Midnights, Mayhem, and Swinging Pendulums: The Use of Clocks in Children’s Gothic Literature by CHELSEA KUESER
A brief perusal of gothic literature would reveal an oft-repeating object: clocks. Big, long-case grandfather clocks with deep chimes and swinging pendulums. Clocks are especially prevalent in 20th-century children’s gothic titles: The Three Investigators and the Mystery of the Screaming Clock (Alfred Hitchcock), Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Clock (Carolyn Keene), Hardy Boys: While the Clock Ticked (Franklin W. Dixon), The House with a Clock in its Walls (John Bellairs). Clocks exist abundantly in gothic literature, Jesse Molesworth points out in his article “Gothic Time, Sacred Time” (29), however it’s not a subject that has received much attention, especially in children’s gothic studies.
Digging deeper into the pages of children’s gothic stories would reveal an even greater prevalence of clocks, used in several different ways: to set an authoritative, baseline reality; signify distortion of said reality; ring in the “witching hour,” creating a liminal space for the supernatural to occur; and contribute to the overall gloomy mood with their, as Dickens put it, “deep, dull, hollow, melancholy” chimes (29). Of course, the infamous crocodile of Peter Pan (Barrie) cannot be forgotten—he who swallowed a clock and thereafter symbolized the monster of Time itself, always lurking, just waiting to gobble up Neverlandians in one way or another.
It is my intent to trace the origins of the trope of clocks in children’s gothic literature, and how it possibly differs from the use of clocks in adult gothic literature. To accomplish this, I will be looking at several different articles addressing both the use of clocks and time in literature, as well as how a specifically gothic affect is achieved through different tropes and writing styles. Additionally, I will be digging into the pages of a handful of classic children’s gothic literature to use as examples. However, I will be focusing most frequently on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 novella Nutcracker and Mouse King, and his use of a pendulum-swinging grandfather clock as a gothic device used in several key ways, including gothic sounds, gothic monsters, midnights as the ‘witching hour,’ the uncanny effect, and mesmerism.
Gothic Sounds
From the beginning of the genre, gothic writing incorporates a fairly specific set of sounds in order to create a more sensory experience for the reader, evoking powerful emotions of fear, Lucie Ratail explains in her study of Victorian soundscapes. Additionally, Ratail points out how Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)—one of the earliest gothic novels—largely prototyped much of the gothic “score,” as it were, with sounds of whispers and murmurs, echoing footsteps, and howling wind woven throughout the novel. These sounds became so key to the genre that Jane Austen used them for a satire effect in her gothic parody, Northanger Abbey (1817). While Ratail highlights how the Gothic genre formulated at a time when Europe was evolving from “a world of silence and Romantic reactions to auditory perception towards a period of sonorous technology and bustling life” (Ratail), the tolling of clock bells receives only a very brief mention.
However, scholars do acknowledge how the sound of a clock striking has been used to create a mood of doom and gloom in gothic literature. Jesse Molesworth points out that “[t]he gothic . . . recognizes and substantiates Lewis Mumford’s (1963 [1934]:14) claim that ‘the clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern Industrial Age’” (qtd. in Molesworth 41), but the sounds of the hour are used to transport the reader and characters into pre-modernism, at least as far as the concept of time goes—back to a time when lives were “governed by the ritual tolling of the abbey bell” (Molesworth 41). It is my hope here to add to these discussions on gothic sounds, highlighting the important role of the ticking and chiming of clocks.
Looking again at Jesse Molesworth’s studies, he conducts a close reading of three of the most prototypical gothic novels: Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764), The Monk by Matthew Lewis (1796), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). He pulls examples from each book, highlighting how important the bell toll is to create sound in the gothic novel. For example: “[t]he abbey bell and . . . the convent bell are ghostly presences throughout The Monk . . . providing a sound track for many of its most crucial events” (Molesworth 42). Bell tolls have historically signified important events, from the start of church services to the hanging of criminals. Lewis clearly uses the familiar effect of the bell toll to signify important happenings in his novel.
In my own examination of the texts, I noted that in The Mysteries of Udolpho, the clock—whether the castle clock or the church bell—strikes twelve no less than twelve times. Aside from the notion of midnight as the ‘witching hour’ or ‘ghostly hour’ (Lewis 164), which will be discussed at a later point in this study, Radcliffe personifies the sound of the bell toll and uses it to paint whole scenes. For example:
Emily was . . . roused from her reverie by the far-off sound of the castle clock . . . as it rolled away on the breeze. Another and another note succeeded, and died in sullen murmur among the mountains:—to her mournful imagination it seemed a knell measuring out some fateful period for her.
The echoing of the bell toll here is important, as it is an integral part of the gothic soundscape. A key gothic notion is that of the past mingling with the present —or, if you will, the echoing of the past—be it through old family secrets, ancient and abandoned buildings, or ghosts themselves. As a clock tower or abbey bell—a loud acoustic set in a tower or dome—will naturally echo, be it through hallways or over moors, it creates a literal representation of this notion.
Another aspect of the sound of a striking clock is its commanding presence. Before the 15th century—before clocks were a common domestic item—the bell toll of the town monastery was loud enough by which for all the townspeople to keep time (Andrewes). It was reverberant and authoritative. Similarly, in gothic writing, when the clock strikes, it often signifies a turn in the story; it’s a sound for the readers to keep track of important events. Authors often note a significant hour by tacking any number of doom-and-gloom adjectives to its chime: “sullen” (Radcliffe), “mournful hollow” (Lewis), “dull, deadened” (Hoffmann 21), “deep, dull, hollow, melancholy” (Dickens 29). Interestingly, Ratail posits that, “[p]aradoxically, the louder the gothic, the more present the silence.” In other words, the booming bell toll not only silences the characters, but—by a phenomenon of binary opposition— accentuates their silence.
Gothic Sounds: Sizing Down
As stated earlier, the gothic soundscape is used to evoke horror and fear through specific sounds (Birkhead 129), and because the original gothic novels were set mainly in old castles and abbeys, the clock trope was grandiose, in the form of tolling church bells and castle clock towers. However, one difference between adult gothic literature and children’s gothic literature is that the setting is often sized down considerably, so as to suit the adventures of children. Instead of abandoned, decrepit castles filled with royal secrets and ghosts of battles lost, think abandoned, condemned houses or local graveyards marinated in neighborhood folklore. (Or, in the case of books like Peter Pan and Nutcracker and Mouse King, a more grandiose setting may be achieved through a sort of dream world.) Significantly, bell chimes are also sized down: church bells and clock towers become household clocks, often the grandfather type. The deep toll of a long-case pendulum clock is reminiscent of the tolling castle clock towers of old, hence maintaining the prototypical gothic soundscape.
An example of this is in Hoffmann’s Nutcracker and Mouse King, where he uses the sounds of a grandfather clock to create a frightening atmosphere: “the wall- clock whirred louder and louder but could not strike the hour . . . Clock, clocks, tick, tocks/Ye all must only softly whir . . . purr-purr—pum pum!/strike up little bell, strike up! . . . Marie began to be filled with horror” (Templeton 20). Hoffmann uses simple onomatopoeia here to relate the sounds of the clock ticking, but it is the quiet dysfunction of the clock that horrifies Marie. The clock is the very first device Hoffmann uses to evoke a gothic atmosphere in Nutcracker and Mouse King.
Making the Monster
In addition to maintaining the echoey, melancholy sound of clock chimes, children’s gothic literature adds another dimension to the clock trope which, I believe, differs from that in adult literature. That is the making of the monster. If the collective fears of a culture combine to form its monsters (Cohen), then what does that say about the culture of childhood and the monsters found in its literature? Molesworth submits that time is a character itself in gothic fiction, anthropomorphized, even, and capable of cause (40).
I have already briefly discussed the crocodile in Peter Pan, where Time is an obvious antagonist as Peter stays in Neverland to escape time, to escape growing up (Aeternus 88,89). Of course Time is a sort of monster for humankind in general. Mitch Albom’s novel The Timekeeper states, “Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.” While most grown adults wouldn’t mind a drink from the fountain of youth, and it does well to acknowledge that behind every children’s story is an adult author, the clock must be looked at differently for children. For adults, time running out essentially means death or loss of beauty. Children, however, seem to have little concept or understanding of either time (Howarth) or death. Their lives are only indirectly run by the clock—adults act as the middle man, watching the clock for them. Death, as well, is too macabre of a concept for most children to fully grasp. They do, on the other hand, have some grasp of authority as it exists in the adults around them. They know that authority is something they have no control over—a keystone of monsters (Cohen)—and they see that adult life is different. As Christopher Robin says to Pooh at the end of The House at Pooh Corner, when he knows he is on the verge of moving on from the Hundred Acre Wood:
“I’m not going to do Nothing any more.”
“Never again?”
“Well, not so much. They don’t let you” (Milne 178).
They know that adult life is essentially servitude to the clock, or this abstract concept of Time. So, the clock represents an even greater authority than that of their parents: it represents a baseline of reality itself, or unchangeableness.
We’ve discussed here how time is possibly a building block of children’s monsters, and now I will transition to how time is used specifically to create a space for those monsters to exist.
Liminal Time: The Witching Hour
In her study on the use of time in monster literature, K.A. Nuzum states that monsters can only exist in either mythic or liminal time; they can never remain in linear time where humans spend their days. Clocks are of course a natural marker for showing a shift from linear to liminal time, opening the door for monsters. The stroke of midnight, as the threshold between days, is a naturally occurring liminal space. This can be compared to solstices and equinoxes, which are also deeply rooted in folk tradition as times when the veil between the living and the dead becomes thin (Osterberg).
Midnights, if they abound in all gothic fiction, likely make an even more pointed appearance in children’s gothic. This can be seen without even delving very deeply into the pages: Tom’s Midnight Garden (Philippa Pearce); Hardy Boys: What Happened at Midnight (Franklin W. Dixon); The Midnight Children (Dan Gemeinhart); the list could go on. It is my opinion that this is because children’s books cannot become too cumbered down with keeping track of time, but midnight is an established gothic trope that is known—even among children—for the supernatural, and a time for ghosts and other gothic monsters to make their appearance.
This ringing in of the threshold between days—or liminal time and space— occurs in many, many places in children’s literature from nineteenth-century Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas to twenty-first-century Neil Gaiman. For example, Gaiman uses clock chimes to signify a dreamlike state of mind in The Graveyard Book: “A clock somewhere began to strike the hour, and Bod counted along with it. Twelve chimes. He wondered if they had been dancing for twelve hours or twenty- four or for no time at all” (162). The chimes here mark both the commencement and the end of a dance between the living and the dead—bringing those living both in and out of a threshold trance where time is misplaced.
Midnight, as a time for monsters and other supernatural occurrences, appears to be a natural gothic trope, although it is never specifically used in The Castle of Otranto, the original gothic novel. Hamlet, while written over a century before the gothic genre was established, has a clearly gothic style. It also has the first known literary reference to the ‘witching time of night’ (Shakespeare 3.2), although there is no specific mention of midnight. The next earliest literary references we have are mid-eighteenth-century poems. For example, “Night: An Ode,” by Matthew West mentions “Midnight’s witching hour.” This reference would have obviously been after Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which does not specifically mention midnight, but before The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which uses midnight quite frequently. Whatever its origins, midnight was securely established as a gothic trope by the turn of the 19th century. E.T.A. Hoffman uses the stroke of midnight to create a space for his gothic monster in what is probably the first gothic story written for children: Nutcracker and Mouse King.
In Nutcracker and Mouse King, we see the anthropomorphizing of time, or at least the grandfather clock, as mention in the above section “Making of the Monster.” This is shown in the following scene as the clock frightens Marie and softens its chimes to hail the Mouse King and not scare him away:
[T]he great gilded owl decoration that sat there on top had let down its wings so that they covered up the entire clock, and had stretched far forward its ugly cat’s-head with the crooked beak . . . Clock, clocks, tick, tocks, ye all must only softly whir . . . for Mouse King has indeed fine hearing . . . and pum —pum went the clock, all muffled and toneless, twelve times! . . . then out from the floor, right hideously hissing and whistling, arose seven mice-heads with seven bright, sparkling crowns (Templeton 20-22, emphasis mine).
Hoffmann uses a lot of detail here to manipulate time and create a liminal space for the Mouse King, as the graven owl atop the grandfather clock comes to life, covers the clock’s face, and muffles its own chimes. Interestingly, this scene is an almost literal representation of how liminal time creates space for the monster, as the chimes are specifically muffled so as not to scare away the Mouse King. Because, as the nursery rhyme of old, “Hickory Dickory Dock” tells us, mice run away from the sound of a striking clock. While perhaps not immediately apparent, this leads directly into the next section of the uncanny, as will be shown shortly.
The Uncanny
As the Gothic genre moved into the 19th century, it reflected the state of society at the time with the greater inclusion of science and mechanics. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and several of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s stories illustrate this. E.F. Bleiler writes that Hoffmann “channelled the Romantic impulse, particularly the supernaturalism which was its heart [into] science” (qtd. in Willis, “E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Magic of Mesmerism”). Studies about Hoffmann and his blending of science and mechanics of the day with fantasy most often focus on his stories “The Sandman” and “Automata,” but for the sake of my concentration on children’s literature, I will be zeroing in on Nutcracker and Mouse King. It may not provide the same level of science and mechanics as his other stories, but it does have what we’re looking for here: a grandfather clock and Herr Droszelmeier, the clockmaker.
As discussed in the above section “Making of the Monster,” the unstoppable and unchangeable nature of time is the quality that enables it to represent the baseline of reality. Pendulum clocks are especially helpful at establishing reality, as the mechanics—or the basic principles of physics they work by—are visible to the bystander who watches the pendulum swing. As a further illustration of this, when Foucault’s Pendulum was hung in the Panthéon in 1851, it was “celebrated as the ascent of truth and reason over falsity and superstition” (Tresch 17). While 1851 is over thirty years passed the publication of Nutcracker and Mouse King, the mechanics of pendulums were discovered in the sixteenth century (Britannica) and have always been the same: they demonstrate gravitational pull, perhaps the most elementary concept of physics. Pendulums, therefore, can be viewed as a type of visual representation of physics, which is essentially the scientific study of reality.
Baseline reality is essential to establish before achieving an uncanny effect, which is another trope of the Gothic genre. In other words, reality cannot be distorted unless and until it has been firmly familiarized in the context of the story and made to appear normal. Clocks, therefore, often work as the baseline; when they malfunction, so does the world around. Interestingly, Freud named Hoffmann the “unrivalled master” of the uncanny in 1919 (Freud 9). The uncanny is described as the horror of childhood dreams and fears becoming suddenly, distortedly real (Malewitz); it has become almost a cliché in the modern horror genre. That is, the uncanny child—particularly “the sweet, nursery-rhyme-esque refrain” (Balanzategui 11)—think Friday the 13th, with a chorus of children singing, or even the allusion of nursery rhymes in several of Agatha Christie’s mystery novels [i.e., Hickory Dickory Dock (1955); Three Blind Mice (1950); A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)]. Nursery rhymes are used to summon early childhood memories, then mix and mingle them with evil to create a disturbing, uncanny effect.
In Nutcracker, Hoffmann uses a grandfather clock to show the first signs of liminality in order for the Mouse King to appear. In this particular scene, there is an interesting feature of the 1853 translation of Nutcracker that could be argued to be an allusion to the nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock,” which was about thirty-years-old at the time of the first publication of Nutcracker. Below, I will argue how this nursery rhyme was possibly used for a terrifying, uncanny effect on Marie, over a hundred years before this type of effect became a common literary and cinematic strategy.
First, it is essential to have an understanding of the scene in question: as Droszelmeier sits atop the grandfather clock with the lights dimmed, Hoffmann begins the scene with the classic gothic soundscape of rustling and whispering all around the room in hidden places, as well as showing the first sign of distortion:
“The great clock whirred louder and louder, but it could not strike” (Simon 21, emphasis mine). It is at this point that the clock sings, “Dick—ry, dick—ry, dock— whirr, softly clock, Mouse-King has a fine ear [...] the old song let him hear [...] or he might—run away in a fright—now the clock strike softly and light” (Simon 21, emphasis mine). Clearly, aside from the first words, the lyrics here do not match precisely with the nursery rhyme, but it should be noted that the lyrics of the song at the turn of the 19th century were indeed “Dickery Dickery Dock,” and it is even referred to here as “the old song.” Additionally, the songs have the similar premise of mice being frightened by the chime of a clock.
As a bit of pertinent history, “Hickory Dickory Dock” was first recorded in 1744, in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, although it is suspected to have been around much longer. The protagonist of Nutcracker, seven-year-old Marie, would have lived in a time period to have learned that particular rhyme in her childhood. The history behind the song has been debated, but is generally assumed to be a counting song, possibly referring to the fact that mice would sometimes climb inside of the famous astronomical clock in the Exeter cathedral, which mechanics were lubricated with lard (thereby attracting rodents), but become frightened and run away at the sound of the clock chiming (Greaves). Or, there is the Richard Cromwell theory.
The Richard Cromwell theory states that the nursery rhyme was possibly meant to mock Richard (aka Dick) Cromwell (1626-1712), who was dubbed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in succession of his father Oliver Cromwell. However, Richard felt the position did not suit him, and so resigned before his first year of rule was up. This earned him nicknames such as “Tumbledown Dick” and “Hickory Dick” (Ferguson). Interestingly, either theory lends itself at least somewhat to the plot line of Hoffmann’s story at this point. This scene is the heralding of the Mouse King, who succeeded his mother’s reign, Madame Mouserink. However, his reign—like Richard Cromwell’s—will be cut short by the Nutcracker.
Alternately, the 1853 translation of Nutcracker seems to alter the premise of the song in an ironic way: in the nursery rhyme, the mouse runs away with fright from the sound of the chimes; in this key scene on Christmas Eve, the Mouse-King is about to appear, hence the clock quiets its chimes to a “dull deadened sound” (Simon 21) so as not to frighten him away. Marie then “tremble[s] with fear” (Simon 21) at the song, just moments before the seven-headed mouse makes his entrance. This is where the uncanny concept is realized, as singing a silly song from early childhood and then having it manifest itself in the form of a seven-headed mouse coming out of a clock would certainly produce this effect.
It should also be noted here, conversely, that Mrs. St. Simon’s translation is the only one to use the words “Dick—ry, dick—ry, dock,” yet even if in so doing she strayed from Hoffmann’s original wording, it should be considered that she was an English woman in the mid-nineteenth century, and her use of the rhyme here—announcing the arrival of a new mouse king of brief reign—may be an insight on the meaning behind the rhyme, which is still only theorized.
Mesmerism
E.T.A. Hoffmann is fairly well-known for using mesmerism in his stories, as well as for using a predictable template for it (Willis; Tatar; Trench). Mesmerism was a hot scientific topic of the day, and hence a concept in which Hoffmann was highly interested. Maria Tatar outlines how Hoffmann uses mesmerism in his stories, as well as Hoffmann’s specific knowledge of mesmerism at the time (3-44, 128). These studies, while thorough in their own right, do not look at Hoffmann’s possible use of mesmerism in Nutcracker and Mouse King, perhaps because it is not, per se, a major theme of the story. However, I argue that Hoffmann uses mesmerism in one key scene in order to introduce the monster of the Mouse King— where linear and liminal times collide. As stated previously, monsters only exist in either mythic or liminal time in literature (Nuzum), and while much of Nutcracker and Mouse King takes place in a sort of dream realm where monsters can exist, I argue that Hoffmann places Marie in a trance by hypnotizing her with the pendulum of a grandfather clock, thereby letting her into that dream world where she can oscillate between fantasy and reality.
To begin with, Hoffmann’s writings are often looked at simply as fantastical, but Martin Willis argues that his work greatly contributed to science fiction, as it should be noted that what may be dismissed as ‘quackery’ or pseudoscience today was not so clear-cut in the early 1800s. A close reading of all his stories reveal Hoffmann to have been one highly enamored with the scientific debates and debacles of the day. By the end of the century, criminal hypnosis had become a trend in Victorian literature (Hurley 171), a trend which Hoffmann likely helped start.
Willis also points out that Maria Tarta, in her study on mesmerism in literature, outlines Hoffmann’s use of mesmerism but does not mention its connection to the mechanical sciences (Willis, “E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Magic of Mesmerism” 29). Both mesmerism and mechanical science easily collide in Nutcracker and Mouse King (hereafter referred to as Nutcracker), as I will demonstrate below. Hoffmann had a clear template in his stories, in which he repeatedly used the techniques of mesmerism to show his characters’ transition from normal consciousness “to sublime revelations of the unconscious mind in terms of a mesmerist operation” (Tarta 151). Tarta only briefly mentions Nutcracker in her study to state that the protagonist, Marie, shows characteristic signs of somnambulism, which is sometimes a side effect of being hypnotized, or mesmerized, as it was called at the time. I will be using the template outlined by Tarta to show Hoffmann’s use of it in Nutcracker.
The scene I will be covering is that by the long case (grandfather) clock on Christmas Eve night, in chapter four of the book. According to his template, Hoffmann always begins by setting the scene with several mesmerist motifs. Dim lighting, for example, and some sort of white noise in the back ground, such as rustling of leaves, which generally indicates that mesmerism is about to begin. In the case of Nutcracker, this is established by “frenetic chittering and whistling” (Simon 21) of mice, as well as Marie’s mother having “put [the lights] all out, so that only the lamp that hung down from the ceiling in the middle of the room diffused a soft, pleasant light” (Simon 18).
After having set the scene for mesmerism, Hoffmann always signifies a threshold into the fantasy world by making “sparks fly, eyes flash, or electric pulses through the atmosphere” (Tarta 140). This is done in Nutcracker too, with a verbal cue of the name Droszelmeier, whereafter “something darted out of [the Nutcracker’s] eyes like green sparkling flashes” (Simon 20, emphasis mine). At this point in his “template,” Hoffmann then signals either a return to ordinary consciousness or the meeting of the monster—or “the demonic potential of a spiritual realm” (Tatar 140)—through descriptions of cold or immobility. Nutcracker continues to stay true to this template with this passage: “But all at once so piercing and ghastly a whistling began that ice-cold ran down [Marie’s] spine” (Templeton 21, emphasis mine), which occurs just before the appearance of the Mouse-King (aka, the “demonic potential”) and the ensuing battle between the mice and the dolls.
After the battle scene in which Marie rescues the Nutcracker by throwing her shoe at the Mouse King, “the blood in her veins stood still” (Simon), signifying immobility, or a mesmerized state of mind. The next morning, she awakens from a “death-like slumber” (Templeton 33), having no memory of what happened after her trance.
So far, this scene has presented a very typical case study of Hoffmann’s use of mesmerism. It is that morning, though, when Marie wakes up in her bed, which contains a passage that I believe merits closer look. When Godfather Droszelmeier appears in her room, she confronts him about frightening her the night before. Aside from gaslighting her and insisting he knows nothing about the previous night’s events, he appears to go into his own trance:
But Godfather Droszelmeier pulled some very odd faces and spoke in a rattling, monotonous voice:
‘Pendulum had to whir;
Loud clock-ticking—would not be fitting
Clocks, Clocks, Clocks’ pendulums
must whir—softly whir,
Bells strike loud, Kling Klang
Hink and Honk, Honk and Hank
Doll-Maidens, be not fearful!
Strike little bell—it is struck,
to chase away Mouse-King,
comes the owl in swift flight
Pak and pik, and pik and puk—
Little bell, Bim Bim
Clocks—whir, whir—
Pendulums must whir—
Loud clock-ticking—would not be fitting
Rattle, whir, and pirr and purr!’
Marie stared at Godfather Droszelmeier with huge eyes, because he looked so very different and so much uglier than usual, and with his right arm he beat back and forth, as if he were pulled just like a marionette (Templeton 36, 37).
There are several aspects of this passage that suggest a mesmerist trance: his monotonous voice, the beating of his arm back and forth as though imitating a pendulum, making odd faces and looking very different and uglier than usual, and the repetition of the sound of the pendulum swinging back and forth without any chiming. The song he sings here is very reminiscent of the song he (or the clock) sang the night before, when Marie was plunged into a fantasy battle between mice and dolls. It repeats the sounds of the clock whirring back and forth, and both songs fill Marie with fright: “and pum—pum went the clock, all muffled and toneless, twelve times! And Marie began to be filled with horror . . . She would have been properly terrified by her Godfather, had not Mother been present” (Templeton 21, 37).
By looking at the trances produced by these clock songs—the first when Marie witnesses the battle between Nutcracker and Mouse King, and the second when Droszelmeier attempts to maintain control over her, going into a trance himself, it would appear that he is using the back and forth motion and sounds of the clock pendulum for a mesmerist, or hypnotic, effect.
In his book Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century, Martin Willis argues for E.T.A. Hoffmann to have more of a place in science fiction considerations of the day, detailing how Hoffmann’s stories reveal him to be someone who was largely involved in the scientific debates, and how “his fictional narratives explored the relationship between mechanical science, mesmerism, and the magical traditions from which ‘knowledge’ is gained in a more esoteric form” (Willis, “E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Magic of Mesmerism” 29). This appears to be exactly what Hoffmann is doing here with Droszelmeier and Marie—combining the mechanics of clocks with the concepts and motifs of mesmerism.
Since I am arguing that Hoffmann used the pendulum for hypnosis in Nutcracker, it is worth noting that pendulums were not known to be used for hypnosis until the mid-19th century. Their use followed James Braid’s discovery that visual fixation and a “‘wavy’ motion of the pupils” (Weitzenhoffer et al. 67) produced a state of hypnosis. Prior to that, there was only mesmerism, a doctor- controlled method based on the idea of animal magnetism, which was looked at both as new science and as charlatanism associated with the occult. It is important to remember that there was not a clear line dividing science and magic in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Hoffmann’s works are important for this reason—they give us perspective on where scientific understanding was at the time (Willis, “E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Magic of Mesmerism”).
It wasn’t until 1841 that James Braid constructed a more ethical, patient- controlled method of ‘mesmerism’ that he now termed hypnotism, and Hoffmann seems to blend the two ideas of Braid and Mesmer together, although Braid was not yet known. Droszelmeier is clearly in control of the situation in this clock scene, using Marie as a sort of puppet in his scheme, and he creates the mesmerized effect through either or both visual and auditory fixation on the swinging pendulum.
It is fascinating to look at Hoffmann’s usage of the pendulum clock for mesmerism, considering how hypnotism is practiced today, and the limited understanding of it at the time of Hoffmann’s writings. He seems to have been ahead of his time, looking to establish a relationship between mechanics and mesmerism. This mesmerist effect would eventually become quite popular in the gothic genre, used as a means of portraying supernatural visions and accessing alternate times and realms.
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper was to look at how clocks are used in gothic literature and to offer a specific critique on their use in children’s gothic literature. It is a topic which I believe merits a greater deal of attention: the clock’s significance as a gothic trope cannot be understated, as we’ve seen the numerous ways it contributes to the macabre gothic atmosphere. Perhaps even more importantly, this small broadening of the study of children’s gothic literature will subsequently deepen our understanding of the culture of childhood and the monsters therein.
Works Cited
Aeternus, Puer. “The Haunting of Time.” From Mythic to Linear, by Maria Nikolajeva, London, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2000, pp. 87–124.
Albom, Mitch, and Emmanuel Pailler. Le Passeur Du Temps. Paris, Kero, Impr, 2012.
Andrewes, William J. H. “A Chronicle of Timekeeping.” Scientific American Sp, vol. 16, no. 1, Feb. 2006, pp. 46–55, www.scientificamerican.com/article/a- chronicle-of-timekeeping-2006-02/, 10.1038/scientificamerican0206-46sp. Accessed 16 Nov. 2022.
Balanzategui, Jessica. The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema : Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. Copyright, 2018.
Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror : A Study of the Gothic Romance. Laverge, Tenn., Nabu Press, 2010.
Cohen, Jeffrey. “Monster Theory: Reading Culture.” Speculum, vol. 73, no. 04, Oct. 1998, pp. 1181–1182, 10.1017/s0038713400107894. Accessed 16 Nov. 2022.
Dawson, Gowan. “Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines: Science Fiction and the Cultures of Science in the Nineteenth Century, by Martin Willis.” Victorian Studies, vol. 49, no. 3, Apr. 2007, pp. 513–515, 10.2979/vic.2007.49.3.513.
Ferguson, Diana. Ring-a-Ring O’Roses. Michael O’Mara Books, 18 Oct. 2018.
Freud, Sigmund, et al. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (the “Uncanny”).” New Literary History, vol. 7, no. 3, 1976, p. 525, 10.2307/468561. Accessed 23 Jan. 2019.
---. The “Uncanny.” 1919.
Greaves, Paul. “The Clock That Proves Exeter Is Home to World-Famous Rhyme.” DevonLive, 27 Sept. 2020, www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/hickory- dickory-dock-clock-proves-4546022. Accessed 22 Nov. 2022.
Hoffmann, E.T.A. Nutcracker and Mouse-King. Alexander Stoll Templeton, 14 Nov. 2017.
---. The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. 1853. Translated by Mrs. St. Simon, The Planet, 2015.
Howarth, Michael. Under the Bed, Creeping : Psychoanalyzing the Gothic inChildren’s Literature. Jefferson, Nc, Mcfarland, 2014.
Hurley, Kelly. “Science and the Gothic.” The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 170–185.
John Mullan. “The Origins of the Gothic.” The British Library, 2014, www.bl.uk/ romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-the-gothic, https:// www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/the-origins-of-the-gothic. Accessed 15 Nov.
Malewitz, Ray. “What Is the Uncanny?” College of Liberal Arts, 3 Aug. 2020, liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-uncanny. Accessed 17 Nov. 2022.
Milne, A. A., and Ernest H. Shepard. The House at Pooh Corner. New York, Ny, E.P. Dutton & Company, 2018.
Molesworth, Jesse. “Gothic Time, Sacred Time.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2014, pp. 29–55, 10.1215/00267929-2377730. Accessed 22 Nov. 2022.
Nuzum, K. A. “The Monster’s Sacrifice—Historic Time: The Uses of Mythic and Liminal Time in Monster Literature.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3, 2004, pp. 217–227, 10.1353/chq.0.1393. Accessed 15 Nov. 2019.
Orford, Pete. “Dickens and Science Fiction: A Study of Artificial Intelligence in Great Expectations.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 19, no. 10, 28 Apr. 2010, 10.16995/ntn.527. Accessed 15 Nov. 2022.
Ostberg, René. “Witching Hour | Description, History, Folklore, & Facts | Britannica.” Www.britannica.com, 30 Nov. 2022, www.britannica.com/ topic/witching-hour. Accessed 10 Dec. 2022.
Ratail, Lucie. “Gothic Sounds and the Foreshadowing of Victorian Soundscapes.” Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, vol. 94, 1 Oct. 2021, 10.4000/cve.9505.
Tatar, Maria M. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton University Press, 1978.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Pendulum.” Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Jan. 2018, www.britannica.com/technology/pendulum. Accessed 10 Dec. 2022.
Tresch, John. “The Prophet and the Pendulum: Sensational Science and Audiovisual Phantasmagoria around 1848.” Grey Room, vol. 43, Apr. 2011, pp. 16–41, 10.1162/grey_a_00030.
Weitzenhoffer, André M., et al. “A Study of the Braid Effect: (Hypnosis by Visual Fixation).” The Journal of Psychology, vol. 47, no. 1, Jan. 1959, pp. 67–80, 10.1080/00223980.1959.9916309. Accessed 23 Nov. 2022.
Willis, Martin. “E.T.A. Hoffmann and the Magic of Mesmerism.” Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism, vol. 216, 2006.
---. “Science and Gothic.” The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, edited by William Hughes et al., UK, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
CHELSEA KUESER received a bachelor of arts in English with a minor in creative writing in 2022. Selected by Trish Jenkins.