Journal articles on the topic 'Crime – Scotland – History'

This piece investigates trends in criminal prosecutions in nineteenth-century Scotland and considers whether fears of a crime epidemic which were prevalent in England at that time were also relevant in the northern context. Using legal prosecutions for robbery more specifically, the article offers an analysis of indictment trends which suggests the existence of a paradox in Scottish criminality, where in a context of heightened awareness and intensified concern about criminality (especially in relation to violent offences) the incidence of this type of criminality declined after the mid-point of the century. The piece also offers an investigation of the nature and incidence of robbery in Scotland during the nineteenth century and determines how the crime was carried out, by whom, and for what purpose. Comparisons are drawn between the Scottish and English experience of violent theft in order to establish certain distinctive characteristics about how robbery was committed north of the Tweed and to reason why a wider and more detailed analysis of crime in nineteenth-century Scotland is warranted. Finally, the article offers some explanations for the decline in robbery and other violent offences in Scotland after 1850, including reference to the ‘civilising process’ hypothesis which merits closer attention in the context of Scottish criminal history.

A session of the north circuit held at Perth on 20 May 1709 marked a turning point in the prosecution of sexual crimes in Scotland and a significant change in the administration of Scottish criminal justice. By pardoning more than 300 men and women charged with fornication and adultery, the court brought about the de facto decriminalisation of those crimes in the Scottish secular courts. An incest trial held before the court the same day revealed difficulties in the prosecution of this crime and challenged prevailing male and clerical attitudes towards rape. The proceedings of the court also demonstrated the growing reluctance of Scottish advocates to appeal to biblical authority in criminal prosecutions. The legal developments at Perth were made possible by a bill of indemnity passed by the British parliament in 1708, the abolition of the Scottish privy council in the same year, and the establishment of a comprehensive circuit court system in Scotland.

In 1563, witchcraft was established as a secular crime in Scotland and it remained so until 1736. There were peaks and valleys in the cases that emerged, were prosecuted, were convicted, and where people were executed for the crime of witchcraft, although there was a decline in cases after 1662. The Scottish Enlightenment is characterized as a period of transition and epistemological challenge and it roughly coincides with this decline in Scottish witchcraft cases. This article looks at pamphlets published in the vernacular between 1697 and 1705, either within Scotland or elsewhere, that focused on Scottish witches, witchcraft, or witch hunting. Often written anonymously, these popular pamphlets about witches, witchcraft, and witch trials reveal the tensions at play between various factions and serve as a forum for ongoing debates about what was at stake in local communities: chiefly, the state of one’s soul and the torture and murder of innocents.

Recent analysis of public executions on judicial warrant for the crime of murder in Scotland includes an assertion that the practice of carrying into effect the sentence at the place of the crime ended in 1841. That date may be open to some doubt given the locations of later public executions. Moreover, the legal aspects of these public executions suggest underlying legal requirements, practices and political tensions yet unaccounted for.

Patrick Wormald used legal material buried deep in volume i of the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland to argue for a comparatively maximalist view of early Scottish royal government. The paper compares this Scottish legal material to two Old English codes to show that there existed in Scotland structures of social organisation similar to that in Anglo-Saxon England and a comparable level of royal control over crime by the early eleventh century. The model of a strong judicial regime in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, put forward fully by Wormald in volume i of The Making of English Law, suggests that the kingdom of the Scots could have been inspired by (or followed a parallel trajectory to) its Anglo-Saxon neighbour in its government's assumption of rights of amendment previously controlled by kin-groups. English influence on Scottish legal and constitutional development can therefore be seen in the tenth and eleventh centuries as much as it can in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The paper also suggests methods of examining the legal material in volume i of the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland and effectively clears the way for further study of this neglected corpus of evidence.

This article examines the role of women in raising criminal actions of homicide before the central criminal court, in early modern Scotland. In doing so, it highlights the two main forms of standing women held; pursing an action for homicide alone and as part of a wider group of kin and family. The evidence presented therein challenges our current understanding of the role of women in the pursuit of crime and contributes to an under-researched area of Scots criminal legal history, gender and the law.

Secure accommodation refers to locked facilities within the child care system. In England the term includes local authority secure children’s homes and secure training centres and in Scotland a more unitary system of secure units run by local authority or voluntary-sector providers. In a climate of heightened awareness of youth crime, such provision can be seen in the public mind and increasingly in political discourse as a response to youth offending. However, while it does work with young offenders, its purposes and regulations are rooted in a human rights imperative to limit rather than facilitate the restriction of young people’s liberty. Secure units have their origins in welfare-oriented child care philosophies rather than in the justice system. Many young people placed there have needs that have been difficult to address elsewhere but they do not fit the profile of the ‘persistent offender’, which has driven the expansion of provision. The commitment to expanding such an expensive resource, especially one with a long history of uncertainty around its purpose and effectiveness, reflects a hardening ideology towards young people who offend and misconceived ideas about what secure accommodation can realistically do. This paper traces the history of secure accommodation, identifying the expansion of provision over the past forty years. It locates this expansion within changing public and professional discourses around young people and crime. It goes on to consider what secure accommodation might realistically offer young people within a continuum of child care provision. The article is written from a Scottish perspective; while there are differences in the legal framework and structure of the sector in Scotland and England, the political and professional trends are sufficiently similar to be of interest to professionals in both jurisdiction.

In the last few years there has been a growth of interest in the history of crime and law enforcement in early modern Scotland. Recent studies by Stephen Davies, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker have described the intricate operation of the country's criminal justice system. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the role played by transportation. During the eighteenth century, banishing criminals to the American colonies became the most common punishment employed by higher courts. By providing a merciful alternative to the death penalty without putting the public at serious risk, transportation carried enormous appeal. An attorney in Edinburgh commented, “In many cases it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the state, and the good order of society, that the country should be rid of certain criminals.” This article seeks to explore the nature of Scottish transportation, from its growing popularity in the early 1700s to its demise in 1775, a result of the American Revolution. Questions basic to an understanding of this punishment and its operation remain unanswered. How often was it utilized by courts? How many offenders were exiled during the century? What sorts of crimes had they committed? By what means were they transported to America? How did Scottish procedure differ from the system employed in England? Answers to these questions, besides shedding new light on the internal mechanics of transportation, should open a valuable window onto the Scottish criminal justice system.

ABSTRACTWhen James VI and I arrived in London in 1603, he created a new bedchamber, which he filled with Scottish courtiers. This he positioned, antagonistically as it turned out, between himself and the more English privy chamber. These Scottish courtiers thus had the most intimate access to James, and were able to exercise great influence over the distribution of James's favour. Whilst their importance has been debated within an English context, their significance within James's government in Scotland has not yet been addressed. These Scotsmen became the focus for patronage networks stretching from Whitehall, through the privy council in Edinburgh, to the Scottish regional elites, and helped James retain the co-operation of those elites. Against the background of attempts to gain fuller union, James sought to demonstrate the benefits of regnal union by prosecuting a pacification of crime within the Scottish and English Borders, now rechristened the Middle Shires. Patronage networks from Whitehall to Roxburghshire secured the co-operation of the Scottish Borders elite, whilst acting as conduits for information and advice back to Whitehall. This article will suggest that these relationships were integral to Scottish governmental processes in James's absence, providing a much-needed cohesive force within his fragile new multiple monarchy.

