61 pages • 2 hours read
Robert W. ChambersThe King in Yellow
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1895A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Stories 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 1 Summary: “The Repairer of Reputations”
Content Warning: This section of the guide quotes outdated and offensive language around mental health conditions and suicide. It also more generally discusses stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health and suicide, which were prevalent when The King in Yellow was published.
The story opens with an epigraph in French that translates as: “Do not mock the fools; their madness lasts longer than ours… that is the only difference” (1). This is a line from Dix épines pour une fleur: petites pensées d’un chasseur a l’affut by the 19th-century French writer Adolphe d’Houdetot.
The first-person narrator, Mr. Hildred Castaigne, lives in 1920 New York City, in an imagined future that had survived an invasion by Germany in the 1890s. Castaigne witnesses the opening of the first “Government Lethal Chamber” (2), a small building placed in Washington Square for the purpose of allowing citizens to legally die by suicide if they find existence “intolerable,” as “[i]t is believed that the community will be benefitted by [their] removal” (5).
Four years before, Castaigne suffered a head injury falling from a horse and was declared temporarily “insane” by Dr. Archer, who had him sent to a psychiatric hospital for treatment. Castaigne insists he was perfectly rational throughout, but it takes a long time for Dr. Archer to declare him “cured.” Castaigne, while being outwardly friendly, has vowed to take revenge on the doctor. During his time in the psychiatric hospital, Castaigne reads a play called The King in Yellow, although it is rumored that all who read it go “mad.” The book haunts Castaigne after he is released. He can still picture the places described, such as the country of Carcosa “where black stars hang in the heavens” (3).
Castaigne visits a friend, Hawkberk, and his daughter, Constance. Constance is the sweetheart of Castaigne’s cousin Louis. Castaigne visits the man who lives above Hawberk’s shop, Mr. Wilde. Hawberk says Mr. Wilde is a lunatic, but Castaigne insists Mr. Wilde is just as rational as he is, and brilliant besides.
Mr. Wilde is an eccentric and deformed man: as small as a child of 10, but with large arms and thighs, and a flattened head. He is missing his ears and wears wax prosthetic ears. He is also missing fingers on his left hand. He keeps a cat that constantly attacks him, covering his face and arms in deep scratches. Castaigne hates the cat and wants to kill it, but Mr. Wilde will not let him.
Mr. Wilde calls himself a “repairer of reputations,” taking money from men who have destroyed their reputations through indiscretions, and employing many people around the city to help him. Mr. Wilde convinces Castaigne that he and his cousin Louis descend from the kings of Carcosa, as described in The King in Yellow, and Mr. Wilde’s book “The Imperial Dynasty of America.” They make ominous plans to “settle the matter” (11) of Louis, Constance, and Dr. Archer. Castaigne intends to kill or in some other way remove Louis from this line of succession, while also exacting revenge on Dr. Archer for having him committed.
Back in his own apartment, Castaigne opens a safe to reveal a jeweled crown. This crown is “fit for a King among kings, an Emperor among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn by his royal servant” (13), meaning Castaigne himself. However, when Louis sees the crown, he calls it cheap brass costume jewelry.
When Louis and Constance become engaged, Castaigne sets his plan in motion. Castaigne asks Louis to meet him in the park at Washington Square to talk. There Castaigne explains that Louis is first in line to inherit the crown of the Imperial Dynasty of America, but he does not deserve it. Castaigne will not let Louis marry Constance and thereby secure an heir to usurp Castaigne’s claim. Louis must abdicate and disappear, or Castaigne will kill him. He claims he has already killed Dr. Archer, and that one of Mr. Wilde’s employees is at this moment killing Constance and Hawberk.
Castaigne sees Mr. Wilde’s employee running through the park and into the Lethal Chamber, the agreed signal that his assignment is complete. Constance and Hawberk are now dead. Castaigne rushes to see Dr. Wilde. When he enters the building, the cat leaps at him and he slashes it with a knife. However, when he lights a lamp, he finds Dr. Wilde with his throat cut, dying. He turns and sees Hawberk and Constance still alive, and Louis coming into the room behind him. Suddenly, the police arrive to arrest him. The last line reveals that Castaigne later dies in a psychiatric hospital for the “criminally insane.”
