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Gothic Literature

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In the most general terms, Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread. Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a terrible secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and threatening character.

Despite the fairly common use of this bleak motif, Gothic writers have also used supernatural elements, touches of romance, well-known historical characters, and travel and adventure narratives to entertain their readers. The type is a subgenre of Romantic literature —that's Romantic the period, not romance novels with breathless lovers with wind-swept hair on their paperback covers—and much fiction today stems from it.

Development of the Genre

Gothic literature developed during the Romantic period in Britain. The first mention of "Gothic," as pertaining to literature, was in the subtitle of Horace Walpole's 1765 story "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story" which was supposed to have been meant by the author as a subtle joke—"When he used the word it meant something like ‘barbarous,’ as well as ‘deriving from the Middle Ages." In the book, it's purported that the story was an ancient one, then recently discovered. But that's just part of the tale.

The supernatural elements in the story, though, launched a whole new genre, which took off in Europe. Then America's Edgar Allen Poe got ahold of it in the mid-1800s and succeeded like no one else. In Gothic literature, he found a place to explore psychological trauma, the evils of man, and mental illness. Any modern-day zombie story, detective story, or Stephen King novel owes a debt to Poe. There may have been successful Gothic writers before and after him, but no one perfected the genre quite like Poe.

Major Gothic Writers

A few of the most influential and popular 18th-century Gothic writers were Horace Walpole ( The Castle of Otranto , 1765), Ann Radcliffe ( Mysteries of Udolpho , 1794), Matthew Lewis ( The Monk , 1796), and Charles Brockden Brown ( Wieland , 1798).

The genre continued to command a large readership well into the 19th century, first as Romantic authors such as Sir Walter Scott ( The Tapestried Chamber , 1829) adopted Gothic conventions, then later as Victorian writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson ( The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , 1886) and Bram Stoker ( Dracula , 1897) incorporated Gothic motifs in their stories of horror and suspense.

Elements of Gothic fiction are prevalent in several of the acknowledged classics of 19th-century literature, including Mary Shelley 's Frankenstein (1818), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Charlotte Brontë 's Jane Eyre (1847), Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831 in French), and many of the tales written by Edgar Allan Poe such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843).

Influence on Today's Fiction

Today, Gothic literature has been replaced by ghost and horror stories, detective fiction, suspense and thriller novels, and other contemporary forms that emphasize mystery, shock, and sensation. While each of these types is (at least loosely) indebted to Gothic fiction, the Gothic genre was also appropriated and reworked by novelists and poets who, on the whole, cannot be strictly classified as Gothic writers.

In the novel Northanger Abbey , Jane Austen affectionately showcased the misconceptions and immaturities that could be produced by misreading Gothic literature. In experimental narratives such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner transplanted Gothic preoccupations—threatening mansions, family secrets, doomed romance—to the American South. And in his multigenerational chronicle One Hundred Years of Solitude , Gabriel García Márquez constructs a violent, dreamlike narrative around a family house that takes on a dark life of its own.

Similarities With Gothic Architecture

There are important, though not always consistent, connections between Gothic literature and Gothic architect . Gothic structures, with their abundant carvings, crevices, and shadows, can conjure an aura of mystery and darkness and often served as appropriate settings in Gothic literature for the mood conjured upthere. Gothic writers tended to cultivate those emotional effects in their works, and some of the authors even dabbled in architecture. Horace Walpole also designed a whimsical, castle-like Gothic residence called Strawberry Hill.

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The Haunted House (1859) by Charles Dickens
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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Gothic Novels and Novelists

Gothic Novels and Novelists

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 11, 2019 • ( 6 )

The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. It began with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765), then traveled through Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Brockden Brown, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and many others into the twentieth century, where it surfaced, much altered and yet spiritually continuous, in the work of writers such as William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Iris Murdoch, John Gardner (1933-1982), Joyce Carol Oates, and Doris Lessing and in the popular genres of horror fiction and some women’s romances.

