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The effect of fantasy on our minds can be extraordinarily powerful, but this relies on the way that, like day-dreaming, it operates by suggestion. It feeds on nyktomorphs, those shadowy, unresolved images which arouse an emotional response for the very reason that they tease our brain by giving it insufficient information fully to get hold of them. One of the most obvious tricks of fantasy-based writing is the way it uses particular words to trigger off such an automatic response. With the addition of a few suggestively incomplete words such as `measureless' or 'sunless', for instance, the otherwise straightforward image of a stream flowing underground may be conjured (by Coleridge himself, in the most overtly dreamlike of all his poems) into lines as powerful as:

Take away from Romantic storytelling or poetry all such nyktomorphic trigger words as nameless, infinite, weird, mysterious, strange, faery, enchanted, ghostly, gloomy, phantom, wraith-like, dream-like, nebulous, unearthly, lurking, haunting, trembling, obscure, tempestuous, ghastly, fearful, dread, etc, and what was left of many admired stories and poems would be no more interesting and a good deal less meaningful than the telephone directory. Thus in A Vision of the Sea Shelley writes:

In reality this is no more than a catalogue of suggestive imagery and violent sounds working themselves into a frenzy that is ultimately meaningless (e.g., `the hum of the hot blood'). But on a fantasy level it achieves its effect, which was why Wordsworth wrote of Shelley's poetry that it was:

`what astrology is to natural science - a passionate dream, straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstraction - a fever of the soul, thirsting and craving after what it cannot have, indulging its love of power and novelty at the expense of truth and nature.'

Certainly the `Gothic novels' which launched literary Romanticism on its way achieved their effect through an abundance of such nyktomorphic imagery, which often makes it difficult for the reader to work out exactly what is going on. But the appeal of such stories was not that they cast a clearer light on the world. It was that they provided the reader with a stream of mental sensations: images which trigger a thrill in the mind precisely because they are not resolved.

When we recall that the archetypal purpose of stories is to achieve a perfect resolution, and that the point at which such a story reaches its fullest resolution is where the hero can liberate and be united with the `light feminine, as the highest value in storytelling, we can see why there was no more revealing feature of this new type of story than how obsessively it focused on the image of the abused heroine.

In itself there was nothing new about the sight of a story's heroine being maltreated. But when Othello murders Desdemona or Hamlet rejects Ophelia or Lear rejects Cordelia, the real significance of this is what it reveals of what is going on inside the hero. It shows more clearly than anything how he has become cut off from true feeling and understanding: the feminine values of the Self. When de Sade fantasises about the cruelties and sexual degradations inflicted on Justine, his only concern is the thrill this can excite in his own mind. The essence of that sensation is the gratification the fantasy-level of the mind derives from contemplating the violation of the anima, as the highest aspect of the Self. By the `dark inversion', the ego no longer subordinated to the Self thus derives its greatest energy from rejecting and violating the very thing it has escaped from.

So subtle are the workings of the unconscious, however, that its response, like a self-correcting mechanism, is then to show that the only way such a course can ultimately end is in death and destruction. Such is the pattern we see emerging in those stories which reflected the darker side of Romanticism as it swept through the collective unconscious