The past several decades have witnessed a shift toward victim interests being considered and incorporated within adversarial systems of justice. More recently, some jurisdictions have somewhat contentiously considered granting sex offences complainants’ legal representation at trial. In Australia, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse (2017), the Royal Commission into Family Violence (2016) and the Victorian Law Reform Commission (2016) considered the potential role of legal counsel for complainants in the criminal trial process. While contrasting quite significantly with the traditional adversarial framework—which sees crime as contested between state and accused—legal representation for complainants is not unprecedented, and victims may already retain counsel for limited matters. Despite broader use of victim legal representation in the United States, Ireland and Scotland, and as recently considered by the Sir John Gillen Review in Northern Ireland, legal representation for sex offences complainants is only just developing in Australia. Notwithstanding recent reference to legal representation for complainants where sexual history or reputational evidence may be adduced, there exists no sufficient guidance as to how such representation may be integrated in the Australian criminal trial context. This article explores the implications of introducing such counsel in Australia, including the possible role of non-legal victim advocates.

Purpose Over the last decade, trust repair has become an important theoretical and practical concern in HRM. The purpose of this paper is to explain why organisations fail to repair their stakeholders’ trust following a series of trust breaches. Design/methodology/approach Archival data is used to investigate the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Using the analytical frame of the detective novel, the authors analyse reputational scandals in RBS, and in doing so, they explore the interweaving of two stories: the story of the “crime” (the bank's actions which led to breaches of trust) and the story of the “detectives” (parliamentary, regulatory and press investigators). Findings Based on their analysis, the authors argue that the organisation's failure to repair trust is associated with ineffective detection of what went wrong in the bank and why. Practical implications HR practitioners dealing with similar situations should understand the complicated and unfolding nature of repeated transgressions, and the reasons why previous trust repair efforts may have failed. Social implications An organisation may be showing willingness to accept responsibility for the violation of trust, but while new transgressions happen, trust repair efforts may fail. Therefore, what is needed in organisations is a longitudinal analysis that takes into account organisational history, including earlier wrongdoings. Originality/value The paper is one of the few analysing trust repair from a process perspective and using the metaphor of the detective novel to provide insights into organizational reintegration.

From ancient times till nowadays information plays a key role in the political processes. The beginning of XXI century demonstrated the transformation of global security from military to information, social etc. aspects. The widening of pandemic demonstrated the weaknesses of contemporary authoritarian states and the power of human-oriented states. During the World War I the theoretical and practical interest toward political manipulation and political propaganda grew definitely. After 1918 the situation developed very fast and political propaganda became the part of political influence. XX century entered into the political history as the millennium of propaganda. The collapse of the USSR and socialist system brought power to new political actors. The global architecture of the world has changed. Former Soviet republic got independence and tried to separate from Russia. And Ukraine was between them. The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine was the start point for a number of processes in world politics. But the most important was the fact that the role and the place of information as the challenge to world security was reevaluated. The further annexation of Crimea, the attempt to legitimize it by the comparing with the referendums in Scotland and Catalonia demonstrated the willingness of Russian Federation to keep its domination in the world. The main difference between the referendums in Scotland and in Catalonia was the way of Russian interference. In 2014 (Scotland) tried to delegitimised the results of Scottish referendum because they were unacceptable for it. But in 2017 we witness the huge interference of Russian powers in Spain internal affairs, first of all in spreading the independence moods in Catalonia. The main conclusion is that the world has to learn some lessons from Scottish and Catalonia cases and to be ready to new challenges in world politics in a format of information threats.

The article is devoted to the history of formation of criminalistics knowledge in different countries of the world. Some issues of the history of systematization of forensic knowledge have been studied by such scientists as R. S. Belkin, M. V. Danshin, V. A. Zhuravel, V. P. Kolmakov, V. O. Konovalova, V. V. Yusupov, V. Yu. Shepitko and al. However, the works do not reveal the historical aspect of systematization and formation of the system of criminalistics knowledge.The purpose of the article is to consider issues related to the history of systematization of criminalistics knowledgeAttention is drawn to the differences in the understanding of different scholars of the system of criminalistics knowledge in different historical periods. The process of systematization of criminalistics knowledge in different countries of the world is analyzed. Issues related to the formation of a system of criminalistics knowledge are outlined.The history of systematization of criminalistics knowledge covers several stages. Scientific works are characterized, which contain a certain system of criminalistics knowledge proposed by various authors. Yes, one of the first to summarize and classify criminalistics knowledge was Hans Gross. Also in different countries of the world, scientists have proposed their vision of the system of criminalistics knowledge. In particular, in the works of Uils William, A. Chebyshev-Dmitriev, RA Reissa, S.M. Tregubov, E. Locar, etc., as well as in many legislative acts of France, England, Scotland, North America contain criminalistics recommendations for the investigation of crimes

The article provides the concept of intermodal technology, considers ferry types and their advantages and disadvantages; describes the material and technical base of cargo transportation on ferries, design features of ferries, the technology for loading, transporting and unloading of wagons and cars. Reducing the transportation distance and cargo operations time make it possible to increase cargo transportation efficiency on ferries in comparison with transportation of the same cargo with numerous transshipments from one transport type to another. The history of ferry lines development in Russia and abroad emphasizes the importance of type of transportation. In Russia, the history of cargo transportation on ferries is considered to be from the end of the XIX century. There were five ferry lines operating in the former USSR. The article considers such lines as the Kerch line between the Crimea and the Caucasus and the Vanino – Kholmsk line through the Tatar Strait. The development of cargo transportation in the post-Soviet period in the Baltic and Caspian basins is considered in detail. The table shows an analysis of the cargo transshipment volume carried by ferries in the main sea basins of Russia. The history of ferry lines development in Europe began in the middle of the ХIХ century in Scotland and Ireland. The greatest development of ro-ro cargo transportation was achieved in the countries of the Baltic basin. Such transportation is also being developed in Japan, the United States and other countries.

