Stoker’s penultimate book,
Famous Impostors
(1910), elucidates many of the concerns embedded in his fiction, most conspicuously that of the relationship between the sexes. A curious incursion into cases of historical imposture, the work devotes an entire section to women who disguise themselves as men and another, entitled ‘The Bisley Boy’, to the attestation that Queen Elizabeth I was in fact a man, the original child having died in infancy and been replaced by a male infant. The inference that a successful woman of power must in fact be a man says much for Stoker’s attitude towards the dominant female, whilst the direct relevance of this book’s theme of gender inversion to
The Lair of the White Worm
is demonstrable by the latter’s dedication to Bertha Nicoll, a friend of Stoker’s who first made him aware of the conspiracy theory attached to the young Queen Elizabeth.
Throughout this collection, the driving force of many of the plots is the instability of women, or the evils that women do. Even scorned female animals are to be treated with the utmost caution, as ‘The Squaw’ amply demonstrates: both this story and ‘The Secret of the Growing Gold’ (1892) are propelled by the power of female vengeance. The tragedies of ‘A Gipsy Prophecy’ and ‘The Coming of Abel Behenna’ (1914), meanwhile,
are provoked by their female characters’ unnatural command of Second Sight or their inconsistency, vanity and greed, whilst it is discernibly the withered old crone in ‘The Burial of the Rats’ who synchronizes the deadly assault upon its narrator. The sole female character in ‘Dracula’s Guest’ is likewise an unnatural object of fear and loathing – a suicide-turned-vampire whose seductive ‘life in death’ trance conjoins the twin pillars of sex and death in horrific association:
In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier.
The incompatible polarization of women as either submissive angels or sexual demons is a particularly unequivocal feature of
The Lair of the White Worm
. Whilst Mimi and Lilla Watford are the embodiment of virtuous, meek womanhood, content to be sustained by their menfolk, Lady Arabella March, the social, sexual and financial independent, is the novel’s antagonist, terrifying, in part, precisely because of her overpowering femininity. Flaunting her womanliness in ‘tightly fitting white [clothes], which showed off her extraordinarily slim figure’ (Chapter X), Lady Arabella uses feminine wiles to lure Edgar Caswall into a promise of matrimony for her own financial ends. However, Lady Arabella is also the white worm of the novel’s title, a grotesque prehistoric survival that preys on humans and animals alike. In this way, dynamic femininity translates itself into an overriding animality, in turn transforming active female sexuality into a dangerous and noxious thing. In fact, throughout Stoker’s works, female sexual proximity of any kind is to be regarded with the utmost caution. In ‘The Squaw’, for example, the narrator notes his relief at having Elias P. Hutcheson join him in the second week of his honeymoon, whilst in
The Lair of the White Worm
Adam Salton treats his proposal of marriage to Mimi as a ‘painful duty’ (
Chapter XXVI
) that Nathaniel finally agrees to undertake.
The intense anxiety pertaining to strong women in
The Lair of the White Worm
is nowhere more palpable than in Diana’s
Grove. Reference to Diana calls to mind the goddess’s association with women and childbirth, yet the grove of the novel is reminiscent only of ‘many great deaths’ (
Chapter X
). As such, traditional roles of woman as life-giver and nurturer are reversed and the grove’s inhabitant is linked instead with death and destruction. Lady Arabella personifies this perversion of the female role, calmly pouring ‘shot after shot’ (
Chapter VIII
) into Adam Salton’s mongoose, whilst her rancid well-hole at the centre of Diana’s Grove perpetuates the image of a monstrous vagina:
It was like… the drainage of war hospitals, of slaughter-houses, the refuse of dissecting rooms. None of these was like it, though it had something of them all, with, added, the sourness of chemical waste and the poisonous effluvium of the bilge of a waterlogged ship whereon a multitude of rats had been drowned. (
Chapter XXI
)
Its ‘Queer smell’ (
Chapter XIX
) characterizes Arabella’s perverted womanhood, the rank ‘primeval ooze’ (
Chapter XXI
) emanating from it being a harbinger of death rather than life. In her own death, furthermore, Lady Arabella herself is reduced to a putrid slime, unrecognizable in either form or species, the ‘great red masses of rent and torn flesh and fat’ (
Chapter XXXIX
) to which she is reduced invoking images of toxic menstrual blood and genital secretions, in turn implying that Lady Arabella has dissolved into her own rancid femininity.
