The Horror Continues

From the middle of the 17th century horror and violence on stage became rare and were not seen on a regular basis until the end of the 18th century when Gothic novels were dramatized and during the melodrama vogue in the 19th century.

During the 18th and 19th century in orthodox doctrine taught in churches hell remained a place of eternal fire and punishment and abode of the devil.  The actual hells of this time were the gaols, the madhouses, the slums, bedlams and those lanes and alleys where vice, squalor, depravity and unspeakable depravity and misery created a social and moral chaos:  a terrestrial counterpart to the horror of Dante's Circles.  The recorder of those scenes was William Hogarth.  At nearly the same time, Piranesi was creating the extraordinary and terrifying nightmare world of his 'Prisons' the grandiose visual equivalent images of Kafka's castles and penal colonies, of panoptic gaols, of labor and concentration camps and of all those megalomanic punitive establishments designed to break and destroy men.

Piranesi's vision prefigures the horrors of the psychological and subjective 'hell' and the state of metaphysical anguish which many writers were to explore in the 19th and 20th centuries.  For instance there are the works of Dostoievski, Gogol, and Kafka, Rimbaud's fragments  in Une saison en enfer (1873), and James Thompson's terrifying The City of Dreadful Night (1874).

Closely associated with the Devil as a character during the Romantic period is the theme of the divisibility of the human identity; the ancient duality; the good and bad man; the two souls co-existent; the divided self  This is German in origin, from the doppelganger of folklore.  Among the most recognizable Doppelganger tales are Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); and Conrad's The Shadow Line (1917).

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By the the mid 1740s the advent of the graveyard school of poetry marked a new stage in the horror tale.  The graveyard school provided verse that was preoccupied with death and suffering, with the necropolitan, corpses, and charnel houses.  The danse macabre was a common motif.

Toward the end of the 18th century the Devil received a new lease on life as a figure and a personality, and was to become a dominant figure in 19th century literature, more particularly in tales of horror.  It shouldn't be a surprise that the Faust theme became popular again.