The externals of the gothic, especially early in its history, are characterized by sublime but terrifying mountain scenery; bandits and outlaws; ruined, ancient seats of power; morbid death imagery; and virgins and charismatic villains, as well as hyperbolic physical states of agitation and lurid images of physical degradation. Its spirit is characterized by a tone of high agitation and unresolved or almost-impossible-to-resolve anxiety, fear, unnatural elation, and desperation.

The first gothic novel is identifiable with a precision unusual in genre study. Walpole (1717-1797), the earl of Orford, began writing The Castle of Otranto in June, 1764,; he finished it in August and published it in an edition of five hundred copies in early 1765. Walpole was a historian and essayist whose vivid and massive personal correspondence remains essential reading for the eighteenth century background. Before writing The Castle of Otranto , his only connection with the gothic was his estate in Twickenham, which he called Strawberry Hill. It was built in the gothic style and set an architectural trend, as his novel would later set a literary trend.

Walpole did not dream of what he was about to initiate with The Castle of Otranto ; he published his first edition anonymously, revealing his identity, only after the novel’s great success, in his second edition of April, 1765. At that point, he no longer feared mockery of his tale of a statue with a bleeding nose and mammoth, peregrinating armor, and an ancient castle complete with ancient family curse. With his second edition, he was obliged to add a preface explaining why he had hidden behind the guise of a preface proclaiming the book to be a “found manuscript,” printed originally “in Naples in the black letter in 1529.” The reader of the first edition was told that The Castle of Otranto was the long-lost history of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. The greater reading public loved it, and it was reprinted in many editions. By 1796, it had been translated into French and Spanish and had been repeatedly rendered into dramatic form. In 1848, the novel was still active as the basis for successful theatrical presentations, although the original gothic vogue had passed.

Close upon Walpole’s heels followed Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin. These three authors, of course, were not the only imitators ready to take advantage of the contemporary trend (there were literally hundreds of those), but they are among the few who are still read, for they made their own distinctive contributions to the genre’s evolution. Radcliffe (1764-1823) was born just as Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was being published. She was reared in a middle-class milieu, acquainted with merchants and professionals; her husband was the editor of The English Chronicle and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. She lived a quiet life, was likely asthmatic, and seems to have stayed close to her hearth. Although she never became a habitué of literary circles and in her lifetime only published a handful of works, she is considered the grande dame of the gothic novelists and enjoyed a stunning commercial success in her day; she is the only female novelist of the period whose work is still read.

Radcliffe’s works include The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian: Or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville (1826). She also wrote an account of a trip through parts of northern Europe, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795). Her remarkably sedate life contrasts strikingly with the melodramatic flamboyance of her works. Her experiences also fail to account for her dazzling, fictional accounts of the scenery of Southern Europe, which she had never seen.

Lewis, called Monk Lewis in honor of his major work, conformed in his life more closely to the stereotype of the gothic masters. Lewis (1775-1818) was a child of the upper classes, the spoiled son of a frivolous beauty, whom he adored. His parents’ unhappy marriage ended when he was at Westminster Preparatory School. There was a continual struggle between his parents to manage his life—his father stern and aloof, his mother extravagant and possessive.

Lewis spent his childhood treading the halls of large, old manses belonging both to family and to friends. He paced long, gloomy corridors—a staple of the gothic— and peered up at ancient portraits in dark galleries, another permanent fixture in gothic convention. Deeply involved with the literati of his day, Lewis (also homosexual) found an equivocal public reception, but his novel The Monk: A Romance (1796; also known as Ambrosio: Or, The Monk ), an international sensation, had an enormous effect on the gothic productions of his day. Lewis died on board ship, a casualty of a yellowfever epidemic, in the arms of his valet, Baptista, and was buried at sea.

