With the defeat of the Poles and an end to war, he becomes a miner and later a sacristan. Hearing "a piercing shriek" at the "ghostly hour of midnight" Alphonsus finds his mother, "her eyes wildly fixed" while "her countenance betrayed the most visible signs of an agonized heart." She tells her son, "your uncle is innocent-one only way can save us both-fly far from hence-fly from me-fly from your uncle-take that purse-return not to the castle." Following his mother's demands, Alphonsus becomes an exile.
Just as readers settle in believing Lathom is going to utilize a plot element from Shakespeare's Hamlet in which the son is warned by the ghost of his father that they boy's uncle is responsible for his murder with the ghost demanding revenge, Lathom takes his story in a different and wild direction. Jane Austin aside, The Midnight Bell has long been considered among the best of gothic novels and the finest one that Francis Lathom (1774-1832) wrote (Lathom also wrote non-gothic works. In her parody of gothic novels, Northanger Abbey (1818), one of Jane Austin's characters lists a number of "horrid" gothic thrillers that simply must be read and Lathom's The Midnight Bell is one of them. It is a bit of irony that it is a piece of satire that, in part, has kept Francis Lathom's gothic classic The Midnight Bell: A German Story, Founded on Incidents in Real Life (1798 the Valancourt Books scholarly edition of 2007 includes an Introduction by David Punter) alive to the extent that it is. But swear to me, by heaven, whenever the murderer stands confessed, thou wilt revenge thy father's death." Thus, given a set of circumstances almost mirroring those of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Alphonsus waits and watches.
Thou marvellest at my words, -thou can'st not think the smooth-tongued Frederic so great a villain! but he is blacker than thy darkest thoughts can paint him! -Oh! I could tell thee. Swear to me thou wilt revenge his death. At seventeen Alphonsus, is the oldest son of Count Cohenburg, "descended from one of the noblest houses of Saxony." His life is forever altered when his father is murdered by "two ruffians, who had burst from a thicket ten leagues distant from Cohenburg castle had fallen upon him and stabbed him to the heart." What Alphonsus' mother has to tell her son is even more shocking: "thy uncle is the murderer of thy father.
0 kommentar(er)
