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GOTHIC DISSECTIONS IN
FILM AND LITERATURE
The Body in Parts
Ian Conrich and Laura Sedgwick
Palgrave Gothic
Series Editor
Clive Bloom
Middlesex University
London, UK
“This is a wonderful book, one that fills a longstanding gap in horror and Gothic
studies. A thumping good read for a dark and stormy night.”
—Joan Hawkins, Indiana University Bloomington, USA
“Meticulously researched and well written, Gothic Dissections is a deliberate act of
dismemberment and rich combinations, offering new views of how the body is
theorised and represented in Gothic texts.”
—Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK
“Gothic Dissections is as lively as it is systematic and comprehensive. The first to ana-
lyse Gothic culture from the perspective of the body’s anatomical features, the book
spans a splendid range of disciplinary perspectives and media and cultural forms.”
—Linda Badley, Middle Tennessee State University, USA
“The body under investigation here is not the monolithic and integrated ‘Gothic
body’ of earlier scholarship but the torn and dismembered body of the autopsy
table; the authors’ critical attention as exacting as the process of anatomical dis-
section itself.”
—Dale Townshend, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
“An excellent addition to the literature on Gothic physicality, and one well
informed by the necessary scientific and medical knowledge.”
—David Punter, University of Bristol, UK
“Gothic Dissections offers a unique and captivating approach to the gothic. The
essays not only uncannily mirror the gothic in their focus on body parts, they also
provide a salient and seductive exploration of the abject nature of the gothic.”
—Barbara Creed, University of Melbourne, Australia
This series of gothic books is the first to treat the genre in its many
inter-related, global and ‘extended’ cultural aspects to show how the

taste for the medieval and the sublime gave rise to a perverse taste for
terror and horror and how that taste became not only international (with
a huge fan base in places such as South Korea and Japan) but also the
sensibility of the modern age, changing our attitudes to such diverse
areas as the nature of the artist, the meaning of drug abuse and the con-
cept of the self. The series is accessible but scholarly, with referencing
kept to a minimum and theory contextualised where possible. All the
books are readable by an intelligent student or a knowledgeable general
reader interested in the subject.
Editorial Advisory Board

Dr. Ian Conrich, University of Vienna, Austria
Barry Forshaw, author/journalist, UK
Prof. Gregg Kucich, University of Notre Dame, USA
Prof. Gina Wisker, University of Brighton, UK
Dr. Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, UK
Dr. Alison Peirse, University of York, UK
Dr. Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Prof. William Hughes, Bath Spa University, UK
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14698
Ian Conrich · Laura Sedgwick
Gothic Dissections in
Film and Literature
The Body in Parts
Ian Conrich Laura Sedgwick
School for Cultural and Social Department of English Literature
Anthropology and Linguistics
University of Vienna University of Stirling
Vienna, Austria Stirling, Scotland
Palgrave Gothic
ISBN 978-1-137-30357-8 ISBN 978-1-137-30358-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-30358-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951537
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: © FotografiaBasica/Getty
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
Acknowledgements
Planning and writing this book has been an edifying experience with
such a wealth of material upon which to reflect. We would like to thank
Prof. Justin D. Edwards, who was there from the start and helped
develop the original ideas. Bits of Justin are stitched within the pages of
this book. Dr. Roy Smith, who is a mine of film and literature of the
weird and wonderful, provided titles for Gothic fiction that we had over-
looked and he carefully read through each chapter as they emerged from
the shadows. We remain even more convinced that he is teaching in the
wrong discipline. Kseniia Kalugina also read parts of the book and her
feedback helped in its own way to keep the project moving forward.
Series Editor, Prof. Clive Bloom, embraced the concept of the book
and quickly realised its potential whilst he was a passenger in a car being
driven to Croydon, for a special event on The Horror of London. Karina
Jakupsdottir, Lina Aboujieb and Felicity Plester at Palgrave Macmillan
have been superb in their support and patience. We have been very for-
tunate to have had such an editorial team, and in particular Karina’s
understanding of our desire to produce the best possible book gave a bit
of breathing space whilst the deadline for completion loomed.
Laura would like to thank her family for all of their enduring support
during the writing of this book, especially given the wide range of Gothic
texts that she inflicted upon them. She would also like to thank the
Screen Demons community in Newcastle upon Tyne for their contin-
ued support and promotion of horror and cult cinema. Ian would like to
apologise to the man in the café at the National Gallery, in London, who
v
vi Acknowledgements
seemed deeply unsettled by a conversation he overheard in which dif-

ferent parts of the body were being divided up and shared. Little did he
know that a book was being devised and he left before he could be reas-
sured of our best intentions. Finally, we would like to thank each other—
working as colleagues, collaborators, conspirators and friends this book
would not have been possible any other way.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 The Brain 15
3 Head and Face 33
4 Eyes 49
5 Ears and Nose 65
6 Teeth 81
7 The Tongue, Mouth and Lips 97
8 Hair and Fingernails 111
9 Hands 131
10 Feet and Limbs 151
11 Bones 165
vii
viii Contents
12 Skin 181
13 The Heart 197
14 Genitalia 211
15 The Uterus 227
16 The Stomach, Intestines and the Anus 243
17 Epilogue 261
Index 263
Films 267
Literature: Fiction and Authors 275
Art and Artists 281
General 283
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 The brain as a delicacy in a cooking masterclass in Hannibal

(2001, directed by Ridley Scott) 20
Fig. 2.2 The all-seeing exhumed brain of a dead serial killer
in Blood Diner (1987, directed by Jackie Kong) 27
Fig. 3.1 The forced union. Moss (Rosey Grier) contends with the head
of Kirshner (Ray Milland) that has been surgically joined
on to his body in The Thing with Two Heads (1972, directed
by Lee Frost) 39
Fig. 3.2 Professor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) attempts a face transplant
in Les yeux sans visage (1960, directed by Georges Franju) 45
Fig. 4.1 The tortured eye of the captive patient in Final Destination 5
(2011, directed by Steven Quale) 55
Fig. 4.2 The displaced eyes of the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006,
directed by Guillermo del Toro) 62
Fig. 5.1 The severed ear as surrealist object in Blue Velvet (1986,
directed by David Lynch) 70
Fig. 5.2 The patchwork face of the crazed Dr Alan Kessler (Randall
William Cook) in I, Madman (1989, directed
by Tibor Takács) 73
Fig. 6.1 Larry Caine inspects a forcibly extracted tooth in The Dentist 2
(1998, directed by Brian Yuzna) 85
Fig. 6.2 The Chattery Teeth ominously await their new owner
in the film Quicksilver Highway (1997, directed
by Mick Garris) 93
ix
x List of Figures
Fig. 7.1 The monstrous-feminine with her killer tongue in La lengua

asesina (1996, directed by Alberto Sciamma) 100
Fig. 7.2 Another victim of the vengeful ventriloquist, with a dislocated
jaw and their tongue removed, in Dead Silence (2007, directed
by James Wan) 108
Fig. 8.1 Uncontrollable possessed hair lifts a woman off the ground
in Ekusute (2007, directed by Sono Sion) 117
Fig. 8.2 The piercing fingernails of Coffin Joe in This Night I Will
Possess Your Corpse (1967, directed by José Mojica Marins) 123
Fig. 9.1 A figment of imagination? The severed hand strangles a
psychologist at the end of The Hand (1981, directed by
Oliver Stone) 137
Fig. 9.2 The subject and object conjoined. Max Renn’s hand-gun
in Videodrome (1983, directed by David Cronenberg) 144
Fig. 10.1 The captive patient. The extreme pain of Paul (James Caan),
with his twisted limbs, in the clutches of Annie (Kathy Bates)
in Misery (1990, directed by Rob Reiner) 154
Fig. 10.2 The empowered civilian as hyper-warrior. Cherry
(Rose McGowan) overcomes the loss of her leg to
defend humanity from a zombie horde in Planet Terror
(2007, directed by Robert Rodriguez) 162
Fig. 11.1 The Sawyer family bone furniture combines perversity
with creativity in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974,
directed by Tobe Hooper) 174
Fig. 11.2 Christopher Maitland (Peter Cushing) is overcome by the
sinister nature of the Marquis de Sade’s skull, in The Skull
(1965, directed by Freddie Francis) 177
Fig. 12.1 Disney’s anthropodermic book of spells in Hocus Pocus
(1993, directed by Kenny Ortega) 188
Fig. 12.2 McNeal’s flayed skin as the powerful books written in blood,
in Book of Blood (2009, directed by John Harrison) 194
Fig. 13.1 An extracted heart as a gruesome gift in My Bloody Valentine
(1981, directed by George Mihalka) 202
Fig. 13.2 The ape-human hybrid that follows a heart transplant in
Night of the Bloody Apes (1969, directed by René Cardona) 204
Fig. 14.1 The fanged entrance revealed. The only appearance of the
vagina dentata in Teeth is on the film’s poster (2007,
directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein) 215
Fig. 14.2 The mutant penis of Bad Biology is spent following its
rampant sex spree (2008, directed by Frank Henenlotter) 220
List of Figures xi
Fig. 15.1 The unveiling of the abnormal external womb in The Brood
(1979, directed by David Cronenberg) 230
Fig. 15.2 The nightmare of childbirth in Baby Blood (1990, directed
by Alain Robak) 239
Fig. 16.1 Josef Heiter (Dieter Laser) outlines his despicable plan for
a remodelled body in The Human Centipede (2009, directed
by Tom Six) 251
Fig. 16.2 Locating the intestinal monster in the poster for Bad Milo
(2013, directed by Jacob Vaughan) 257
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Studies of the Gothic have often focused on the revenant of hauntings

and spectrality, and the buildings and ruins, the vaults, chambers and
passages of castles and homes—the physical spaces of the forbidden and
forgotten from which the dead return. What tends to be lost in this
theoretical approach—this methodological paradigm—is the material-
ity of the body, and in particular body parts. Within studies of the con-
temporary horror film, a body horror subgenre has been identified and
defined, but the discussion is drawn to monstrous corporeality in its uni-
fied form. The body, however, consists of components and bits—that can
break, be operated upon, sutured and preserved. They can also be dis-
membered, penetrated, transformed and transplanted. Crucially, whilst
the body is designed to work as a complex unit of moving parts, each
organ and segment of the human anatomy is different in how it func-
tions. Certain parts of the body can regrow and change colour, are more
precious, associated with a specific sense, exposed and protrude more,
or have a greater susceptibility to pain, infection and deformity, whilst
the gendered human exhibits anatomical differences across the sexes,
which Gothic fiction exploits. In Gothic film and literature, specific parts
of the body are emphasised for a particular effect or horrific moment.
For instance, the changing appearance of teeth, ears, eyes and hair are
employed for the transforming monstrous body to illustrate the emerg-
ing beastliness and abnormality of the once human. Elsewhere, a chest
cavity or a skull is commonly prised open in surgical horrors, with the
© The Author(s) 2017 1