Lewis’s bibliography is as frenetic as his biography. Although his only gothic novel is the infamous The Monk , he spent most of his career writing plays heavily influenced by gothic conventions; he also translated many gothic works into English and wrote scandalous poetry. Among his plays are Village Virtues (pb. 1796), The Castle Spectre (pr. 1797), The East Indian (pr. 1799), Adelmorn the Outlaw (pr., pb. 1801), and The Captive (pr. 1803). He translated Friedrich Schiller’s The Minister (1797) and August von Kotzebue’s Rolla: Or, The Peruvian Hero (1799). He became notorious for his poetic work The Love of Gain: A Poem Initiated from Juvenal (1799), an imitation of Juvenal’s thirteenth satire.

Maturin (1780-1824) is the final major gothic artist of the period. He was a Protestant clergyman from Dublin and a spiritual brother of the Marquis de Sade. He also was a protégé of Sir Walter Scott and an admirer of Lord Byron. His major gothic novel is Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), as shocking to its public as was Lewis’s The Monk . An earlier Maturin gothic was Fatal Revenge: Or, The Family of Montorio (1807). His other works include the novel The Milesian Chief (1812); a theological novel, Women: Or, Pour et Contre (1818); a tragedy, Bertram: Or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand (pr., pb. 1816), produced by Edmund Kean; and the novel The Albigenses (1824).

Among the legions of other gothic novelists, a few writers (especially the following women, who are no longer generally read) have made a place for themselves in literary history. These writers include Harriet Lee, known for The Canterbury Tales (1797-1805), written with her sister, Sophia Lee, author also of The Recess: Or, A Tale of Other Times (1783); Clara Reeve ( The Champion of Virtue: A Gothic Story , 1777; also known as The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story ); Regina Maria Roche ( The Children of the Abbey , 1796); Charlotte Smith ( Emmeline: Or, The Orphan of the Castle—A Novel , 1788); Charlotte Dacre ( Zofloya: Or, The Moor— A Romance of the Fifteenth Century , 1806); and Mary Anne Radcliffe ( Manfroné: Or, The One Handed Monk— A Romance , 1809).

Critics generally agree that the period gothics, while having much in common, divide into relatively clear subclassifications: the historical gothic, the school of terror, and the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. All gothics of the period return to the past, are flushed with suggestions of the supernatural, and tend to be set amid ruined architecture, particularly a great estate house gone to ruin or a decaying abbey. All make use of stock characters. These will generally include one or more young and innocent virgins of both sexes; monks and nuns, particularly of sinister aspect; and towering male and female characters of overpowering will whose charismatic egotism knows no bounds.

Frequently the novels are set in the rugged mountains of Italy and contain an evil Italian character. Tumultuous weather often accompanies tumultuous passions. The gothic genre specializes in making external conditions metaphors of human emotions, a convention thought to have been derived in part from the works of William Shakespeare. Brigands are frequently employed in the plot, and most gothics of the period employ morbid, lurid imagery, such as a body riddled with worms behind a moldy black veil.

The various subdivisions of the gothic may feature any or all of these conventions, being distinguished by relative emphasis. The historical gothic, for example, reveals the supernatural against a genuinely historical background, best exemplified by the works of the Lee sisters, who, although their own novels are infrequently read today, played a part in the evolution of the historical novel through their influence on Sir Walter Scott. The school of terror provided safe emotional titillation— safe, because the morbidity such novels portray takes place not in a genuine, historical setting, but in some fantasy of the past, and because the fearful effects tend to be explained away rationally at the end of the respective work. Radcliffe is the major paradigm of this subgroup. The Schauer-Romantik school of horror, best represented by Lewis and Maturin, did not offer the reassurance of a moral, rational order. These works tend to evoke history but stir anxiety without resolving or relieving it. They are perverse and sadistic, marked by the amoral use of thrill.

There are very few traditional gothic plots and conventions; a discrete set of such paradigms was recycled and refurbished many times. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Lewis’s The Monk, and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer represent the basic models of the genre.

Castle of Otranto

The Castle of Otranto , emphatically not historical gothic, takes place in a fantasy past. It is not of the school of terror either; although it resolves its dilemmas in a human fashion, it does not rationally explain the supernatural events it recounts. This earliest of the gothics trembles between horror and terror.

