account of whom they had removed the father in the
first place. (“Totem and Taboo” 917; emphasis in original)
Incidentally, we can detect in Freud’s account the suggestion that the mythological father – the
prehistoric father of the “primal horde” – is in fact a transgressive father. Not only does he
not adhere to what is to become the most fundamental prohibition of human social life (being
rather the one who prompts the development of this institution by ‘negative example,’ so to
speak), he is one who takes ‘everything’ (all women) as his own, leaves ‘nothing’ (no women)
for the others and thus neglects to care for them and to, as it were, ‘keep his side of the
bargain’ (a neglect that the totem will make good for in providing actual protection to its tribes
in return for being honoured).
The totemic system was a kind of agreement with the father in which the latter
37
granted everything that the child’s phantasy could expect from him, protection,
care, and forbearance, in return for which the pledge was given to honour his life,
that is to say, not to repeat the act against the totem through which the real father
had perished. Totemism also contained an attempt at justification, “If the father
had treated us like the totem we should never have been tempted to kill him.”
(“Totem and Taboo” 918)
Sir Malcolm, in Penny Dreadful, actually appears rather like this mythological father: claiming all
women for his own, as well as generally everybody’s admiration and affection, until his ‘sons’
have had enough and rise up against him. He does not only claim his wife’s affection for his
own, but also that of his neighbour’s wife – Vanessa’s mother, with whom, as we find out, he
has an affair. He does not only claim his daughter’s affection for his own, but also that of his
neighbours’ daughter – as we learn in episode 5, which shows scenes from Vanessa’s and
Mina’s youth and makes clear that much of their everyday life is structured by either
speculating about Malcolm’s adventures in Africa, or preparing for and celebrating his return
(see PD 5 00:06:22-07:35). When Malcolm arrives back from his expedition in these scenes, he
takes both Vanessa and Mina in his arms (one left, one right), yet his son Peter (of roughly the
same age as the girls) receives a manly handshake instead of the embrace that he was
obviously going in for. As Peter eagerly asks his father, “What have you brought me?”, he
does receive a rather fine-looking big cat’s skin – but even while he tries to touch it, his father
moves it out of his grasp to show it to the girls who are standing by. He does hand it back to
Peter, but only to embrace both girls again, vanishing with the two of them and his wife from
the room in search of a meal. Two things are established clearly in this exchange: Vanessa is as
close as a daughter to Sir Malcolm; and things aren’t going smoothly between him and his son.
Vanessa’s actual father stays a thoroughly pale figure throughout the entire series and does not
contribute to the plot at all: it is as if he has to step back to allow room for Sir Malcolm’s
overwhelming presence, who claims Mr. Ives’ daughter and wife for his own – we never see
significant (sexual, affectionate, or otherwise) interaction between Vanessa’s father and his
wife and daughter, but we do witness it between them and Malcolm.
In a later episode, Vanessa voices precisely this tendency of Sir Malcolm in rather
obscene terms. Her words characterise Malcolm as neglecting and at the same time,
transgressive or excessive in his claim to other people, just as the father in Totem and Taboo.
Her choice of topics brings up general sexual transgression (generally, necrophilia and
pornography, with specific reference to Malcolm, infidelity and colonialist exploitation), incest
(by speaking as Sir Malcolm’s daughter, with a childish voice, about matters decidedly sexual,
suggesting flirtation by her intermittently teasing tone), and Malcolm’s neglect of his children.
38
As we can assume that Vanessa is here not quite speaking as herself (this happens in the
middle of the period in which she fights demonic possession, and we often do not know
which words are her own and which are that of a demonic instance speaking through her), we
do not know how much of this is true; however, Sir Malcolm makes no move to contradict
her and by the regrets he expresses later in connection to his conduct in Africa, we can at least
assume that she is not entirely wrong:
Vanessa [musing as she is reclining on the couch]: “To be beautiful is to be almost
dead, isn’t it. [...] There’s a brisk trade for photographs of dead women, did you
know that? [...]The men circulate the pictures and pleasure themselves.” [...]
Malcolm: [walking over and leaning over her] “ [...] Last evening you went into a–
a spell or a fit of a kind, unlike previously. [...] You’ve been asleep since.” [...]
Vanessa: “And you dressed me?”
Sir Malcolm: “Yes.”
Vanessa [with a child-like voice and bright smile]: “Like when I was a girl? –
[sobering] Oh no, you didn’t dress me as a girl, how silly of me. You weren’t there
to dress me, were you? You were away on some trek or other. [...] We tried to
follow your progress on that map in the solarium with little red pins but you were
in terra incognita. That’s where you said your were going [...] father?”
Malcolm [hestitantly]: “Mina?”
Vanessa: “Somewhat. [Casually taking up her cup of tea.] Fat mother wept, of
course. [amused] [...] You loathed her fatness – unlike those other women. But fat
mother wept because she missed you and feared for you. [...] [Changing into
serious tone, challenging.] Tell me about the other women. Not Mrs. Ives, I know
all about her. You might have attended the funeral at least. For decency’s sake!”
Malcolm: “You stop this right now!”
Vanessa [teasingly]: “Ooh, it’s that face, is it. The hard face for the niggers. [...]
But we were speaking of the women. [Speaking up challengingly while Sir
Malcolm towers over her.] They were as follows: the whores in Zanzibar when
you landed, mostly North-African so almost white, then the native women along
the way. They enjoyed you pawing at them – or you convinced yourself they did.
You made Peter fuck them to prove he was a man. He didn’t enjoy it but he
would do anything for you. Except make a proper off spin bowler like you
wanted. So off you went, tribe to tribe, father and son, fucking the Masaai, the
Mamohela, the Bangweulu, the Bantu, the Burundi!” (PD 7 00:02:12-06:15)
39
This “weak, foul, lustful, vainglorious man,” as Vanessa accuses him in a conscious moment
(PD 5 00:49:21-4), clearly does cross the line of modesty in taking advantage of others. When
Vanessa is attacked in earnest by the demonic forces trying to take over her mind and body
and she is, as we are given to understand, fighting them with all her strength, 58 Malcolm
actually urges her to engage with those forces and thus further endanger herself in order to
learn about Mina’s whereabouts (who is herself taken captive by supernatural forces, which are
supposedly particularly accessible to Vanessa in her state). A severely weakened Vanessa
pleads him not to ask this of her, but Malcolm insists. She starts crying – “How cruel you are”
– yet Malcolm urges her on – “Find her!” – until he is called back by Ethan, who has entered
the room unnoticed by Sir Malcolm (PD 7 00:39:30-41:17).
Following this particular misconduct on the part of Sir Malcolm, we finally watch the
‘sons’ rise against the father. Ethan has in fact explicitly – if only jokingly – referred to himself
and Victor Frankenstein as Malcolm’s sons earlier, while teaching Victor how to shoot in the
basement of Sir Malcolm’s house, where the three of them are taking turns in watching over
the struggling Vanessa. As the two are getting into their stride (“Whoo! What about a rifle. Do
you have a rifle?” Frankenstein asks), Sembene steps in and says that “Sir Malcolm is inquiring
about the noise.” “Uh-oh,” Ethan chuckles. “We’re in trouble with Dad” (see PD 7 00:34:1436). Now, after Ethan has witnessed Malcolm’s demands of Vanessa, they literally are,
attacking Sir Malcolm for his course of action, who they say is utilising Vanessa instead of
calling a priest and letting her go if need be. “You got a girl dying in there, not some monster
with fangs. You want a daughter? There she is!” Ethan protests (PD 7 00:42:05-42:12), further
condemning Malcolm’s behaviour as transgressive, as he is not only committing a crime
against a “dying girl,” but against his “daughter” – a daughter, moreover, which he also
desires, as Ethan has suggested earlier: “I’m not sure Sir Malcolm is being honest with us,” he
remarks to Victor. “I know he doesn’t want her [Vanessa] to die, but I’m not sure why he
wants her to live.” “He cares for her,” Victor suggests. “She’s like a daughter.” But Ethan
contradicts him: “No she’s not. That’s the problem” (PD 7 00:32:14-35).
Now Ethan threatens Malcom with death: “Sir Malcolm, I swear to Christ, if she’s
right, if you let all this happen so that you could manipulate her, I’ll rip your throat out” (PD 7
00:42:28-40). In the end, Sir Malcolm does not end up like Freud’s mythological father – in his
death enabling the establishment of culture.59 Rather, his life and paternal authority are
All through episode 7, we watch Vanessa engaged in a brutal struggle against this possession – her body
twisting and bruised due to the demonic onslaught, starving as she cannot keep food, and her mental strength
drained as she tries to keep on resisting demonic seduction. “You don’t know what it’s like having this thing
inside me,” she says at some point. “Always…scratching. That’s an awful word but that’s what it feels like. An
animal scratching to get out” (PD 7 00:22:01-14).