Descendant du chevalier Bayard, Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard faisait partie de la compagnie de gentilshommes qui accompagnèrent Marie Stuart en Écosse après la mort de François II. Épris de la reine, il se cacha sous son lit en espérant peut-être séduire sa bien-aimée ; la souveraine lui pardonna cette audace, mais le jeune homme ne put s’empêcher d’oser une seconde tentative. Surpris par une servante de Marie, l’amant éperdu fut livré aux tribunaux et décapité. À partir des récits de John Knox et de Brantôme, je propose d’étudier les enjeux et les modalités de la représentation des passions dans les œuvres que les historiens, les romanciers, et les peintres ont consacrées à la tragique destinée de Chastelard. Métamorphosé en personnage de fiction historique, le gentilhomme amoureux joue un rôle important dans l’intrigue de La Princesse de Clèves ; son histoire fit aussi l’objet d’une étonnante supercherie littéraire : William Henry Ireland publie en 1808 ses Effusions of Love from Chatelar to the queen of Scotland, ensemble de fragments et de poèmes soi-disant composés par le jeune homme peu avant son exécution. Dans les Crimes célèbres d’Alexandre Dumas, puis dans Chastelard: a Tragedy de Charles Swinburne, le chevalier infortuné se métamorphose en personnage Shakespearien atteint d’une mélancolie qui risque de l’entraîner « dans la folie ou dans la tombe ». This paper focuses on the life of Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard, a French gentleman and aspiring poet who was beheaded on the order of Mary Stuart after he entered the queen’s appartments without permission. I have studied various historical accounts (notably those of John Knox and Pierre de Brantôme), that provide very different versions of the events that led to Chastelard’s execution: he is sometimes presented as a spy in the service of the French crown, sometimes as a paramour whose presence at court had become too inconveniencing for the queen of Scots. From these historical accounts, I follow Boscosel’s transformation into a fictional character in Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves (1678), William Henry Ireland’s forged Effusions of love from Chatelard to Mary, queen of Scots (1808), and Swinburne’s Chastelard, a tragedy (1866). My goal is to unveil and analyze the nationalistic and political motivations that underlie successive historical and fictional accounts of the French court poet’s life and death.

J. R. D. Falconer. Crime and Community in Reformation Scotland: Negotiating Power in a Burgh Society. Perspectives in Economic and Social History. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Pp. xiii + 214. ISBN 9781848933279. $109.22 CAD.

Mentoring is an increasingly popular approach for supporting people who have a history of offending. Previous research provides some evidence that it may contribute to reductions in offending behaviour and support desistance from crime. The present study analysed interviews with 33 people who used mentoring services in Scotland to examine the relationships between mentoring, motivation and desistance. The findings suggest that the offer of mentoring may translate a general desire to change into motivation by providing the means to achieve this change. Mentoring may help people develop ‘hooks for change’ through practical assistance that leads to positive changes and by encouraging people see the value of such changes. Mentors can also model ways of being that outline possible future selves and services can structure in pro-social activities that support stakes in conformity. The article contributes to theoretical understandings of motivation and desistance by specifying the interplay of agency and structure.

Scotland has witnessed a remarkable reduction in violent crime in recent years. In part, the success of this reduction has been attributed to a ‘public health’ approach, which includes improvements in partnership working across multiple agencies – especially law enforcement and public health. Nevertheless, the emergency services continue to deal with a high volume of violent incidents, an increasing number of which involve some aspect of underlying vulnerability. Policy makers are keen to understand more about how aspects of vulnerability impact on violent crime, especially as this is a primary driver for policies like the public health approach to reducing violence. In a project that brings together stakeholders from the Scottish Government, Police Scotland and the Scottish Ambulance Service, the Scottish Centre for Administrative Data Research aims to examine patterns of ambulance callouts and/or hospital admissions involving people who experience violence. The study, which will link together a range of health datasets, will bring together data about violence-related incidents with wider information about an individual’s history of drug misuse, alcohol-related conditions and mental health problems. The study will also examine the extent to which violence and vulnerability contribute to increasing risk of premature death. This paper will focus on the development of the research proposal and the opportunities and challenges of trying to bring together data from different emergency service organisations. If possible, it will present preliminary findings from the research. It is anticipated that this study will support the development of further violence prevention policies in Scotland, especially in terms of helping to identify opportunities for better partnership working and points of intervention that could reduce demand on blue light services to deal with violent incidents.

Over the past four decades, the importance of safeguarding the rights of victims of crimes has been progressively recognised. While the European Convention on Human Rights, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, as well as the European Union Directive on the Rights of Victims of Crime Directive 2012/20 EU have all contributed to this change, this recognition has been driven primarily by EU law. 1 By contrast with the general provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights adopted in 1950, 2 which seeks merely to establish minimum standards in 46 very different States, the Directive sets out in detail the component elements of rights in a legislative text. Further, it enjoys probably both direct effect and certainly supremacy and has the overt intention to harmonise the law in the Member State to which it applies. 3 Increasingly, victims are seen as rights-holders. There is now a growing consensus that victims of crime have an inherent interest in the manner in which criminal justice is administered with accompanying rights as a participant. This concern is heightened 4 in cases of sex offending and has resulted in national reviews and inquiries into the investigation and prosecution of sexual offences 5 in the adversarial criminal jurisdictions of the UK and Ireland. One of the rights focussed on in these reports was the substantive participatory right to state-funded independent legal representation for defence applications to question the victim in relation to sexual history or character evidence at the pre-trial stage. Ireland played a significant leadership role in these initiatives and it extended the already established right from the trial to the pre-trial stage. By contrast, a report commissioned by the Victims’ Commissioner indicates that England and Wales is far behind in providing substantive participatory rights to victims of crime 6 while proposals exist in Scotland and Northern Ireland to follow the Irish approach and place the right on a statutory footing. The decision of the UK to leave the EU now means that the domestic implementing measures and any unimplemented provisions are converted to retained EU law by the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. 7 Further, the Act removes Charter rights from domestic law on exit day 8 while retaining in domestic law fundamental rights or principles which exist irrespective of the Charter. 9 I will explore here some of the challenges for the UK courts in defining and interpreting these retained law rights. Crucially, any future development will not have access to the “benchmark” 10 of either EU law or a written constitution. The UK’s relationship with the Convention is an evolving one and, while general Convention protections continue to apply, for now at least, 11 I will focus here on implications for the UK’s uncodified constitutional order. This now diluted legal order will be more reliant on common law rights which, by contrast with rights in a written constitution, generally lack a hard -fundamental status.

