When one thinks of gothic art, Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) appears from its shadowy composition and affronts the mind. Although static, the painting bears all the trademarks of the most gripping of contemporary gothic fiction. Out of dark shadows and dusty curtains emerge both a helpless damsel and a horse-riding troll. His eyes peer out of the frame, as if questioning why anyone (other than his glassy-eyed horse) should be looking in on such an intimate scene.
But when first presented to the London public in 1782, it seemed everyone wished to gawp at the unexplained persons upon the canvas. One contemporary critic claimed that the subject of “hag-riding is too unpleasant a thought to be agreeable to anyone”. But this feeble criticacry did not prevent 55,000 Londoners out of a population of 750,000 clambering out of their “chater’d streets” (Blake) to crane their necks at this “unpleasant[ness]” by candlelight.
The public were not content simply to view these figures in a single gallery. Cheap engravings, satires and even variants by Fuseli himself made the painting one of the most popular of the late eighteenth century. Its bizarre compo- sition became almost a stock motif of gothic fiction that sat upon fine Chippendale tables in fine leather tomes. Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas De Quincy all wedged descriptions or allusions of the work into their pages during the nineteenth century, whilst F. W. Murnau and Ken Russell brought Fuseli’s work to the silver screen of the twentieth, branding the image upon cultural memory across many generations.
It is the warped pleasure with which Fuseli places his figures and their unknown motives where his originality lies. European folklore frequently iterate the act of incubi copulating with women in their sleep as an explanation of fantastical births. But by opening the mouth of the woman and curling her toes ever so, Fuseli implies that the women is experiencing orgasmic pleasure from this demonic figure. Yet, like the sleep paralysis or lucid dreaming the incubus represents, the pleasure is but a dream.
For the artist, though, the nightmarish sexual frustration was one arguably lived by himself – a living, inescapable paralysis. An unrequited romance Fuseli experienced in 1779 suggests that he figured himself as the frustrated mounting incubus. Unable to give pleasure or be pleasured, he becomes a hideous troll perching on the edge of the maiden’s crotch. Like the horse that does not fully penetrate the curtain of the backdrop and enter the scene, neither painter nor painted reach their desired location. As with all art, conjecture is everything. The horse may be a euphemism, or it could just be a pun upon ‘nightmare’. But it is the cryptic aspect of the work which has enraptured viewers for centuries.
Contemporaries believed eating raw pork and smoking opium could be the only things to inspire such confusion, while modern critics believe only a sufferer of sleep-paralysis could. Regardless, it is an image whose bizarre composition has been implanted upon the cultural landscapes of both the past and present.
