GOTHIC FICTION

The word “GOTHIC” could be used about a group of

Germanic people (the Goths) who wandered all over
Europe in the first centuries of the Common Era, about
certain kinds of medieval architecture (Gothic cathedrals)
or about a specific type of literature, which is said to have
originated in the second half of the 18th century and to
have developed throughout the 19th century, and is still
very much with us at present – only we tend to call it
horror – rather than Gothic – fiction.

THE MOST POPULAR LITERATURE in Britain during

the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the
Gothic novel, regarded by some as “the latest trash of the
day.” By the end of 1794, critical reviewers were unable to
keep up with “the present daily increasing rage for novels
addressed to the strong passions of wonder and terror.”
This was the earliest genuinely popular literature,
appealing to all classes of readers, and especially to
women, rather than just to an elite of well-educated
literary men. It produced the first “bestseller” in Ann Rad-
cliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Commented [SG1]: Ann Radcliffe (9 July 1764 – 7 February
1823) was an English author, a pioneer of the gothic novel. She
published as Mrs. Radcliffe. It was her technique of the explained
supernatural, in which every seemingly supernatural intrusion is
Though first editions were relatively expensive, a wide eventually traced back to natural causes, and the impeccable conduct
of her heroines that finally met with the approval of the reviewers,
readership was assured by the existence of cheap reprints transforming the gothic novel into something socially acceptable.
and numerous circulating libraries from which they could
be borrowed, well stocked by specialist publishers. The
novels written by Radcliffe's colleagues were regarded as
“sofa companions,” never destined to find a place on the
shelves of a gentleman's library. Most of the novelists,
who produced Gothic texts, were women, working in what
came increasingly to be seen as a feminine literary
tradition; for this reason, their work was dismissed by
most male critics and refused canonical status. But by all
contemporary accounts, their novels affected popular taste
and, in Sir Walter Scott's words, “flew from hand to hand”
among middle-class tradespeople and their daughters,
working-class men, ladies' maids, university students and
professors, earls and gentlewomen.

The characteristic form of the genre was the long novel.

For instance, Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho is
nearly 300,000 words long, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the
Wanderer is not much shorter. Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein is relatively short.

Despite the fact that this type of novel was dominated by

female writers, 1764, the publication date of Horace
Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto, is regarded as the
starting date of the Gothic novel.

The Castle of Otranto

Many works earlier than this influenced the Gothic

tradition: Edmund Burke's essay On the Sublime (1756),
the poetry of James Thomson, Thomas Gray, James
Macpherson's “Ossian” poems, Edward Young and the
“graveyard” poets, and revivals of “Celtic” or “Saxon” or
“Bardic” poetry by antiquaries - but if all influential work Commented [ЛК2]: Antiquaries were amateur historians, who
researched local history, legends and folklore. Some of them made
were included, we would have to go back to the ghost serious contributions to the study of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic history.

scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet and the witches’ scenes in

Macbeth.

Gothic novels appeared at the rate of more than a dozen

every year from 1794 through 1797, and increased to
nearly two dozen per year for 1798 through 1810, before
subsiding to little more than half a dozen per year for 1811
through 1820, then to only three or four per year for 1821
to 1830.
CHARACTERISTICS OF GOTHIC

Gothic is an example of formulaic art, that is, in Gothic

novels we encounter a number of recurrent formulas,
starting with the three main characters, the villain, the
heroine and the hero (in that order!) and the setting (a
haunted castle, house, church or abbey).

The villain of a story either 1) poses as a hero at the

beginning of the story or 2) simply possesses enough
heroic characteristics (charisma, sympathetic past,
etc.) so that either the reader or the other characters
see him as more than a simple charlatan or bad
guy. Two closely related types exist:

Satanic Hero: a Villain whose nefarious

deeds and justifications of them make him a
more interesting character than the rather
bland hero. Example: The origin of this
prototype comes from Romantic misreadings
of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost,
whose Satan poets like Blake and Shelley
regarded as a far more compelling figure than
the moralistic God of the epic. Gothic
examples: William Beckford's Vathek,
Radcliffe's Montoni, John Polidori's Ruthven
and just about any vampire.