I. Conrich and L. Sedgwick, Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature,
Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-30358-5_1
2 I. Conrich and L. Sedgwick
brain, eye, head, hand or heart transplanted into or onto a new body
within Gothic fiction’s reimagined boundaries of modern science.
This is the first book-length study to systematically and theoretically
analyse body parts—such as fingernails, the mouth, skin and bones—that
are crucial to the Gothic. It devotes fifteen chapters to twenty-three dif-
ferent anatomical parts, beginning at the brain and ending with the anus.
It moves fluidly between filmic and literary texts, engaging in unique
readings by drawing on the cross-disciplinary potential of Gothic stud-
ies, foregrounding representations of physicality in the visual image
and in textual discourse. As a result, this study is particularly distinc-
tive in two ways: first, in its approach (focusing on body parts) and, sec-
ond, in its formal structure (balancing readings of Gothic literature and
film). Literature/film adaptations are discussed where possible, dealing
with the differences in the ways the Gothic is interpreted across related
media. Wider reference is also made to art history, positioning case stud-
ies within a context of visual culture where fragmentation and the iso-
lation and reorganisation of body parts has been central to Renaissance
anatomical drawings, symbolist and surrealist painting and to sculpture—
such as the postmodern work of the Young British Artists, Marc Quinn
and Jake and Dinos Chapman.
The Gothic is becoming culturally illimitable, inspiring not just popu-
lar music and fashion but comic books, video games and creative ranges
of children’s merchandise. Gothic Dissections reflects this vibrancy and
boundlessness by not setting a prescribed theoretical approach. Few criti-
cal studies exist within the arts and humanities that focus at length on
understanding the function and representation of specific body parts;
therefore, the chapters in this book are directed foremost by the value
and explicit presence of each anatomical feature as depicted within
Gothic fiction. This study does not aim to be complete but to give an
advanced consideration to the wealth of existing examples of the Gothic
body in its various parts. There will always be examples that could have
been included, and even body parts that are not featured. Subsequent
editions may permit the space to include discussions of the back, neck,
breasts and veins, and to expand into literature not written or translated
into the English language. Priority has been given to solid anatomical
features as opposed to the associated fluid, sense or expression; there-
fore, we are interested primarily in the nose before a study of mucus
and smell, the ear above hearing, and the brain before the mind. That
said, Gothic Dissections remains broad and inclusive in the case studies
1 INTRODUCTION 3
selected, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, address-

ing short films, short stories, children’s books, teen fiction and television
alongside novels and feature-length movies, both live action and anima-
tion. It charts body parts in an understanding of the Gothic mode across
periods, from Edgar Allan Poe to David Cronenberg. It also focuses
on key filmic and literary texts across nations and regions, from Japan,
Australia and France to Brazil and Mexico.
Gothic Dilemmas
Despite the seeming abundance of available examples, studies of the
Gothic have often been restrictive in terms of the texts defined as rel-
evant. For when it comes to considerations of film, Gothic Studies could
be accused of cherry-picking examples, perhaps out of convenience. This
is not an approach that Gothic Dissections supports, as it contends that
the horror film genre and Gothic literature are substantially intercon-
nected, culturally and historically, and that all relevant texts, irrespective
of their quality, are germane. David Punter makes the productive argu-
ment that not ‘all horrifying films are Gothic; but at the same time it
is true that the fundamentally formulaic model which is conventionally
known as “the horror film” has indeed many Gothic aspects’ (1996,
p. 96). These are recognised by Linda Badley, who, for part of her study
of body horror films, positions them in terms of the influence of Gothic
literature, with the medical horrors of the Robin Cook adaptation Coma
(1978), the living dead narratives of Night of the Living Dead (1968)
and Re-Animator (1985), and the transplantations and transformations
of Body Parts (1991) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991), framed as
‘Frankenstein’s Progeny’ (1995, pp. 65–99).
But whilst Film Studies would largely unite behind these views,
English Studies often exhibits purist and conservative tendencies in
the movies it is prepared to consider. In his otherwise valuable study
Gothic (1996), Fred Botting relegates cinema to almost an afterthought,
and then dedicates nearly as much space to science fiction—Metropolis
(1927), Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982)—as he does to the
horror film, selecting just a few examples: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari
(1920), Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931),
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Psycho
(1960), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Blue Velvet (1986) and
Angel Heart (1987). This is a very truncated and unbalanced selection,
with no British horror cinema, no continental European sound horror

films, and no films from the horror new wave of the 1970s and 1980s.
This is particularly worrying, when in the succeeding chapter, labelled
‘The End of Gothic’, in which Botting focuses solely on Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1992), he concludes that with this film ‘Gothic dies, divested
of its excesses, of its transgressions, horrors and diabolical laughter, of
its brilliant gloom and rich darkness, of its artificial and suggestive
forms’ (1996, p. 180). Carol Siegel takes up the challenge to this awk-
ward statement by Botting, noting that he ‘ignores’ Edward Scissorhands
(1990) and The Crow (1994), which are ‘obvious’ and ‘seminal’ contem-
poraneous Gothic films. She argues that these productions speak more
to Gothic communities and Goth youth culture, where the values that
Botting says have died continue to be appreciated (Siegel, 2005, p. 5).
Part of the problem in the disjunction between the approaches of the
film and literature communities stems from the labels that have been
employed over time. In The Handbook of the Gothic, Ian Conrich writes
that ‘[t]he culturally prevalent form of the modern Gothic has been
manifested most strongly in film. Cinema has embraced the Gothic as
a popular text, its elements continually being employed and reinvented
across a myriad of productions’ (2009, p. 136). Film Studies has been
drawn to this genre more than any other but, interestingly, the predomi-
nant term employed is ‘horror’. In comparison, English Studies, with its
significant branches of Gothic and Victorian Literature is much less likely
to favour ‘horror’ as a generic term. Misha Kavka is wrong in her argu-
ment as to why there is ‘no established genre called Gothic cinema or
Gothic film’ (2002, p. 209; emphasis in original). She reads Gothic film
within a controlling frame of Gothic literature, and attempts to abstract
screen examples from what she terms the ‘catch-all film genre of hor-
ror’ (2002, p. 210), concluding that ‘the Gothic is thus not quite that
of horror, which is our response to having confronted something mon-
strous; rather, it bears witness to the permeability of boundaries, which is
the point at which monstrosity begins to arise’ (2002, p. 228).
Yet, Kavka seems unaware of how these films were marketed and how
the term horror only came to define a screen genre post World War II.
Films that are today termed ‘horror’ were originally predominantly mar-
keted and understood as ‘eerie’, ‘macabre’, ‘thriller’, ‘mystery’, ‘weird’,
‘uncanny’ and ‘gothic’ or ‘gothique’, and this includes the Hollywood
monster movies of the 1930s (see Conrich, 2004, p. 46). As Rhona
J. Berenstein correctly notes, many of these films were also marketed
1 INTRODUCTION 5
as romances (1996, pp. 66–69). Dracula (1931) was released in the