Born not of any union between man and woman but existing since the dawn of history, Lady Arabella is thus the physical manifestation of intrinsic and unbridled woman. Challenging the bounds of gender prescription, however, is not only the prerogative of the women of Stoker’s novels. Just as women consistently overstep their feminine margins, men are continually called to live up to their masculinity. Although the ‘male’ does ultimately triumph in
The Lair of the White Worm
, it requires a band of men to counteract the threat of a single woman. Furthermore, maleness is repeatedly associated with images of familial, mental or physical degeneration. Both Adam
Salton and Edgar Caswall are the last in their respective family lines, whilst Caswall himself descends into insanity as the novel progresses. In turn, Mimi and Lilla’s grandfather is rarely involved in the narrative; Richard Salton all but disappears after the opening chapters, and Arabella’s father is but a shadow character, talked about yet never seen. Moreover, the male triumvirate, although vociferous in avowing their willingness ‘to risk whatever is to be risked’ (
Chapter XXVIII
), remain a passive force, Sir Nathaniel resolving to ‘postpone decisive action until the circumstances depended’ (
Chapter XXV
). Women are the inciters of action whilst men are content to let that action take its course: even Lady Arabella’s death is, technically, by her own hand as she removes back to her own lair the kite cable along which the final, deadly, bolt of electricity travels.
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The concern about aggressive femininity is augmented in
The Lair of the White Worm
by the species boundaries Lady Arabella straddles between human and snake. Aside from the palpable biblical links with the serpent that identify Arabella with the role of God’s nemesis and the augury of Original Sin, the symbolic snake also places
The Lair of the White Worm
within the context of legendary tales of dragon-slaying in England and their own related associations with moral triumphs of good over evil. References to both the ‘Lambton Worm’ and the ‘Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh’ (1890) (see
Appendix II
) connect the novel with such folk fables, whilst the specific significance of the symbol of the dragon, or
wyrm
, to the kingdom of Mercia is evident from the place names that have survived into the modern age.
26
The battle between man and worm/ woman is thus elevated to a level of universality that encompasses both religion and folklore and accords judgement not only against Lady Arabella but also her ophidian species and her female sex.
This association between serpent and woman at the turn of the twentieth century was not Stoker’s alone. Bram Dijkstra’s
Idols of Perversity
(1986) makes much of the iconography of misogyny against feminine evil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in particular highlighting the recurring
image of the serpent in association with women in a large number of works of art produced at this time.
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Pictures such as Jean Delville’s
The Idol of Perversity
(1891) and Franz von Stuck’s
Sin
(1893) depicted sexual women and sinuous snakes locked in mutual embrace – an unholy alliance of moral and physical corruption that prompted association with biblical sin and the physical usurpation of the male penis. A direct challenge to the rising force of the New Woman, that new breed of independent female who challenged male prerogatives and refused to be defined by the traditional roles of wife and mother, such works pilloried women both for their ‘natural’ sinfulness and for their adoption of the male role. In spite of her veneer of female respectability, Lady Arabella’s ruthlessness and ambition are revealed when she assumes her true form: a ‘tall white shaft’ that rises from the bushy tangle of the ‘trees which lay between’ (
Chapter XXVIII
). Just as she confuses the male/female divide in her forward conduct, the enormous white penis that Lady Arabella effectively becomes in her ophidian form is the physical representation of her departure from received and acceptable womanhood.
The physical borderland that Lady Arabella March embodies, between human and animal, and male and female, is similarly reflected in her very name, which also makes a connection with the historical feminine. The name ‘Mercia’ itself means ‘the land of the boundary people’, from the Anglo-Saxon word
Mierce
for boundary, whilst the heart of the kingdom of Mercia once covered that area which is now known as the Welsh Marches. Stoker may have also drawn inspiration for his fictional dominatrix from the historical chronicles of Mercia’s own commanding female, Queen Æthelflaed. Æthelflaed’s reign (911–18) was unique not only because she stood almost alone in early medieval Europe as a female ruler in her own right, or because she was a woman in command of a kingdom dominated by warfare and the needs of warfare, but because her reign was remarkably successful personally, politically and militarily. Mercia prospered under her guidance, successfully defending itself against outside aggression, but also securing a series of victorious military campaigns against the
Welsh and the Danes.