This paper argues that illegitimacy is a concept that relates to almost all of the fundamental ways in which Western society has traditionally organised itself. Sex, family and marriage, and the power of the church and state, are all implicated in the various ways in which society reproduces itself from generation to generation. All employ the concepts of legitimacy and illegitimacy to define what is and what is not permissible. Further, the creation of the illegitimate can occur in more or less legitimate ways; for example, through acts of consent, on the one hand; and force, on the other. This paper uses the study of an English Renaissance text, Shakespeare’s Henry V, to argue that these concepts remain potent ones, regularly invoked as a means of identifying and denouncing perceived threats to the good ordering of the social fabric. In western societies, many of which may be constructed as post-marriage, illegitimate is often applied as a descriptor to unlicensed migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In countries subject to war and conflict, rape as a war crime is increasingly used by armies to create fractures within the subject community and to undermine the paternity of a cohort of children. In societies where extramarital sex is prohibited, or where rape has been used as a weapon of war, the bastard acts as physical evidence that an unsanctioned act has been committed and the laws of society broken, a “failure in social control” (Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, 5). This paper explores these themes, using past conceptions of the illegitimate and bastardy as an explanatory concept for problematic aspects of legitimacy in contemporary culture.Bastardy was a particularly important issue in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe when an individual’s genealogy was a major determining factor of social status, property and identity (MacFarlane). Further, illegitimacy was not necessarily an aspect of a person’s birth. It could become a status into which they were thrust through the use of divorce, for example, as when Henry VIII illegitimised his daughter Mary after annulling his marriage to Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon. Alison Findlay’s study of illegitimacy in Renaissance literature lists over 70 portrayals of illegitimacy, or characters threatened with illegitimacy, between 1588 and 1652 (253–257). In addition to illegitimacy at an individual level however, discussions around what constitutes the “illegitimate” figure in terms of its relationship with the family and the wider community, are also applicable to broader concerns over national identity. In work such as Stages of History, Phyllis Rackin dissected images of masculine community present in Shakespeare’s history plays to expose underlying tensions over gender, power and identity. As the study of Henry V indicates in the following discussion, illegitimacy was also a metaphor brought to bear on issues of national as well as personal identity in the early modern era. The image of the nation as a “family” to denote unity and security, both then and now, is rendered complex and problematic by introducing the “illegitimate” into that nation-family image. The rhetoric used in the recent debate over the Scottish independence referendum, and in Australia’s ongoing controversy over “illegitimate” migration, both indicate that the concept of a “national bastard”, an amorphous figure that resists precise definition, remains a potent rhetorical force. Before turning to the detail of Henry V, it is useful to review the use of “illegitimate” in the early modern context. Lacking an established position within a family, a bastard was in danger of being marginalised and deprived of any but the most basic social identity. If acknowledged by a family, the bastard might become a drain on that family’s economic resources, drawing money away from legitimate children and resented accordingly. Such resentment may be reciprocated. In his essay “On Envy” the scientist, author, lawyer and eventually Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon explained the destructive impulse of bastardy as follows: “Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious. For he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.” Thus, bastardy becomes a plot device which can be used to explain and to rationalise evil. In early modern English literature, as today, bastardy as a defect of birth is only one meaning for the word. What does “in everything illegitimate” (quoting Shakespeare’s character Thersites in Troilus and Cressida [V.viii.8]) mean for our understanding of both our own society and that of the late sixteenth century? Bastardy is an important ideologeme, in that it is a “unit of meaning through which the ‘social space’ constructs the ideological values of its signs” (Schleiner, 195). In other words, bastardy has an ideological significance that stretches far beyond a question of parental marital status, extending to become a metaphor for national as well as personal loss of identity. Anti-Catholic polemicists of the early sixteenth century accused priests of begetting a generation of bastards that would overthrow English society (Fish, 7). The historian Polydore Vergil was accused of suborning and bastardising English history by plagiarism and book destruction: “making himself father to other men’s works” (Hay, 159). Why is illegitimacy so important and so universal a metaphor? The term “bastard” in its sense of mixture or mongrel has been applied to language, to weaponry, to almost anything that is a distorted but recognisable version of something else. As such, the concept of bastardy lends itself readily to the rhetorical figure of metaphor which, as the sixteenth century writer George Puttenham puts it, is “a kind of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or coueniencie with it” (Puttenham, 178). Later on in The Art of English Poesie, Puttenham uses the word “bastard” to describe something that can best be recognised as being an imperfect version of something else: “This figure [oval] taketh his name of an egge […] and is as it were a bastard or imperfect rounde declining toward a longitude.” (101). “Bastard” as a descriptive term in this context has meaning because it connects the subject of discussion with its original. Michael Neill takes an anthropological approach to the question of why the bastard in early modern drama is almost invariably depicted as monstrous or evil. In “In everything illegitimate: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama,” Neill argues that bastards are “filthy”, using the term as it is construed by Mary Douglas in her work Purity and Danger. Douglas argues that dirt is defined by being where it should not be, it is “matter in the wrong place, belonging to ‘a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications,’ a source of fundamental pollution” (134). In this argument the figure of the bastard aligns strongly with the concept of the Other (Said). Arguably, however, the anthropologist Edmund Leach provides a more useful model to understand the associations of hybridity, monstrosity and bastardy. In “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, Leach asserts that our perceptions of the world around us are largely based on binary distinctions; that an object is one thing, and is not another. If an object combines attributes of itself with those of another, the interlapping area will be suppressed so that there may be no hesitation in discerning between them. This repressed area, the area which is neither one thing nor another but “liminal” (40), becomes the object of fear and of fascination: – taboo. It is this liminality that creates anxiety surrounding bastards, as they occupy the repressed, “taboo” area between family and outsiders. In that it is born out of wedlock, the bastard child has no place within the family structure; yet as the child of a family member it cannot be completely relegated to the external world. Michael Neill rightly points out the extent to which the topos of illegitimacy is associated with the disintegration of boundaries and a consequent loss of coherence and identity, arguing that the bastard is “a by-product of the attempt to define and preserve a certain kind of social order” (147). The concept of the liminal figure, however, recognises that while a by-product can be identified and eliminated, a bastard can neither be contained nor excluded. Consequently, the bastard challenges the established order; to be illegitimate, it must retain its connection with the legitimate figure from which it diverges. Thus the illegitimate stands as a permanent threat to the legitimate, a reminder of what the legitimate can become. Bastardy is used by Shakespeare to indicate the fear of loss of national as well as personal identity. Although noted for its triumphalist construction of a hero-king, Henry V is also shot through with uncertainties and fears, fears which are frequently expressed using illegitimacy as a metaphor. Notwithstanding its battle scenes and militarism, it is the lawyers, genealogists and historians who initiate and drive forward the narrative in Henry V (McAlindon, 435). The reward of the battle for Henry is not so much the crown of France as the assurance of his own legitimacy as monarch. The lengthy and legalistic recital of genealogies with which the Archbishop of Canterbury proves to general English satisfaction that their English king Henry holds a better lineal right to the French throne than its current occupant may not be quite as “clear as is the summer sun” (Henry V 1.2.83), but Henry’s question about whether he may “with right and conscience” make his claim to the French throne elicits a succinct response. The churchmen tell Henry that, in order to demonstrate that he is truly the descendant of his royal forefathers, Henry will need to validate that claim. In other words, the legitimacy of Henry’s identity, based on his connection with the past, is predicated on his current behaviour:Gracious lord,Stand for your own; unwind your bloody flag;Look back into your mighty ancestors:Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb,From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit…Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,And with your puissant arm renew their feats:You are their heir, you sit upon their throne,The blood and courage that renowned themRuns in your veins….Your brother kings and monarchs of the earthDo all expect that you should rouse yourselfAs did the former lions of your blood. (Henry V 1.2.122 – 124)These exhortations to Henry are one instance of the importance of genealogy and its immediate connection to personal and national identity. The subject recurs throughout the play as French and English characters both invoke a discourse of legitimacy and illegitimacy to articulate fears of invasion, defeat, and loss of personal and national identity. One particular example of this is the brief scene in which the French royalty allow themselves to contemplate the prospect of defeat at the hands of the English:Fr. King. ‘Tis certain, he hath pass’d the river Somme.Constable. And if he be not fought withal, my lord,Let us not live in France; let us quit all,And give our vineyards to a barbarous people.Dauphin. O Dieu vivant! shall a few sprays of us,The emptying of our fathers’ luxury,Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds,And overlook their grafters?Bourbon. Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!...Dauphin. By faith and honour,Our madams mock at us, and plainly sayOur mettle is bred out; and they will giveTheir bodies to the lust of English youthTo new-store France with bastard warriors. (Henry V 3.5.1 – 31).Rape and sexual violence pervade the language of Henry V. France itself is constructed as a sexually vulnerable female with “womby vaultages” and a “mistress-court” (2.4.131, 140). In one of his most famous speeches Henry graphically describes the rape and slaughter that accompanies military defeat (3.3). Reading Henry V solely in terms of its association of military conquest with sexual violence, however, runs the risk of overlooking the image of bastards themselves as both the threat and the outcome of national defeat. The lines quoted above exemplify the extent to which illegitimacy was a vital metaphor within early modern discourses of national as well as personal identity. Although the lines are divided between various speakers – the French King, Constable (representing the law), Dauphin (the Crown Prince) and Bourbon (representing the aristocracy) – the images develop smoothly and consistently to express English dominance and French subordination, articulated through images of illegitimacy.The dialogue begins with the most immediate consequence of invasion and of illegitimacy: the loss of property. Legitimacy, illegitimacy and property were so closely associated that a case of bastardy brought to the ecclesiastical court that did not include a civil law suit about land was referred to as a case of “bastardy speciall”, and the association between illegitimacy and property is present in this speech (Cowell, 14). The use of the word “vine” is simultaneously a metonym for France and a metaphor for the family, as in the “family tree”, conflating the themes of family identity and national identity that are both threatened by the virile English forces.As the dialogue develops, the rhetoric becomes more elaborate. The vines which for the Constable (from a legal perspective) represented both France and French families become instead an attempt to depict the English as being of a subordinate breed. The Dauphin’s brief narrative of the English origins refers to the illegitimate William the Conqueror, bastard son of the Duke of Normandy and by designating the English as being descendants of a bastard Frenchman the Dauphin attempts to depict the English nation as originating from a superabundance of French virility; wild offshoots from a true stock. Yet “grafting” one plant to another can create a stronger plant, which is what has happened here. The Dauphin’s metaphors, designed to construct the English as an unruly and illegitimate offshoot of French society, a product of the overflowing French virility, evolve instead into an emblem of a younger, stronger branch which has overtaken its enfeebled origins.In creating this scene, Shakespeare constructs the Frenchmen as being unable to contain the English figuratively, still less literally. The attempts to reduce the English threat by imagining them as “a few sprays”, a product of casual sexual excess, collapses into Bourbon’s incoherent ejaculation: “Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!” and the Norman bastard dominates the conclusion of the scene. Instead of containing and marginalising the bastard, the metaphoric language creates and acknowledges a threat which cannot be marginalised. The “emptying of luxury” has engendered an uncontrollable illegitimate who will destroy the French nation beyond any hope of recovery, overrunning France with bastards.The scene is fascinating for its use of illegitimacy as a means of articulating fears not only for the past and present but also for the future. The Dauphin’s vision is one of irreversible national and familial disintegration, irreversible because, unlike rape, the French women’s imagined rejection of their French families and embrace of the English conquerors implies a total abandonment of family origins and the willing creation of a new, illegitimate dynasty. Immediately prior to this scene the audience has seen the Dauphin’s fear in action: the French princess Katherine is shown learning to speak English as part of her preparation for giving her body to a “bastard Norman”, a prospect which she anticipates with a frisson of pleasure and humour, as well as fear. This scene, between Katherine and her women, evokes a range of powerful anxieties which appear repeatedly in the drama and texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: anxieties over personal and national identity, over female chastity and masculine authority, and over continuity between generations. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost – Further Explored points out that “the engendering of children on a scale which might threaten the social structure was never, or almost never, a present possibility” (154) at this stage of European history. This being granted, the Dauphin’s depiction of such a “wave” of illegitimates, while it might have no roots in reality, functioned as a powerful image of disorder. Illegitimacy as a threat and as a strategy is not limited to the renaissance, although a study of renaissance texts offers a useful guidebook to the use of illegitimacy as a means of polarising and excluding. Although as previously discussed, for many Western countries, the marital status of one’s parents is probably the least meaningful definition associated with the word “illegitimate”, the concept of the nation as a family remains current in modern political discourse, and illegitimate continues to be a powerful metaphor. During the recent independence referendum in Scotland, David Cameron besought the Scottish people not to “break up the national family”; at the same time, the Scottish Nationalists have been constructed as “ungrateful bastards” for wishing to turn their backs on the national family. As Klocker and Dunne, and later O’Brien and Rowe, have demonstrated, the emotive use of words such as “illegitimate” and “illegal” in Australian political rhetoric concerning migration is of long standing. Given current tensions, it might be timely to call for a further and more detailed study of the way in which the term “illegitimate” continues to be used by politicians and the media to define, demonise and exclude certain types of would-be Australian immigrants from the collective Australian “national family”. Suggestions that persons suspected of engaging with terrorist organisations overseas should be stripped of their Australian passports imply the creation of national bastards in an attempt to distance the Australian community from such threats. But the strategy can never be completely successful. Constructing figures as bastard or the illegitimate remains a method by which the legitimate seeks to define itself, but it also means that the bastard or illegitimate can never be wholly separated or cast out. In one form or another, the bastard is here to stay.ReferencesBeardon, Elizabeth. “Sidney's ‘Mongrell Tragicomedy’ and Anglo-Spanish Exchange in the New Arcadia.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010): 29 - 51.Davis, Kingsley. “Illegitimacy and the Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939).John Cowell. The Interpreter. Cambridge: John Legate, 1607.Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Findlay, Alison. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.Hay, Denys. Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost - Further Explored. London: Methuen, 1983.Laslett, P., K. Oosterveen, and R. M. Smith, eds. Bastardy and Its Comparative History. London: Edward Arnold, 1980.Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” E. H. Lennenberg, ed. New Directives in the Study of Language. MIT Press, 1964. 23-63. MacFarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.Mclaren, Ann. “Monogamy, Polygamy and the True State: James I’s Rhetoric of Empire.” History of Political Thought 24 (2004): 446 – 480.McAlindon, T. “Testing the New Historicism: “Invisible Bullets” Reconsidered.” Studies in Philology 92 (1995):411 – 438.Neill, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on English Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.Reekie, Gail. Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rowe, Elizabeth, and Erin O’Brien. “Constructions of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Political Discourse”. In Kelly Richards and Juan Marcellus Tauri, eds., Crime Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2013.Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.Shakespeare, William. Henry V in The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J.E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York and London: Norton, 2008.

