Abstract
This is an exploration of the red-haired Golem throughout legend, literature, and film. It locates the development of the Golem in medieval Jewish history beginning with the story’s origins in Prague, 1580, and theorizes the rise of its popularity during and immediately after World War I. The red-haired golem appears in numerous films as early as 1912 and as recent as 2019. Finally, the chapter gives an in-depth analysis of the symbolism of red hair in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994).
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Notes
- 1.
Gibson and Wolfreys theorize the reason for both titles (198–200). Lionsgate produced a film adaptation in 2016, from a screenplay by Jane Goldman. It was directed by Juan Carlos Medina and starred Olivia Cooke, Bill Nighy, and Douglas Booth. An opera was also adapted from it, titled Elizabeth Cree, and first performed in Philadelphia in 2017.
- 2.
All quotes are from The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (1994).
- 3.
The victims were Lizzie’s mother (poisoned; 16–17); a Jewish scholar, Solomon Weil (whose penis was removed and placed alongside a passage about golems in a book he had been studying and his nose cut off and placed on a pewter plate; 4–5, 77–79), Little Victor (broken neck from having been kicked down the stairs; 92, 94, 174), Uncle, John’s father (“By a stroke of good fortune”: poisoned; 237), John Cree (poisoned; 28), Jane Quig (a prostitute, whose head was placed on one step, torso on the next step, and legs on the third, her organs impaled on a post near the Thames, and her eyes gouged out; 3, 23–25, 55–56), Alice Stanton (a prostitute, mutilated and placed on the white pyramid outside of St. Anne with her face toward the workshop where the “analytical Engine waited to begin its life”; 117, 5), and Mr. and Mrs. Gerrard and their three children and one maid (6, 23. 150–52). If I missed any, I do apologize, but truly it was difficult to keep track.
- 4.
See Butler xvi–xviii, xxi–xxxiv, and “performativity” pervades her entire book.
- 5.
See T. A. Critchely’s book.
- 6.
Remove the “ae” or the first “e” and you have meth, which is Hebrew for “death.”
- 7.
For a history of the proliferation of the myth, see Elizabeth Baer (2012), Edan Dekel and David Gantt Gurley (2013), and Ruthi Abeliovich (2019). Jane Davison (1996) and Cathy Gelbin (2013) tenuously argue that Mary Shelley learned about the legends of the Jewish Golem through German Romanticism that was popular in England, and that is how she got the idea of Dr. Frankenstein’s creation of a living being made out of parts of dead people.
- 8.
Onega regards Ackroyd’s novel as a neo-Victorian attempt to question the traditional view of “family” as the center of Victorian culture insofar as it depicts “gendered and familial relationships and intergenerational bonds” as “increasingly strained and compromised” (2011, 269).
- 9.
Quoted in “The ‘Broken and Abnormal Career’ of George Gissing” (1904, 381).
- 10.
From Act 5, Scene 5 of Macbeth, 24–26.
- 11.
From Act 2, Scene 7: 146–48. When Lizzie is studying Murray’s New Plan of London and says she “plotted” all her “exits and entrances,” maybe Ackroyd was quoting from the play (24).
- 12.
Like Shakespeare’s “walking shadow,” Lizzie is often described as a shadow throughout the book. See especially 195.
- 13.
The quote is not verbatim. The excerpt refers to Wilde’s “Of course the aesthetic value of Shakespeare’s plays does not, in the slightest degree, depend on their facts, but on their Truth, and Truth is independent of facts always, inventing or selecting them at pleasure. … The true dramatist, in fact, shows us life under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life” (246–47, 256).
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Ayres, B. (2021). “Here we are again!” Red-Haired Golems Galore Including Those in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. In: A Vindication of the Redhead. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83515-6_6
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