My previous blog post features the sample assignment that I wrote for my British literature students. This post presents a second sample that I wrote along with them.
The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli depicts a blonde lying in her bed chamber with a demon crouched on her chest, eyeing her with a wicked grin. In the background, a wide-eyed, white horse gazes at the pair, his head parting the curtains that separate the irrational world of the nightmare from reality and reason. Though the painting’s title indicates that the slumbering woman is having a nightmare, her arched back and raised knees create an image that’s more erotic than horrific. The demon crouched on her chest heightens the eroticism of the painting, as the impish figure appears in the form of the iconic incubus of mythology and folklore, a demon who descends upon people in slumber, often to engage in sexual intercourse.
A painting of the Romantic era, The Nightmare evokes literature of the period as well works of earlier centuries that the Romantics turned back to for inspiration. With paint, Fuseli expresses the same themes that Mary Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge convey with words: Victor Frankenstein’s Angel of Destruction (Ch. 3) and the Ancient Mariner’s vision of death and his mate (line 189). Pre-Romantic-era works that The Nightmare echoes include John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost–the source of Frankenstein‘s epigraph–“The Daemon-lover,” from the oral tradition of Celtic balladry, and the New Testament Book of Revelation.
Works Cited
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Romantic Period. 10th ed. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. W. W. Norton, 2017. pp. 448-64.
Fuseli, Henry. The Nightmare. The Norton Anthology of British Literature: The Romantic Period. 10th ed. Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor. W. W. Norton, 2017. p. C5.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. 1818, 1831. Introduction and Notes by Karen Karbiener. Barnes and Noble, 2003.
Jane Lucas 
The most effective aspect of this post is the detail in the description of the image as well as the connection to the book, Frankenstein, and the poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Also, the title is very clever and eye-catching for the readers.
Thank you for your comment, Morgan. Your post “The Garden of Disappointed Love” thoughtfully examines the theme of disappointment as a link between Francis Danby’s painting and William Blake’s poem. I look forward to reading your posts on art and literature of the Victorian age and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.