59 In fact, Sir Malcolm appears as both the prohibitive paternal instance of culture as well as the pre-cultural
father for whom no prohibitions applied, who establishes cultural law precisely because he himself does not
58
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narrowly saved in the conflict concerning Vanessa’s ‘illness’ until he, at a later point,
relinquishes it of his own accord. Even though both Frankenstein and Ethan are severely
attacking Malcolm for his course of action, they do not appear to be willing or able to call the
priest without his consent (which is precisely why they put so much force into convincing
him). He is still ‘master of the house’ and ultimate authority. Wisely, though, he finally agrees,
thus both backing down and holding his own. In the season’s finale, Malcolm shoots Mina
(who is, by that time, apparently lost to the demonic influence) to save Vanessa, telling
‘demon-Mina’: “I already have a daughter!” (PD 8 00:44:18-20). Afterwards, he is shown
stowing away his expedition gear with which he had been preparing another trip to Africa. “I
was never going to go to Africa,” he admits, asking his new found daughter if they should not
get a Christmas tree in exchange for the gear he is going to clear out of the study. As he starts
crying, Vanessa first comforts him, then joins in herself (PD 8 00:45:00-48). In declaring
Vanessa his daughter, we might see him assuming a ‘healthy’ parental stance towards her –
refuting, as it were, the erotic ambivalence between them by declaring them a family proper
who will put up a tree for Christmas, and thus giving up the claim of the mythological father
to ‘possess all women’ (not only his daughter, but also his potential sexual encounters in
Africa, where he has now decided not to go anymore). At the same time – as the two comfort
each other – he relinquishes a general authoritative stance in showing open emotion and thus
vulnerability (we otherwise experience him almost exclusively as poised and collected).
No such reconciliation is possible with Peter, who has died in Africa. Malcolm is both
accused and accuses himself of killing his son. This is another instance where Malcolm
appears as a transgressive father: In the Freudian Oedipal scenario, a threat (of castration and
by extension, of death60) might be exuded from the position of the father – however the father
is not expected to, so to speak, ‘make good on that promise.’ Malcolm, however, does. As we
have learned from those initial scenes in episode 5 where Malcolm, upon returning from
Africa, clearly chooses the two girls over Peter, there is an ongoing conflict between the two:
Peter admires his father and wants to be like him – expressed in his wish to go with him to
Africa – but Malcolm cannot see his equal in his child.61 Does Malcolm bar his son the way
out of his Oedipal struggles, so to speak, as he denies him identification with himself? As
regards own sexual impulses, Peter himself is either not interested in Vanessa, not interested in
follow it. It might very well be this double function which makes him appear as a person of double standard, and
makes Vanessa accuse him as “weak, foul, lustful, vainglorious.”
60 It is possible, Freud explains, “to regard the fear of death, like the fear of conscience, as a development of the
fear of castration” (qtd. in Mitchell 81).
61
As a young adult – and shortly before he does eventually accompany his father to Africa – Peter reflects:
“Everything time I talk with father about it [going with him to Africa], he shies away […] It’s all I ever dreamed
about […] My father and I, off on an adventure, blazing some daring new trail. [...] perhaps then I wouldn’t be
such a disappointment to him. I was never the son he wanted. Always ill, never good at games – a
disappointment” (PD 5 00:14:44-15:30).
41
women, or not interested in sex at all. We actually might suppose the latter, assuming that
Africa and his father take up the psychic energy that might otherwise have been directed to
sexual interests. Does Malcolm actually deny Peter taking up his place, or does Peter shy away
from taking it, if only as second in line or in imagination, because this would mean not only
sharing the acclaim for Malcolm’s colonial conquests but also ‘sharing’ Vanessa, who Malcolm
– as the monopolising mythological father – lays claim to? Does Malcolm finally ‘kill’ his son
in Africa as a very ‘thorough’ form of castration, which does not only prevent Malcolm from
having to share any of his existing claims but also all potential future ones? Something of the
kind, at least, is suggested in several instances. Even in early adolescence, Peter tells Vanessa
with regard to their future: “I shall not be here to marry you, Van.” As young Vanessa asks,
“Where will you be?” he retorts: “In Africa, with father!” (PD 5 00:06:11-7). The expedition
will take place instead of the marriage, he announces – and then in Africa he will die instead of
completing the expedition. Peter might have imagined – rather like Freud’s little Hans
imagined, to resolve his castration complex – “that he would one day be heir to his father’s
rights” (see Mitchell 82), but such a succession is precluded. As the series fast-forwards a few
years, from early adolescence to young adulthood and, as Vanessa calls it tellingly, “the season
of Peter’s inadequate beard” (PD 5 00:13:08-13), we see Peter – literally – shying away from
Vanessa’s attempts at seducing him into sexual contact (PD 5 00:15:38-16:27). Vanessa –
possessed Vanessa – at one point hurls defiance at Malcolm: “Ah! Is the child killer back for
more? No sons for you to kill here, Malcolm!” (PD 7 00:16:27-34) Similarly Ethan, when
Malcolm tries to coax him into accompanying him on his next Africa trip, confronts him:
“You know what, I have a father. I don’t need another one. And you had a son, and you killed
him! Am I missing anything?!” (PD 7 00:27:40-9) Malcolm in fact submits to these accusations
in his own accounts of Peter’s and his trip to Africa. “I buried my son, Peter, on the shores of
Lake Tanganyika,” he tells Ethan.
He was like a skeleton. The insects had gotten to him. I carried him to the grave
and put him in. He weighed practically nothing. And then I left, because I still had
to survey the northern end of the lake to ascertain if any of the outlets might be
the source of the Nile. (PD 7 00:28:06-33)
Malcolm buries his son and proceeds, without further ado – his fame still (or finally, now that
his son can make no claim to it anymore?) unshared. A while later, he admits his most secret
crime against his son to Victor: “I left him [Peter] at base camp and went off. When I
returned, he was dead. – He asked me to name a mountain after him.” “The Murray
Mountains in the Congo,” Frankenstein offers. But Malcolm explains: “When the time came
42
to claim the range – and affix a proper English name to it, I mean – I wasn’t thinking of him. I
named it for myself. No, Doctor. I haven’t a shred of decency left” (PD 7 00:44:28-45:10). It is
not only as if Malcolm is unwilling to share physical and sexual potency (the mountain
appearing as rather obvious phallic symbol). It is the name of the father – the symbolic power
of the parental position that Malcolm cannot release. It takes Vanessa and her relentless
struggle, against who- or whatever means to possess her, to take him down.
4.2 ...will be visited upon the daughter
Episode 5 gives us the crucial details of Vanessa’s back story, a history of sexual transgression
and psychiatric treatment. This history takes up both the idea of a ‘shocking’ sexual discovery
that influences a child in its development, and the image of the hysteric patient. Vanessa’s
discovery of Sir Malcolm and her mother engaged in sexual activity, hiding in the garden’s
hedge-maze at dark, which effects severe psychological changes in the girl,62 reminds us of
Freud’s ‘Wolfman’ case study. In the Wolfman’s case, Freud reconstructs the event, which the
patient cannot remember, during analysis by interpreting one of the patient’s dreams, and
presumes it to have taken place in early childhood (at about one and a half years of age). Freud
assumes that the small child, sleeping in his parent’s bedroom, wakes up and watches his
parents have sex; Freud refers to this as the “primal scene” (“History of an Infantile Neurosis”
226) and supposes it to disturb – a few years after its actual occurrence – the patient’s sexual
development in decisive ways.63 Both Vanessa and Freud’s patient are unintentionally
witnessing a sexual act and thus ‘committing’ an act of voyeurism that is to leave lasting
psychological traces. Freud singles out the elements of the patient’s dream that direct his
interpretation to the primal scene as follows: “an actual event – occurring at a very early age –
watching – motionlessness – sexual problems – castration – the father – something terrible”
(“History of an Infantile Neurosis” 222). Freud describes how in the dream – and in the
original situation that causes it – the patient experiences a moment of discovery both
unexpected and inadvertent, a sudden visual impression unprepared for: “my eyes are
suddenly opened” (“History of an Infantile Neurosis” 223) are the words the patient uses in
description of dream material which Freud will then decipher as representation of the primal
scene. “He woke up ... and saw a scene of violent excitement,” Freud sums up, “which he
At least psychological is what they seem like at first and are understood as by her surroundings for a long time.
Witnessing the primal scene is not the only factor that Freud identifies as relevant during analysis; there are
several aspects that lead to the patient’s “neurotic disorder” (“anxiety hysteria (animal phobia) and then …
obsessive-compulsive neurosis”) between the ages of four and ten (see “History of an Infantile Neurosis” 196).
With regard to the primal scene, it is specifically, as Freud repeatedly emphasises, the fact that the parents have
sex a tergo that convinces the child of the reality of castration and causes him to repress his sexual desires of his
father, which are replaced by animal phobia (see “History of an Infantile Neurosis” 230-2). It is less the details of
this particular case history than the general spirit which links it to Vanessa’s story, as will be elaborated above.
62
63
43
watched with tense attentiveness” (“History of an Infantile Neurosis” 223).
