Nature Selects the Horla: How the Concept of Natural Selection Influences Guy de Maupassant’s Horror Tale

Abstract

The Gothic is repeatedly characterized as bringing the dark, the uncanny, the unheimlich into everyday reality. In consequence, Pasi Nyyssönen writes, “the characters of Gothic fiction are gradually led to acknowledge the unreliability of their perceptions and finally to accept the existence of the entities and aspects of reality of which they have been previously unaware” (194). This illumination leaves them horrified, alienated, robbed of their natural, social, and personal identities. So, holy men and women, as well as venerable elders and relations, are revealed as lustful, vicious, predatory, even demonic. The boundaries between life and death, sanity and madness, safe and dangerous are erased by the invasion and predation of ghosts, vampires, werewolves, demons, and sorcerers, or (in later work) scientists on a supernatural plane or insanity on a personal one. More relevant to the theme of this collection, in Gothic landscapes nothing is as it seems, either reflecting, embodying, or even acting out threats of disorientation, dismemberment, disillusionment. Eldritch castles and monasteries, crumbling mansions, and jagged mountains are riddled with secret passages and tunnels, caverns, or sealed rooms (often dungeons, attics, or crypts) that threaten to burst free the terrible or seal us up in eternal pain and terror. The characters of Gothic fiction are caught in the terror of finding themselves adrift, unanchored from a world map of security and hope. Kelly Hurley takes this proposition one step further, explaining how Gothic’s incarnations of terror evolve to reflect the changing circumstances of human anxieties across time and culture: “the Gothic can serve as a sort of historical or sociological index: if the genre serves to manage a culture’s disturbances and traumatic changes, its thematic preoccupations will allow us to track social anxieties at one remove, in the register of supernaturalism.” (197).¹ Not surprisingly, The Origin of Species, one of what Freud called the greatest psychic wounds to humanity (186–87), became a powerful influence on late nineteenth-century Gothic literature.