Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [156]
Mephistophilis has an ominous answer: “Aye, think so still, till experience change thy mind.”
Faustus then embarks on a series of rather disconnected adventures ranging from tragedy to farce and finally gets his come-uppance in a dramatic last scene where he repents too late. In other versions of the story Faust is saved in the nick of time by his repentance. In the Gothic tales particularly, the Faustian hero-villain has no such luck.
The basic Faust plot involves an intelligent man whose experiments lead him—and often others—to a sticky end. In religious terms this is a man who is attracted to evil, who succumbs to it and is finally ruined by it. In scientific terms it is a man who conducts a dangerous experiment which gets out of control and overcomes him.
Probably it was the influence of Goethe’s more complex Faust and Milton’s Satan of Paradise Lost on the German Schauer-Romantik (“Horror Romance”) school of the late eighteenth century which, by their influence, produced the superfluity of Faustian heroes in the English Gothic novel and its progeny. Mrs. Radcliffe’s monk Schedoni of The Italian (1797) is the villain of her finest novel which concentrates on the Satanically attractive Schedoni, with his cowl which “threw a shade over the livid paleness of his face” which “bore the traces of many passions, which seemed to have fixed the features they no longer animated.”
M.G. Lewis was influenced by Radcliffe (though not by Schedoni) when he wrote his very readable The Monk (1796—Bestseller Library, 3/6). Here, a lustful woman, Matilda, takes the place of Mephistophilis and uses sex to bring down her prey, but the pact with Satan soon follows:
Ambrosio started, and expected the demon with terror … The thunder ceasing to roll, a full strain of melodious music sounded in the air! At the same time the cloud disappeared, and he beheld a figure more beautiful than fancy’s pencil ever drew. It was a youth seemingly scarce eighteen, the perfection of whose form and face was unrivalled. He was perfectly naked, a bright star sparkled on his forehead, two crimson wings extended themselves from his shoulders, and his silken locks were confined by a band of many-coloured fires, which shone with a brilliancy far surpassing that of precious stones. Circlets of diamonds were fastened around his arms and ankles, and in his right hand he bore a silver branch imitating myrtle. His form shone with dazzling glory: he was surrounded by clouds of rose-coloured light, and at the moment that he appeared a refreshing air breathed perfumes throughout the cavern. Ambrosio gazed upon the spirit with delight and wonder.
The Monk had its mysterious ruins, crypts and labyrinths and virtuous imperiled heroines, but was unusual in that the main narrative was told from the villain’s viewpoint and not from the heroine’s. It was also unusual for its overt eroticism. As in many other Gothic novels, the shadow of Lovelace, demon-lover of Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1748) is observed here.
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1817) the downfall of the hero comes about because of his basically-alchemical dabbling. Frankenstein continues in the Faust tradition. His evil takes on independence in the tragic monster (really the hero of the tale) and he struggles with an evil he is no longer able to control and which, in the end, is his doom. Frankenstein’s monster is, of course, really an aspect of Frankenstein himself and his frantic attempts to destroy his creation, his long conversations with it, can be seen as an ever-weakening effort to control his own “bad” self. In Frankenstein we see the early development of one of fantasy fiction’s largest sub-genres