The story opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, ready to marry his sickly son, Conrad, to the beautiful Isabella. Manfred, the pattern for future gothic villains of towering egotism and pride, is startled when his son is killed in a bizarre fashion. The gigantic statuary helmet of a marble figure of Alphonse the Good has been mysteriously transported to Manfred’s castle, where it has fallen on and crushed Conrad.

Manfred precipitously reveals that he is tired of his virtuous wife, Hippolita, and, disdaining both her and their virtuous daughter, Mathilda, attempts to force himself on the exquisite, virginal Isabella, his erstwhile daughter-in-law elect. At the same time, he attempts to blame his son’s death on an individual named Theodore, who appears to be a virtuous peasant lad and bears an uncanny resemblance to the now helmetless statue of Alfonso the Good. Theodore is incarcerated in the palace but manages to escape. Theodore and Isabella, both traversing the mazelike halls of Otranto to escape Manfred, find each other, and Theodore manages to set Isabella free. She finds asylum in the Church of St. Nicholas, site of the statue of Alfonso the Good, under the protection of Father Jerome, a virtuous friar. In the process of persuading Jerome to bring Isabella to him, Manfred discovers that Theodore is actually Jerome’s long-lost son. Manfred threatens Theodore in order to maneuver Jerome into delivering Isabella. The long-lost relative later became a popular feature of the gothic.

Both Isabella and Theodore are temporarily saved by the appearance of a mysterious Black Knight, who turns out to be Isabella’s father and joins the forces against Manfred. A round of comings and goings through tunnels, hallways, and churches ensues. This flight through dark corridors also became almost mandatory in gothic fiction. In the course of his flight, Theodore falls in love with Mathilda. As the two lovers meet in a church, Manfred, “flushed with love and wine,” mistakes Mathilda for Isabella. Wishing to prevent Theodore from possessing the woman he thinks is his own beloved, Manfred mistakenly stabs his daughter. Her dying words prevent Theodore from revenging her: “Stop thy impious hand . . . it is my father!”

Manfred must now forfeit his kingdom for his bloody deed. The final revelation is that Theodore is actually the true Prince of Otranto, the direct descendant of Alfonso the Good. The statuary helmet flies back to the statue; Isabella is given to Theodore in marriage, but only after he completes a period of mourning for Mathilda; and order is restored. The flight of the helmet remains beyond the pale of reason, as does the extraordinary, rigid virtue of the sympathetic characters, but Manfred’s threat to the kingdom is ended. Here is the master plot for the gothic of the Kingdom

The Mysteries of Udolpho

Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho presents apparently unnatural behavior and events but ultimately explains them all. Not only will the sins of the past be nullified, but also human understanding will penetrate all the mysteries. In The Mysteries of Udolpho , the obligatory gothic virgin is Emily St. Aubert; she is complemented by a virginal male named Valancourt, whom Emily meets while still in the bosom of her family. When her parents die, she is left at the mercy of her uncle, the villainous Montoni, dark, compelling, and savage in pursuit of his own interests. Montoni whisks Emily away to Udolpho, his great house in the Apennines, where, desperate for money, he exerts himself on Emily in hopes of taking her patrimony while his more lustful, equally brutal friends scheme against her virtue. Emily resists, fainting and palpitating frequently. Emily’s propensity to swoon is very much entrenched in the character of the gothic heroine.

Emily soon escapes and, sequestered in a convent, makes the acquaintance of a dying nun, whose past is revealed to contain a murder inspired by lust and greed. Her past also contains Montoni, who acquired Udolpho through her evil deeds. Now repenting, the nun (née Laurentini de Udolpho) reveals all. The innocent victim of Laurentini’s stratagems was Emily’s long-lost, virtuous aunt, and Udolpho should have been hers. Ultimately, it will belong to Emily and Valancourt.

Radcliffe was known to distinguish between horror and terror and would have none of the former. Terror was a blood-tingling experience of which she approved because it would ultimately yield to better things. Horror she identified with decadence, a distemper in the blood that could not be discharged but rendered men and women inactive with fright. Lewis’s The Monk demonstrates Radcliffe’s distinction.

