Employee Q&A: Gothic Expert Jerry Hogle

This English professor doesn't scare easily. But he's an authority on some of the most haunting characters in Gothic literature.

Name
Jerry Hogle

Position
University Distinguished Professor, Department of English

Number of years at the UA
35

Favorite part about working at the UA
"Teaching the students, working with students."

 

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Dracula, Frankenstein's creature and other ghoulish characters enjoy a surge of popularity this time of year, but for one University of Arizona professor things that go bump in the night are to be appreciated year round. 

Jerry Hogle, University Distinguished Professor of English, is an international authority on Gothic literature. He has authored numerous articles and other works on the subject, including the book "The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux's Novel and Its Progeny," considered the definitive study of the "Phantom of the Opera." He also edited and wrote the introduction for "The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction," published by the Cambridge University Press in 2002.

A childhood love of ghost stories led Hogle to his career in Gothic studies. His research focuses largely on questions related to the cultural significance of Gothic tales, which are still alive and well in modern forms, as evidenced by hits like HBO's vampire-themed "True Blood" series and the "Twilight" books for teens.

Hogle has a master's degree in English and a doctorate in English and American literature, both from Harvard University. He has held several positions throughout his UA teaching career, including vice provost for instruction from 2004 to 2007.

With Halloween creeping near, Hogle talked with Lo Que Pasa about his fascination with the spooky side.

What appeals to you about the Gothic fiction genre?
I've had an interest in this kind of thing for a long, long time. I would say it goes back to when I was young and used to imagine monsters in the dark and always liked telling ghost stories. I think I had an early fascination for why we deliberately let ourselves be afraid. I mean, we don't have to, but we deliberately put ourselves in situations where we're going to be afraid and yet we're safe from the fear, like reading or telling horror stories

So why do we do that?
I think there's an abundance of evidence that we like to get our adrenaline and endorphins excited while at the same time being free from actual harm. We like playing that double game – having the benefit of the excitation that comes with fear without having a real actual threat. And from the very beginning of the Gothic novel in the 1700s, people talked about it that way – as a way to arouse sensations of fear, terror, desire, without threat.

Do you remember the first Gothic novel you read?
I think it was the original (Mary Shelley's) "Frankenstein" from 1818 as far as an out-and-out Gothic novel. I probably saw movies of that type before then, or comic books of that type before then.

How has the field of gothic studies changed?
In the early days of my career, in the '70s and early '80s, it wasn't considered scholarly to work on Gothic fictions themselves because they were considered to be popular culture, beneath academic attention. ...  But academia's changed enormously since then and now people realize that there's a lot of symbolic dimension to Gothic fictions. They have deep symbolic significance that extends to the use of the Gothic in film, in video games, in graphic novels. All of those, including Gothic novels, are now the subject of a lot of intense academic analysis to figure out these questions: Why do we need this kind of phenomenon in our culture and why does it keep reproducing itself? ... One of the things that happened is that Gothic studies as an enterprise has become a big international phenomenon. I would say it was 1980 when we had our first major scholarly study of Gothic that a lot of people responded to. It was a book called "The Literature of Terror," by David Punter in England, and a lot of people wrote books and articles in response to it and that sort of set off a three decades-long proliferation of studies in the Gothic. And so now there's a whole international community of scholars who go to Gothic conferences. We have an International Gothic Association of international scholars, of which I was the president myself from 1995 to 1997, and I'm still on the editorial and advisory board for that. And we organize conferences every other year and we have a journal. In fact, the 10th anniversary issue of the journal just came out; it's called "Gothic Studies," and I was a guest editor.  

Do you have a favorite literary character?
I don't have a lot of absolute single favorites. ... If you're asking what Gothic character fascinates me the most, even there I have a hard time because I think Frankenstein's creature has much more symbolic suggestion to us than people give it credit for, but that's true of Dracula as a vampire and that's true of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. ... The reason I worked on the "Phantom of the Opera" was not so much because he was my favorite Gothic character but because no one else had done much. I was asked to write a short essay about it and I discovered that nobody had done a thoroughgoing study of the whole phenomenon – where it came from and why the adaptations have changed it – and I did. This book ("The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera") that came out a few years ago was my seven- or eight-year effort to account for the whole phenomenon and it was really, really fascinating to uncover all the things that had not been discovered and explained about where that character came from why he appeared the way he first did in a 1910 novel. ... Since it's a French novel, and not an English novel, that started the whole thing, not many people in English and American studies have heard of it as a novel.

