The Gothic Project - Olalla - background information

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Olalla - background information

Olalla is a short story by the Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in the Christmas 1885 issue of The Court and Society Review, then re-published in 1887 as part of the collection The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. It is set in Spain during the Peninsular War.

The story is based on a dream that Stevenson had and in his 1888 essay A Chapter on Dreams (Annotated): (how dreams inspired the classic author) he describes the difficulties he had in fitting his vision into a narrative framework. Stevenson wrote the story at the same time as he was proofing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

The Gothic Tradition

Olalla contains many of the trademark elements of Gothic fiction. There is a once-proud family of failing nobility, a lonely home in a mountain setting, and a preoccupation with death and decay. Stevenson also focuses on the subject of heredity, demonstrated by a family portrait to which Olalla bears an uncanny resemblance. This was a very popular Gothic device, famously employed by J. Sheridan Le Fanu in his short story Carmilla and by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Arthur Conan Doyle novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Heredity and decadence, of course, cannot but remind us of Gothic master Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher.

Olalla has been variously interpreted as a vampire story and does contain some familiar tropes, such as the red hair of Olalla and her mother and their deeper voices. However, this interpretation is ambiguous; where vampires are very traditionally noted for their strength, daylight restrictions, and need to feed, this story touches little on these conventions. Rather, due to centuries of inbreeding brought on by the exclusive nature of noble lineage, as well as increasing isolation, Olalla's family has "impure" blood.