Lewis’s The Monk concerns a Capuchin friar named Ambrosio, famed throughout Madrid for his beauty and virtue. He is fervent in his devotion to his calling and is wholly enchanted by a picture of the Virgin, to which he prays. A young novice of the order named Rosario becomes Ambrosio’s favorite. Rosario is a beautiful, virtuous youth, as Ambrosio thinks, but one night Ambrosio perceives that Rosario has a female breast, and that “he” is in fact “she”: Mathilda, a daughter of a noble house, so enthralled by Ambrosio that she has disguised herself to be near him.

Mathilda is the very image of the picture of the Virgin to which Ambrosio is so devoted, and, through her virginal beauty, seduces Ambrosio into a degrading sexual entanglement that is fully described. As Mathilda grows more obsessed with Ambrosio, his ardor cools. To secure him to her, she offers help in seducing Antonia, another virginal beauty, Ambrosio’s newest passion. Mathilda, the madonna-faced enchantress, now reveals that she is actually a female demon. She puts her supernatural powers at Ambrosio’s disposal, and together they successfully abduct Antonia, although only after killing Antonia’s mother. Ambrosio then rapes Antonia in the foul, suffocating stench of a charnel house in the cathedral catacombs. In this scene of heavy breathing and sadism, the monk is incited to his deed by the virginal Antonia’s softness and her pleas for her virtue. Each tear excites him further into a frenzy, which he climaxes by strangling the girl.

Ambrosio’s deeds are discovered, and he is tried by an inquisitorial panel. Mathilda reveals his union with Satan through her. The novel ends with Satan’s liberation of Ambrosio from the dungeon into which the inquisitors have thrown him. Satan mangles Ambrosio’s body by throwing him into an abyss but does not let him die for seven days (the de-creation of the world?). During this time, Ambrosio must suffer the physical and psychological torments of his situation, and the reader along with him. The devil triumphs at the end of this novel. All means of redressing virtue are abandoned, and the reader is left in the abyss with Ambrosio.

Melmoth the Wanderer

The same may be said of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer , a tale of agony and the failure of redemption. The book may be called a novel only if one employs the concept of the picaresque in its broadest sense. It is a collection of short stories, each centering on Melmoth, a damned, Faust-like character. Each tale concerns Melmoth’s attempt to find someone to change places with him, a trade he would gladly make, as he has sold his soul to the devil and now wishes to be released.

The book rubs the reader’s nerves raw with obsessive suffering, detailing scenes from the Spanish Inquisition that include the popping of bones and the melting of eyeballs. The book also minutely details the degradation of a beautiful, virginal island maiden named Immalee, who is utterly destroyed by the idolatrous love of Melmoth. The last scene of the book ticks the seconds of the clock as Melmoth, unable to find a surrogate, awaits his fall into Satan’s clutches. The denouement is an almost unbearable agony that the reader is forced to endure with the protagonist. Again the horror is eternal. There will never be any quietus for either Ambrosio or Melmoth, or for the reader haunted by them. These are the molds for the gothic of damnation.

The Modernization of the Gothic

The reading public of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was avid for both horror and terror, as well as for supernatural history. Such works were gobbled greedily as they rolled off the presses. Indeed, the readers of the gothic may have begun the mass marketing of literature by ensuring the fortunes of the private lending libraries that opened in response to the gothic binge. Although the libraries continued after the gothic wave had crested, it was this craze that gave the libraries their impetus. Such private lending libraries purchased numerous copies of long lists of gothic works and furnished subscribers with a list from which they might choose. Like contemporary book clubs, the libraries vied for the most appetizing authors. Unlike the modern clubs, books circulated back and forth, not to be kept by subscribers.