Much of this is also an apt description of Vanessa’s experience (see PD 5 00:09:3012:00). “On that terrible night, the night it happened,” wandering through the moonlit garden
after the dinner on occasion of Sir Malcolm’s return from Africa, she walks into the hedgemaze and hears noises. “I honestly thought I was going to find you and Peter round the next
corner, playing some trick on me,” Vanessa explains in retrospective voice-over. Who she
actually finds is “my mother, your father” making love. The scene emphasises the sudden
moment of seeing in much the same way as it is emphasised by Freud. Something that was
hidden is dis-covered: whereas in the Wolfman’s dream, a window suddenly opens, we here
see the corner of the hedge, around which Vanessa is going to find Malcolm and her mother,
looming eerily into view on screen, and then, intercut with scenes of the ‘parent’s’ lovemaking,
close-ups of the young girl’s face half-hidden by the hedge, thus stressing the position of the
secret observer. The incident leaves Vanessa shaken in several regards – not only due to the
unexpected discovery, but also due to her own feelings of pleasure: “More than the shock, the
sinfulness, the forbidden act, there was this: I enjoyed it. Something whispered. I listened.” 64
Vanessa – raised Catholic, as is emphasised repeatedly throughout the series – hurries to her
room and kneels down in prayer, presumably in need of absolution for her experience of
pleasure. “Perhaps I was just cherishing the secrecy of it, as a hidden sin,” Vanessa muses in
retrospect. “But in me there was a change.” She begins to commit “hidden acts of
wickedness” such as stealing small items, like a comb, from her friend Mina. “I told myself it
was no more than mischief [...] but I knew it was more.” A strong sense of guilt and
transgression is thus conveyed through Vanessa’s account of her experience, as is the sense
that this event is decisive for her development (she starts her account, after all, by saying
ominously, “on that terrible night, the night it happened,” the event apparently meaningful
enough not to need a name) and at least partially responsible for her following transgressions
and the ordeal she has to live through later. It is not hard to see in Freud’s words – “an actual
event – occurring at a very early age – watching – the father – something terrible” – a
description that can just as well be applied to Vanessa’s story.
Many particulars, of course, are also different: the issue of guilt – which is relevant to
both scenes, Vanessa’s and the Wolfman’s – includes different aspects as Vanessa and Freud’s
patient are in different stages of development: whereas the Wolfman’s guilt is the ‘instinctive’
According to the story of Penny Dreadful, Vanessa’s history is actually one of supernatural influence rather than
psychological disturbance; however the two do go closely together for most of the time, in particular as the other
characters for a long time understand Vanessa’s condition as psychological. Incidents such as the one described
above are plausible (as elements of a fictional narrative) both as psychological as well as as supernatural
developments. Ultimately, the series seems to suggest an interconnection of the supernatural and the
psychological: the demonic influence is a fact, but Vanessa’s predisposition and experiences have also made her
susceptible to it (as is indicated in episode 5 already: the demonic is “whispering,” but she is also “listening”).
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guilt of the child caught up in the Oedipal complex, who fears castration and will out of this
fear of castration develop a fear of conscience, Vanessa’s guilt is the more ‘grown-up,’
conscious guilt of one who already has developed this judging internal instance (we can only
guess her age but it might be around 12 years). It results from her reflection on rules of proper
behaviour (such as marital fidelity and standards of modesty), and the knowledge that she does
not adhere to them (by her little acts of mischief but also, ironically, by deriving pleasure from
watching others not adhering to those rules).65
The episode moves from this event to Vanessa’s main act of (sexual) transgression
which in turn leads directly to her (presumed) illness and psychiatric treatment, in other
words, to her appearance as hysteric. Vanessa struggles with accepting the fact that Mina is
going to be married while she herself is rejected by Peter and also otherwise not looking
forward to any exciting prospects (“How was it possible that you [Mina], always so meek and
obliging, were to have this greatest of adventures before me? [...] You would know a man’s
touch while I, the courageous one, knew nothing of life”; PD 5 00:13:00-14:09). She looks
unsuccessfully for religious comfort. Instead of God’s voice, however, she hears a demonic
whisper: “I tried to pray that night. God didn’t answer me. But another did” (PD 5 00:17:0020). This reference to a malevolent influence thus directly links Vanessa’s betrayal of her best
friend to her earlier experience in the hedge-maze, where she also heard an obscure force
“whispering” to her. In those scenes (see PD 5 00:18:05-21:57) where Vanessa seduces Mina’s
fiancé, Captain Branson (who clearly does not make too much of an effort at resisting), she
styles herself as having magical powers, as witch or sorceress. 66 Vanessa and Branson end up
having sex between the stuffed animals on the table, a rather rough procedure where we
cannot quite tell whether Vanessa does actually end up as victim of the situation she initiated,
and being caught in the act by Mina in a quasi-repetition of Vanessa’s earlier experience.
There is, again, a distinct ambivalence about the events – they appear to be half the
result of psychological drama, half of demonic influence. Psychological disturbance,
connected to sexuality, and possession appear to band together to push Vanessa into the
transgression that will determine her further course of life. Considering the history of hysteria,
Arguably, Vanessa is disturbed by the events because they disturb her system of which rules to adhere to and
which authorities to follow. What the child acquires in the Oedipal complex – broadly speaking, a sensitivity for
instances of authority, both abstract and personified – is impaired in Vanessa’s case, as it is precisely the figure of
paternal authority which breaches the social rules established by his own authority.
66
Taxidermy has apparently been a hobby for Vanessa, Mina, and Peter from childhood on. We have earlier seen
the younger Vanessa discuss with Peter how to make the stuffed animals look alive. According to her, you have
to give them names: “It’s like a witch’s spell” (PD 5 00:05:26-9). Vanessa repeats this idea now towards Brandon
as she shows him the workroom full of stuffed animals. Explaining that in contrast to Mina, she does not favour
peaceful animals at all, she elaborates techniques that will make the animals come to life – naming them, “like a
witch’s spell,” and putting little mirrors behind their glass eyes to make them sparkle. “I would put mirrors
behind the entire world if I could,” she tells Branson. Vanessa appears in this episode both as child and
seductress – both hurt and defiant, as well as self-empowering.
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it is rather appropriate that it is a mixture of sex, trauma, and bedevilment that causes her to
end up in a psychiatric establishment. Hysteria was certainly, to use Logan’s words, “in the
water” in 1891 – considering that Jean-Martin Charcot had at that point been gaining fame as
neurologist at the Parisian Salpêtrière for many years, his “favourite neurosis” declared to be
hysteria (see Bronfen 176) and that Freud, who had studied with Charcot in 1885-6, was to
publish with Josef Breuer their Studien über die Hysterie in 1895, frequently referred to as the
“inaugural text of psychoanalysis” (for example Belsey 33). Several of the crucial aspects that
have characterised hysteria, or the idea of hysteria, throughout its long and complex history
resonate in the figure of Vanessa: the strong visual impact, the vocabulary of body language,
associated with the condition; the persistent association between hysteria and (a ‘dysfunction’
of) female sexuality; the efforts to find physiological cause of and treatment for hysteria; and
the reorientation towards (sexual) trauma and a talking cure. Penny Dreadful does here not only
connect to the contents of psychoanalytical teachings but also recreates the actual beginnings
of psychoanalysis as discipline and method, as it reconstructs how fin de siècle science and
culture constructed the complex of gynaecological condition, mental illness, and physical
spectacle that made up hysteria as imagined, diagnosed and treated around the turn from the
18th to the 19th century.
Vanessa’s first ‘performance’ as hysteric takes place in episode 2 (see PD 2 00:30:5036:37).67 At the séance that Vanessa and Sir Malcolm attend it is her, rather than the spiritualist
Madame Kali who initiated the séance, who ends up speaking in the voice of the dead – that
of Mina and Peter, specifically, confronting Malcolm with his own transgressions (his
libertinage and neglect of his children). Her outbreaks end with her on the table around which
the other participants are gathered, head thrown back, long hair falling, arms outstretched and
body bent backwards. It is not hard to recognise in this posture the hysteric’s arc de cercle, the
“circular curve in which the patient would bend completely in the back” (Bronfen 181)
included by Charcot in what he identified as the regular sequence of a hysterical attack.68 Not
only at the séance, but also during the attacks we witness later, Vanessa exhibits various kinds
of “eccentric body turnings and bizarre and grotesque body postures, marked by an unusual
flexibility, mobility, fluidity, and sheer physical force” (Bronfen 181) that make her appear as
hysteric. This repertoire of body language, “the somatic alphabet Charcot and his
collaborators were in the process of creating” (Bronfen 189), is an important element in late
19th century understandings of hysteria, as Charcot capitalised on the potential for visual
impression that he found in his patients’ physical conditions: in particular in his (in)famous
67 A
“riveting performance” is what Mr. Lyle, host of the party at which Vanessa’s attack happens, calls it (PD 2
00:41:29).
68 For a detailed description of this sequence see Bronfen 180-2.
46
Tuesday lectures, the hysterical attack was made into a spectacle for science and art alike. The
“novelty of Charcot’s scientific method stems from his insisting on the theatricality and
visuality of hysteria and in [sic] his insisting on rendering the hysterical body as a public
spectacle” (Bronfen 174-5), a method of imaging in which Charcot drew, not least, on “the
connection between demon possession, mystic visions, and hysteria” (Bronfen 178-9).69 The
focus is on the female sexualised body: As “Charcot never fully relinquished the notion that
an unsatisfied sexual desire was one of the causes of hysteria,” his “notion of hysteria knots
together the vicissitudes of traumatic experience with the legacy of received cultural images of
the feminine body contorted into fits of ecstasy, stigmatizing the presence of a foreign body
within her” (Bronfen 179).