USA on Valentine’s Day and supported by adlines such as ‘The Story of
the Strangest Passion Ever Known’; posters for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1931) described it as ‘A Great Love Story’; Revolt of the Zombies (1936)
carried the adline ‘Weirdest Love Story in 2000 Years’; and Maurice
Renard’s novel Les mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac, 1920), was reti-
tled Mad Love (1935) for its Hollywood adaptation. The idea that films
were ‘horror’ did occur, but as Berenstein writes, not ‘as a generic label’
(1996, p. 12). She sees in the 1930s a ‘generic looseness’, and the need
to view the films in ‘cross-generic terms’ (1996, p. 11). As Conrich
(2002) has established, horror films in the UK were originally promoted
as ‘uncanny’, ‘creepy’ or a ‘melodrama’, with the aim of distancing
themselves from the dreaded ‘H’ for horrific label, a British-created rat-
ing which when applied to a movie severely limited its exhibition. This
was a classification, later a formal certificate, that was given to a range
of films not necessarily recognised by today’s definitions as horror but
instead deemed ‘horrific’, an adjective that lasted between 1933 and
1951, when the ‘H’ was replaced by the ‘X’ certificate.
Horrific was still an evident term for certain films when Hammer
Film Productions made their landmark Gothic adaptation, The Curse of
Frankenstein, in 1957. Soon the studio became synonymous with a type
of film that, for marketing purposes, aligned neatly with the company’s
name, creating the alliteration Hammer Horrors. In the UK at least,
‘horror’ was more of a mutation from ‘horrific’—a term used for pro-
moting a group of films that had progressed from a label for regulating
movies deemed adults only. British horror films became highly associated
internationally with a new cycle in a genre that they helped to define in
its contemporary form; beginning with the Hammer horrors, these films
were now ‘generally made in colour, used excess, explicitness, sensuality
and violence’ (Conrich, 1997, p. 229).
There is a second problem in Kavka’s approach, in which she prior-
itises her understanding of Gothic films through screen adaptations of
classic Gothic literature. It is a problem that can be found in other stud-
ies of Gothic film, such as Botting’s book Gothic. Here, theatre is too
often completely overlooked as the important bridge between Gothic
literature and its early screen adaptations. Kavka is not entirely accurate
when she writes that Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) were
‘derived from literary classics’ (2002, p. 214); Heidi Kaye (2012) at least
observes the developments of these films from their theatrical sources.
Both Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) were adapted from inter-
mediate theatre productions as opposed to the immediate literary publi-
cations. For instance, the 1931 version of Dracula was an adaptation of
the 1924 British play by Hamilton Deane, the first authorised adaptation
of Bram Stoker’s novel. The play, in turn, was significantly revised, com-
pressed and simplified by John L. Balderston in 1927 for a Broadway
production starring Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula and Edward Van
Sloan as Professor Abraham Van Helsing, who both reprised their roles
for the screen. The 1931 film is therefore a direct adaptation of the 1927
play and not the novel, which is quite different, with Hollywood encour-
aged to not only adapt the play but to also transfer accomplished speak-
ing members of the Broadway cast, who were familiar with the show, to
the west coast.
Similarly, Frankenstein (1931), was based on the 1927 stage play
by Peggy Webling, which was adapted for the screen by Balderston.
Moreover, Webling’s play had evolved from the numerous theatrical ver-
sions of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel which had been performed since its
first stage adaptations in 1823, when there were no less than five versions
produced in one year (see Glut, 1973, pp. 28–42). As Conrich has rec-
ognised, the 1920s was ‘a period of intense film adaptations of Broadway
stage productions’ (2004, p. 47). Many films, such as The Monster
(1925), The Bat (1926) and The Cat and the Canary (1927), were adap-
tations of Gothic plays, ‘transferred to film as productions that retained
the atmospherics and enclosed spaces of the original shows’ (Conrich,
2004, p. 47). With the rush to convert from silent to sound productions
that emerged in the late 1920s, Hollywood continued to turn to plays
but now for their ability to provide ready-made dialogue-centred perfor-
mances. For instance, the film Doctor X (1932) was based on the play
The Terror, which had been premiered in New York only the year before.
Of course, cinema also found popular Gothic fiction to be a practical
supply of material for adaptations, with not just the dark stories of H.G.
Wells and Robert Louis Stevenson filmed in the 1930s and 1940s but
the work of Abraham Merritt, Edgar Wallace, J.B. Priestley and Dorothy
Macardle produced for the screen. Within Gothic Studies, the appre-
ciation of the relationship between film and literature has been most
comfortable when considering the screen adaptations of classic writers—
Shelley, Poe, Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Angela Carter and Anne
Rice. Depending on the study, the Gothic fiction (literature and film) of
H.P. Lovecraft, Dennis Wheatley, Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson,
1 INTRODUCTION 7
Stephen King, James Herbert, Clive Barker and Thomas Harris may be
explored, but there are many other writers, such as John Saul, Dean R.
Koontz, Graham Masterton, Peter Straub and Jack Ketchum, who are
frequently ignored, suggesting that within academia their work is less
appreciated. Gothic Dissections presents no hierarchy in its case studies
and for the film/literature adaptations that we examine writers range
from Poe, Washington Irving, Victor Hugo, Gaston Leroux, Ira Levin,
Robert Bloch and Curt Siodmak, to King, Barker, Marc Brandel, Roald
Dahl and Neil Gaiman. Many other examples of non-screen adaptations
are discussed, with writers including Edith Wharton, Jerome K. Jerome,
H. Rider Haggard, W.F. Harvey, Koontz, Masterton, Kathy Acker,
Chuck Palahniuk and Sinan Antoon.
The Gothic Body

Shelley’s Frankenstein is undeniably a commanding progenitor of the
Gothic body. Punter emphasises that Frankenstein ‘is a text which, cru-
cially, is about the body […] indeed, it is more obviously about the body
than any other novel in the Western tradition’ (1998, p. 50; emphasis in
original). This Gothic tale is of the body reassembled, after being accu-
mulated in parts from multiple corpses and from different locations:
‘I collected bones from charnel-houses’, ‘dabbled among the unhallowed
damps of the grave’ and the ‘dissecting room and the slaughter-house
furnished many of my materials’, confesses the obsessed scientist Victor
Frankenstein (Shelley 1999 [1818], p. 43). Frankenstein’s monster
is the body manufactured and physically birthed from within a ‘work-
shop of filthy creation’ (1999 [1818], p. 43). This monstrous ‘Adam’
(1999 [1818], p. 77), this experimental body constructed beyond the
laws of science, is an unholy and forbidden Creature. Once ‘alive’ it is
an unruly and murderous body of the living dead that refuses to then
die. Punter argues that ‘Frankenstein is about, first, the cannibalisation
of the body, the work of the charnel house, and thus about the threat of
decay’ (1998, p. 50). He further argues that, as a patchwork of corpses,
the Creature is ‘not merely “born”; he is reborn […] that the material of
his rebirth is body-stuff, not soul-stuff: he is put together from the detri-
tus of the organic’ (1998, p. 50).
Death and destruction is inherent, congenital to the Gothic hulk of
Frankenstein’s monster—a reanimated composition of dead parts that
remain fragments. Christoph Grunenberg writes that ‘[o]ne of the
enduring characteristics of the Gothic can be found in its emphasis on

fragmentation […] and decentralized forms and shapes’ (1997, p. 162).
There is power too in the reconstitution of those parts. The alchemical
creation of the Frankenstein creature invokes the scientific discoveries of
Europe’s Renaissance, a period regarded by Jonathan Sawday as present-
ing a ‘culture of dissection’, a ‘culture of enquiry’ in which sense was
made of the world through a ‘recomposition of the human body’ (1996,
p. ix). Through a dissevering and decentring of the anatomically whole,
Gothic Dissections captures the essence of the body in its constituents. It
recognises that a greater understanding of the materialism of the Gothic
body is in its division or dismemberment into pieces that better display
and relay specific fears and intimate horrors, whilst retaining a cohesion
to the body as a totality.
As Philip Brophy has argued, the modern horror film, with its body
horror fascination, draws ‘on the fear of one’s own body’ (1986, p. 8).
For in Gothic fiction, as the body is threatened, assaulted or altered, the
reader or viewer is reminded that this human body, in its detail, repre-
sents our body. In approaching the corpse, there is a recognition that
it was once like us and is us in the future. The rising dead, the zom-
bie hordes, that have followed in Frankenstein’s wake, are the corpse
returned, the horrific reminder for the living of the body degenerated,
decomposed—previously buried but now never to be forgotten—with
its rotting skin and empty eye sockets. There are numerous theoreti-
cal approaches that permit an understanding of the horror effect of the
Gothic body and, whilst Gothic Dissections engages with each one, none
are promoted as paramount. Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny,
Julia Kristeva’s understanding of the abject, Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion
of the carnivalesque that extends the work of François Rabelais and his
ideas of the grotesque, or Barbara Creed’s studies of body horror that
are inspired by both Kristeva and Bakhtin, demonstrate a diversity of per-
spectives that Gothic Dissections employs where appropriate. Our prior-
ity is for these individual studies of the Gothic body to allow each part
the opportunity to be grasped, as opposed to a particular theory being
employed as the tool to best perform a textual autopsy.
For Freud, the uncanny is ‘undoubtedly related to what is fright-
ening—to what arouses dread and fear’ (1985 [1919], p. 339). The
German equivalent is the unheimlich, translated as the unhomely, which
Freud associates with the unfamiliar and the unknown. Interpreting
the meaning further, it comes to stand for the secret or concealed, and
1 INTRODUCTION 9
the revealing of that which has been repressed: the uncanny ‘uncovers
what is hidden and by doing so effects a disturbing transformation of
the familiar into the unfamiliar’ (Jackson, 1988, p. 65). The theory is
developed around the fear of being ‘robbed of one’s eyes’ (1985 [1919],
p. 351) or being made blind, which Freud concludes refers ‘to the anxi-
ety belonging to the castration complex of childhood’ an ‘infantile factor
[… which is] responsible for feelings of uncanniness’ later in life (1985
[1919], p. 354). Whilst this anxiety is immediately relevant for an under-
standing of Gothic fiction’s focus on the assault on the eye, it also per-
mits a reading of dismemberment or anatomical loss, where the body
has become unfamiliar due to its incompleteness. The uncanny body can
also be the body that lacks human qualities: the hybrid, artificial or frag-
mented body that has been transformed, modified, or that has replace-
ment parts that are not made of flesh and bone. It is the body that has
lost control and that cannot recognise the new independence of a part—
perhaps a limb—that appears to have a mind of its own. It is also the ani-
mation of the inanimate: the severed hand that continues to move, the
skeleton that is able to walk and talk, the dead brought back to life.
The corpse is uncanny as the body that was once familiar, now unrec-
ognisable, collapsed and putrefying. In Kristeva’s neo-Freudian theory
of the abject, in which she addresses society’s taboos and the bounda-
ries of the body, between the self and the ‘other’, she argues that the
corpse is the ‘utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life’ (1982,
p. 4). Society’s taboos include the exudations and expulsions of waste
from the body, the fluids and solids that are seen to pollute—menstrual
blood, urine, excrement, vomit, pus. They are jettisoned in order to
maintain the identity of the self, which is extricated from the discharged
and from the place where it falls. As Kristeva states, ‘dung signifies the
other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits
me to be’ (1982, p. 3). The body that has failed to discharge is at the
risk of collapsing, the defiled parts evidenced by the presence of the con-
taminant. The abject in Gothic fiction is not just the corpse that dis-
turbs, but it is the body that presents itself as having become polluted.
It is the body that disgusts for its proximity to the abject, the body that
is pus-ridden, bloodied or leaking, ruptured and diseased. The abject
is the place where order is disturbed, meaning collapses—‘abjection is
above all ambiguity’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 9)—and it is here where the
body has been horribly disfigured, damaged and reconfigured that the
Gothic monstrous exists.
Kristeva’s theory is developed by Creed’s 1993 study in relation to the