William Lane’s Minerva Public Library was the most famous and most successful of all these libraries. Lane went after the works of independent gothic authors but formed the basis of his list by maintaining his own stable of hacks. The names of most of the “stable authors” are gone, and so are their books, but the titles linger on in the library records, echoing one another and the titles of the more prominent authors: The Romance Castle (1791), The Black Forest: Or, The Cavern of Horrors (1802), The Mysterious Omen: Or, Awful Retribution (1812).

By the time Melmoth the Wanderer had appeared, this trend had run its course. Only hacks continued to mine the old pits for monks, nuns, fainting innocents, Apennine banditti, and Satanic quests, but critics agree that if the conventions of the gothic period from Walpole to Maturin have dried out and fossilized, the spirit is very much alive. Many modern novels set miles from an abbey and containing not one shrieking, orphaned virgin or worm-ridden corpse may be considered gothic. If the sophisticated cannot repress a snicker at the obvious and well-worn gothic conventions, they cannot dismiss the power and attraction of its spirit, which lives today in serious literature.

Modern thinking about gothic literature has gravitated toward the psychological aspects of the gothic. The castle or ruined abbey has become the interior of the mind, racked with anxiety and unbridled surges of emotion, melodramatically governed by polarities. The traditional gothic is now identified as the beginning of neurotic literature. In a perceptive study of the genre, Love, Misery, and Mystery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction (1978), Coral Ann Howells points out that the gothic literature of the eighteenth century was willing to deal with the syntax of hysteria, which the more prestigious literature, controlled by classical influences, simply denied or avoided. Hysteria is no stranger to all kinds of literature, but thinking today seeks to discriminate between the literary presentation of hysteria or neuroticism as an aberration from a rational norm and the gothic presentation of neuroticism as equally normative with rational control, or even as the dominant mode.

The evolution of the modern gothic began close to the original seedbed, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, the traditional sins of the gothic past cavort in a mansion of ancient and noble lineage. A young virgin is subjected to the tortures of the charnel house; the tomb and the catacombs descend directly from Lewis. So, too, do the hyperbolic physical states of pallor and sensory excitement. This tale is also marked, however, by the new relationship it seeks to demonstrate between reason and hysterical anxiety.

Roderick Usher’s boyhood friend, the story’s narrator, is a representative of the normative rational world. He is forced to encounter a reality in which anxiety and dread are the norm and in which the passions know no rational bounds. Reason is forced to confront the reality of hysteria, its horror, terror, and power. This new psychological development of the gothic is stripped of the traditional gothic appurtenances in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where there are neither swooning virgins nor charnel houses, nor ruined, once-great edifices, save the ruin of the narrator’s mind. The narrator’s uncontrollable obsessions both to murder and to confess are presented to stun the reader with the overwhelming force of anxiety unconditioned by rational analysis.

Thus, a more modern gothic focuses on the overturning of rational limits as the source of horror and dread, without necessarily using the conventional apparatus. More examples of what may be considered modern gothic can be found in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). Although Hawthorne was perfectly capable of using the conventional machinery of the gothic, as in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he was one of the architects of the modern gothic. In Hawthorne’s forward-looking tales, certain combinations of personalities bond, as if they were chemical compounds, to form anxiety systems that cannot be resolved except by the destruction of all or part of the human configuration. In The Scarlet Letter (1850), for example, the configuration of Hester, Chillingsworth, and Dimmesdale forms an interlocking system of emotional destruction that is its own Otranto. The needs and social positions of each character in this trio impinge on one another in ways that disintegrate “normal” considerations of loyalty, courage, sympathy, consideration, and judgment. Hester’s vivacity is answered in Dimmesdale, whose violently clashing aloofness and responsiveness create for her a vicious cycle of fulfillment and rejection. Chillingsworth introduces further complications through another vicious cycle of confidence and betrayal. These are the catacombs of the modern gothic.

