Tag Archives: Gothic Horror

Elements of Time in Joan Lindsay’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock”

Posted on by Julia Weiser
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this blogpost includes spoilers of the novel and its adaptations

An uncanny premise

Joan Lindsay’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1967) is a pseudo-historical Gothic Horror novel which was followed by its famous movie adaptation “The Day of Saint Valentine” in 1975. The novel begins with Lindsay’s fateful remark that it would be up to the reader to decide whether or not the story to be told is completely fictious, or utterly true.

            Appleyard College is a school in Australian Victoria in the year 1900, where upper-class girls are meant to be raised to eligible women of society. After the students and teachers venture off to have a picnic at the near rock formation known as the Hanging Rock, the headmistress Mrs. Appleyard receives dreadful news upon their return: Four of the students wandered off to the rock formation to explore it despite having been forbidden, and only one of them returned. At the same time, one of the teachers has disappeared into thin air. None of the women were found in several search parties, until one day, one of the students can be rescued – but neither her nor her fellow student who returned from the Hanging Rock are able to remember anything that happened in the outback.

            In the aftermath of the incident, many of the residents at Appleyard College are taken back home by their worried parents, and a few, including the headmistress, meet their grim and untimely fates…A year later, the college burns to the ground in a terrible bush fire, but even a decade later, the missing girls still haven’t been found.

Passing and conception of time within the story and its role as a stylistic element

Time takes up an intricate task in the telling of Lindsay’s novel. Not only does it create an air of mystery, impatience, and uncanniness within the plot itself, it is also utilized as a stylistic feature in form of slowing down and speeding up the perceived pace of the story. To shorten this analysis to a length appropriate for the format of a blog post, the focus will lay on the events up until a few days after the vanishing. 

            Mrs. Appleyard’s college is a place where strict manners and the abiding to set appointments is expected. The different steps of the day, from breakfast to bedtime, are organized by the clock (e.g. “I shall expect you back […] at about eight o’clock […].”, p.7; “As it was still only eleven o’clock […].”, p.11) and time is generally perceived in a very measurable manner, as time specifications are used often (e.g. “[…] about an hour from now […]”, p.18; “[…] only a few minutes ago […]”, p.19). The journey to the picnic grounds itself seems to take forever: There are hardly any indications of the time that is passing, only elaborate descriptions of the surrounding outback, and the entire ride seems stretched by that to the extent that it almost appears to occur in real time (p.8-14). In a similar way, the stay at the grounds appears lengthy, too. The language draws a picture of a warm summer day, the girls scattered across the lawn all drowsy and lazy, almost as if time stood still (pp.16f) when suddenly, it turns out time had stood still – in form of everybody’s watches, that is: at 12pm sharp, Mr. Hussey the driver’s watch stops ticking, as well as one of the teacher’s, which had “Never stopped before” (p.18). From that moment on, the travelling shadow of the Hanging Rock becomes the only measure of time, indicating how it starts to cast its spell and suck the picnic party in. 

            There are several instances throughout the opening of the novel where the future is being teased and events are being foreshadowed. One particular passage even shifts the narrative perspective for a brief moment: When one of the students, Miranda, calls back to her fellow boarder Edith on the way to the rock formation, it is referred to how Michael witnesses this and later thinks back to it (p.25), evoking the interpretation that something terrible happens between these two timelines which makes this mundane sight somehow more important. In fact, this will turn out to be the last time somebody saw the group of girls together, but all characters are unsuspecting of this truth then. At the picnic grounds, the girls and their supervisors suddenly lose the devices to measure time properly, yet they try to stick to their schedule (compare again pp.18f). Meanwhile, the girls venturing off into the outback experience something similar: At first, they, too, refer to passing of time in form of minutes, and Miranda keeps reminding the others about how they had to get back soon (e.g. p.28). But at some point of going deeper into the rock formation, their conception of time seems to vanish, the loss of a sense of time even increased by them falling asleep (p.31), as do their inhibitions (p.28). The atmosphere shifts to one that is detached from the order of society and that is almost ethereal, and the girls seem to lose touch, taking off their shoes and dancing on the rocks (p.30). It is then that time seems to slow down, caught in a mysterious haze, until Edith – the only one who has not become a victim of whatever it is that bewitches her friends – snaps and hastily returns to the picnic grounds (p.32). From the later police report of Mr. Hussey, it becomes apparent that Edith’s disruptive reaction triggers time to speed up when panic breaks lose (p.40). As Mr. Hussey also states in his account that by the time they started searching for the girls, they had no way of telling the time at all anymore (p.41) – the Hanging Rock had begun its witching hour. 