Story 2 Summary: “The Mask”
This story opens with an epigraph that is a passage from the fictional play, The King in Yellow, in which a character named Camilla asks The Stranger to remove his mask, only for The Stranger to insist he wears no mask.
The first-person narrator, Alec, is an artist living in Paris. His friend Boris Yvain, a sculptor, shows him a new chemical formula he has devised, which turns any living thing into marble when submerged in the liquid. Boris demonstrates first with a lily and then with a fish, both of which are now perfect white marble with azure veins where the blood and heart would be. Alec is impressed but horrified. Boris promises never to use it for his art as it would be cheating. He has merely made it out of curiosity.
Boris’s lover Genevieve enters. Alec is in love with Genevieve, but she once told him she loves Boris more. Boris and Genevieve live together, in a villa with art studios. They have a room for displaying Boris’s sculptures with a shallow decorative pool at its center. Alec visits constantly, partly to work on painting a mural in Genevieve’s room.
One day, Alec and Boris are teasing each other when Boris threatens to throw Alec into the pool as a joke. At the last moment, Boris remembers that he filled the pool with his chemical formula for turning things into marble. They are both horrified and then laugh it off. Another friend and painter, Jack Scott, arrives and they forget the incident.
Later, while staying late to work on the mural, Alec falls asleep in Boris’s parlor, only to awaken to “the saddest music [he] had ever heard” (35). He finds Genevieve in the room playing an old spinet and weeping. When he calls her name, she collapses. The next day Alec visits Boris in his studio. Boris says Genevieve now has an inexplicable fever; she keeps saying her heart is broken and she wants to die.
While keeping Boris company, Alec picks up a book at random and reads from The King in Yellow. Moments later, Genevieve cries out. In her feverish state, she babbles of love for Alec, who is embarrassed and horrified. Boris does not blame him, however. Jack Scott brings a doctor to help Genevieve, but Alec begins to feel sick as well. He hears Jack exclaim: “[W]hat ails him, to wear a face like that?” (38) and thinks of the Pallid Mask from The King in Yellow before he collapses.
For weeks, Alec lies in bed delirious. He dreams of the King in Yellow, the towers of Carcosa. He feels his “mask of self-deception” (38) lift from him, so that he can no longer hide the painful jealousy he feels over Boris and Genevieve. Still, he believes: “[N]o matter what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for existing was to meet some requirement of Boris and Genevieve” (39). Finally, he awakens from his delirium and asks to see Boris. Jack tells him that Boris and Genevieve are both dead.
Not long after Alec collapsed, Genevieve threw herself into Boris’s pool of chemical solution. In horror, Boris shot himself in the heart. Boris has left the villa to Alec in his will. Alec cannot face the house or their deaths, so he leaves the country and travels to Constantinople and India. After two years, he returns to Paris to meet with Jack and finally returns to live in the villa. One day, the housemaid complains to Alec that someone is playing tricks on her: the marble statues of a rabbit and fish have disappeared and someone has put a live rabbit and fish in their place. Alec, realizing what has happened, rushes to the sculpture room. He runs into the room to find the marble statue of Genevieve no longer a statue. She lifts her head and opens her eyes.
Stories 1-2 Analysis
In these two opening stories, “madness” is induced by contact with things or ideas, such as reading the play The King in Yellow. This allows the narrative to explore the uncertainty and strangeness of outside influences on the mind, including the influence of artistic works. Here, Chambers continues a literary tradition that connects art and artistic inspiration with mental health conditions. This tradition relies on poetic (i.e., unscientific) models of the mind that engage with concepts of “madness” that are often stigmatizing and inappropriate for describing mental health. The period’s literature also reflects late Victorian and fin de siècle society’s interest in disordered mental and emotional states. Psychologists and other thinkers proposed theories that are now discredited but that had currency at the time. The causes of mental health conditions were not understood and many believed that “insanity” could be caught or transmitted, like an infectious disease. In this vein, Chambers establishes horror as originating in the threat of mental health conditions that can be passed from person to person and that cannot be protected against, as mental health conditions were not well understood.