Like any genre or mode, the Gothic is malleable, changing according to time and place. This is particularly apparent when what is considered Gothic in one era is compared with that of another. The giant helmet that falls from the sky in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) is a very different threat to the ravenous vampires that stalk the novels of Anne Rice, just as Ann Radcliffe’s animated portraits may not inspire anxiety for a contemporary reader of Stephen King. The mutability of Gothic is also apparent across various versions of national Gothic that have emerged, with the specificities of place lending Gothic narratives from countries such as Ireland, Scotland and Australia a distinctive flavour. In New Zealand, the Gothic is most commonly associated with Pakeha artists exploring extreme psychological states, isolation and violence. Instead of the haunted castles, ruined abbeys and supernatural occurrences of classic Gothics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as those produced by writers as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown, Matthew Lewis, Edgar Allen Poe, Radcliffe, Bram Stoker and Walpole, New Zealand Gothic fiction tends to focus on psychological horror, taking its cue, according to Jenny Lawn, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which ushered in a tendency in the Gothic novel to explore the idea of a divided consciousness. Lawn observes that in New Zealand “Our monsters tend to be interior: they are experiences of intense psychological states, often with sexual undertones within isolated nuclear families” (“Kiwi Gothic”). Kirsty Gunn’s novella Rain (1994), which focuses on a dysfunctional family holidaying in an isolated lakeside community, exemplifies the tendency of New Zealand Gothic to omit the supernatural in favour of the psychological, with its spectres being sexual predation, parental neglect and the death of an innocent. Bronwyn Bannister’s Haunt (2000) is set primarily in a psychiatric hospital, detailing various forms of psychiatric disorder, as well as the acts that spring from them, such as one protagonist’s concealment for several years of her baby in a shed, while Noel Virtue’s The Redemption of Elsdon Bird (1987) is another example, with a young character’s decision to shoot his two younger siblings in the head as they sleep in an attempt to protect them from the religious beliefs of his fundamentalist parents amply illustrating the intense psychological states that characterise New Zealand Gothic. Although there is no reason why Gothic literature ought to include the supernatural, its omission in New Zealand Gothic does point to a confusion that Timothy Jones foregrounds in his suggestion that “In the absence of the trappings of established Gothic traditions – castles populated by fiendish aristocrats, swamps draped with Spanish moss and possessed by terrible spirits” New Zealand is “uncertain how and where it ought to perform its own Gothic” (203). The anxiety that Jones notes is perhaps less to do with where the New Zealand Gothic should occur, since there is an established tradition of Gothic events occurring in the bush and on the beach, while David Ballantyne’s Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) uses a derelict slaughterhouse as a version of a haunted castle and Maurice Gee successfully uses a decrepit farmhouse as a Gothic edifice in The Fire-Raiser (1986), but more to do with available ghosts. New Zealand Gothic literature produced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries certainly tends to focus on the psychological rather than the supernatural, but earlier writing that utilises the Gothic mode is far more focused on spooky events and ghostly presences. There is a tradition of supernatural Gothic in New Zealand, but its representations of Maori ghosts complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. The stories in D. W. O. Fagen’s collection Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand (1952) illustrate the tendency in colonial New Zealand literature to represent Maori in supernatural terms expressive both of anxieties surrounding Maori agency and indigeneity, as well as Western assumptions regarding Maori culture. In much colonial Gothic, Maori ghosts, burial grounds and the notion of tapu express settler anxieties while also working to contain those anxieties by suggesting the superstitious and hence backward nature of indigenous culture. In Fagan’s story “Tapu”, which first appeared in the Bulletin in 1912, the narrator stumbles into a Maori burial ground where he is confronted by the terrible sight of “two fleshless skeletons” that grin and appear “ghastly in the dim light” (37). The narrator’s desecration of land deemed tapu fills him with “a sort of nameless terror at nothing, a horror of some unknown impending fate against which it was useless to struggle and from which there was no escape” (39). This expresses a sense of the authenticity of Maori culture, but the narrator’s thought “Was there any truth in heathen devilry after all?” is quickly superseded by the relegation of Maori culture as “ancient superstitions” (40). When the narrator is approached by a tohunga following his breach of tapu, his reaction is outrage: "Here was I – a fairly decent Englishman, reared in the Anglican faith and living in the nineteenth century – hindered from going about my business, outcast, excommunicated, shunned as a leper, my servant dying, all on account of some fiendish diablerie of heathen fetish. The affair was preposterous, incredible, ludicrous" (40). Fagan’s story establishes a clear opposition between Western rationalism and “decency”, and the “heathen fetishes” associated with Maori culture, which it uses to infuse the story with the thrills appropriate to Gothic fiction and which it ultimately casts as superstitious and uncivilised. F. E. Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863) includes an episode of Maori women grieving that is represented in terms that would not be out of place in horror. A group of women are described as screaming, wailing, and quivering their hands about in a most extraordinary manner, and cutting themselves dreadfully with sharp flints and shells. One old woman, in the centre of the group, was one clot of blood from head to feet, and large clots of coagulated blood lay on the ground where she stood. The sight was absolutely horrible, I thought at the time. She was singing or howling a dirge-like wail. In her right hand she held a piece of tuhua, or volcanic glass, as sharp as a razor: this she placed deliberately to her left wrist, drawing it slowly upwards to her left shoulder, the spouting blood following as it went; then from the left shoulder downwards, across the breast to the short ribs on the right side; then the rude but keen knife was shifted from the right hand to the left, placed to the right wrist, drawn upwards to the right shoulder, and so down across the breast to the left side, thus making a bloody cross on the breast; and so the operation went on all the time I was there, the old creature all the time howling in time and measure, and keeping time also with the knife, which at every cut was shifted from one hand to the other, as I have described. She had scored her forehead and cheeks before I came; her face and body was a mere clot of blood, and a little stream was dropping from every finger – a more hideous object could scarcely be conceived. (Maning 120–21) The gory quality of this episode positions Maori as barbaric, but Patrick Evans notes that there is an incident in Old New Zealand that grants authenticity to indigenous culture. After being discovered handling human remains, the narrator of Maning’s text is made tapu and rendered untouchable. Although Maning represents the narrator’s adherence to his abjection from Maori society as merely a way to placate a local population, when a tohunga appears to perform cleansing rituals, the narrator’s indulgence of perceived superstition is accompanied by “a curious sensation […] like what I fancied a man must feel who has just sold himself, body and bones, to the devil. For a moment I asked myself the question whether I was not actually being then and there handed over to the powers of darkness” (qtd. in Evans 85). Evans points out that Maning may represent the ritual as solely performative, “but the result is portrayed as real” (85). Maning’s narrator may assert his lack of belief in the tohunga’s