female, and in particular the maternal body, marked by difference and
instability, which she terms the monstrous-feminine. Moving away from
previous studies which viewed the female as a recurring victim, Creed
explores the many monstrous figures of the reproductive female body in
the horror genre. The theory of the monstrous-feminine observes that
within society’s taboos regarding purity and pollution it is the female
body that is most often associated with defilement and the unclean, espe-
cially when considering blood and the menstruating body. The female
body also signifies castration, a source of anxiety for the male, which can
coalesce in the figure of the castrating mother, just one of several mater-
nal monsters identified by Creed. The femme castratrice, the castrating
woman, is most dramatically depicted in the vagina dentata, the trap of
the toothed vagina of the all-devouring woman, that mutilates and dis-
empowers the male.
Creed’s interest in the body-monstrous continues in a 1995 study,
influenced by Bakhtin and his theory of the carnivalesque, where, in a
politics of inversion, the body challenges society’s norms. The carnival
as cultural performance permits the alteration of the body through ritu-
als, dressing up, marvel and trickery. For Creed, the carnivalesque has
been conveyed into body horror fiction, for which she proposes a series
of categories and subcategories that includes the man as mother, capable
of giving birth; metamorphosis and the transformative body, and bodies
defined as bestial, supernatural, possessed, psychokinetic, demonic and
pagan; bleeding, hysterical, dismembered, disintegrating, exploding and
invaded bodies; the body as living corpse, the mechanical body, and the
sexually deviant body. It is an extensive consideration, but other than a
few small subsections at the end on skin, the mouth and the womb, it
does not recognise the values of specific body parts as they function in
horror.
Connected to the carnivalesque is the grotesque body, with its
abnormalities, protrusions, bulges and bursts. It is not the classical,
smooth or uniform body but distorted and impure, with openings and
growths. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White state that the grotesque body
is ‘always in process, it is always becoming, it is a mobile and hybrid
creature’ (1986, p. 9). Creed reads the grotesque in part through the
abject and adds that this body lacks boundaries, is unfinished and unsta-
ble. The grotesque body is deathly, corpse-like, dripping and decaying;
it is the exaggerated body considered unsightly, with its blemishes and
1 INTRODUCTION 11
scars, and regions of excessive and unexpected flesh and hair; it is the
disharmonious body undergoing transformation, altered, malformed
and in-between; the absurd body, comic and terrifying, exhibiting ani-
mal characteristics or those of both sexes. It is the pregnant body, part of
what Creed terms ‘the modern pantheon of female grotesques’ (1995,
p. 136), but it is also the ballooned belly of the male, perhaps obese,
ill, invaded or expectant on the verge of a most unnatural birth. Creed,
however, observes an important distinction between the grotesque body
of horror fiction and Bakhtin’s carnivalesque: whereas the latter ‘privi-
leges the lower regions of the body over the upper, the monstrous body
of horror draws on the bodily categories of inside and outside in order to
shock and horrify’ (1995, p. 136).
Gothic Dissections recognises the significance of body parts inside and
out, from the upper and lower regions, in an understanding of the mul-
titude of ways in which fiction has incorporated anatomical features into
tales of terror. This is a timely book for, as Catherine Spooner observes,
‘[c]ontemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than in any of its
previous phases’ (2006, p. 63). Spooner notes a contemporary society in
which the disturbing spectacle of Gunther von Hagens’s neo-Franken-
steinian Body Worlds exhibition of plastinated dead bodies is embraced by
the public in gallery displays of popular dissection: ‘a conglomeration of
bodily process and the macabre jokiness of postmodern Carnival’ (2006,
p. 63). We would add that this is also an era in which the modern primi-
tive is no longer subcultural but mainstream, with bodies modified—tat-
tooed, pierced, stretched, split, mutilated—in a desire for individuality
and difference. Prime time programmes, such as the British television
show Embarrassing Bodies (2007–2015), appear to have an endless
supply of afflicted bodies willing to be exposed in a widely broadcast
modern freak show. And all within an age of obsession with the body-
beautiful through fitness clubs, health fads, spas and waxing, magazine
ads and catwalk models, pumped-up bodies, and hyper-masculine and
hyper-feminine comic book heroes.
Responding to these cultural modes is the Gothic body of contem-
porary film and literature, that is increasingly interested in destroying
and manipulating the human form in ever-more perverse, creative and
spectacular set-pieces of the flesh fantastic. Corpses and severed human
parts litter modern Gothic fiction in a carnographic parade of the opened
and damaged body that has flourished since the new wave of horror lit-
erature and film that emerged in the 1970s. Amongst writers such as
King, Herbert and Koontz, and directors such as Cronenberg, John

Carpenter and George A. Romero, body horror films then were regularly
associated with special effects technicians such as Tom Savini and Rick
Baker, whose wondrous anatomical creations made them celebrated art-
ists, their work trumpeted in full colour and pull-out posters in glossy
prozines such as Fangoria and Mad Movies. Badley, however, is right to
argue that contemporary horror cinema has been more than its special
effects and that it ‘returned to its wellsprings in the theatrical’—the cir-
cus side show, the phantasmagoria show, the wax museum, the Theatre
of Cruelty and the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol of Paris (1995, p. 9). For
example, Conrich considers the Friday the 13th films (1980–2009), to be
essentially body counts functioning ‘as a modern grand guignol’ (2010,
p. 174), graphically displaying in detailed performances of execution and
suffering gory effects that are designed to appear believable. Significantly,
the tradition has continued in the grand slasher narratives of the Final
Destination (2000–2011) and Saw films (2004–2017), which present
an array of conundrums and devices in which the body is destroyed (see
Conrich 2015). Across both series, so many different parts of the body
have become the focus for horror and whilst some of these moments are
featured within Gothic Dissections, it would be impractical to include each
and every one where relevant to a chapter. Yet what these series and oth-
ers demonstrate in their richness of examples is that the body previously
dissected for anatomical explorations continues to engage and engross
within a popular culture of modern mutilation, and that once collapsed
into its parts, is highly revealing of the impact of Gothic fiction.
Bibliography
Badley, Linda (1995), Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic, Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984), Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Berenstein, Rhona J. (1996), Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality
and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema, New York: Columbia University
Press.
Botting, Fred (1996), Gothic, London: Routledge.
Brophy, Philip (1986), ‘Horrality—The Textuality of Contemporary Horror
Films’, Screen 27: 1, pp. 2–13.
Conrich, Ian (1997), ‘Traditions of the British Horror Film’, in Robert Murphy
(ed.), The British Cinema Book, London: British Film Institute.
1 INTRODUCTION 13
Conrich, Ian (2002), ‘Horrific films and 1930s British cinema’, in Steve Chibnall
and Julian Petley (eds), British Horror Cinema, London: Routledge.
Conrich, Ian (2004), ‘Before Sound: Universal, Silent Cinema, and the Last of
the Horror-Spectaculars’, in Stephen Prince (ed.), The Horror Film, New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Conrich, Ian (2009), ‘Gothic Film’, in Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The
Handbook of the Gothic, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Conrich, Ian (2010), ‘The Friday the 13th Films and the Cultural Function of
a Modern Grand Guignol’, in Ian Conrich (ed.), Horror Zone: The Cultural
Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, London: I.B. Tauris.
Conrich, Ian (2015), ‘Puzzles, Contraptions and the Highly Elaborate Moment:
The Inevitability of Death in the Grand Slasher Narratives of the Final
Destination and Saw Series of Films’, in Wickham Clayton (ed.), Style and
Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Creed, Barbara (1993), The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis,
London: Routledge.
Creed, Barbara (1995), ‘Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-monstrous’,
in Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman (eds), Fields of Vision: Essays in
Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Freud, Sigmund (1985 [1919]), ‘The Uncanny’, in James Strachey and Albert
Dixon (eds), Art and Literature: Vol. 14 of The Penguin Freud Library,
London: Penguin Books.
Glut, Donald F. (1973), The Frankenstein Legend, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press.
Grunenberg, Christoph (1997), ‘Unsolved Mysteries: Gothic Tales from
Frankenstein to the Hair Eating Doll’, in Christoph Grunenberg (ed.),
Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art, Boston,
MA: MIT Press.
Jackson, Rosemary (1988), Fantasy–The Literature of Subversion, London:
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Kavka, Misha (2002), ‘The Gothic on Screen’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kaye, Heidi (2012), ‘Gothic Film’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to
the Gothic, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Punter, David (1996), The Literature of Terror Volume 2: The Modern Gothic,
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Punter, David (1998), Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law,
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Spooner, Catherine (2006), Contemporary Gothic, London: Reaktion Books.
Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon (1986), The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression, London: Routledge.
CHAPTER 2
The Brain
Such is the complexity of the brain that it is perhaps the only organ in
the human body that is far from being fully understood. It is one of the
organs that is essential to life, used as a legal determiner of death—the
body with irreversible cessation of the brain is brain-dead—and it is a
focus for suicides and murders, where there is an objective for the brains
to be ‘blown out’. Even the living dead in popular fiction, who appear to
be brainless, are best stopped by aiming for the brains. A precious organ,
it is encased within the hard shell of the skull and any operation to repair
its damage through brain surgery is viewed as requiring the utmost of
skill. For horror films looking for a combination of gross realism and
special effects glory, craniotomy has become a gory moment that is now
shown in increasingly graphic detail, as viewed in a lengthy sequence in
Saw III (2006), which will be discussed below.
The brain is the location of the mind and our intelligence, the centre
of the nervous system, and the greatest source of our individualism, with
thoughts, compulsions, emotions and memories controlled and stored by
the brain, which also directs and conducts the processes and movement
of the body. A reduced or missing part of the brain, through perhaps
an accident, a stroke or a lobotomy, removes or lessens its effectiveness,
and can alter or affect the performance of the body—as will be exam-
ined with a focus on a specific scene in Thomas Harris’s novel Hannibal
(1999) and its 2001 film adaptation. Brain reshaping and experimenta-
tion will also be addressed with a consideration of H.G. Wells’s novel The
Island of Doctor Moreau (1896).
© The Author(s) 2017 15

