6 - Uncanny female interiors

Summary

It was the face of a woman, and yet it was not human.

Arthur Machen, “The Inmost Light”

Arthur Machen's “The Inmost Light,” much like The Great God Pan, details the shocking effects of an experiment in human neurology. A certain Dr. Black labors to reconcile physiological with occult science, his goal being to “bridge over the gulf between the world of consciousness and the world of matter” (p. 182). “[F]rom some human being,” he explains, “there must be drawn that essence which men call the soul, and in its place … would enter in what the lips can hardly utter, what the mind cannot conceive without a horror more awful than the horror of death itself” (p. 182). Dr. Black here appears to affirm that a human “soul” exists independently from the human body, and thus that human identity cannot be fully explicated within a materialist framework.

Yet the story as a whole will not bear out this conclusion. It dwells obsessively on the horrific prospect of a human being conceived in utterly material terms. The doctor's work establishes that the “soul” is seated within the physiological reality of the brain; once extracted, moreover, it appears as a “splendid jewel” (p. 180) – exquisitely beautiful, but nonetheless most corporeal. The demonic force that then gains entry into the evacuated human body is not malevolent in any spiritual sense: it seems rather a representation of the grossly physical, animalistic potentialities of human beings, like the satyr-deity in The Great God Pan. Dr. Black's experimental subject becomes an abomination, the sight of which arouses violent symptoms – nausea, “cold sweat,” shortness of breath – in the spectator (p. 160).