Elisabeth Bronfen describes that although Charcot did consider psychic trauma as part
of the cause of hysteric illness, his treatment remained symptomatic, and his primary interest
nosological (see 177-9). What was “significantly absent in Charcot’s spectacle of the hysteric
body [...] was the inversion of specularity, namely, the psychic topology hidden beneath the
body surface, impenetrable to any investigation of body organs.” It is “this inverted site that
Freud came to explore after he had studied with Charcot” (Bronfen 176). Freud and Breuer
came to link hysteria firmly to psychical trauma and somatised memory traces. The symptoms
of hysteric patients “enact memories that are residues of traumatic experiences, representing
these as mnemic symbols, because a reaction to the wounding experience had initially been
suppressed” (Bronfen 260-1). The hysteric’s condition can be undone “once the affect
connected with the traumatic moment [...] is linked back to a narrative about this event” (260).
Freud ultimately prefers to conceive of those traumatic moments as typically sexual in nature:
“his own theorization has convinced him,” Bronfen explains in her examination of several of
Freud’s case studies, “that an exhaustive explanation is possible only if it includes sexuality as
the agent provocateur in the mental life of the hysteric” (267) – the sexual etiology of hysteria
is a “theory romance [...] which Freud [...] desperately wanted to prove” (268).
All of this – the twisting female body as spectacle, the links to possession as well as to
sexual desire, the search for a traumatic experience as cause – finds its expression in Vanessa’s
history. There is a certain ‘double approach’ to be detected in the series. On the one hand, the
series makes itself use of the visual impressiveness of the “contorted” female body and the
association between hysteria, sexual desire, and demonic possession; on the other it presents
hysteria as condition that was treated and staged in one or the other way by late 19th century
medical science: we see Vanessa being treated in a psychiatric establishment as well as, later,
Charcot published, together with Paul Richer, a work on Les demoniaques dans l’art (1887). On the sources,
production, and distribution of Charcot’s ‘hysteric images’ see Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria.
Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière.
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diagnosed in a quasi-psychoanalytical manner by Victor. After the incident with Mina’s fiancé,
and after she is banned from the Murray estate by Sir Malcolm, Vanessa falls dramatically ill,
into a constant fever-like trance, suffering alternately from convulsive fits, paroxysms and
states of apathy. Her parents finally commit her to a clinic that is well-known for, as Vanessa’s
mother puts it, “treating women’s disorders” (PD 5 00:26:40). The attending physician assures
Vanessa’s parents that “hysteria of a psychosexual nature can be treated,” explaining that “the
treatments involve 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 and then cease” (PD 5 00:28:00-14). The psychiatrist’s confident manner
begins to crack, though, as he is left alone with Vanessa and she addresses him with his
complete name – Christopher Matthew Banning – even though he only introduced himself as
“Christopher Banning” to her and the two have never met before. The impression that
Vanessa is in fact supernaturally inflicted is strengthened when she does not react to being
called by her name (“Who’s Vanessa?) and attacks Banning, speaking in an unkown tongue,
snarling, going for his head and throat (PD 5 00:29:20-48). In the following, we see her going
through an extended ordeal of psychiatric treatment – forced into iced-water baths in a
straightjacket, restrained on a bed and sedated, chained to the wall as to a cross while a large
water hose is being directed on her (the phallic imagery is anything but subtle), her hair shorn,
and finally brain surgery, which leaves her vegetating unresponsively (PD 5 00:29:48-33:20).
Pictures of mental illness, demonic possession, and sex continue to go together in the
course of Vanessa’s story. Not only have we witnessed her strong language and frequent
reference to sexual acts during the séance and seen her seduce a stranger in the streets after
she has left the party (see PD 2 00:36:45-37:50). When we see for the first time one of
Vanessa’s encounters with the devil,70 we find him to be, or appear as, Sir Malcolm (see PD 5
00:39:25-44:10). She initially resists him but he manages to – literally – seduce her with “the
true knowledge of man’s virtue, as well as his sin. The power. The sight beyond this world.”
We witness the finalisation of the pact between Vanessa and devil-Malcolm through sexual
intercourse only from the perspective of Vanessa’s mother – who finds her daughter alone on
the bed, naked and hips thrashing, her eyes rolled back to show only the whites, in what must
appear as a particularly obscene hysteric attack. These images of intimate physical interaction
between Vanessa and Sir Malcolm (we do not witness sexual intercourse, but we do see the
two kissing) not only activate the impression of incestuous desires being at work between
them (no matter who actually acts as Sir Malcolm in that moment, the body we see on screen
is his). All these scenes (the images of Vanessa’s thrashing body viewed from her mother’s
perspective included) also capitalise on the conceptual closeness between hysteric disease,
70
At least, that is what we assume him to be: when he prompts Vanessa to name him, she calls him “serpent.”
48
demonic influence, and sexual desire.71
It will also turn out that it is actually her sleeping with Dorian that brings about her
final and strongest period of hysteria/possession some time later, after she has come to
London and Sir Malcolm’s house. As she and Dorian are having sex, Vanessa is struck by
hearing again those demonic voices which she apparently has been able to hold in check for
some time (PD 6 00:44:22-45:00). She leaves abruptly and returns to Malcolm’s house, only to
shock him by suddenly levitating (in precisely the hysteric’s classic posture discussed before:
head tilted back, back arched; see PD 6 00:47:35-53). The next morning and the beginning of
episode 7 finds her lying on the couch in the living room, talking to Sir Malcolm, a bearded
fatherly figure sitting in an arm-chair in the background: the reference to a psychoanalytic
therapeutical setting could hardly be more obvious. The exchange between them (discussed in
4.1 above) is hardly therapeutical; however, Victor Frankenstein later takes over, as it were,
from Malcolm the position of doctor – according to his actual profession – and presents, in
conversation with Malcolm, an interpretation of Vanessa’s condition truly Freudian in spirit:
Victor: “What brings on the fits?”
Malcolm: “I don’t know. Emotion of some kind.” […]
Victor: “I must ask you a difficult question. Has she experienced sexual trauma in her
life? [...] Is she intact?”
Malcolm: “I wouldn’t have thought so. I place no judgement on that.”
Victor: “I have no interest in your judgement. Miss Ives is manifesting a deep
psychosexual responsiveness. I would say the root of her condition lies there. In guilt.
Something or someone has triggered it.”
Malcolm: “Well, last night she went out with a young man.”
Victor: “All right. Let’s imagine this: She has an erotic encounter with this man,
perhaps her first, we don’t know, and it evolves into some sort of sexual extremity or
perversity that produces feelings of guilt or shame that might stimulate a psychological
break or dissociation which–”
Victor’s psychoanalytical explanation, linking desire, guilt, and hysteric condition, is negated by
There is no one imperative reading for these scenes. We can read all of this as a metaphor for a young woman
being oppressed by a society which allows her little opportunity for exploration, sexually and otherwise; we might
read this as a history of a traumatising event, initiated by Vanessa catching Sir Malcolm and her mother in the
hedge-maze, an occurrence which distorts her moral compass; we can accept the supernatural as fact in Penny
Dreadful’s fictional universe, and ascribe the devil’s seduction of Vanessa simply to his powers of temptation
which override human resistance – him being the devil after all – or to a combination of his power and Vanessa’s
ambivalent moral status. Plot and imagery are clearly related to the genealogy of concepts described above; but of
course this relation can again be interpreted in different ways (Vanessa being caught in the ‘straightjacket’ of
contemporary psychiatric misogyny and inflexible gender roles, for example).
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the turn of events: out of nothing, a large spider appears on the tarot card which he has taken
from the table to play with as he pieces together his theory. Soon the whole living room is
crawling with spiders (PD 7 00:11:50-13:20).72 Sir Malcolm finally utters what the audience has
long known,73 but what had not yet been established as common and accepted knowledge
between the characters, who continued to put forward medical-psychological explanations:
“She’s been possessed by the devil” (PD 7 00:17:25).
In a similar way, the earlier couch setting was turned from psychoanalytic into supernatural scene as Vanessa’s
excitement raises a storm that wreaks havoc on the whole room (PD 7 00:06:15-07:00).
73 Such an explanation becomes more and more plausible as hints towards supernatural events accumulate:
Vanessa flying, her improbable knowledge of details like Banning’s middle name, the spiders, the storm that tears
up the interiors of the living room.
72
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5 “A kind of fluctuating rhythm” – serial narration beyond the pleasure
principle
5.1 “Freud’s own masterplot” – Beyond the Pleasure Principle and (serial) narrative
If the characters in Penny Dreadful fall prey to guilty pleasures, and if the series tells us that we
also fall prey to guilty pleasures in watching them do so – why does this work so well, and
what does it have to do with repetition?74 Reading (or following a story, as we can also
substitute to allow a less media-specific application)75 is frequently discussed as an act of
pleasure, not only in popular discourse, but also in theory. “All fictional texts attempt to
tantalize, to seduce the reader,” Linda Hutcheon claims (33). “Only by forcing the act of
reading to become one of imaginative possession, analogous in degree of involvement and
active participation to the sexual act, can literature bring itself to life” (86).
