Her preparations: rubbing herself with poisonous rue, foxgloves, hemlock and monks head and donning the girdle of a black wolf, feed her muffled sense of “sinking, sinking to a place that is at the bottom of all bottomless things –between heaven and hell, sending the story towards a moment of seeing demonic figures moving round and in the fire, bearing an inverted cross. Her instinctive reactions to the midnight, when “it is time” the call of the wild, the “long, long howl” of something far away. On this special night, there are more disturbances and activities for some than others and for Hevar there is an unavoidable call. (McCormick) As Bram Djikstra’s Idols of Perversity illustrates, they were often visually represented as languorously animalistic, predatory creatures, snakelike, vampiric, seductively then violently predatory and carnal, figments of the heated terrified imagination of the men who variously lusted after, idolised, or kept them in their domestic roles and enforced delicate state both physical and mental. Some werewolf tales grow from the fin de siècle representations of women’s “physical or libidinal energies as unnatural to the point of being dangerously demonic”. ![]() Hallowe’en’ (1909): ‘Queen of Behemia’ New Zealander/Australian Dulcie Deamer’s Gothic ‘Hallowe’en’ ( 1909 ) is a werewolf tale in which Hevar the wife and she-wolf is seen as domestic, neighbourly and a victim to violence born of male terror. The bunyip’s deceptive cry, significantly (for Praed’s tale), triggers instinctive human responses to bring it to a safe place, with destructive outcomes. It resembles a crocodile in its method of dragging its prey under the water and rolling it over to drown it. European Gothic and supernatural tales have their fairies, ogres, goblins, dangerous creatures of lakes and swamps alongside the deceptively alluring, seductive sidhe, lorelei and so on but this very Australian creature is nothing to tempt an errant knight, described in Aboriginal tales as a pig, or sea-snake from a waterhole rather than the sea. The bunyip is a particularly Australian creature of forest, swamp and waterhole, the “one respectable flesh-curdling horror of which Australia can boast”. The bunyip has been seen by someone else which shifting of verification beyond the narrator while insisting on its plausibility, produces a mixed sense of security and a gap of vagueness. normalised in British and European ghost stories relying on the trustworthiness of another. ![]() The Bunyip (1891): Australian Rosa Praed’s “The Bunyip” (1891) is a fine example of a Gothic, supernatural tale dramatising the layering in of the unknown into the known. Both Rosa Praed and Dulcie Deamer engaged in spiritualism, the occult and Praed evoke the inexplicable cultural otherness of a land still felt as strange, inexplicable dangerous. However, this dearth of criticism belies the quality of that small, rich strain of writing, some of which appeared only in newspapers or in UK Penny Dreadfuls. There is relatively little critical work on the supernatural or Gothic stories of late nineteenth, and early twentieth century women writers from Australia and New Zealand. ![]() Monsters Down Under: Australian and New Zealand Women’s Gothic Horror: Rosa Praed’s “The Bunyip” (1891) Dulcie Deamer “ Hallowe’en ” (1909). Speaker: Efram Sera-Shriar, University of Copenhagen This online workshop, co-hosted by CNCSI and the Dark Arts Research Group at the University of Copenhagen, will feature a series of talks exploring the role played by monsters in the nineteenth century, investigating how their uncanny corporeality subverts dominant discourses and how therefore we might understand the monster as a valuable tool in uncovering hidden epistemologies in the study of the nineteenth century and its legacies. From literature to architecture, and from the visual arts to medical and political discourse, monsters emerge as useful vehicles for articulating cultural anxieties, but also for making sense of a rapidly changing world. Gargoyles and grotesques adorn the exteriors of neo-Gothic churches experiments with blood transfusion elicit fears of monstrous hybrids in 1885, Punch publishes a cartoon satirising Ireland’s desire for Home Rule through the image of a vampire. But their hold on the nineteenth-century imagination runs far deeper. With the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), monsters became a staple of nineteenth-century literature.
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