Is that a decaying corpse in the closet, or are you just happy to see me?

Chris Mooney and PZ Myers are both irritated by what Mooney calls "the skeptic conversion narrative" in supernatural films.  There is a "rationalist" tradition in Gothic, descended from the work of Ann Radcliffe, in which all of the spectral and gory horrors turn out to have perfectly reasonable explanations--the terrifying corpse in The Mysteries of Udolpho being one of the most notorious examples.  But this tradition has never been very popular; even at the time, readers like Sir Walter Scott complained that it was really much more effective, from a literary standpoint, to have the ghosts et al. be real.  (Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor, which tries to steer a middle ground between the post-Scottish Enlightenment historical novel and the "irrational" Gothic, inadvertently suggests the difficulty of doing both at once.  In a very astute review, the econonomist Nassau W. Senior pointed out that the novel's mental landscape, as it were, was entirely incoherent.)  Skeptic conversion narratives are especially popular in the Victorian Gothic tradition, although it's worth noting that such "conversions" do not necessarily do much good: while converting to the reality of the supernatural may help the skeptic remain alive, as opposed to becoming inconveniently dead, it doesn't necessarily solve the minor problem of having a ghost wandering about your house, killing people as it goes.  J. S. Le Fanu's great "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street," which is explicitly a skeptic's conversion narrative--"I had never pretended to conceal from poor Tom my superstitious weakness; and he, on the other hand, most unaffectedly ridiculed my tremors. The sceptic was, however, destined to receive a lesson, as you shall hear"--suggests some of the narrative's complexities: the narrator, who is the "superstitious" one, nevertheless is also the character who apparently soldiers on with his medical studies, whereas Tom "preferred the Church, poor fellow, and died early, a sacrifice to contagion, contracted in the noble discharge of his duties."  The reader suspects that there's a connection between Tom's conversion to the supernatural and Tom's entry into the Church ("poor fellow"), but the narrator's own pre-existing "superstitious" leanings do not lean him towards a religious vocation. Indeed, if the narrator has anything in the way of religious sentiment, it's difficult to detect it in this tale. 

Comments

[Richard Heft]

Although I believe it's technically Edwardian fiction, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES is a rationalist text that has doggedly kept its popularity (pun intentional). Doyle tried a skeptic-conversion narrative in one of the Professor Challenger novels; Challenger ultimately bends his knee to the revealed truth of Spiritualism. It's a dreadful book.

[Ray Davis]

Even if one views the supernatural as a virus, it makes sense that one should contract it early and often if one is to avoid catastrophe in adult life.

Another example of the rationalist gone too far.

[Brandon]

The reader suspects that there's a connection between Tom's conversion to the supernatural and Tom's entry into the Church ("poor fellow"), but the narrator's own pre-existing "superstitious" leanings do not lean him towards a religious vocation. Indeed, if the narrator has anything in the way of religious sentiment, it's difficult to detect it in this tale.

That's interesting, because it does seem as if there is a strand of thought at least by the late nineteenth century that is precisely this -- in some sense superstitious, but at the same time very nonreligious. (Society for Psychical Research and the like, with some members looking at the alleged phenomena as religious phenomena, and some merely regarding them as facts having little to do with religion as such.) But I don't know much about the history of this line of thought.

[The Constructivist]

While teaching this semester in Japan a course on American literary hauntings based on a world lit course I stopped teaching 7 years ago, I realized I'd have to give my students a lot of historical, cultural, and political context. Here's one attempt that's precisely relevant to this discussion. What do you think of it?