I. Conrich and L. Sedgwick, Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature,
Palgrave Gothic, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-30358-5_2
Functions are compartmentalised within the brain, which is composed

of different lobes and departments for specific abilities. Essentially, though,
the body is managed in halves, the brain consisting of two hemispheres,
the left and the right cerebral, which control opposing sides of the body.
An imbalance can lead to brain duality, with such a body in internal conflict
the subject of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 Gothic tale, Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in which Dr Jekyll ‘exhibits left-hemisphere attrib-
utes’, whilst the monstrous Hyde ‘embodies right-hemisphere traits’ (Stiles
2014, p. 37). It forms the basis of an idea for the split self in Stephen
King’s novel The Dark Half (1989; adapted into a film in 1993), which
will be part of a discussion on the exposed brain. The story concerns an
author, Thad Beaumont, who writes under a pseudonym, and who finds
his evil alter ego sharing his thoughts, feelings and pain. However, there
was also the presence of an unborn twin brother, and parts of this parasite
are discovered within Beaumont’s brain during childhood surgery.
Despite its significance, historically the brain has been an organ over-
looked, perhaps because it has been considered so unfathomable. Being
seen as unknown and unfamiliar has been a factor in how the brain has
been received, with its exposure from beneath a detached cranium espe-
cially displeasing to behold. Unlike the heart, to which the brain has
often been contrasted, this is an organ that has not been embraced as
sacred. As Scott Manning Stevens writes in his consideration of the body
and Christianity, it is the heart that has been metaphorically transferred
as ‘an unambiguous symbol of love’ (1997, p. 273), and he knows ‘of
no iconographic tradition depicting Christ’s exposed brain’ (1997,
p. 276). The brain is aesthetically less pleasing, with its lumps and
grooves of grey matter. With its chemical releases, electrical sparks and
intricate internal workings, it has been labelled a machine and it is in
some ways so alien to the rest of the body that it has inspired fiction
in which the organ is imagined to be incredibly powerful, possessing
an independence where it no longer requires a body, and able to con-
trol the minds of others whilst held in glass containers. The central texts
that will be considered here are Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain
(1942) and its screen adaptation in 1953, as well as those in 1944 (as The
Lady and the Monster) and 1962 (as The Brain). The discussion will also
include Roald Dahl’s short story ‘William and Mary’ (1959), its television
adaptations, and the films Blood Diner (1987) and The Brain (1988).
Fantasies of the brain have been explored most in science fiction,
which imagines futures of unlocked brain potential or encounters with
2 THE BRAIN 17
other lifeforms of heightened intelligence. The giant brain bugs of the

Starship Troopers series of films (1997–2012) have the power of telepathy
and can absorb knowledge from humans. This is done through piercing
the skull and then literally sucking out the brain, an idea perhaps inspired
by the creature with a long forked tongue that sucks out brains in the
Mexican film The Brainiac (1962), or the British production Fiend
without a Face (1958), with its giant ‘mental vampire’ floating brains.
Such fiction also includes the alien invasion film, The Brain from Planet
Arous (1957), in which a giant brain takes over and controls the body
of a scientist. Whilst it is a possession narrative, this film is related to the
subgenre of body transplant fiction, with the surgical obsession of trans-
ferring a healthy or valuable brain into the body of another. These brain
transplant movies appear across an array of Gothic narratives, and will
be addressed with a focus on the films Black Friday (1940), Monstrosity
(1963), Brain of Blood (1971) and Get Out (2017).
In these stories, in which the physical brain is transferred, there is a
relocation of the mind and soul. The brain in a container is imagined
to have retained an ability to think, control, communicate and have an
awareness of its existence. Scientists and philosophers have debated the
location of the body’s soul and the divide or relationship between the
heart and the mind and the body and the head, but as Stevens has noted,
there is also a ‘mind–brain split’ (1997, p. 268), adding that the brain
‘seems tied to its own physicality and function, oddly separate from the
more evocative term “mind”’ (1997, p. 278). The brain as the physical
body part will be the primary focus of this chapter, whilst the mind in
relation to the organ will be a secondary concern. In that context, this
chapter acknowledges that there are significant horror fictions that depict
madness or the psychic powers of the mind—telepathy, precognition,
clairvoyance—for instance David Cronenberg’s film Scanners (1981),
and the Stephen King novels Carrie (1974; filmed in 1976, 2002 and
2013), The Shining (1977; filmed in 1980 and 1997), and The Dead
Zone (1979; filmed in 1983), but these are beyond this discussion.
The Exposed Brain

Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting of a brain dissection, The Anatomy
Lesson of Dr Joan Deyman (1656), celebrates the ‘execution of another
thief: Joris Fonteyn’ (Sawday 1996, p. 154), but as Jonathan Sawday
observes (1996, p. 155), it takes the top of this body’s exposed head
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33. Changes in the United States and Japan[109]
The occidentalization of Japan, in methods although not in national

spirit,—which changes much more slowly,—has been fully
demonstrated to an astonished world by the war of 1894 with China.
It is one of the incidents of the closing nineteenth century. To this
achievement in the military sphere, in the practice of war which
Napoleon called the science of barbarians, must be added the
development of civil institutions that has resulted in the concession
to Japan of all international dignity and privilege; and consequently
of a control over the administration of justice among foreigners
within her borders, not heretofore obtained by any other Oriental
State. It has thus become evident that the weight of Japan in the
international balances depends not upon the quality of her
achievement, which has been shown to be excellent, but upon the
gross amount of her power. Moreover, while in wealth and
population, with the resources dependent upon them, she may be
deficient,—though rapidly growing,—her geographical position
relatively to the Eastern center of interest, and her advantage of
insularity, go far to compensate such defect. These confer upon her
as a factor in the Eastern problem an influence resembling in kind, if
not equaling in degree, that which Great Britain has held and still
holds in the international relations centering around Europe, the
Atlantic, and the Mediterranean.
Yet the change in Japan, significant as it is and influential upon
the great problem of the Pacific and Asia, is less remarkable and less
important than that which has occurred in the United States. If in the
Orient a nation may be said to have been born in a day, even so the
event is less sudden and less revolutionary than the conversion of
spirit and of ideals—the new birth—which has come over our own
country. In this are evident a rapidity and a thoroughness which
bespeak impulse from an external source rather than any conscious
set process of deliberation, of self-determination within, such as has
been that of Japan in her recognition and adoption of material
improvements forced upon her attention in other peoples. No man or
group of men can pretend to have guided and governed our people in
the adoption of a new policy, the acceptance of which has been rather
instinctive—I would prefer to say inspired—than reasoned. There is
just this difference between Japan and ourselves, the two most
changed of peoples within the last half-century. She has adopted
other methods; we have received another purpose. The one
conversion is material, the other spiritual. When we talk about
expansion we are in the realm of ideas. The material addition of
expansion—the acreage, if I may so say—is trivial compared with our
previous possessions, or with the annexations by European states
within a few years. The material profit otherwise, the national gain to
us, is at best doubtful. What the nation has gained in expansion is a
regenerating idea, an uplifting of the heart, a seed of future
beneficent activity, a going out of self into the world to communicate
the gift it has so bountifully received.
34. Our Interests in the Pacific[110]
[The preceding pages of the essay explain the dependence of the

“Open Door” policy on an international balance of power in the
Pacific, and the modification of this balance owing to the growth of
the German Navy and the increasing European tension.—Editor.]
The result is to leave the two chief Pacific nations, the United
States and Japan, whose are the only two great navies that have
coastlines on that ocean, to represent there the balance of power.
This is the best security for international peace; because it
represents, not a bargain, but a fact, readily ascertainable. Those two
navies are more easily able than any other to maintain there a
concentration of force; and it may even be questioned whether sound
military policy may not make the Pacific rather than the Atlantic the
station for the United States battle fleet. For the balance of naval
power in Europe, which compels the retention of the British and
German fleets in the North Sea, protects the Atlantic coast of the
United States,—and the Monroe Doctrine,—to a degree to which
nothing in Pacific conditions corresponds. Under existing
circumstances, neither Germany nor Great Britain can afford, even
did they desire, to infringe the external policy of the United States
represented in the Monroe Doctrine.
With Japan in the Pacific, and in her attitude towards the Open
Door, the case is very different from that of European or American
Powers. Her nearness to China, Manchuria, Korea, gives the natural
commercial advantages that short and rapid transportation always
confers. Labor with her is still cheap, another advantage in open
competition; but the very fact of these near natural markets, and her
interest in them, cannot but breed that sense of proprietorship
which, in dealing with ill-organized states, easily glides into the
attempt at political control that ultimately means control by force.
Hence the frequent reports, true or untrue, that such advantage is
sought and accomplished. Whether true or not, these illustrate what
nations continually seek, when opportunity offers or can be made.
This is in strict line with that which we call Protection; but with the
difference that Protection is exercised within the sphere commonly
recognized as legitimate, either by International Law or by the policy
of competing states. The mingled weakness and perverseness of
Chinese negotiators invite such attempt, and endanger the Open
Door; give rise to continual suspicion that undue influence resting
upon force is affecting equality of treatment, or is establishing a basis
for inequality in the future. There can be no question that the general
recent attitude of Russia and Japan, however laudably meant, does
arouse such suspicions.
Then again, the American possession, the Hawaiian Islands, are
predominantly Japanese in labor population; a condition which, as
the outcome of little more than a generation, warrants the jealousy of
Japanese immigration on the part of the Pacific coast. Finally, the
population of that coast is relatively scanty, and its communications
with the East, though rapid for express trains, are slow for the
immense traffic of men and stores which war implies and requires.
That is, the power of the country east of the Rocky Mountains has far
to go, and with poor conveyance, in order to reinforce the Western
Coast; the exact opposite of our advantage of rapid maritime access
to the Panama Canal. In the absence of the fleet, invasion may be
easy. Harm may be retrieved in measure by the arrival of the fleet
later; but under present world conditions the Pacific coast seems
incomparably the more exposed of the three great divisions of the
American shore line—the Atlantic, the Gulf, and the Pacific.
35. The German State and its Menace[111]
The prototype of modern Germany is to be found rather in the

