The Supernatural in Modern English FictionScarborough, Dorothy
History
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction
Scarborough, Dorothy
English fiction -- History and criticism; Supernatural in literature
Barry Pain's _The Love Philter_ is related both to the old and the new
types of supernatural chemistry. A man loves a woman who doesn't care,
so he asks aid of a wise woman, who gives him a potion that will surely
win the stubborn heart. As he lies asleep in the desert, on his way
back, he dreams that his love says to him that love gained by such
means is not love, so he pours the liquid on the sand. When he returns,
the woman tells him that she has been with him in his dreams and loves
him because he would not claim her wrongly. _Blue Roses_ is another of
his stories of magic that bring love to the indifferent. _Twilight_,
by Frank Danby, is a novel based on the relation between morphia and
the supernatural. A woman ill of nervous trouble, under the influence
of opiates, continually sees the spirit of a woman dead for years,
who relives her story before her eyes, so that the personalities are
curiously merged. This inevitably suggests De Quincey's _Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater_ with its dream-wonders, yet it has a power of
its own and the skillful blending of reality with dream-supernaturalism
and insanity has an uncanny distinction.
Fu-Manchu, the Chinese wonder-worker in Sax Rohmer's series of
stories bearing that name, is a representative example of the modern
use of chemistry for supernormal effect. He employs all the forces
of up-to-the-minute science to compass his diabolic ends and works
miracles of chemistry by seemingly natural methods. By a hypodermic
injection he can instantly drive a man to acute insanity incurable save
by a counter-injection which only Fu-Manchu can give, but which as
instantly restores the reason. By another needle he can cause a person
to die--to all intents and purposes, at least,--and after the body has
been buried for days he can restore it to life by another prick of the
needle. He terrorizes England by his infernal powers, killing off or
converting to slavery the leading intelligences that oppose him.
Stevenson's _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ is perhaps the best-known
instance of chemical supernaturalism. Here the magic drug not only
changes the body, evolving from the respectable Dr. Jekyll his baser
self in the form of Mr. Hyde, enabling him to give rein to his criminal
instincts without bringing reproach on his reputation, but has the
subtle power to fix the personality of evil, so that each time the drug
is used Hyde is given a stronger force and Jekyll is weakened. This
fictive sermon on dual nature, the ascendence of evil over the nobler
soul if it be indulged, seems yet an appallingly real story of human
life. In a similar fashion Arthur Machen uses supernatural chemistry
most hideously in _The Three Impostors_, where a certain powder
perverts the soul, making man a sharer in the unspeakable orgies of
ancient evil forces.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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