4.
Title: [The Missionary]
Author: Sydney (Lady Mary) Owenson
Genre: Victorian Novel
Medium: Broadview Paperback
Acquisition: Independent Study
Date Completed: January 13, 2016
Rating: *

Early Gothic novels rely on a consistent series of tropes in order to relate horror and excitement in readers, without challenging their own identities or standard morals.  In order to protect the British sense of propriety, Gothic tales are most often set in foreign environments (allowing for the assertion that such nefariousness could never happen "here"), historically (to protect a sense of progress), and often draw on themes of religious extremity or superstition - evil monks, threatening monasteries, and the Devil himself.  Sydney Owenson's The Missionary pulls heavily on these traditions, placing a Portuguese Franciscan by the name of Hilarion in India in the seventeenth-century, where he seeks to save the poor pagans from their heretical beliefs. Ownenson's work is not intended as a Gothic, however, and where the later will draw on long descriptive passages to increase tension and enjoyable anxiety in the reader, Owenson saturates page after page with purple prose of the missionary's piety and divine dedication, preaching a perfection of soul and religious fervor which rankles the modern sense of imperialism, racism, and intolerance.  It is, in a word, abysmal.

Hilarion meets his match in the Brahmian prophetess and priestess Luxima, whose perfection in her own faith and culture is a match for the missionary's; as such, an Indian guide suggests to Hilarion that her conversion to Christianity will be the ultimate conquest, and through her the missionary may reach multitudes who otherwise placate the monk with polite smiles and nothing more.  Taking this advice, Hilarion engages in what I'll describe a series of tactical assaults on the young woman, challenging her not just philosophically, but directly violating the tenants of her religion by touching her and seeking her out in the place of her most intimate worship.  Luxima's challenges to Hilarion are the only passages I found engaging, as Owenson captures Luxima's own sense of certainty in the face of Christian assurances, allowing the "rude pagan" the same eloquence and superiority of her would-be converter.

Though I did not enjoy the novel, and would only recommend it to scholars interested in studying Orientalism and Victorian imperialism, I managed to tease a potential thread related to my own research, and potentially a final project - the fetishization of the priestess, most notably her hair and her veil.

5.
Title: [Through the Woods]
Author: Emily Carroll
Genre: Graphic
Medium: Hardback
Acquisition: Library Book
Date Completed: January 14, 2016
Rating: ****

I have extremely vivid memories of reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark when I was eight years old.  I checked out the books from our school library, and devoured them.  I can trace much of who I am today to those books, as they inspired a love and fascination with the macabre and the frightening (and also a fear of the dark).  Like many, I'd wager, what has stuck with me through the years is less the narrative than the dripping India-ink illustrations made of nightmares and dark whispers.  Today, when I picked up Emily Carroll's Through the Woods I was brought back to that first viewing of Schwartz's ghost stories, and gleefully devoured the entire thing in one sitting.

This is not to say that Carroll's illustrations are the same - far from it, Carroll's art is more similar to the graphic genre in which she writes. But like Scary Stories, Through the Woods often relies on imagery which draws from a sense of Freudian uncanny- the familiar becoming unfamiliar, and thus horrific. The stories are beautifully executed and precisely constructed, and it was a sweet joy to read.