Roman Empire, to which in a certain sense the present German
Empire may be said to be—if not heir—at least historically affiliated.
The Holy Roman Empire merged into that somewhat extenuated
figment attached to the Austrian Hapsburgs, which finally deceased
at the opening of the nineteenth century; but the idea itself survived,
and was influential in determining the form and name which the
existing powerful Germanic unity has assumed. To this unity the
national German character contributes an element not unlike that of
antiquity, in the subordination of the individual to the state. As a
matter of national characteristic, this differs radically from the more
modern conception of the freedom and rights of the individual,
exemplified chiefly in England and the United States. It is possible to
accept the latter as the superior ideal, as a higher stage of advance, as
ultimately more fruitful of political progress, yet at the same time to
recognize the great immediate advantage of the massed action which
subordinates the interests of the individual, sinks the unit in the
whole, in order to promote the interests of the community. It may be
noted incidentally, without further insistence just here, that the
Japanese Empire, which in a different field from the German is
manifesting the same restless need for self-assertion and expansion,
comes to its present with the same inheritance from its past, of the
submergence of the individual in the mass. It was equally the
characteristic of Sparta among the city states of ancient Greece, and
gave to her among them the preponderance she for a time possessed.
As an exhibition of social development, it is generally anterior and
inferior to that in which the rights of the individual are more fully
recognized; but as an element of mere force, whether in economics or
in international policies, it is superior.
The two contrasted conceptions, the claims of the individual and
the claims of the state, are familiar to all students of history. The two
undoubtedly must coexist everywhere, and have to be reconciled; but
the nature of the adjustment, in the clear predominance of the one or
the other, constitutes a difference which in effect upon the particular
community is fundamental. In international relations, between states
representing the opposing ideas, it reproduces the contrast between
the simple discipline of an army and the complicated disseminated
activities of the people, industrial, agricultural, and commercial. It
repeats the struggle of the many minor mercantile firms against a
single great combination. In either field, whatever the ultimate issue,
—and in the end the many will prevail,—the immediate result is that
preponderant concentrated force has its way for a period which may
thus be one of great and needless distress; and it not only has its way,
but it takes its way, because, whatever progress the world has made,
the stage has not been reached when men or states willingly
subordinate their own interests to even a reasonable regard for that
of others. It is not necessary to indulge in pessimistic apprehension,
or to deny that there is a real progress of the moral forces lumped
under the name of “public opinion.” This unquestionably tells for
much more than it once did; but still the old predatory instinct, that
he should take who has the power, survives, in industry and
commerce, as well as in war, and moral force is not sufficient to
determine issues unless supported by physical. Governments are
corporations, and corporations have not souls. Governments
moreover are trustees, not principals; and as such must put first the
lawful interests of their wards, their own people.
It matters little what may be the particular intentions now
cherished by the German government. The fact upon which the
contemporary world needs to fasten its attention is that it is
confronted by the simple existence of a power such as is that of the
German Empire; reinforced necessarily by that of Austria-Hungary,
because, whatever her internal troubles and external ambitions,
Austria is bound to Germany by nearness, by inferior power, and by
interests, partly common to the two states, as surely as the moon is
bound to the earth and with it constitutes a single group in the
planetary system. Over against this stands for the moment a number
of states, Russia, Italy, France, Great Britain. The recent action of
Russia has demonstrated her international weakness, the internal
causes of which are evident even to the most careless observer. Italy
still belongs to the Triple Alliance, of which Germany and Austria are
the other members; but the inclination of Italy towards England,
springing from past sympathies, and as a state necessarily naval,
because partly insular, partly peninsular, is known, as is also her
recent drawing towards France as compared with former
estrangement. Also, in the Balkan regions and in the Adriatic Sea
there is more than divergence between the interest of Italy and the
ambitions of Austria,—supported by Germany,—as shown in the late
annexations and their antecedents. An Austrian journal, which fore-
shadowed the annexations with singular acumen, has written
recently,[112] “We most urgently need a fleet so strong that it can rule
the Northern Adriatic basin,”—in which lies the Italian Venice, as
well as the Austrian Trieste,—“support the operations of our land
army, protect our chief commercial ports against hostile maritime
undertakings, and prevent us from being throttled at the Strait of
Otranto. To do this, the fleet must at least attain the approximate
strength of our probable enemy. If we lag behind in developing our
naval programme, Italy will so outrun us that we can never overtake
her. Here more than elsewhere to stand still is to recede; but to
recede would be to renounce the historical mission of Austria.” The
Austrian Dreadnoughts are proceeding, and the above throws an
interesting side light upon the equipoise of the Triple Alliance. In the
Algeciras Conference, concerning the affairs of Morocco, Italy did not
sustain Germany; Austria only did so.
Analyzing thus the present international relations of Europe, we
find on the one side the recently constituted Triple Entente, France,
Great Britain, and Russia; on the other the Triple Alliance, Austria-
Hungary, Germany, and Italy, of thirty years’ standing. The
sympathies of Italy, as distinguished from the pressure of conditions
upon her, and from her formal association, are doubtful; and the
essentials of the situation seem to be summed up in the Triple
Entente opposed by the two mid-Europe military monarchies.
The Bulwark of British Sea Power[113]
[The intervening pages show that exposure on their land frontiers

