“Old hell transformed into a new purgatory”: the disturbing historical experience in the novel “The Haunted Hotel” by Wilkie Collins
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2026-1-8
- Pages
- 114-131
Abstract
The aim of the article is to identify the representative possibilities of the Gothic text using the example of Wilkie Collinsʼs story “The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice” (1878). The authors rely on hermeneutic methodology, directing their attention to the historical subtext of the story, expressed in its figurative structure, as well as in the many allusions and reminiscences contained in it, which have a clearly expressed historical content. The need for such a methodology is dictated by the main objective of the study: to demonstrate the possibility of interpreting Collinsʼs story as a specific historical representation. As a result of the analysis, the veiled historical content of the story was explicated, thanks to which it can be considered as a specific representation of historical reality, close to oneiric representation: historical characters and events in it undergo a process of symbolization reminiscent of dream work, according to Freud, and the historical itself is reduced to the “family”. Although such a reduction excludes history as such, it provides great opportunities for representing the meaning of historical events through the depiction of a certain historical experience. It is precisely this historical experience (Franklin R. Ankersmitʼs term), along with the fragmentary Gothic narrative of Countess Narona, present in the story like a “dream within a dream”, that reveals the truth of this work with its puzzling ending. The story’s ending, which explicitly declares the impossibility of uncovering the “secret of the hotel,” functions as a trigger for the allegorical interpretation developed in this article.