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, foreigners – who must be dispatched to restored order; they can never assimilate. That social class shift in the werewolf persona, from gentleman victim to low-status monster, has continued in many popular media depictions of the creature ever since The Wolf Man . This chapter will explore this lesser position of the werewolf by first briefly examining that seminal film. Then, in an effort to contextualise the personification of the werewolf as la bête rather than a beauty, I draw briefly on texts from the seventeenth century through the Victorian
liminality, in fantasy. They come in all shapes, sizes, social classes and temperaments. Fairies can be good, evil, mischievous or just amoral. The Victorian and Edwardian miniature flower fairy retains some of the ambivalence and liminality of her wilder folkloric cousins. Julian Wolfreys argues that ‘spectrality appears in a gap between the limits of two ontological categories’, which can be ‘between life and death, though neither alive nor dead’ ( 2002 : x). Fairies, of any kind, stand in this role. Yuki Yoshino points out that ‘fairies do not exist
life, habits and struggles of the person whose body they reside in but also about their own strengths and weaknesses, and their privileges or lack thereof’. 52 Thus, not only does the body switch defamiliarise the protagonists’ own bodies to themselves; it also effectively highlights the importance of social differences and the existence or lack of nurturing home environments, which is not always linked to social class in the trilogy. What makes the body switch in Eld unusual, in addition to the focalisation
’. While he subsequently acknowledges a selection of those nineteenth-century figures of public stature who either embraced or expressed antagonism towards phrenology – John Stuart Mill, Richard Cobden, Robert Owen, Thomas Wakley, John Elliotson, Lord Palmerston, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Prince Albert among them – Cooter's statement, above, implicates also that vast and anonymous body of people, literate and illiterate, from all social classes, whose lives were touched, influenced or, on occasions, significantly shaped by phrenological thought
head against her back and shoulders till she obtained relief by means of a seminal discharge. Whether or not orgasm – the ‘seminal discharge’ of the nymphomaniac – might be considered a form of temporary madness is immaterial here. What is clear is that the customary modesty associated with both gendered biology and social class has been breached. In her abnegation of self-control, the exemplified woman has expressed not merely a momentary release or relief but the more extensive
‘open skulls’ which revealed the contoured interior – the city hosted a junior society of sixty-three members, ‘The Edinburgh Ethical Society, for the Study and Practical Application of Phrenology’, which had been founded in 1833; the Ethical Society met weekly, the Phrenological Society fortnightly. Glasgow, likewise, had two societies, one founded in 1829 and a second probably in the 1830s. The junior of these two, which styled itself as the ‘Operatives Phrenological Society’ may well have been differentiated from its counterpart upon social-class lines: a similar
intellectual decorum. Rhetorically, the reader is manoeuvred into a position in which the doctrines espoused by Hall cannot be taken seriously because of his humble origins and present place in popular – rather than professional – culture. As Alison Winter rightly notes, social class is a factor in the policing of ‘fringe’ medicine. 21 Hence: Mr Spencer Hall was formerly a journeyman printer in the ‘York Courant’ newspaper office; the public will be rather
religion, calls for justice, vengeance, repayment of debts. Only temporarily distinguished in terms of inside and outside, however, monstrosity and spectrality remain associated with ambivalence, borders and otherness, disclosing any opposition to be ultimately unstable. Gothic fiction emerged in the middle of an eighteenth century undergoing shifts in the relations between social classes, between landed and
sameness, an elusive but underlying identity of all things? Balzac’s Séraphita had announced that there all was homogeneous but here, in the interim world of a self-divided Anglo-Ireland at work upon an emergent ideology which will serve to eclipse any dangerous talk of social class, the unity of all things is a consummation, not an end in itself
charged issue at stake here. Hoppenstand traces the legacy of King's conservatism to Lovecraft: ‘his work is ripe with paranoid reflections of ethnicity and social class; his horror fiction often mirrors an inner dread of outer social forces’. 12 This is, of course, going too far for King's own broadly liberal outlook, but is in complete opposition to Barker's radical