would weaken the aid that could be given Great Britain by her allies
in continental Europe.—Editor.]
These conclusions, if reasonable, not only emphasize the
paramount importance in world politics of the British navy, but they
show also that there are only two naval states which can afford to
help Great Britain with naval force, because they alone have no land
frontiers which march with those of Germany. These states are Japan
and the United States. In looking to the future, it becomes for them a
question whether it will be to their interest, whether they can afford,
to exchange the naval supremacy of Great Britain for that of
Germany; for this alternative may arise. Those two states and
Germany cannot, as matters now stand, touch one another, except on
the open sea; whereas the character of the British Empire is such that
it has everywhere sea frontiers, is everywhere assailable where local
naval superiority does not exist, as for instance in Australia, and
other Eastern possessions. The United States has upon Great Britain
the further check of Canada, open to land attack.
A German navy, supreme by the fall of Great Britain, with a
supreme German army able to spare readily a large expeditionary
force for over-sea operations, is one of the possibilities of the future.
Great Britain for long periods, in the Seven Years War and
Napoleonic struggle, 1756–1815, has been able to do, and has done,
just this; not because she has had a supreme army, but because,
thanks to her insular situation, her naval supremacy covered
effectually both the home positions and the expedition. The future
ability of Germany thus to act is emphasized to the point of
probability by the budgetary difficulties of Great Britain, by the
general disorganization of Russia, and by the arrest of population in
France. Though vastly the richer nation, the people of Great Britain,
for the very reason of greater wealth long enjoyed, are not habituated
to the economical endurance of the German; nor can the habits of
individual liberty in England or America accept, unless under duress,
the heavy yoke of organization, of regulation of individual action,
which constitutes the power of Germany among modern states.
The rivalry between Germany and Great Britain to-day is the
danger point, not only of European politics, but of world politics as
well.
36. Advantages of Insular Position[114]
Great Britain and the Continental Powers
Every war has two aspects, the defensive and the offensive, to each of
which there is a corresponding factor of activity. There is something
to gain, the offensive; there is something to lose, the defensive. The
ears of men, especially of the uninstructed, are more readily and
sympathetically open to the demands of the latter. It appeals to the
conservatism which is dominant in the well-to-do, and to the
widespread timidity which hesitates to take any risk for the sake of a
probable though uncertain gain. The sentiment is entirely
respectable in itself, and more than respectable when its power is
exercised against breach of the peace for other than the gravest
motives—for any mere lucre of gain. But its limitations must be
understood. A sound defensive scheme, sustaining the bases of the
national force, is the foundation upon which war rests; but who lays
a foundation without intending a superstructure? The offensive
element in warfare is the superstructure, the end and aim for which
the defensive exists, and apart from which it is to all purposes of war
worse than useless. When war has been accepted as necessary,
success means nothing short of victory; and victory must be sought
by offensive measures, and by them only can be ensured. “Being in,
bear it, that the opposer may be ware of thee.” No mere defensive
attitude or action avails to such end. Whatever the particular mode
of offensive action adopted, whether it be direct military attack, or
the national exhaustion of the opponent by cutting off the sources of
national well-being, whatsoever method may be chosen, offense,
injury, weakening of the foe, to annihilation if need be, must be the
guiding purpose of the belligerent. Success will certainly attend him
who drives his adversary into the position of the defensive and keeps
him there.
Offense therefore dominates, but it does not exclude. The necessity
for defense remains obligatory, though subordinate. The two are
complementary. It is only in the reversal of rôles, by which priority of
importance is assigned to the defensive, that ultimate defeat is
involved. Nor is this all. Though opposed in idea and separable in
method of action, circumstances not infrequently have permitted the
union of the two in a single general plan of campaign, which protects
at the same time that it attacks. “Fitz James’s blade was sword and
shield.” Of this the system of blockades by the British Navy during
the Napoleonic wars was a marked example. Thrust up against the
ports of France, and lining her coasts, they covered—shielded—the
operations of their own commerce and cruisers in every sea; while at
the same time, crossing swords, as it were, with the fleets within,
ever on guard, ready to attack, should the enemy give an opening by
quitting the shelter of his ports, they frustrated his efforts at a
combination of his squadrons by which alone he could hope to
reverse conditions. All this was defensive; but the same operation cut
the sinews of the enemy’s power by depriving him of sea-borne
commerce, and promoted the reduction of his colonies. Both these
were measures of offense; and both, it may be added, were directed
upon the national communications, the sources of national well-
being. The means was one, the effect twofold....
[It is shown that, in the case of insular states, offense and defense
are often closely combined, home security depending on control of
the sea assured by offensive action of the national fleet.—Editor.]
An insular state, which alone can be purely maritime, therefore
contemplates war from a position of antecedent probable superiority
from the twofold concentration of its policy; defense and offense
being closely identified, and energy, if exerted judiciously, being
fixed upon the increase of naval force to the clear subordination of
that more narrowly styled military. The conditions tend to minimize
the division of effort between offensive and defensive, purpose, and,
by greater comparative development of the fleet, to supply a larger
margin of disposable numbers in order to constitute a mobile
superiority at a particular point of the general field. Such a decisive
local superiority at the critical point of action is the chief end of the
military art, alike in tactics and strategy. Hence it is clear that an
insular state, if attentive to the conditions that should dictate its
policy, is inevitably led to possess a superiority in that particular kind
of force, the mobility of which enables it most readily to project its
power to the more distant quarters of the earth, and also to change
its point of application at will with unequalled rapidity.
The general considerations that have been advanced concern all
the great European nations, in so far as they look outside their own
continent, and to maritime expansion, for the extension of national
influence and power; but the effect upon the action of each differs
necessarily according to their several conditions. The problem of sea-
defense, for instance, relates primarily to the protection of the
national commerce everywhere, and specifically as it draws near the
home ports; serious attack upon the coast, or upon the ports
themselves, being a secondary consideration, because little likely to
befall a nation able to extend its power far enough to sea to protect
its merchant ships. From this point of view the position of Germany
is embarrassed at once by the fact that she has, as regards the world
at large, but one coast-line. To and from this all her sea commerce
must go; either passing the English Channel, flanked for three
hundred miles by France on the one side and England on the other,
or else going north about by the Orkneys, a most inconvenient
circuit, and obtaining but imperfect shelter from recourse to this
deflected route. Holland, in her ancient wars with England, when the
two were fairly matched in point of numbers, had dire experience of
this false position, though her navy was little inferior in numbers to
that of her opponent. This is another exemplification of the truth that
distance is a factor equivalent to a certain number of ships. Sea-
defense for Germany, in case of war with France or England, means
established naval predominance at least in the North Sea; nor can it
be considered complete unless extended through the Channel and as
far as Great Britain will have to project hers into the Atlantic. This is
Germany’s initial disadvantage of position, to be overcome only by
adequate superiority of numbers; and it receives little compensation
from the security of her Baltic trade, and the facility for closing that
sea to her enemies. In fact, Great Britain, whose North Sea trade is
but one-fourth of her total, lies to Germany as Ireland does to Great
Britain, flanking both routes to the Atlantic; but the great
development of the British sea-coast, its numerous ports and ample
internal communications, strengthen that element of sea-defense
which consists in abundant access to harbors of refuge.
For the Baltic Powers, which comprise all the maritime States east
of Germany, the commercial drawback of the Orkney route is a little
less than for Hamburg and Bremen, in that the exit from the Baltic is
nearly equidistant from the north and south extremities of England;
nevertheless the excess in distance over the Channel route remains
very considerable. The initial naval disadvantage is in no wise
diminished. For all the communities east of the Straits of Dover it
remains true that in war commerce is paralyzed, and all the resultant
consequences of impaired national strength entailed, unless decisive
control of the North Sea is established. That effected, there is
security for commerce by the northern passage; but this alone is
mere defense. Offense, exerted anywhere on the globe, requires a
surplusage of force, over that required to hold the North Sea,
sufficient to extend and maintain itself west of the British Islands. In
case of war with either of the Channel Powers, this means, as
between the two opponents, that the eastern belligerent has to guard
a long line of communications, and maintain distant positions,
against an antagonist resting on a central position, with interior
lines, able to strike at choice at either wing of the enemy’s extended
front. The relation which the English Channel, with its branch the
Irish Sea, bears to the North Sea and the Atlantic—that of an interior
position—is the same which the Mediterranean bears to the Atlantic
and the Indian Sea; nor is it merely fanciful to trace in the passage
round the north of Scotland an analogy to that by the Cape of Good
Hope. It is a reproduction in miniature. The conditions are similar,
the scale different. What the one is to a war whose scene is the north
of Europe, the other is to operations by European Powers in Eastern
Asia.
To protract such a situation is intolerable to the purse and morale
of the belligerent who has the disadvantage of position. This of
course leads us straight back to the fundamental principles of all
naval war, namely, that defense is ensured only by offense, and that
the one decisive objective of the offensive is the enemy’s organized
force, his battle fleet. Therefore, in the event of a war between one of
the Channel Powers, and one or more of those to the eastward, the
control of the North Sea must be at once decided. For the eastern
State it is a matter of obvious immediate necessity, of commercial
self-preservation. For the western State the offensive motive is
equally imperative; but for Great Britain there is defensive need as
well. Her Empire imposes such a development of naval force as
makes it economically impracticable to maintain an army as large as
those of the Continent. Security against invasion depends therefore
upon the fleet. Postponing more distant interests, she must here
concentrate an indisputable superiority. It is, however, inconceivable
that against any one Power Great Britain should not be able here to
exert from the first a preponderance which would effectually cover
all her remoter possessions. Only an economical decadence, which
would of itself destroy her position among nations, could bring her
so to forego the initial advantage she has, in the fact that for her
offense and defense meet and are fulfilled in one factor, the
command of the sea. History has conclusively demonstrated the
inability of a state with even a single continental frontier to compete
in naval development with one that is insular, although of smaller
population and resources. A coalition of Powers may indeed affect
the balance. As a rule, however, a single state against a coalition
holds the interior position, the concentrated force; and while
calculation should rightly take account of possibilities, it should
beware of permitting imagination too free sway in presenting its
pictures. Were the eastern Powers to combine they might prevent
Great Britain’s use of the North Sea for the safe passage of her
merchant shipping; but even so she would but lose commercially the
whole of a trade, the greater part of which disappears by the mere
fact of war. Invasion is not possible, unless her fleet can be wholly
disabled from appearing in that sea. From her geographical position,
she still holds her gates open to the outer world, which maintains
three fourths of her commerce in peace.
37. Bearing of Political Developments on Naval
Policy and Strategy[115]
The external activities of Europe, noted a dozen years ago and before,
have now to a certain extent been again superseded by rivalries
within Europe itself. Those rivalries, however, are the result of their
previous external activities, and in the last analysis they depend
upon German commercial development. This has stimulated the
German Empire to a prodigious naval programme, which affects the
whole of Europe and may affect the United States. In 1897 I summed
up two conspicuous European conditions as being the equilibrium
then existing between France and Germany, with their respective
allies, and the withdrawal of Great Britain from active association
with the affairs of the Continent. At that date the Triple Alliance,
Austria, Germany, Italy, stood against the Dual Alliance, France and
Russia; Great Britain apart from both, but with elements of
antagonism against Russia and France, and not against the German
monarchies or Italy. These antagonisms arose wholly from
conditions external to Europe,—in India against Russia, and in Africa
against France. Later, the paralysis of Russia, through her defeat by
Japan, and through her internal troubles, left France alone for a
time; during which Germany, thus assured against land attack, was
better able to devote much money to the fleet, as the protector of her
growing commerce. The results have been a projected huge German
navy, and a German altercation with France relative to Moroccan
affairs; incidents which have aroused Great Britain to a sense of
naval danger, and have propelled her to the understandings—
whatever they amount to—with France and Russia, which we now
know as the Triple Entente. In short, Great Britain has abandoned
the isolation of twenty years ago, stands joined to the Dual Alliance,
and it becomes a Triple Entente.
To the United States this means that Great Britain, once our chief
opponent in matters covered by the Monroe Doctrine, but later by
the logic of events drawn to recede from that opposition, so that she
practically backed us against Europe in 1898, and subsequently
conceded the Panama arrangement known as the Hay-Pauncefote
Treaty, cannot at present count for as much as she did in naval
questions throughout the world. It means to the United States and to
Japan that Great Britain has too much at stake at home to side with
the one or the other, granting she so wished, except as bound by
treaty, which implies reciprocal obligations. Between her and Japan
such specific obligations exist. They do not in the case of the United
States; and the question whether the two countries are disposed to
support one another, and, if so, to what extent, or what the attitude
of Great Britain would be in case of difficulty between Japan and the
United States, are questions directly affecting naval strategy.[116]
Great Britain does indeed for the moment hold Germany so far in
check that the German Empire also can do no more than look after
its European interests; but should a naval disaster befall Great
Britain, leaving Germany master of the naval situation, the world
would see again a predominant fleet backed by a predominant army,
and that in the hands, not of a state satiated with colonial
possessions, as Great Britain is, but of one whose late entry into
world conditions leaves her without any such possessions at all of
any great value. The habit of mind is narrow which fails to see that a
navy such as Germany is now building will be efficacious for other
ends than those immediately proposed. The existence of such a fleet
is a constant factor in contemporary politics; the part which it shall
play depending upon circumstances not always to be foreseen.
Although the colonial ambitions of Germany are held in abeyance for
the moment, the wish cannot but exist to expand her territory by
foreign acquisitions, to establish external bases for the support of
commercial or political interests, to build up such kindred
communities as now help to constitute the British Empire, homes for
emigrants, markets for industries, sources of supplies of raw
materials, needed by those industries.
All such conditions and ambitions are incidents with which
Strategy, comprehensively considered, has to deal. By the successive
enunciations of the Monroe Doctrine the United States stands
committed to the position that no particle of American soil shall pass
into the hands of a non-American State other than the present
possessor. No successful war between foreign states, no purchase, no
exchange, no merger, such as the not impossible one of Holland with
Germany, is allowed as valid cause for such transfer. This is a very
large contract; the only guarantee of which is an adequate navy,
however the term “adequate” be defined. Adequacy often depends
not only upon existing balances of power, such, for instance, as that
by which the British and German navies now affect one another,
which for the moment secures the observance of the Doctrine.
Account must be taken also of evident policies which threaten to
disturb such balances, such as the official announcement by
Germany of her purpose to create a “fleet of such strength that, even
for the mightiest naval power, a war with Germany would involve
such risks as to jeopardize its own supremacy.” This means, at least,
that Great Britain hereafter shall not venture, as in 1898, to back the
United States against European interference; nor to support France
in Morocco; nor to carry out as against Germany her alliance with
Japan. It is a matter of very distinct consequence in naval strategy
that Great Britain, after years of contention with the United States,
essentially opposed to the claims of the Monroe Doctrine, should at
last have come to substantial coincidence with the American point of
view, even though she is not committed to a formal announcement to
that effect.[117] Such relations between states are primarily the
concern of the statesman, a matter of international policies; but they
are also among the data which the strategist, naval as well as land,
has to consider, because they are among the elements which
determine the constitution and size of the national fleet.
I here quote with approval a statement of the French Captain
Darrieus:
“Among the complex problems to which the idea of strategy gives
rise there is none more important than that of the constitution of the
fleet; and every project which takes no account of the foreign
relations of a great nation, nor of the material limit fixed by its
resources, rests upon a weak and unstable base.”
I repeat also the quotation from Von der Goltz: “We must have a
national strategy, a national tactics.” I cannot too entirely repudiate
any casual word of mine, reflecting the tone which once was so
traditional in the navy that it might be called professional,—that
“political questions belong rather to the statesman than to the
military man.” I find these words in my old lectures, but I very soon
learned better, from my best military friend, Jomini; and I believe
that no printed book of mine endorses the opinion that external
politics are of no professional concern to military men.
It was in accordance with this changed opinion that in 1895, and
again in 1897, I summed up European conditions as I conceived
them to be; pointing out that the distinguishing feature at that time
was substantial equilibrium on the Continent, constituting what is
called the Balance of Power; and, in connection with the calm thus
resulting, an immense colonizing movement, in which substantially
all the great Powers were concerned. This I indicated as worthy of
the notice of naval strategists, because there were parts of the
American continents which for various reasons might attract upon
themselves this movement, in disregard of the Monroe Doctrine.
Since then the scene has shifted greatly, the distinctive feature of
the change being the growth of Germany in industrial, commercial,
and naval power,—all three; while at the same time maintaining her
military pre-eminence, although that has been somewhat qualified
by the improvement of the French army, just as the growth of the
German navy has qualified British superiority at sea. Coincident with
this German development has been the decline of Russia, owing to
causes generally understood; the stationariness of France in
population, while Germany has increased fifty per cent; and the very
close drawing together of Germany and Austria, for reasons of much
more controlling power than the mere treaty which binds them. The
result is that to-day central Europe, that is, Austria and Germany,
form a substantially united body, extending from water to water,
from North Sea to Adriatic, wielding a military power against which,
on the land, no combination in Europe can stand. The Balance of
Power no longer exists; that is, if my estimate is correct of the
conditions and dispersion which characterize the other nations
relatively to this central mass.
This situation, coinciding with British trade jealousies of the new
German industries, and with the German naval programme, have
forced Great Britain out of the isolation which the Balance of Power
permitted her. Her ententes are an attempt to correct the
disturbance of the balance; but, while they tend in that direction,
they are not adequate to the full result desired. The balance remains
uneven; and consequently European attention is concentrated upon
European conditions, instead of upon the colonizing movements of
twenty years ago. Germany even has formally disavowed such
colonizing ambitions, by the mouth of her ambassador to the United
States, confirmed by her minister of foreign affairs, although a dozen
years ago they were conspicuous. Concerning these colonizing
movements, indeed, it might be said that they have reached a
moment of quiet, of equilibrium, while internally Europe is
essentially disquieted, as various incidents have shown.
The important point to us here is the growing power of the
German Empire, in which the efficiency of the State as an organic
body is so greatly superior to that of Great Britain, and may prove to
be to that of the United States. The two English-speaking countries
have wealth vastly superior, each separately, to that of Germany;
much more if acting together. But in neither is the efficiency of the
Government for handling the resources comparable to that of
Germany; and there is no apparent chance or recognized inducement
for them to work together, as Germany and Austria now work in
Europe. The consequence is that Germany may deal with each in
succession much more effectively than either is now willing to
consider; Europe being powerless to affect the issue so long as
Austria stands by Germany, as she thoroughly understands that she
has every motive to do.
It is this line of reasoning which shows the power of the German
navy to be a matter of prime importance to the United States. The
power to control Germany does not exist in Europe, except in the
British navy; and if social and political conditions in Great Britain
develop as they now promise, the British navy will probably decline
in relative strength, so that it will not venture to withstand the
German on any broad lines of policy, but only in the narrowest sense
of immediate British interests. Even this condition may disappear,
for it seems as if the national life of Great Britain were waning at the
same time that that of Germany is waxing. The truth is, Germany, by
traditions of two centuries, inherits now a system of state control,
not only highly developed but with a people accustomed to it,—a
great element of force; and this at the time when control of the
individual by the community—that is, by the state—is increasingly
the note of the times. Germany has in this matter a large start. Japan
has much the same.
When it is remembered that the United States, like Great Britain
and like Japan, can be approached only by sea, we can scarcely fail to
see that upon the sea primarily must be found our power to secure
our own borders and to sustain our external policy, of which at the
present moment there are two principal elements; namely, the
Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door. Of the Monroe Doctrine
President Taft, in his first message to Congress, has said that it has
advanced sensibly towards general acceptance; and that
maintenance of its positions in the future need cause less anxiety
than it has in the past. Admitting this, and disregarding the fact that
the respect conceded to it by Europe depends in part at least upon
European rivalries modifying European ability to intervene,—a
condition which may change as suddenly as has the power of Russia
within the decade,—it remains obvious that the policy of the Open
Door requires naval power quite as really and little less directly than
the Monroe Doctrine. For the scene of the Open Door contention is
the Pacific; the gateway to the Pacific for the United States is the
Isthmus; the communications to the Isthmus are by way of the Gulf
of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea. The interest of that maritime
region therefore is even greater now than it was when I first
undertook the strategic study of it, over twenty years ago. Its
importance to the Monroe Doctrine and to general commercial
interests remains, even if modified.
At the date of my first attempt to make this study of the Caribbean,
and to formulate certain principles relative to Naval Strategy, there
scarcely could be said to exist any defined public consciousness of
European and American interest in sea power, and in the methods of
its application which form the study of Strategy. The most striking
illustration of this insensibility to the sea was to be found in
Bismarck, who in a constructive sense was the greatest European
statesman of that day. After the war with France and the acquisition
of Alsace and Lorraine, he spoke of Germany as a state satiated with
territorial expansion. In the matter of external policy she had
reached the limits of his ambitions for her; and his mind thenceforth
was set on internal development, which should harmonize the body
politic and ensure Germany the unity and power which he had won
for her. His scheme of external relations did not stretch beyond
Europe. He was then too old to change to different conceptions,
although he did not neglect to follow the demand of the people as
their industry and commerce developed.
The contrast between the condition of indifference to the sea
which he illustrated and that which now exists is striking; and the
German Empire, which owes to him above all men its modern
greatness, offers the most conspicuous illustration of the change. The
new great navies of the world since 1887 are the German, the
Japanese, and the American. Every state in Europe is now awake to
the fact that the immediate coming interests of the world, which are
therefore its own national interest, must be in the other continents.
Europe in its relatively settled conditions offers really the base of
operations for enterprises and decisive events, the scene of which
will be in countries where political or economical backwardness must
give place to advances which will be almost revolutionary in kind.
This can scarcely be accomplished without unsettlements, the
composing of which will depend upon force. Such force by a
European state—with the single exception of Russia, and possibly, in
a less degree, of Austria—can be exerted only through a navy.