28
Clearly a strong character able to wield power and command respect, Æthelflaed, like Queen Elizabeth I, stepped outside the gender expectations of later historians and chroniclers.
Despite accusations of a hasty pen or an unwieldy imagination, then, the rationality of Stoker’s mind in creating
The Lair of the White Worm
cannot be questioned. His knowledge and consideration of historical and thematic material and the story’s measured construction within a
fin de siècle
framework of fear of the dominant female reveal an imagination thoroughly in tune with the cultural zeitgeist. Moreover, and as the next section will show, the composition of
The Lair of the White Worm
displays an originality which places the novel at the vanguard of early twentieth-century literary expression.
The 1911 edition of
The Lair of the White Worm
included six colour plates by the artist and clairvoyant Pamela Coleman Smith. Illustrating scenes from the novel, the pictures variously depicted: Edgar Caswall mesmerizing Lilla, Caswall’s hawk-shaped red kite, Oolanga with an armful of snakes, and Lady Arabella dancing in the wood, descending the turret steps of Castra Regis, and as the White Worm. By virtue of the difficulty of their reproduction, however, these images have been left out of subsequent reprints. This is unfortunate as they draw attention to Stoker’s preoccupation with the visual as well as the textual narrative. Coleman Smith had accompanied the Lyceum Theatre Company on its sixth tour of America in 1899 and is probably now best remembered for her illustrations of the classic Rider-Waite tarot deck. The strikingly bold use of block colour combined with an almost cartoon-like simplicity of line and structure that characterizes Coleman Smith’s illustrations (as well as her tarot designs) elevates Stoker’s narrative beyond formal, definable realism. Indeed, in the hallucinatory game with reality that the novel itself engages in, in its destabilization of rationality and even in the very pace at which it was written,
The Lair of the White Worm
itself displays artistic
elements that would be at the heart of the Surrealist movement that emerged six years after its publication.
Surrealism itself was inspired in part by the English Gothic novel’s philosophy of immediacy, non-rational emotional excess and exploitation of subconscious desires and fears. The hyperbolic immoderation of novels such as Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
and Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk
(1796) particularly appealed to the Surrealists in their rebellion against propriety and convention, typified in much of the movement’s painting by the deliberate displacement of external object for internal meaning. In seeking to put human nature back in touch with the forces of the imaginative unconscious, it also sought inspiration from the non-rational forces of myth, madness and dreams. In 1924 André Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto contended that, ‘If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them.’
29
Undermining nineteenth-century naturalism, Surrealism however did not try to transcend realism; rather it sought to dissolve the foundations of stability upon which realism depended and, in the process, to question the basis upon which it claimed to be able to represent reality. In short, Surrealism refused to recognize the existence of a divide between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’.
Abandoning the critical mind to its imaginative faculty, the Surrealists’ practice of ‘automatic’ writing was predicated on the suppression of rational consciousness. For the Surrealists, to write with no predetermined thought as quickly as one could on a blank sheet of paper revealed the infinite powers of imagination, the total surrender of oneself to the impulse of chance illuminating the depths of human consciousness and capturing the immediacy of thought. This quest for a reality beyond logic characterized much of Stoker’s writing. Its relevance, however, is particularly apposite to
The Lair of the White Worm
, which, composed in a mere three months, displays the emotional excesses and subversion of logic which were the hallmarks of Surrealism. Demonstrating his own avowal that ‘No one has the power to stop the workings of imagination’,
30
and emancipating imagination itself from the formal world of logic, Stoker’s
Mercia amalgamates dreams, hypnosis, madness and hallucinations with the recognized conventions of social propriety. The novel’s hasty production may in turn be seen as a precursor to the ‘automatism’ of the Surrealists, the baggy narrative and disjointed chronology merely by-products of a far more interesting experimentation in the art of subconscious creativity. Inhabiting a borderland where distinctions between what has tangible reality and what is imaginary are unclear, Stoker’s final novel encapsulates André Breton’s summation of Surrealism’s goal: