The Supernatural

Abstract

The supernatural was an important aspect of Victorian society. It pervaded all forms of art and science, as well as Victorians’ daily lives, and its language and metaphors impregnated Victorian culture. The 19th-century understanding of the supernatural was hotly contested, including by theologians. As a result, the category of the supernatural was a slippery one, but it was commonly held that it encompassed both the otherwordly, the strange and the unseen, and the ordinary and the material. The supernatural was as important as the realm of the natural in Victorian times, as is proven by its relevance in political, cultural and religious history and in the incipient entertainment industry. Etymologically speaking, the term ‘supernatural’ refers to what is superior or above nature. However, there are several interpretations of the word ‘supernatural’ which are generally accepted by the critics: preternatural, spiritual or paranormal, and supernatural (the natural and the supernatural inhabit the same ontological space). In Victorian times these three interpretations coexisted. The supernatural belief was understood as a response to “Victorian crisis of faith” and also as part of a broader cultural discourse about scientific knowledge and modern society. The rapid secularization of the Victorian period also allowed for the emergence of new systems of beliefs that renegotiated ways of dealing with the spiritual and the material. In fiction, the fashion for the unknown and the otherworldly coincided with the burgeoneing interest in ghost stories, and it showed connections with sensation fiction, and the Victorian gothic. Authors such as Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, M. R. James, Rhoda Broughton, Henry James, Richard Marsh, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, and Vernon Lee explored the supernatural in its various guises in their works. Some of them openly expressed their belief in the supernatural. Also, the supernatural maintained close links with the professionalization of science and the establishment of psychology, and the advent of new media such as telegraphy, photography, and cinema, which were at first regarded as occult phenomena. This article mainly focuses on secondary critical material, organized in thematic sections that testify to the relevance of the supernatural in the Victorian period, from the emergence of spiritualism as a system of belief and its intrinsic connections with science and technology, to folklore, and finally to the persistence of the supernatural in contemporary imagination through the critical master trope of haunting and spectrality, as well as in “Neo-Victorianism” as examined in the article in Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature by Jessica Cox.