One who has paid detailed attention to what such an “imaginative possession” might
actually look like is Peter Brooks. His Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative is an
immensely useful resource in the context at hand as it presents an understanding in
psychoanalytic terms of the dynamics a story unfolds as it is produced and as it is received.
The psychoanalytical model that Brooks bases his analysis on is Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, itself a ‘story’ of how organic life in general came to be as desire to move forward
‘clashed’ with the urge to stay put.76 We can “conceive of the reading of plot as a form of
desire that carries us forward, onward, through the text,” Brooks explains. It is precisely this
forward-moving impulse, striving to put together single elements into an ever-growing
structure, which is identified by Brooks as the major force and motivation in following a story.
He finds it expressed most clearly in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
To recapitulate briefly: Chapter 4 has elaborated how Penny Dreadful casts its characters’ background in
psychoanalytic terms and makes their present state appear as a result of the illicit desires they have given in to –
illicit in the sense that desire, following Freudian teaching, in Oedipal constellations is prohibited by the threat of
castration and later the ‘threat of conscience’; but also illicit in the sense that the characters commit real and not
only symbolic or imagined transgression (Malcolm killing – or at least letting die – his own son and then even
‘overwriting’ his son’s name with his own). Chapter 2 has examined how the series captures almost all
interpersonal relations specifically as processes of seduction, and seduction with corruptive consequences at that;
by calling itself a ‘penny dreadful’, the series inserts itself into a tradition of cheap but addictive entertainment
and thus marks its own reception by the audience as an act of giving in to the promise of a morally questionable
experience. Chapter 3 has focused on how Penny Dreadful both exercises and reflects on repetition as the modus
operandi of fiction (able to “resurrect” its entities without limitations); this repetition, however, turned out to be
not ‘simple’ replication, but rather complex ‘repetition with variation,’ which in turn is particularly evident as
mode of operation when we are confronted with serial fiction.
75 This substitution does not distort the claims put forward by theorists such as Barthes, Hutcheon or Brooks,
which will be referenced in the following. Their studies might derive from an occupation with written texts, but
their studies do not preclude an application to a visual narrative.
76 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle constitutes Freud’s own masterplot, the essay where he lays out most fully a total
scheme of how life proceeds from beginning to end, and how each individual life in its own manner repeats the
masterplot and confronts the question of whether the closure of an individual life is contingent or necessary”
(Brooks 96-7).
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Desire is in this view like Freud’s notion of Eros, a force including sexual desire
but larger and more polymorphous, which (he writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle)
seeks “to combine organic substances into ever greater unities.” Desire as Eros,
desire in its plastic and totalizing function, appears to me central to our experience
of reading narrative, and if in what follows I evoke Freud […] it is because I find
in Freud’s work the best model for a “textual erotics.” (37)
Freud is so useful a resource for Brooks because he employs an “energetic” and a
“dynamic model” for mental life – the energetic “involves investments, movements, and
discharges of energies, derived from physics and especially from thermodynamics”; the
dynamic model derives psychic processes from the interplay of forces, which are
originally drives […] The unconscious is the place of drives or instincts in conflict,
a basic dualism whence comes its permanent driving force [...] . (Brooks 42)
Both models are based on ideas of movements and forces, are thus models of dynamics rather
than of situation or structure. Brooks’ interest in “motors and engines,” he says, results from
his “dissatisfaction” with the rigidity of those approaches to narrative that can only capture
static form and thereby neglect the fact that every narrative incites movement as it directs our
thought to something that is not yet there and has to be reached – “what makes plot move us
forward to the end” (47). With reference to Derrida, Brooks emphasises that we need an
energetics rather than a mechanics of narrative text, that we need to put force before form,
even though we are unable to grasp the former as well as we can grasp the latter: “I can make
no claim to understanding force in itself,” Brooks admits. “But I think we can use such a
concept to move beyond the static models of much formalism, toward a dynamics of reading
and writing” to do justice to “the dynamics of the narrative text, connecting beginning and
end across the middle and making of that middle – what we read through – a field of force” (47;
emphasis in original). This dynamic relation between beginning, middle, and end decisively
shapes Brooks’ approach to narrative plots and provides the link to Freud’s text:
Because it concerns ends in relation to beginnings and the forces that animate
the middle in between, Freud’s model is suggestive of what a reader engages
when he responds to plot. It images that engagement as essentially dynamic, an
interaction with a system of energy which the reader activates. This in turn
suggests why we can read Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a text concerning
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textuality [...] It is [...] the superimposition of the functioning of the psychic
apparatus on the functioning of the text that offers the possibility of a
psychoanalytic criticism. (Brooks 112) 77
In Brooks’ account, beginning a narrative initiates desire (to move “forward, onward, through
the text”),78 but both this beginning and the ‘appetite’ it awakens depend on an ending
looming ahead, so that there is ultimately desire for continuance as well as for closure: the
concept of an ending is necessary to that of a beginning […] The very possibility
of meaning plotted through sequence and through time depends on the
anticipated structuring force of the ending: the interminable would be
meaningless […] we read only those incidents and signs that can be construed as
promise and annunciation, enchained toward a construction of significance79
[…] To say ‘I have begun…’ (whatever it may be) acquires meaning only
through postulation of a narrative begun, and that beginning depends on its
ending. (Brooks 93-4)
In the interplay of contradictory forces, “both a drive towards the end and a resistance to
ending” (Brooks 281) manifest themselves: “If the motor of narrative is desire, [...] building
ever-larger units of meaning, the ultimate determinants of meaning lie at the end, and narrative
desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end” (Brooks 52) – the forward move of narrative
What does this “superimposition” mean – how does it understand the entity ‘text,’ and how does it position
readers and writers? “We may conceive of the text as an as-if medium, fictional […] yet speaking of the
investments of desire on the part of both addresser and addressee, author and reader, a place of rhetorical
exchange or transaction,” Brooks explains (234). The text thus appears here as the site where desires take place. This
actually proves itself to be quite an apt understanding in the present context, considering that serial fiction, Penny
Dreadful specifically, understands itself and is understood as an attractive force that makes its readers ‘give in’ to
its temptations (see chapter 2). If “narrative [is] a process of dynamic exchange” in which “shape and meaning
are the product of the listening as of the telling” (236), if narrative is thus a matter of continuous development, it
is only appropriate to apply a literally ‘organic’ model such as Freud’s – whose subject matter are ‘living
organisms’ of all kind – to it. Roland Barthes similarly regards the text as opening up a site of interacting
(demands for) pleasures, even though in contrast to Brooks, who understands this site to be the text itself, for
Barthes this site is located in the reader’s position: “If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure,
it is because they were written in pleasure […] Does writing in pleasure guarantee – guarantee me, the writer –
my reader’s pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader […] without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then
created. It is not the reader’s ‘person’ that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire”
(4; emphasis in original).
78 As does Hutcheon – and as does Penny Dreadful – Brooks also explicitly conceives of the fictional text as
seductive: “it is important to consider not only what a narrative is, but what it is for, and what its stakes are […]
There can be a range of reasons for telling a story, from the self-interested to the altruistic. Seduction appears as a
predominant motive, be it specifically erotic and oriented toward the capture of the other, or more nearly
narcissistic, even exhibitionistic, asking for admiration and attention.” (236).
79 This certainly applies to some genres or literary styles more than to others; however it is clearly true of many
contemporary popular serial narratives (where generally all at least halfway prominent events in earlier episodes
have, as we expect them to have, consequences in later episodes, if they do not have them already in the same
episode).
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is both result of the urge to go on as well as the urge to finish.
Brooks identifies this mode of operating on beginnings and end points as
characteristic dynamics of all narrative (the “authority of narrative derives from its capacity to
speak of origins in relation to endpoints”; 276), yet there is good reason to emphasise the
relevance of this characterisation to serial narrative in particular: as it multiplies beginnings and
endings, it may also be assumed to multiply the dynamics that those two poles engender. The
reasons for Brooks to turn to Freud for a model for narrative plot are thus good reasons to
apply Freud’s suggestion to serial narrative, specifically:
If in the beginning stands desire, and this shows itself ultimately to be desire for
the end, between beginning and end stands a middle that we feel to be necessary
[…] Here it is that Freud’s most ambitious investigation of ends in relation to
beginnings may be of help, and may contribute to a properly dynamic model of
plot. (Brooks 96)
Freud’s “metapsychological account” – as he himself terms it, which is employed by Brooks as
‘metatextual account’ – in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is concerned with the “evolution of
psychic processes” (132) and the forces or principles which determine this evolution. One is
assumed to be the pleasure principle – that is, the principle that aims at reducing unpleasurable
tension of any kind and the “quantity of excitation”80 within the psyche (see 133-4).81 There
are, however, phenomena which suggest the “prevalence of tendencies beyond the pleasure
principle; tendencies, that is, that are arguably more primal than the pleasure principle, and
quite independent of it” (143; emphasis in original). These phenomena have to do with
repetition. The aim of therapy is making the patient remember, making conscious what is
repressed; what the analyst encounters more often than not, however, is repetition instead of
remembrance, as the repressed refuses to become conscious: “the patient is driven to repeat the
repressed matter as an experience in the present, instead of remembering it as something
belonging to the past, which is what the physician would much rather see happen” (145;
emphasis in original). It is specifically this curious “compulsion to repeat” (145), to relive
unpleasurable experiences that makes Freud “postulate that there really is a compulsion to
“The most abundant sources of such excitation from within,” Freud explains, “are the organism’s so-called
drives, which represent all those manifestations of energy that originate in the inner depths of the body and are
transmitted to the psychic apparatus” (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 162).