            As the perspective switches to the impatient Mrs. Appleyard waiting for her staff and students to return, the perceived time stands still. Both the headmistress and the readers are anxious to know what is going on, fearing something tragic has happened (p.37). The woman creates an unbearable atmosphere of impatience, checking the clock a dozen times and straining to hear a nearing carriage (p.36). Remembering that the days at Appleyard college are usually strictly time managed and organized, everything seems to fall out of place, strengthening the assumption that bad news ought to be expected. 

After that, everything is in a mess, reality appears warped and time not linear: “For the inmates of Appleyard College, Sunday the fifteenth of February was a day of nightmare indecision: half dream, half reality […].” (p.43) The report on the happenings of Sunday the 15th are rather lengthy (pp.43-47), similar to the ride to the picnic grounds. Monday, the college apparently tries to go back to how things were before (“Meals were served with their customary clockwork precision, but only a few of the usually ravenous young women […] did more than trifle with the mutton and apple pie.”, p.47), but the lives of everyone touched by the incident are changed. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are overloaded with more dates, time specifications, and detailed conversations with witnesses, so that it appears as if time had to have slowed down in order to encompass so many little things taking place, and the 3 days after the vanishing of the girls and their teacher seem like the longest ones in history (pp.43-59), especially to those who are left with the mystery.

Final thoughts

Joan Lindsay is incredibly skilled in utilizing time for her storytelling. Elements like clocks and time telling are used to signify a contrast between the mundanity of the real world, and the bewitching aura that encases the Hanging Rock. A mix of overly detailed reports of what is happening and what is said stretch the perceived time in the novel, while rapid time jumps and changes of behavior like Edith’s speed it up, to the effect that Lindsay’s audience can feel the insufferableness that is the mystery of the students and their teacher who disappeared during their picnic at Hanging Rock.

The Gothic Origins of Kat’s Nightmare in “The Time of the Ghosts”

Posted on by Daniel Kupke
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When you go to bed at night, you know that once you fall asleep anything can happen. There is a good chance that you are about to go on a great adventure. Indeed, dreams tend to be larger than life. They can make you escape the mundane and experience the exciting. Or they can make you re-live the everyday and put a neat spin on it. Those are the kinds of good dreams attending to our inner hopes and ambitions, yet there are also bad dreams fueled by our deeper fears and sorrow. Nightmares trap you in the most unpleasant situations that fill you with utter despair. Even after you wake up from them and you catch your breath, you are still haunted by them. They are so sinister in nature that they are hard to forget and even harder to overcome.

In The Time of the Ghosts, nightmares are one of the major recurring themes. Kat keeps having them over and over again. No matter what she does, they creep back into her mind and become all the more intense with each new iteration. Kat first confesses her nightmare to Ann:

It’s like I wake up, but I’m still asleep. And there’s something. It sits on my chest and I tell it to get off. It doesn’t. I try to scream, but nothing comes out. And it sits on me heavier and heavier and heavier and I’m suffocating and I can’t do anything. (28)

As she keeps returning to this place of misery, the picture starts to clear up and she realizes that it is “[a]n animal sitting on her chest, pressing the air out of her” (117). She also notices that the “heavier and heavier and heavier” pressure on her chest transforms into a force that “drained and drained and drained” all of her joy (28, 117). Moreover, she suddenly catches the sight of two eyes “piercing [her] soul” that even follow her into the real world (117–118, 190–191).

This disturbing image is by no means unfamiliar to us. Nightmares in which we are unable to move, scream, or breathe are quite common and the overall aesthetic of this vision portrays a rather prototypical example of Gothic terror. But even though this nightmare might not shock us anymore, it still intrigues us as if we had encountered it for the very first time. As modern readers, we pride ourselves on our ability to recognize any literary trope. We think that our intellectual capacity can expose any manipulative attempt to grab our attention. And yet, while reading about this nightmare, we still inch our way towards the edge of our seat. In this rare instance, our reason is outweighed by our imagination, as the Gothic spectacle stands supreme. There simply is something so curious about this nightmare that we cannot help but to give into it. We feel such a strong reaction to the prospect that Kat could die in her dreams, because she has been our character of identification. And this danger seems so real and imminent, because Kat has been portrayed as so innocent and unstable. The Gothic nightmare escalates the tension of this novel, significantly, and imbues it with a greater sense of gravity. After all, it was Edgar Allan Poe who openly proclaimed that “the death … of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (165).

However, this passage does not just evoke a literary significance, but also a visual one, because the vision seen by Kat is also eerily similar to one painted by Henry Fuseli:

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781, Oil on Canvas, 102 x 127 cm, Detroit Institute of Arts.

The Nightmare was first exhibited at the Royal Academy summer show of 1782, where it enthralled thousands of visitors. Initially, art critics were puzzled by this image, though, since it “did not make explicit reference to a particular literary or mythological source” (Frayling 11). Consequently, they tried to decipher what inspired this painting by comparing it to similar scenes in established texts like King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Paradise Lost. This debate clouded the painting in “an aura of mystery” that drew an unusual amount of visitors who tried to make sense of it on their own (11–12). Chief among them was Horace Walpole, the writer of the first major work of Gothic fiction, who exclaimed that The Nightmare was a truly “shocking” sight to behold (10). As the exhibition came to a close, critics reconsidered the work and reaffirmed its impressive execution which justified it as a “well conceived” piece of art regardless of its source (12). Afterwards, an unprecedented amount of printings of The Nightmare were distributed all around the world, “until it became the way of visualising bad dreams [and] the design for depicting monsters of the night” (13). Therefore, it should be of no surprise that this exact picture has also made its way into the Australian mindset. Whether it is the author or the character who consciously or unconsciously evokes The Nightmare in their description, it is apparent that the impression of this painting has become part of their mental lexicon.

So, after looking at the literary and visual meaning of this nightmare, one might as well analyse it on a semantic level. Thus, it suddenly becomes interesting how Samuel Johnson actually first defined a nightmare:

Ni’ghtmare.
n.s. [night, and according to Temple, mara, a spirit that, in the heathen mythology, was related to torment or suffocate sleepers.]

A morbid oppression in the night, resembling the pressure of weight upon the breast.

“Saint Withold footed thrice the would,
He met the nightmare, and her name he told;
Bid her alight, and her troth plight.
[And aroint thee, witch, aroint thee!]”

(Shakespeare, King Lear 3.4.119–123)

It is quite astonishing how almost everything discussed so far can be contained in this small definition from 1755. First, Johnson examines the etymology of the word and remarks that “mara” can be traced back to its origin as a tormenting spirit in Germanic Neopaganism. Afterwards, Johnson presents his actual definition of a nightmare: “[a] morbid oppression in the night.” This specific term is not unfamiliar to readers of The Time of the Ghosts, though, since Polack also described Kat’s nightmare as “[a]n oppression surrounding her” (117). Furthermore, Johnson explains that the dreamer experiences “[a] pressure of weight upon the breast,” which is also prominently featured in Fuseli’s and Polack’s work. Finally, Johnson references another work of art, King Lear, which was also the same text that critics consulted to make sense of The Nightmare. However, Fuseli, who “made his name as a ‘painter of Shakespeare’” (Frayling 10), has actually cut ties with this canonical piece of literature, since he does not depict a witch or sorceress as the source of evil. Instead, Fuseli refers back to the folkloric explanation of this phenomena. In The Nightmare, a “mara” — a demonic and apelike incubus — sits atop of its defenseless victim and stares relentlessly at the viewer of this scene. And in The Time of the Ghosts, this sensation is being vividly recalled:

I feel strange, she thought. Like those eyes were piercing my soul. Like a hurt lay inside. I don’t know if they made it worse or were investigating to see what it was that hurt. They were clinical, though. Those eyes didn’t care. They may have been human, once. They may have cared, once. But when they were looking at me they were cold and clinical. Yucky. Very, very yuck. (117–118)

We have come full circle. One Gothic nightmare was felt very strongly in a very similar way by two different people, at two different times. And if you have ever experienced a nightmare like this, you know exactly why they stand united in their interpretation of it. Nightmares are truly intense and uniquely distinct.

Works Cited

Frayling, Christopher. “Fuseli’s The Nightmare: Somewhere between the Sublime and the Ridiculous.” Gothic Nightmares. Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination, edited by Martin Myrone, Tate Publishing, 2006, pp. 9–20.

“Nightmare.” A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson, 1755, johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/nightmare_ns.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” Graham’s Magazine, vol. 28, no. 4, 1846, pp. 163–167. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/grahamsamerican04grisgoog/.

Polack, Gillian. The Time of the Ghosts. Next Chapter, 2021.