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Gothic Dissections in Film and

Literature: The Body in Parts 1st

Fairytale and Gothic Horror: Uncanny Transformations in

Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British

The gothic in contemporary literature and popular

Resistant Reproductions: Pregnancy and Abortion in

The British Official Film in South-East Asia:

Rethinking Gothic Transgressions of Gender and

New Feminisms in South Asian Social Media Film and

The Transnationalism of American Culture Literature

Editorial Advisory Board

More information about this series at

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951537

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © FotografiaBasica/Getty

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

seemed deeply unsettled by a conversation he overheard in which dif-

3 Head and Face 33

5 Ears and Nose 65

7 The Tongue, Mouth and Lips 97

8 Hair and Fingernails 111

10 Feet and Limbs 151

13 The Heart 197

15 The Uterus 227

16 The Stomach, Intestines and the Anus 243

Literature: Fiction and Authors 275

Art and Artists 281

Fig. 2.1 The brain as a delicacy in a cooking masterclass in Hannibal

Fig. 7.1 The monstrous-feminine with her killer tongue in La lengua

Studies of the Gothic have often focused on the revenant of hauntings

© The Author(s) 2017 1

selected, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, address-

with no British horror cinema, no continental European sound horror

as romances (1996, pp. 66–69). Dracula (1931) was released in the

The Gothic Body

enduring characteristics of the Gothic can be found in its emphasis on

Kristeva’s theory is developed by Creed’s 1993 study in relation to the

King, Herbert and Koontz, and directors such as Cronenberg, John

© The Author(s) 2017 15

Functions are compartmentalised within the brain, which is composed

other lifeforms of heightened intelligence. The giant brain bugs of the

The Exposed Brain

The occidentalization of Japan, in methods although not in national

[The preceding pages of the essay explain the dependence of the

The prototype of modern Germany is to be found rather in the

The Bulwark of British Sea Power[113]

[The intervening pages show that exposure on their land frontiers

Great Britain and the Continental Powers

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