81 The pleasure principle is somewhat inhibited by the reality principle which ultimately, however, does not
diverge too strongly from the pleasure principle (“Thanks to the influence of the ego’s self-preservation drive it
[the pleasure principle] is displaced by the reality principle, which, without abandoning the aim of ultimately
achieving pleasure, none the less demands and procures the postponement of gratification, the rejection of
sundry opportunities for such gratification, and the temporary toleration of unpleasure on the long and circuitous
road to pleasure”; “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 135).
80
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repeat that pays no heed to the pleasure principle” (149).82
Those “manifestations of a compulsion to repeat [...] plainly bear the stamp of drives”
(163). Having thus established the fundamental status of this urge to repeat, Freud then lays
out his account of the development of organic life as such, in which the compulsion to repeat
figures prominently.
A drive might accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism
to restore a prior state the organism was compelled to relinquish due to the disruptive
influence of external forces [...] This conception of drives sounds strange, for we
have become accustomed to seeing drives as the key factor pressing for change
and development, and now we are supposed to see them as the direct opposite: as
the expression of the conservative nature of organic life. (165; emphasis in original)
This “prior state” turns out to be death:
It would contradict the conservative nature of drives if it were the goal of life to
achieve a state never previously attained to. Rather, it must aspire to an old state,
a primordial state from which it once departed [...] we can only say that the goal of
all life is death [...]. (166; emphasis in original)
Freud thus presents a story of universal scope – of which he has warned us that it is
“speculation, often quite extravagant speculation” (151) – following the evolution of organic
life from its first stirrings to its present-day form:
At some point or other, the attributes of life were aroused in non-living matter by
the operation upon it of a force that we are still quite incapable of imagining. [...]
Freud elaborates: “the compulsion to repeat also brings back experiences from the past that contain no
potential for pleasure whatever, and which even at the time cannot have constituted gratification, not even in
respect of drive impulses that were only subsequently repressed” (147; emphasis in original). As an example,
Freud names the repetition of the painful experiences included in the development of infantile sexuality, which
must, due to its ‘inadequacy,’ result in feelings of rejection: “The early florescence of infantile sexuality is doomed
to come to nothing because a child’s desires are incompatible with reality, and its physical development is
insufficiently advanced. Its demise is brought about in the most harrowing circumstances, and accompanied by
intensely painful emotions. […] All these unwelcome circumstances and painful layers of emotion are accordingly
repeated by neurotic patients in the transference process, and are brought back to life with immense ingenuity
[…] the patient’s experience of the fact that then, too, they brought unpleasure instead of gratification makes not
a scrap of difference: the action is repeated regardless. The patient is driven to this by a compulsion” (148). Freud
also counts the phenomena of “accident-induced neurosis” (149) among the manifestations of this compulsion to
repeat (that is, the tendency to relive traumatic experiences brought about by external circumstances, to which no
gain of pleasure can possibly be attributed: the “dreams of patients with accident-induced neurosis can no longer
be viewed in terms of wish-fulfilment, and nor can those dreams, familiar to us from psychoanalysis, that bring
back memories of the psychic traumas of childhood”) (160).
82
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The tension generated at that point in previously inanimate matter sought to
achieve equilibrium; thus the first drive came into existence: the drive to return
toward the inanimate. At that stage death was still easy for living matter; the
course of life that had to be gone through was probably short, its direction
determined by the newly created organism’s chemical structure. In this way living
matter may have experienced a long period of continual re-creation and easy
death, until decisive external factors changed in such a way that they compelled
still-surviving matter to take ever greater diversions from its original course of life
and ever more complex detours in achieving its death-goal. These detours on the
path to death, all faithfully preserved by the conservative drives, may well be what
gives us our present picture of the phenomena of life. (“Beyond the Pleasure
Principle” 167)
Any self-preservation drives that we ascribe to organisms in this account turn out to be forces
that work to keep the organism on the ‘proper’ road the death (that is the one intrinsic to the
being in question): “safeguarding the organism’s own particular path to death and barring all
possible means of return to the inorganic other than those already immanent” (167). Every
living being has a particular detour that it is made to take in its ‘journey back’ to the inanimate:
“the organism wants only to die in its own particular way” (167).
On closer inspection, however, this, for Freud, turns out to be not be whole story (“if
we really think about it, this cannot be true!”; 168). In fact, it is both the urge to go back and
the urge to go forward, to reach death and to become immortal, as it were, that determine the
actual course of an organism’s life:
[...] not all the individual organic elements that make up the complex body of a
higher organism stay with it throughout the entire course of its development to
the point of natural death. Some of them, the germ-cells, probably retain the
original structure of living matter and after a certain period they separate off from
the organism [...] they begin to develop, i.e. they repeat the game to which they
owe their own existence, and the outcome of this is that one portion of their
matter continues its development right through to the end, while another reverts
once more to the beginnings of the development process as a new particle. These
germ-cells thus work in opposition to the death of living matter, and succeed in
giving it what in our eyes must seem like potential immortality ... The drives that
take charge of the destiny of these organic elements [...] constitute the group
termed ‘sexual drives’. (168-9)
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These – which Freud in the course of his text comes to term alternatively ‘life drives,’ ‘sexual
drives,’ or ‘libidinal drives,’ as opposed to ‘death drives’ or ‘ego drives’ (see in particular part
VI of Beyond the Pleasure Principle) – are conservative as well in the sense that they act in a
preserving manner; however, they are also the only drives to which “we can attribute an inner
tendency towards ‘progress’ and higher development” (172 fn. 10). They counteract the move
towards death that organic life otherwise undertakes. Ultimately, life in general, in Freud’s
account, turns out to be determined by the interaction of the wish for continuance with the
wish for closure:
It amounts to a kind of fluctuating rhythm within the life of organisms: one group
of drives goes storming ahead in order to attain the ultimate goal of life at the
earliest possible moment, another goes rushing back at certain point along the way
in order to do part of it all over again and thus prolong the journey. (170)
If narrative desire is – following Brooks – desire for the end, and if – following Freud – desire
for the end is always counteracted by the desire to go back and “do part of it all over again,” it
is precisely the pattern of serial narrative that we end up with: as the narrative opens, it carries
with it the promise of an ending which bestows meaning to the events (as described by
Brooks), both those resolved at the end of an episode, and those resolved in later episodes or
even at the end of the series. But the lure of the end is counteracted by the lure of ‘doing part
of it all over again’ in the next episode, so that the serial narrative not only ends up on a
particularly elaborate “detour” – to use Freud’s expression – towards its end, but that it also
provides a chief example of the “fluctuating rhythm” that Freud postulates, a rhythm of going
forward and drawing back that can be extended over considerable periods of time.83
Brooks applies Freud’s account to narrative fiction in general as “masterplot,” as the
plot of all narrative plots. It is mainly Freud’s concept of the “detour” that prompts him to do
so. “Plot is a kind of arabesque or squiggle toward the end,” Brooks explains, “the arbitrary,
transgressive, gratuitous line of narrative, its deviance from [...] the shortest distance between
beginning and end” (Brooks 104). This deviance from the shortest possible distance for
Brooks makes for the main parallel to the life story of Freud’s organism which wants “only to
die in its own particular way”:
These counteracting forces are maybe particularly evident in season finales. Penny Dreadful’s season 1 finale, for
example, juxtaposes the emotional impact of closure (Brona dies, Vanessa calls off her affair with Dorian, who
has obviously entertained hopes for their future) with the impatience to move on generated by cliffhangers (is
Ethan’s wolfish alter ego actually Jack the Ripper? Will Victor really reanimate Brona’s body as companion for
Caliban? Will Vanessa be willing and able to undergo a ‘proper’ exorcism?).
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The complication of the detour is related to the danger of short-circuit: the
danger [...] of achieving the im-proper death. The improper end lurks
throughout narrative, frequently as the wrong choice: choice of the wrong
casket, misapprehension of the magical agent, false erotic object choice. […] The
desire of the text (the desire of reading) is hence desire for the end, but desire
for the end reached only through the at least minimally complicated detour, the
intentional deviance, in tension, which is the plot of narrative. (Brooks 103-4)
Brooks capitalises on this concept of digression: the arabesque of plot
is the longest possible line between two points [...] depending on the play of
retardation, repetition, and return in the postponement and progressive unveiling
of the end. As in the model of plot we derived from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the
drive toward the end is matched by an ever more complex, deviant, transgressive,
tension-filled resistance to the end: the space of plotted existence (155-6).