Promethean: a Villain-Hero who has done good but

only by performing an overreaching or rebellious
act. Prometheus from ancient Greek mythology saved
humanity but only after stealing fire and ignoring Zeus'
order that humanity should be kept in a state of
subjugation. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is tellingly
subtitled the "Modern Prometheus."

Pursuit of the Heroine

The pursuit of a virtuous and idealistic (and usually
poetically inclined) young woman by a villain, normally
portrayed as a wicked, older but still potent aristocrat or a
cleric. While in many early Gothic novels such a chase
occurs across a Mediterranean forest and/or through a
subterranean labyrinth, the pursuit of the heroine is by no
means limited to these settings. This pursuit represents a
threat to the young lady's ideals and morals (usually
meaning her virginity), to which the heroine responds in
the early works with a passive courage in the face of
danger; later gothic heroines progressively become more
active and occasionally effective in their attempts to
escape this pursuit and indict patriarchy.
Examples: The pursuit of the heroine can be physical,
such as in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

The hero is the least interesting figure in the trio.

Significantly, he appears rather ineffective at first. In some
Gothic novels the heroine assumes that the hero is the
villain’s agent. Nevertheless, the hero becomes active in
the last third of the novel and usually (but not always!)
defeats and/or unmasks the villain and marries the heroine.

Setting

The Haunted Castle or House

A dwelling that is inhabited by or visited regularly by a
ghost or other supposedly supernatural being.
Examples: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.
Walpole's novel first introduced to gothic literature its
single most influential convention, the haunted castle. The
castle is the main setting of the story and the centre of
activity. It is an old, dark, decaying edifice plagued by
memories of the past. Some other works of art that re-tool
this durable gothic convention include the haunted house
in The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson and Psycho by
Robert Bloch. Both were made into movies which you
may have seen.

In addition, in most eighteenth-century Gothic novels the

setting is continental – and, specifically, South West
European – Italian, Spanish or French. Gothic writers
linked the terrifying/horrifying experiences of their novels
to British prejudice about those parts of Europe in which
Roman Catholicism was the dominant religion. The
Gothic thus came to be a decidedly anti-Catholic genre.

In the 19th century, especially in the later 19th century,

Spanish and Italian settings became overused and Gothic
writers directed their attention to certain parts of Central
and Eastern Europe. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla
(1872) is set in the Austrian district of Styria and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is set in Transylvania, a region
split between Romania and Hungary today. The
East/Central European settings had the attraction of
novelty. In the late 20th century, following the fall of
communist regimes, Eastern Europe was re-discovered as
a Gothic (or horror) setting but the new horror genre was
heavily politicized.

AUDIENCE

From the beginning Gothic appears to have been intended

for a captive audience: a group of people who read or
watch something with whose conventions they are
overfamiliar. In spite of their familiarity with the genre,
the compulsion to go on “consuming” it is very strong.

Ladies of different ages “devouring” Matthew

Lewis’s novel The Monk

CLASSIFICATION

In connection with the development of Gothic writing

between 1764 and 1840, we can speak of two main
streams or schools, Radcliffe and the School of Terror, and
Matthew Lewis and the School of Horror.
Matthew Lewis became notorious as the author of a
scandalous novel called The Monk. Its plot includes incest,
entombment, demonic possession and direct contact with
the supernatural.
These two schools are often portrayed as emphasizing,
respectively, sensibility versus sensationalism. Although
the “machinery” of the Radcliffe School is often mocked,
the agents and incidents of terror in this stream are usually
internal, whereas the agents and incidents of horror in the
Lewis School are usually external. The former is
characterized by mystery and corner-of-the-eye
creepiness, whereas the latter is characterized by violence
and raw-head-and-bloody-bones. In the former we are
often invited to wonder if the events are not really in the
mind of the narrator, whereas in the latter our focus is
often directed to political agents of oppression. In the
former a common theme is sensibility; in the latter a
common theme is sadomasochism.