Another strand of the modern gothic can be traced to Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1979-1851). The novel was published just as the gothic genre was on the wane. Shelley’s story represents an important alternative for the gothic imagination. The setting in this work shifts from the castle to the laboratory, forming the gothic tributary of science fiction. Frankenstein reverses the anxiety system of the gothic from the past to the future. Instead of the sins of the fathers—old actions, old human instincts rising to blight the present—human creativity is called into question as the blight of the future. Frankenstein’s mind and laboratory are the gothic locus of “future fear,” a horror of the dark side of originality and birth, which may, as the story shows, be locked into a vicious cycle with death and sterility. A dread of the whole future of human endeavor pursues the reader in and out of the dark corridors of Frankenstein .

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) may be considered an example of a further evolution of the gothic. Here one finds a strong resurgence of the traditional gothic: the ruined castle, bandits ranging over craggy hills, the sins of the past attacking the life of the present, and swooning, morbidly detailed accounts of deaths. The attendant supernatural horror and the bloodletting of the vampires, their repulsive stench, and the unearthly attractiveness of Dracula’s vampire brides come right out of the original school of Schauer-Romantik horror. The utterly debilitating effect of the vampire on human will is, however, strong evidence for those critics who see the gothic tradition as an exploration of neurosis.

Stoker synthesizes two major gothic subclassifications in his work, thereby producing an interesting affirmation. Unlike the works of Radcliffe and her terror school, Dracula does not ultimately affirm the power of human reason, for it never explains away the supernatural. On the other hand, Stoker does not invoke his vampires as totally overwhelming forces, as in the horror school. Dracula does not present a fatalistic course of events through which the truth will not win out. Humankind is the agency of its salvation, but only through its affirmation of the power of faith. Reason is indeed powerless before Dracula, but Dr. Van Helsing’s enormous faith and the faith he inspires in others are ultimately sufficient to resolve gothic anxiety, without denying its terrifying power and reality.

The Gothic in the Twentieth Century and Later

Significantly, in the contemporary gothic, reason never achieves the triumph it briefly found through the terror school. Twentieth and twenty-first century gothic tends toward the Schauer-Romantik school of horror. Either it pessimistically portrays an inescapable, mindforged squirrel cage, or it optimistically envisions an apocalyptic release through faith, instinct, or imagination, the nonrational human faculties. For examples of both twentieth century gothic trends, it may be instructive to consider briefly William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose works are frequently listed at the head of what is called the southern gothic tradition, and Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013 ), whose later works took a turn that brought them into the fold of the science-fiction branch of gothic. If there remains any doubt about the respectability of the genre and its writers, it may be noted here that both Faulkner and Lessing are winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Faulkner’s fictions have all the characteristic elements of the southern gothic: the traditional iconography; decaying mansions and graveyards; morbid, deathoriented actions and images; sins of the past; and virgins. The Sound and the Fury (1929) is concerned with the decaying Compson house and family, the implications of past actions, and Quentin’s morbid preoccupation with death and virginity; it features Benjy’s graveyard and important scenes in a cemetery. As I Lay Dying (1930) is structured around a long march to the cemetery with a stinking corpse. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is full of decaying houses and lurid death scenes and features prominently three strange virgins—Rosa Coldfield, Judith Sutpen, and Clytie—or five if Quentin and Shreve are to be counted. In this work, the past eats the present up alive and the central figure, Thomas Sutpen, is much in the tradition of the charismatic, but boundlessly appropriating, gothic villain.

These cold gothic externals are only superficial images that betray the presence of the steaming psychological modern gothic centers of these works. Like Hawthorne, Faulkner creates interfacing human systems of neurosis whose inextricable coils lock each character into endless anxiety, producing hysteria, obsession, and utter loss of will and freedom. The violence and physical hyperbole in Faulkner reveal the truly gothic dilemmas of the characters, inaccessible to the mediations of active reason. As in Hawthorne, the combinations of characters form the catacombs of an inescapable though invisible castle or charnel house. Through these catacombs Faulkner’s characters run, but they cannot extricate themselves and thus simply revolve in a maze of involuted thought. The Compsons bind one another to tragedy, as do the Sutpens and their spiritual and psychological descendants.