A key aspect of the stories’ horror is the suggestion that anyone may be susceptible to “madness.” The epigraph at the beginning of “The Repairer of Reputations” implies that all people possess some kind of mental health condition, although it may not be as permanent for some as it is for others. This is the first instance of the theme Interpretations of Reality, how reality is influenced by delusion and dream, and the exploration of the boundary where individual differences of experience shade into irregular behavior or differing mental states. The first-person narrator of the first story, Hildred Castaigne, embodies this boundary of “madness”; he has been declared “insane” even while he continually claims he is rational. Although the reader may believe this claim at the beginning, as the plot progresses it becomes clear that Castaigne is an unreliable narrator, calling both his present and past mental state into question. His behavior, even in the weird world of the story, increasingly takes on erratic and fantastical elements. The narrative reveals Castaigne’s skewed perception when he describes his beautiful crown of gold and velvet and jewels, only for his cousin Louis to ask him why he is wearing a cheap costume of brass. The matter of perspective is also raised when Castaigne claims his “mind is as healthy as Mr. Wilde’s” (17) when Hawberk believes Mr. Wilde to be a “lunatic.” The narrative presents alternative views of reality; rather than Mr. Wilde being just as “sane” as he is, perhaps Castaigne is just as “insane” as Mr. Wilde.
It is through Louis that the reader learns that the play drives its readers to an extreme mental state. Significantly, although Castaigne describes The King in Yellow at length in his narrative, he does not personally reveal this information to his reader. The narrative now suggests that Castaigne may be “mad” because he read the play (albeit while already in a psychiatric hospital). The reader must, therefore, question if any of Castaigne’s account is true at all. Did he plan an elaborate scheme with Mr. Wilde? Did Mr. Wilde really have a network of employees in the city, including one hired to kill Hawberk and Constance for him? Or was all of that merely in Castaigne’s imagination? This is left open for the reader to decide, playing with the ambiguity of individual perspective and creating horror out of unresolved tension.
The motif of the fictional play The King in Yellow is significant throughout the first four stories of the collection and each of these stories will add to the mythos surrounding the play. In each case, the play will influence the mind or life of the character-reader in some way. It plays a vital role in the plot and characterization of the first story, where it is set up by Chambers as a key thread running through the set. In the second story "The Mask,” the story opens with an epigraph that is another fictional passage from the play. In this passage, two characters, Camilla and the Stranger, converse. When Camilla asks the Stranger to remove his mask only for him to insist that he is not wearing a mask, Camilla is terrified. Although no context is given, her terror implies that the stranger’s face must be mask-like in some deeply unsettling way. It is not at first clear how this passage pertains to the story in “The Mask,” which focuses on the love triangle between Alec, Boris, and Genevieve and the “mad scientist” premise of a chemical formula that turns living tissue into marble. The epigraph therefore sets up suspense and mystery in the story as the reader looks for its influence in the narrative. The King in Yellow finally makes an appearance when Alec reads the play while sitting in Boris’s art studio. The reader knows from the previous story that The King in Yellow supposedly drives those who read it to experience a break from reality. Reading the play seems to upset Alec, as he puts it “away with a nervous shudder” (37), after which he grows ill and delirious for several weeks, during which time he hallucinates scenes from the play. In this way, the narrative draws a suggestive line between the play and Alec’s unexplained illness and delirious mental state. The play forms his temporary “madness,” and/or is formed by it, as it appears in his hallucinations, but the narrative is ambiguous about causation.
It is at this point, that the image of the mask from the epigraph re-enters the narrative. Alec, having long been in love with Genevieve but determined to keep quiet, admits that this is a “mask of self-deception” (38). While ill, he realizes that it “was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me” (38), echoing the Stranger’s statement that he wears “no mask.” As he recovers, he resolves to honorably remove himself from the love triangle and to leave Genevieve and Boris to one another; his silence about his love for her (his “mask”) has become a resolution to relinquish her completely, in other words, Alec will become what he has pretended to be. Given the theme of The Recklessness of Desire running through the stories, Alec’s considered self-sacrifice seems to be his salvation. Alec does not permanently break with reality and regains his senses after the delirium passes. Moreover, the story offers a potentially happy ending when Genevieve wakes from her marble sleep: “[T]he sunlight steamed into my face, and through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled” (45). The use of Christian and paradisiacal imagery gives this ending a strongly optimistic feeling and suggests that Alec has been rewarded.