power, but he nevertheless experiences that power. Such moments of unease occur throughout colonial writing when assertions of European dominance and rational understanding are undercut or threatened. Evans cites the examples of the painter G. F. Angus whose travels through the native forest of Waikato in the 1840s saw him haunted by the “peculiar odour” of rotting vegetation and Edward Shortland whose efforts to remain skeptical during a sacred Maori ceremony were disturbed by the manifestation of atua rustling in the thatch of the hut in which it was occurring (Evans 85). Even though the mysterious power attributed to Maori in colonial Gothic is frequently represented as threatening, there is also an element of desire at play, which Lydia Wevers highlights in her observation that colonial ghost stories involve a desire to assimilate or be assimilated by what is “other.” Wevers singles out for discussion the story “The Disappearance of Letham Crouch”, which appeared in the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in 1901. The narrative recounts the experiences of an overzealous missionary who is received by Maori as a new tohunga. In order to learn more about Maori religion (so as to successfully replace it with Christianity), Crouch inhabits a hut that is tapu, resulting in madness and fanaticism. He eventually disappears, only to reappear in the guise of a Maori “stripped for dancing” (qtd. in Wevers 206). Crouch is effectively “turned heathen” (qtd. in Wevers 206), a transformation that is clearly threatening for a Christian European, but there is also an element of desirability in such a transformation for a settler seeking an authentic New Zealand identity. Colonial Gothic frequently figures mysterious experiences with indigenous culture as a way for the European settler to essentially become indigenous by experiencing something perceived as authentically New Zealand. Colonial Gothic frequently includes the supernatural in ways that are complicit in the processes of colonisation that problematizes them as models for contemporary writers. For New Zealanders attempting to produce a Gothic narrative, the most immediately available tropes for a haunting past are Maori, but to use those tropes brings texts uncomfortably close to nineteenth-century obsessions with Maori skeletal remains and a Gothicised New Zealand landscape, which Edmund G. C. King notes is a way of expressing “the sense of bodily and mental displacement that often accompanied the colonial experience” (36). R. H. Chapman’s Mihawhenua (1888) provides an example of tropes particularly Gothic that remain a part of colonial discourse not easily transferable into a bicultural context. Chapman’s band of explorers discover a cave strewn with bones which they interpret to be the remains of gory cannibalistic feasts: Here, we might well imagine, the clear waters of the little stream at our feet had sometime run red with the blood of victims of some horrid carnival, and the pale walls of the cavern had grown more pale in sympathy with the shrieks of the doomed ere a period was put to their tortures. Perchance the owners of some of the bones that lay scattered in careless profusion on the floor, had, when strong with life and being, struggled long and bravely in many a bloody battle, and, being at last overcome, their bodies were brought here to whet the appetites and appease the awful hunger of their victors. (qtd. in King) The assumptions regarding the primitive nature of indigenous culture expressed by reference to the “horrid carnival” of cannibalism complicate the processes through which contemporary writers could meaningfully draw on a tradition of New Zealand Gothic utilising the supernatural. One answer to this dilemma is to use supernatural elements not specifically associated with New Zealand. In Stephen Cain’s anthology Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side (1996) there are several instances of this, such as in the story “Never Go Tramping Alone” by Alyson Cresswell-Moorcock, which features a creature called a Gravett. As Timothy Jones’s discussion of this anthology demonstrates, there are two problems arising from this unprecedented monster: firstly, the story does not seem to be a “New Zealand Gothic”, which a review in The Evening Post highlights by observing that “there is a distinct ‘Kiwi’ feel to only a few of the stories” (Rendle 5); while secondly, the Gravatt’s appearance in the New Zealand landscape is unconvincing. Jones argues that "When we encounter the wendigo, a not dissimilar spirit to the Gravatt, in Ann Tracy’s Winter Hunger or Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, we have a vague sense that such beings ‘exist’ and belong in the American or Canadian landscapes in which they are located. A Gravatt, however, has no such precedent, no such sense of belonging, and thus loses its authority" (251). Something of this problem is registered in Elizabeth Knox’s vampire novel Daylight (2003), which avoids the problem of making a vampire “fit” with a New Zealand landscape devoid of ancient architecture by setting all the action in Europe. One of the more successful stories in Cain’s collection demonstrates a way of engaging with a specifically New Zealand tradition of supernatural Gothic, while also illustrating some of the potential pitfalls in utilising colonial Gothic tropes of menacing bush, Maori burial caves and skeletal remains. Oliver Nicks’s “The House” focuses on a writer who takes up residence in an isolated “little old colonial cottage in the bush” (8). The strange “odd-angled walls”, floors that seem to slope downwards and the “subterranean silence” of the cottage provokes anxiety in the first-person narrator who admits his thoughts “grew increasingly dark and chaotic” (8). The strangeness of the house is only intensified by the isolation of its surroundings, which are fertile but nevertheless completely uninhabited. Alone and unnerved by the oddness of the house, the narrator listens to the same “inexplicable night screeches and rustlings of the bush” (9) that furnish so much New Zealand Gothic. Yet it is not fear inspired by the menacing bush that troubles the narrator as much as the sense that there was more in this darkness, something from which I felt a greater need to be insulated than the mild horror of mingling with a few wetas, spiders, bats, and other assorted creepy-crawlies. Something was subtlely wrong here – it was not just the oddness of the dimensions and angles. Everything seemed slightly off, not to add up somehow. I could not quite put my finger on whatever it was. (10) When the narrator escapes the claustrophobic house for a walk in the bush, the natural environment is rendered in spectral terms. The narrator is engulfed by the “bare bones of long-dead forest giants” (11) and “crowding tree-corpses”, but the path he follows in order to escape the “Tree-ghosts” is no more comforting since it winds through “a strange grey world with its shrouds of hanging moss, and mist” (12). In the midst of this Gothicised environment the narrator is “transfixed by the intersection of two overpowering irrational forces” when something looms up out of the mist and experiences “irresistible curiosity, balanced by an equal and opposite urge to turn and run like hell” (12). The narrator’s experience of being deep in the threatening bush continues a tradition of colonial writing that renders the natural environment in Gothic terms, such as H. B. Marriot Watson’s The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure (1891), which includes an episode that sees the protagonist Palliser become lost in the forest of Te Tauru and suffer a similar demoralization as Nicks’s narrator: “the horror of the place had gnawed into his soul, and lurked there, mordant. He now saw how it had come to be regarded as the home of the Taniwha, the place of death” (77). Philip Steer points out that it is the Maoriness of Palliser’s surroundings that inspire his existential dread, suggesting a certain amount of settler alienation, but “Palliser’s survival and eventual triumph overwrites this uncertainty with the relegation of Maori to the past” (128). Nicks’s story, although utilising similar tropes to colonial fiction, attempts to puts them to different ends. What strikes such fear in Nicks’s narrator is a mysterious object that inspires the particular dread known as the uncanny: I gave myself a stern talking to and advanced on the shadow. It was about my