Somewhat surprisingly, Brooks is actually referring at this point to the arabesque as a
metaphor for the content, and not a description of the form (or rather, as pointed out earlier,
the energetics) of the serial narrative he is at that moment investigating (Eugène Sue’s Les
Mystères de Paris). He points out that the socially deviant makes a good subject matter for
narrative precisely because it is deviant and deviance is the trademark of the plot as such.84 It
appears just as noteworthy, however, that if deviance is the trademark of plot, it is particularly
so of the plot(s) of serial narrative. These live off the “postponement and progressive
unveiling of the end” in a particularly striking way – frequently (still, we might say, in the light
of recent developments in broadcasting) including forced delays not only through digression
on content level, but by making the whole story unavailable for further consumption for a
while.85 These caesuras make particularly obvious narrative’s gesture of return – a repetition
(with variation) to a “prior state” which prevailed before (‘previously on ...’) and is now taken
up again and prolonged by being subjected to change (the majority of aspects in which the
narrative changes hinge, after all, on what happened ‘previously on ...’; ‘new developments’ are
Deviancy is what makes the subject matter interesting and thus suitable as material for a story: “I spoke earlier
of narrative desire, the arousal that creates the narratable as a condition of tumescence, appetency, ambition,
quest, and gives narrative a forward-looking intention. […] The ensuing narrative […] is maintained in a state of
tension, as a prolonged deviance from the quiescence of the ‘normal’ – which is to say, the unnaratable – until it
reaches the terminal quiescence of the end” (Brooks 103).
85 Even if a series is broadcast in whole seasons at a time – a gap between the seasons themselves remains even
then.
84
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therefore generally the extension rather than the replacement of this prior state).
5.2 (Beyond) The pleasure principle: pleasure, repetition, (dis)comfort
Repetition alerts Freud to the workings of the death drive; however repetition also to some
extent remains the blind spot of his “metapsychological account”: “we still see it as a major
drawback in our argument,” he complains in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “that in the case of the
sexual drive, of all things, we remain unable to demonstrate a compulsion to repeat, the very
attribute that put us on the trail of the death drive in the first place” (185); “in fact the
problem of determining the relationship of the drives’ repetition processes to the dominion of
the pleasure principle still remains unresolved” (192).86 In other words: beyond the pleasure
principle, repetition works towards the equilibrium of the inanimate state, but how do
repetition and pleasure go together? In the present case, the specific question probably is: how
do pleasure and the repetitive text go together?
The “claim to an act of repetition – ‘I sing of,’ ‘I tell of’ – appears to be initiatory of
narrative,” Brooks argues (97). “An event gains meaning by its repetition, which is both the
recall of an earlier moment and a variation of it: the concept of repetition hovers ambiguously
between the idea of reproduction and that of change, forward and backward movement”
(Brooks 99-100; emphasis added). He suggests repetition – repetition with variation, that is –
as a form of organisation that enables the text to have an effect of pleasure in the first place:
Repetition in all its literary manifestations may in fact work as a ‘binding,’ a
binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into
serviceable form […] repetition, repeat, recall, symmetry, all these journeys back
in the text […] that allow[...] us to bind one textual moment to another [...]
Textual energy […] cannot otherwise be plotted in a course to significant
discharge, which is what the pleasure principle is charged with doing. [...] As the
word ‘binding’ itself suggests, these formalizations and the recognitions they
provoke may in some sense be painful: they create a delay, a postponement in
the discharge of energy, a turning back from immediate pleasure, to ensure that
the ultimate pleasurable discharge will be more complete. The most effective or,
at the least, the most challenging texts may be those that are most delayed, most
At some point, Freud even makes novelty an explicit precondition for enjoyment, at least in grown-ups:
pointing out that while children enjoy hearing the same story over and over again with not a word changed, in
adults the opposite effect occurs (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 163-4). However, Freud is here talking about
exact replication, which is, as has been discussed in chapter 3 in particular, precisely not the kind of repetition that
serial narrative is interested in.
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highly bound, most painful. (Brooks 101-2)
Serial narrative, in its traditional form, includes forced breaks – like any fiction, the audience
can abandon the narrative whenever they want to, but in contrast to non-serialised fiction, the
serial narrative dictates when they have to do so. Return to the text is thus not arbitrary or
contingent, but quasi-ritualised or scripted. The forcibly interrupted narrative emphasises the
gesture of return, hence the repetitive moment in the text and in its reception, hence the
organisation of the text for pleasure.
What is ‘the pleasure’ of ‘the text’? Following Roland Barthes, there are in fact two,
rather than one, ‘pleasures of the text’ – there is the text of pleasure and also that of bliss.
Associated with fill and loss respectively, the former placates where the latter unsettles:
Texts of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes
from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of
reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that
discomforts [...] unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological
assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories [...]. (Barthes 14)
Barthes associates bliss with novelty (“bliss may come only with the absolutely new, for only the
new disturbs [...] consciousness”; 40, emphasis in original) and aligns, in opposition, pleasure,
repetition, and stereotype:
encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of
power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language
are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all
continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words:
the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. [...] Whence the
present configuration of forces: on the one hand, a mass banalization (linked to
the repetition of language) [...] and on the other, a (marginal, eccentric) impulse
toward the New – a desperate impulse that can reach the point of destroying
discourse: an attempt to reproduce in historical terms the bliss repressed beneath
the stereotype. (Barthes 40-1)
Even while not claiming absolute validity (“the distinction [between pleasure and bliss] will
not be the source of absolute classification, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be
precarious” 4), this account firmly links together mass culture, pleasure, and comfort. Can we,
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against this account, attribute unsettling potential to highly commercialised popular cultural
products such as television series, by postulating that instincts towards death (as elaborated in
Freud’s “discomfiting theory of ‘death drives’” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; 176, emphasis
added) inhabit these narratives just as instincts towards pleasure do?
To make a case for the unsettling potential of or the affective challenge intrinsic to
popular serial narratives87 is to make a case for abandoning the division of texts into the
comforting and the discomforting ones and to argue that the text is attractive not because it is
either pleasurable or blissful, but because it conjoins opposing impulses – which is what is
expressed in Freud’s “masterplot” and what was argued above to stand out so
characteristically about serial narrative. (Rather appropriately, the serial narrative combines
gratification and loss as well as recapitulation and novelty, which were respectively located by
Barthes on either side of the division.)88 After all, Brooks makes a case for those texts being
the most “challenging” that are “the most delayed”; that make the greatest use of “repetition,
repeat, recall, symmetry, all these journeys back in the text” that amount to a “turning back
from immediate pleasure, to ensure that the ultimate pleasurable discharge will be more
complete.” Challenging us both to abstain from and to indulge in pleasurable experience by
the delay of plot: that is something that serial narrative can achieve particularly well.
It is quite interesting to note, in this context, that contemporary discussions of
television series are largely dominated by the extreme poles of ‘trash’ and ‘quality TV’ (see
Frizzoni 339-40). The term ‘quality TV’, although coined already in the 1970ies, has gained
currency in particular as reference to American television series of the late 1990s and early 21st
century. Not only do these series slightly defer the commercial meaning of the term ‘popular’
– aiming not at a particularly large, but at a particularly well-educated and thus presumably
well-to-do audience (see Frizzoni 340)89 – they also quite frequently derive their legitimacy as
quality TV from their affiliation with literature (as watching television series and reading
novels, or as the authors of the literary canon and the authors of popular series are equated;
see Frizzoni 344-5). Another factor supports the impression that television series become
more and more ‘like novels.’ Film editor Edgar Burcksen describes how new forms of
“Unsettling potential” as it emerges from the current analysis does not refer to unsettling effects of content
(these are not negated, they are simply regarded as an additional issue), but to the unsettling effect of the form –
or rather, the dynamics, as elaborated by Brooks – of the narrative.
88 As Frank Kelleter puts it, “each conclusion bears the impression of providence. […] Literary criticism has long
been aware of the sensual, psychological, even epistemological satisfaction connected to the figure of closure.
[…] Yet this is only part of what narratives achieve. The other part, seemingly opposed, has to do with […] the
postponement of a final ending, the promise of continuous renewal” (11-2) (“wohl aber birgt jeder Abschluss ein
Versprechen glücklicher Fügung. […] Die Literaturwissenschaften wissen seit langem von der sinnlichen, psychologischen, sogar
epistemologischen Befriedigung, die mit der Figur der Schließung einhergeht. […] Das ist aber nur ein Teil dessen, was Erzählungen
leisten. Der andere Teil, scheinbar entgegengesetzt, hat mit […] dem Aufschub eines endgültigen Endes [zu tun], dem Versprechen
ständiger Erneuerung”).
89 See also Thomas on the striking differences in the figures that make basic channel and premium channel
television series, respectively, count as successful (tellingly entitled, “How much gold is Game of Thrones worth?”).
87
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distribution might come to actually change the face of television drama:
With the advent of greater bandwidth on cable and internet new forms of
distribution of content have also have been introduced. […] For TV drama […]
we were dependent on the funding through the sale of advertising and the
straitjacket of precise time slots for the drama. Each segment had to have a
cliffhanger of some sort to make sure the viewer would stay on the same channel.
