Essay Questions

Some criticism of the novel—especially among more modern reviewers—is situated in the writing style rather than the content. What is an example of the assessment that The Purple Cloud is crippled by too much purple prose?

Keep in mind that one widely accepted interpretation of the work is that it is a Biblical allegory of some complex construction. As a result, the first person narration often falls into dense, richly figurative and perhaps overly melodramatic proclamations that recall certain passages of scripture. When one thinks of the narrative as a written gospel left behind by an eyewitness to the apocalypse, passages such as the following can come to seem less purplishly florid and more overly ornamental in a way that is key to working out its themes:

“The Earth is all on my brain, on my brain, O dark-minded Mother, with thy passionate cravings after the Infinite, thy regrets, and mighty griefs, and comatose sleeps, and sinister coming doom, O Earth: and I, poor man, though a king, sole witness of thy bleak tremendous woes. Upon her I brood, and do not cease, but brood and brood…”

The Purple Cloud may not be a household name, but its influence upon generations of writers can be felt across a wide expanse of very familiar stories. What are some famous works that bear hallmarks of its influence?

The scenes of Adam Jeffson making his way through corpse-lined cities devoid of any signs of human life or activity may bring to mind Vincent Price in The Last Man or Earth or Will Smith in the later remake. Any number of books and movies about the apocalypse leaving behind a new Adam and a new Eve are the descendants of Adam and Leda. The imaginative seeds planted by Shiel’s addition of the battle for supremacy between The White and The Black bear one kind of fruit or another in latter 20th century landmarks such as Stephen King’s The Stand and the black and white lodges of Twin Peaks. Speaking of King, anyone who has seen Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining will almost certainly sense the influence of Jeffson’s descent into madness brought on by isolation and alienation on that of Jack Torrance’s submission to cabin fever.

The Purple Cloud itself exhibits signs of a strong influence by previous novels which first tackled the now-prevalent trope of man daring to tamper into God’s domain. How does it work itself onto the same shelf as Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, and The Island of Dr. Moreau?

A persistent thematic application to the apocalypse which wipes out humanity is that it is God’s retribution for man’s willingness to move too fast and too far with scientific experimentation. One passage in particular early on lays down the foundation for developing this theme; a passage that is as dramatically effective as it scientifically dubious. But then again, the novel was published eight years before the Peary expedition finally reached the North Pole and the infamous difficulty in any human making it there and back again surely proved to provide a fine-burning fuel to the idea that even on planet Earth there are some places that man are simply not designed to enter:

“On the 10th April we passed the 89th parallel of latitude, and though sick to death, both in spirit and body, pressed still on. Like the lower animals, we were stricken now with dumbness…but in selfish brutishness on through a real hell of cold we moved. It is a cursed region—beyond doubt cursed—not meant to be penetrated by man: and rapid and awful was the degeneration of our souls…If men could enter into a country specially set apart for the habitation of devils, and there become possessed of evil, as we were so would they be.”