What are the best film versions of some of the classic Gothic novels?      
So many of the interpretations are so scared of dealing with the real difficult things in the novel that I have not seen a great many interpretations that fully satisfy me, I guess because I like the novels better. The novels are richer, they have more symbolic possibilities, they're more suggestive of multiple things, and movies tend to shut that down to one dimension. Now some of the film versions I think have done good jobs with parts of the stories, visualizing them. ... I liked parts of the original "Frankenstein" 1931 film when the creature's first created and he's sort of groping his way around. Now the way he's created has almost nothing to do with the way he's created in the original novel. (In the book), there's no big electrical apparatus; there's no shooting of lightning down some conductors into his body. ... And I guess I've come to be persuaded that that's OK; that is, I accept the fact that there are different Frankensteins and different Draculas and different Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydes and different phantoms that are made for different times because they incarnate the fears of the times in which they're made.

What books do you have students read in your classes on Gothic literature?
I always have the students read the first Gothic novel, "The Castle of Atronto," published in 1764, and the first Gothic drama, "The Mysterious Mother," both by Horace Walpole. He wrote the play in 1768; it was not staged until the 1790s because it was so controversial. It's essentially about incest. ... Also, (I have them read) "The Mysteries of Udolpho," by Ann Radcliffe. It's probably the most influential novel in Gothic history. More women trapped in Gothic situations have come from that novel than any other. There is also a wildly horrific Gothic novel called "The Monk," by Matthew Gregory Lewis.  So I always have students read that because the Gothic, after Radcliff and Lewis, divided into two forms: terror Gothic, which was more about the threat of things that might happen, things that go bump in the night but you never quite find out what they are, and horror Gothic, where you do find out what they are and they eat you and it's bloody. "The Monk" is very horror Gothic. People get torn to shreds by mobs; it's very bloody, whereas in Ann Radcliffe's novels, things that you think might be ghostly turn out not to be; there's some sort of rational or realistic explanation.

What are your own feelings about the supernatural? Do you believe in ghosts?
No. I like the dramatic possibility of them and I like thinking that there might be ghosts ... but I'm a skeptic. I believe what I have evidence for.

What about modern fictions like the "Twilight" series? Is that revisiting the Gothic?
It absolutely is, and it's one of the things that keeps the Gothic going. One of the things that the Gothic has actually long been about, and I have a whole section in the "Phantom of the Opera" book about it, is the relationship of Gothicism to adolescence. The idea of teenagers dressing up as goths and now teenagers being vampires, this is not a new idea.  Stephanie Meyer (author of the "Twilight" series) did not invent it. She's doing a particular take on it that probably had its most immediate source in the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" TV show about a girl in high school who senses vampires and learns how to kill them. But I think adolescents are at such a betwixt and between state, and they have these ravenous sexual appetites, but at the same time it's forbidden. They feel like these forbidden creatures and they would like to have the power of being immortal and above all that and able to carry out these feelings without punishment and so the vampire is very attractive because the vampire lives forever and is very sexy.

Are you working on any new research?
Oh yes. I'm doing a number of projects. I'm doing a series of essays, which could lead to a book, about the relationship between Gothic and romantic texts. Many of the romantic authors in England in the late 18th and early 19th century disdained the Gothic. They said, "Well, this is trash," but they borrowed from it, they used it, they stole from it again and again and again. ... I'm also working on essays for collections sort of like this one ("The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction"). Ever since I edited this, people are now asking me to write essays for theirs.  

Do you have any plans for Halloween?
Well, we don't know whether we're going be part of a party yet or whether we're just going to be home. When I was young I used to do very elaborate things for Halloween, as you might imagine. And when I got too old to actually go out I became the greeter at the door. I was always figuring out some ghoulish way to greet people. I think the last one I did, we had a table, in which we made a hole, and I put on this ugly hand, and the hand came up with the candy. Well the little kids were so terrified they screamed and cried, so I gave up after that. It was too cruel – they screamed and ran away.