[…] erosion of the TV drama model was caused by TiVo and DVRs that could
easily skip the advertising but the final blow came when Netflix started to make
complete seasons of TV series available on its video streaming site on the same
day. […] If this movement to put a whole season up on one date continues, it
could have interesting repercussions for the way we tell our stories. Lines of
drama can be more easily perpetuated over the boundaries of episodes and recaps
or previews can be eliminated. In the end we might lose the whole notion of
separate episodes and dividing lines might be constructed or inserted in totally
new ways. (Burcksen 6)
The suggestion Burcksen makes is clear: the forced interruption, so characteristic for
television series for a long time, might actually be replaced by the contingent and (largely) selfpaced, individual interruptions characteristic to reading novels. Assuming for the moment that
predictions like Burcksen’s are correct and that we will see, in the near future, an ever greater
proliferation of ‘quality TV’ – television fictions, that is, which are more and more niche
products, and less mass-audience oriented – which simultaneously, while becoming more and
more ‘niched,’ also develops more and more into large-scale narratives rather than narratives
of ritualised interruption and return: Does this amount to a ‘double consolidation’ as it
reinstates, by its very terminology, the distinction between ‘placating’ and ‘interesting’, ‘easy’
and ‘difficult’ texts even while actually removing that element – the interruption – that
highlighted most clearly the hybrid, “fluctuating” nature of narrative? Following the
assumptions made so far – loss and gratification (and thus bliss and pleasure) interact in
narrative and this interaction becomes particularly obvious in serial narrative – the logic
behind the effort is flawed: if the overtly fluctuating rhythm of the interrupted narrative has
been (re-)suppressed into covert “pulsation” (Brooks 102), the term ‘quality TV’ would be
labelling as ‘challenging’ what has really been tamed. Yet the very attempt might testify to a
tendency to preserve the distinction between ‘placating’ and ‘interesting’ – after all,
62
the subject who keeps the two texts90 in his field and in his hands the reins of
pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and
contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture [...] and in the
destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his
pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over,
doubly perverse. (Barthes 14; emphasis added)
Those who do not decide between hedonism and criticism come to be regarded as “perverse”
with the particular disdain reserved for the illogical.91 Actually, Penny Dreadful appears as rather
appropriate example of this hybridity, mixing together, as it does, narcissistic sensationalism
and (self-)reflection. If the development of the serial narrative as analysed above really is a
case in point, can we interpret this – itself ‘logically flawed’ – development as expression of
the continued effort to preserve a distinction not only between ‘sophisticated’ and ‘cheap,’ but
also between ‘understanding’ and ‘feeling’?
5.3 To be continued: narrative, understanding, affect
“Affectivity against or with or after Cognition? Enjoyment and/or Understanding?”, Meir
Sternberg asks in a paper which discusses Universals of Narrative and their Cognitivist Fortunes
(353), explaining that “‘affective’ has long stood opposed to ‘cognitive’ in the sense associated
with knowing, perceiving or conceiving as a mental act or faculty distinct from emotion”
(355). Is an encounter with narrative an undertaking of the emotional or of the intellectual
kind? To see the only purpose of narrative and fiction in its emotional entertainment value
results in an odd stance, as Sternberg rightly points out:
Is narrative experience reducible to emoting for pleasure, our mental activity there
to affectivity, interest to sheer arousal and release – or, indeed, to their meaningladen contraries? Such affect-bound reduction teems with oddities. We have
already observed the irony of its echoing – only with the valuation reversed – a
Which, however, the current analysis does not regard as two texts, but as two impulses included in narrative in
general, which can become more or less clearly visible in their interaction.
91 “Imagine someone,“ Barthes prompts right at the outset of his essay, “who abolishes within himself all
barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism, but by simple discard of that old specter: logical
contradiction; […] who silently accepts every charge of illogicality, of incongruity; who remains passive in the
face of Socratic irony (leading the interlocutor to the supreme disgrace: self-contradiction) and legal terrorism
(how much penal evidence is based on a psychology of consistency!). Such a man would be the mockery of our
society: court, school, asylum, polite conversation would cast him out: who endures contradiction without
shame?” (Barthes 3).
90
63
chorus of literary Puritans old and new, who animadvert on the low thrills
supplied at the expense of higher interests. (354-5)
What is more, such views imply that emotional engagement is simple, as opposed to the
challenging task of intellectual evaluation. This whole paper, however, is based to a large
degree on the premise that pleasure is in fact not a simple matter at all, that there is no such
thing as “sheer arousal and release.”
There are however also reasons to reject the alternative consequence of the
“dichotomy between affect and comprehension, enjoyable feeling and humdrum
understanding” (Sternberg 354), that is the association of narrative and fiction predominantly
with understanding, so that all emotional involvement becomes secondary or a means to an
end. To suggest, as Brian Boyd does in his On the Origin of Stories. Evolution Cognition, and Fiction,
that art is “cognitive play” (80; emphasis added) for evolutionary purposes92 suppresses the
possibility of purposeless pleasure (of binge-watching a penny dreadful in one lazy, excessive,
wasteful sitting, say), which is a view that even while it does allow the emotional aspects of the
narrative/fictional experience ultimately derives their raison d’être from usefulness, assuming
that ‘understanding emotions’ is an evolutionary advantage.93 Assuming, as Boyd does, that
“narrative reflects our mode of understanding events […] a generally mammalian mode of
understanding” (131; emphasis added) puts an emphasis on comprehension that does not
negate, but clearly subordinates feeling, which is included first and foremost because of its
value as “social information” (130; emphasis added): “trying to understand why others do what
they do matters so much in both human life and literature” because presumably, “higher
intelligence emerged primarily as social intelligence, through a cognitive arms race to
understand conspecifics and to reveal or conceal from others our own beliefs, desires, and
intentions”, “desires” thus being a sub-aspect of a general “cognitive arms race” (Boyd 141)
and “social information” being “strategic information” in a social context (167; emphasis
added).
“An evolutionary adaptation […] is a feature of body, mind, or behavior that exists throughout a species and
shows evidence of good design for a specific function or functions that will ultimately make a difference to the
species’ survival and reproductive success. If art is a human adaptation, it has been established throughout the
species because it has been selected as a behavior for the advantages it offers in terms of survival and
reproduction” (Boyd 80-1).
93 As Terry Eagleton points out in his review of Boyd’s work: “Play, as we know, is a serious business, and art, so
Boyd considers, springs out of it. So it is not surprising to find that, evolutionarily speaking, art is a serious
business too. Part of its point, however, may lie in not having a point – a case that Boyd’s doggedly utilitarian cast
of mind is loath to contemplate. If music, dance and story can educate our sensory skills, they can also permit
those capacities pleasurably to freewheel, blessedly released from anything so dull as a direct function. It is just
the same with power and desire, which have definite objects in view but which always overshoot them, delighting
exultantly in themselves. In Boyd’s evolutionary world, however, nothing seems to be done just for the hell of it”
(n.p.). (It must be remarked, however, that the dichotomy mentioned above is not quite absent from Eagleton’s
remark, either: the “blessed” realm of fun and the “dull” realm of purpose.)
92
64
Arguing for refinement of social competences through experiencing narrative and
fiction is an approach of long tradition (although this tradition does not typically rely, as Boyd
does, on Darwinian arguments). It frequently involves, as Suzanne Keen points out, a
sharpening of the dichotomy between the ‘challenging’ and the ‘easy’ text:
Among moral philosophers, the debate about the status of emotional
responsiveness to narrative typically centers on the question of whether it should
be cultivated (to encourage recognition of other minds, enhance comprehension,
or form morality) or distrusted […] Ironically, the argument in favor of aesthetic
emotions (cultivation through narrative) results in a more proscriptive, narrow list
of valued narratives, while the suspicious argument […] is much more willing to
admit the potentially deleterious impact of narrative as encouraging escapism,
time-wasting, and vicious habits. This latter side admits a broader range of
narrative, including comic books, video games, and romance novels, but does so
to warn against the dangers of emotionally-engaged reading practices. (Keen 26)
Keen posits against both these views that “literariness ought not to mean worthiness […] : We
have much to learn about emotion and narrative from a full range of texts […] unconstrained
by value judgements” (40). It is, however, not only emotion that is relevant about this “range
of texts.” Even “rudimentary tales” (if there is such a thing) work on the “manifold that we
call the human mind” in such a way as to undermine a binary feeling/understanding ‘setup’:
emotion gets as unmistakably […] twinned with comprehension as in high art’s
knottiest gaps. And so twinned that either dynamics of response enters into
multiple relations with the other, shiftable relations at that. Affective and
conceptual processing may join forces or join battle [...] The rhetoric of narrative
thrives on such protean fact/feeling interdynamics. (Sternberg 364)
We do not either only understand or only feel stories – nor do we do one or the other only
with regard to a certain ‘class’ of texts. To understand, as Brooks does, narrative text as a site
of interacting desires allows all kinds of forces to be at work behind a story: instinctual,
reflective, sentimental, erotic, as the initial impulse that is sparked by plot – to want to know –
concerns the faculties of affect (visceral and emotional) as well as those of the intellect.94 In
94
According to the approach suggested above, wanting to know is complemented by not wanting to know – that
is, wanting the end and wanting to avoid it – as the narrative proceeds, which makes for the complex appeal of
(serial) narrative.
65
serial narrative, following the analysis above, these interactions become particularly salient. In
addition, serial (television) narrative frequently hovers between the self-reflective and the
hedonistic, between ‘quality’ and ‘trash’. Currently maybe the most prominent site of textual
pleasure (both plaisir and jouissance), it can actually be conceived as a reply to the question
posed by Roland Barthes (23; emphasis in original): “what if knowledge itself were delicious?”
66
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