However, both schools exploit the resources of the

subconscious, taboo, trauma and nightmare, sexuality,
mental disorientation and madness, and both schools
portray social injustice, prisons, and the brutalizing effect
of poverty. Both schools are, in other words, equally
“Gothic.”

Another distinction scholars employ is between “the

Female Gothic” and “the Male Gothic.” The distinction
was first introduced by Ellen Moers in her book Literary
Women (1976).

The Female Gothic

One of the earliest forms of Gothic literature, the Female

Gothic often aims to socialize and educate its female
readers and is usually morally conservative. Yet the
Female Gothic can also express criticism of patriarchal,
male-dominated structures and serve as an expression of
female independence. This form is often centred on gender
differences and oppression.

Female Gothic works usually include a female protagonist

who is pursued and persecuted by a villainous patriarchal
figure in unfamiliar settings and terrifying
landscape. While achieving a considerable degree of
terror and chills, the Female Gothic usually avoids the
more overt and graphic scenes of violence and sexual
perversion found in the literature of horror, which is often
called “Male Gothic.” The Female Gothic often opts for
the "explained supernatural" instead of the “real”
thing. For instance, in Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of
Udolpho, superstitious servants speak about ghostly
visitations but the “ghost” turns out to be the heroine’s
lover, who has been trying to get in touch with her. In
some of Radcliffe’s other novels, villains use bogus ghosts
to dupe superstitious people. Such ghosts participate in the
female Gothic's language of subtle and implied terror.

The initial development of Female Gothic was led by

writers such as Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, and Ann
Radcliffe, and then later by Mary Shelley, the Bronte
Sisters and Christina Rosetti (a nineteenth-century poet
and artist, who wrote a remarkable poem, entitled "Goblin
Market"). A durable strain of the Gothic, it can be found
everywhere in later nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-fist-
century work by women writers and even in present-day
Harlequin romances.

The distinction between “the Female Gothic” and “the

Male Gothic” is relative and can be hard to maintain
along historical principles.

The Male Gothic

In contrast with the Female Gothic, the Male Gothic uses

images of the supernatural and focuses on the explicit
physicality of horror. Ambrosio, Lewis's anti-hero in The
Monk, is fascinated by sexual pleasure and is prepared to
barter his soul in order to gain access to the virtuous
Antonia, who turns out to be his own half-sister. He rapes
her and then murders her to avoid discovery.

The body, its appearance, passions and appetites underpin

Lewis's quasi-pornographic imagery – creating a
dialectical “other” to Radcliffe's world of imaginative and
emotional excess.

The Psychoanalytical Approach to Gothic

The psychoanalytical approach has been very popular,
especially in the use of Freudian theory and Freud's
concept of “the uncanny.” Much attention has been given Commented [SG3]: Freud’s Unheimlich (the Uncanny)
For Freud, the uncanny derives its terror not from something external,
to the analysis of repressed sexuality and how this is alien, or unknown but--on the contrary--from something strangely
familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it.
reflected by Gothic compositional devices, such as According to Freud, we find things to be uncanny (unheimlich) when
premonitory dreams and the projection or displacement of they are familiar to us (heimlich or “belonging to the home") yet also
somehow foreign or disturbing.
fear, and Gothic images such as the spectre or monster
(representing “the other”).

There is a general consensus that the terror at the heart of

the Gothic reflects pent-up desire. Some Gothic plots are
seen as narratives of emergent female sexuality, in terms
of the heroine's relation both with her mother and with the
patriarchal villain.

The heroines of Gothic novels never quite grow up, but

remain fixed at some childhood stage. Fear of being raped
is often cited as being fundamental to “the Female
Gothic,” while actual rape is fundamental to “the Male
Gothic.” But prurient rape imagery is found not only in
Lewis' The Monk, but also in many examples of “the
Female Gothic.”

Incest is a frequent theme in the genre, often explicitly, as

in Lewis' The Monk, sometimes implicitly.
Ambrosio and Antonia