height, angular, bony and black. It stood as it now stands, as it has stood for centuries, on the edge of a swamp deep in the heart of an ancient forest high in this remote range of hills forming a part of the Southern Alps. As I think of it I cannot help but shudder; it fills me even now with inexplicable awe. It snaked up out of the ground like some malign fern-frond, curving back on itself and curling into a circle at about head height. Extending upwards from the circle were three odd-angled and bent protuberances of unequal length. A strange force flowed from it. It looked alien somehow, but it was man-made. Its power lay, not in its strangeness, but in its unaccountable familiarity; why did I know – have I always known? – how to fear this… thing? (12) This terrible “thing” represents a return of the repressed associated with the crimes of colonisation. After almost being devoured by the malevolent tree-like object the narrator discovers a track leading to a cave decorated with ancient rock paintings that contains a hideous wooden creature that is, in fact, a burial chest. Realising that he has discovered a burial cave, the narrator is shocked to find more chests that have been broken open and bones scattered over the floor. With the discovery of the desecrated burial cave, the hidden crimes of colonisation are brought to light. Unlike colonial Gothic that tends to represent Maori culture as threatening, Nicks’s story represents the forces contained in the cave as a catalyst for a beneficial transformative experience: I do remember the cyclone of malign energy from the abyss gibbering and leering; a flame of terror burning in every cell of my body; a deluge of shrieking unreason threatening to wash away the bare shred that was left of my mind. Yet even as each hellish new dimension yawned before me, defying the limits even of imagination, the fragments of my shattered sanity were being drawn together somehow, and reassembled in novel configurations. To each proposition of demonic impossibility there was a surging, answering wave of kaleidoscopic truth. (19) Although the story replicates colonial writing’s tendency to represent indigenous culture in terms of the irrational and demonic, the authenticity and power of the narrator’s experience is stressed. When he comes to consciousness following an enlightenment that sees him acknowledging that the truth of existence is a limitless space “filled with deep coruscations of beauty and joy” (20) he knows what he must do. Returning to the cottage, the narrator takes several days to search the house and finally finds what he is looking for: a steel box that contains “stolen skulls” (20). The narrator concludes that the “Trophies” (20) buried in the collapsed outhouse are the cause for the “Dark, inexplicable moods, nightmares, hallucinations – spirits, ghosts, demons” that “would have plagued anyone who attempted to remain in this strange, cursed region” (20). Once the narrator returns the remains to the burial cave, the inexplicable events cease and the once-strange house becomes an ideal home for a writer seeking peace in which to work. The colonial Gothic mode in New Zealand utilises the Gothic’s concern with a haunting past in order to associate that past with the primitive and barbaric. By rendering Maori culture in Gothic terms, such as in Maning’s blood-splattered scene of grieving or through the spooky discoveries of bone-strewn caves, colonial writing compares an “uncivilised” indigenous culture with the “civilised” culture of European settlement. For a contemporary writer wishing to produce a New Zealand supernatural horror, the colonial Gothic is a problematic tradition to work from, but Nicks’s story succeeds in utilising tropes associated with colonial writing in order to reverse its ideologies. “The House” represents European settlement in terms of barbarity by representing a brutal desecration of sacred ground, while indigenous culture is represented in positive, if frightening, terms of truth and power. Colonial Gothic’s tendency to associate indigenous culture with violence, barbarism and superstition is certainly replicated in Nicks’s story through the frightening object that attempts to devour the narrator and the macabre burial chests shaped like monsters, but ultimately it is colonial violence that is most overtly condemned, with the power inhabiting the burial cave being represented as ultimately benign, at least towards an intruder who means no harm. More significantly, there is no attempt in the story to explain events that seem outside the understanding of Western rationality. The story accepts as true what the narrator experiences. Nevertheless, in spite of the explicit engagement with the return of repressed crimes associated with colonisation, Nicks’s engagement with the mode of colonial Gothic means there is a replication of some of its underlying notions relating to settlement and belonging. The narrator of Nicks’s story is a contemporary New Zealander who is placed in the position of rectifying colonial crimes in order to take up residence in a site effectively cleansed of the sins of the past. Nicks’s narrator cannot happily inhabit the colonial cottage until the stolen remains are returned to their rightful place and it seems not to occur to him that a greater theft might underlie the smaller one. Returning the stolen skulls is represented as a reasonable action in “The House”, and it is a way for the narrator to establish what Linda Hardy refers to as “natural occupancy,” but the notion of returning a house and land that might also be termed stolen is never entertained, although the story’s final sentence does imply the need for the continuing placation of the powerful indigenous forces that inhabit the land: “To make sure that things stay [peaceful] I think I may just keep this story to myself” (20). The fact that the narrator has not kept the story to himself suggests that his untroubled occupation of the colonial cottage is far more tenuous than he might have hoped. References Ballantyne, David. Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Melbourne: Text, 2010. Bannister, Bronwyn. Haunt. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2000. Calder, Alex. “F. E. Maning 1811–1883.” Kotare 7. 2 (2008): 5–18. Chapman, R. H. Mihawhenua: The Adventures of a Party of Tourists Amongst a Tribe of Maoris Discovered in Western Otago. Dunedin: J. Wilkie, 1888. Cresswell-Moorcock, Alyson. “Never Go Tramping Along.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 63-71. Evans, Patrick. The Long Forgetting: Postcolonial Literary Culture in New Zealand. Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2007. Fagan, D. W. O. Tapu and Other Tales of Old New Zealand. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1952. Gee, Maurice. The Fire-Raiser. Auckland: Penguin, 1986. Gunn, Kirsty. Rain. New York: Grove Press, 1994. Hardy, Linda. “Natural Occupancy.” Meridian 14.2 (October 1995): 213-25. Jones, Timothy. The Gothic as a Practice: Gothic Studies, Genre and the Twentieth Century Gothic. PhD thesis. Wellington: Victoria University, 2010. King, Edmund G. C. “Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century Zealand Writing,” Journal of New Zealand Literature 28.2 (2010): 35-57. “Kiwi Gothic.” Massey (Nov. 2001). 8 Mar. 2014 ‹http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwpubafs/magazine/2001_Nov/stories/gothic.html›. Maning, F. E. Old New Zealand and Other Writings. Ed. Alex Calder. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. Marriott Watson, H. B. The Web of the Spider: A Tale of Adventure. London: Hutchinson, 1891. Nicks, Oliver. “The House.” Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side. Ed. Stephen Cain. Wellington: IPL Books, 1996: 8-20. Rendle, Steve. “Entertaining Trip to the Dark Side.” Rev. of Antipodean Tales: Stories from the Dark Side, ed. Stephen Cain. The Evening Post. 17 Jan. 1997: 5. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Ed. Patrick Nobes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Steer, Philip. “History (Never) Repeats: Pakeha Identity, Novels and the New Zealand Wars.” Journal of New Zealand Literature 25 (2007): 114-37. Virtue, Noel. The Redemption of Elsdon Bird. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. London: Penguin, 2010. Wevers, Lydia. “The Short Story.” The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. Ed. Terry Sturm. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991: 203–70.