There is, however, an alternative in the modern gothic impulse. In her insightful, imaginative study of the modern evolution of the gothic, Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence (1980), Judith Wilt assigns Lessing a place as the ultimate inheritor of the tradition. Lessing does portray exotic states of anxiety, variously descending into the netherworld ( Briefing for a Descent into Hell , 1971) and plunging into outer space (the Canopus in Argos series), but Wilt focuses on The Four-Gated City (1969). This novel has both the trappings and the spirit of the gothic. The book centers on a doomed old house and an old, traditional family succumbing to the sins of the past. These Lessing portrays as no less than the debilitating sins of Western culture, racist, sexist, and exploitive in character. Lessing does indeed bring down this house. Several of the major characters are released from doom, however, by an apocalyptic World War III that wipes away the old sins, freeing some characters for a new, fruitful, life without anxiety. Significantly, this new world will be structured not on the principles of reason and logic, which Lessing excoriates as the heart of the old sins, but on the basis of something innately nonrational and hard to identify. It is not instinct and not faith, but seems closest to imagination. Lessing’s ultimately hopeful vision, it must be conceded, is not shared by most contemporary practitioners of the genre. The gothic enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980’s that critics identified as a significant literary trend. Typical of the diversity of writers mentioned under this rubric are those represented in a collection edited by Patrick McGrath (born 1950): The New Gothic: A Collection of Contemporary Gothic Fiction (1991; with Bradford Morrow). McGrath, himself a writer of much-praised gothic fictions, assembled work by veteran novelists such as Robert Coover and John Hawkes as well as younger (now established) writers such as Jamaica Kincaid and William T. Vollmann; the group includes both the best-selling novelist Peter Straub and the assaultive experimental novelist Kathy Acker. These works were first collected by McGrath in the journal Conjunctions (1989), in which he contributed an essay outlining some of the characteristics of the new gothic. While resisting any attempt at rigid definition (the gothic, he says, is “an air, a tone, a tendency”; it is “not a monolith”), he acknowledges that all the writers whom he places in this group “concern themselves variously with extremes of sexual experience, with disease and social power, with murder and terror and death.” That much might be said about most gothic novelists from the beginnings of the genre. What perhaps differentiates many of the writers whom McGrath discusses from their predecessors—what makes the new gothic new—is a more self-consciously transgressive stance, evident in McGrath’s summation of the vision that he and his fellow writers share.

Common to all is an idea of evil, transgression of natural and social law, and the gothic, in all its suppleness, is the literature that permits that mad dream to be dreamt in a thousand forms.

Among popular-fiction writers, the gothic split into two main genres, one based on supernatural or psychological horror and the other based on women’s fiction, featuring romance and, often, historical settings. Moreover, combinations of the two traditions most approach the hyperreal intensity and blend of fear and passion seen in the original gothic: for example, the saga of the Dollanganger family by V. C. Andrews (1923-1986) or the Blood Opera series— Dark Dance (1992), Personal Darkness (1993), and Darkness, I (1994)—by Tanith Lee (1947-2015). While horror writers often substitute the suburbs or small town for the isolated castle—and sometimes psychic abilities, deranged computers, or psychotic killers for ghostly nuns and predatory villain-heroes—they continue to explore the intense feeling, perilous world, tense social situations, and alluring but corrupt sexuality of the original gothic. Unlike the romantic gothic, which has seen periods of quiescence and revival, an unbroken line of the horror gothic persisted from The Castle of Otranto through Dracula and into the twentieth century with books such as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), by M. R. James (1862-1936), and the works of Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) and H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). These stories continue the trend—seen in Poe, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and others—of maintaining morbid and sensational gothic elements while rooting the terror in psychology and even epistemology. Often, hauntings reveal, or are even replaced by, obsession and paranoia. Before the burgeoning of the modern commercial horror novel, Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), in two eerie and lyrical novels, The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), uses the traditional gothic form and many of its motifs, with both psychological sophistication and true terror. Robert Bloch (1917-1994), with his novel Psycho (1959), also updates and psychologizes gothic conventions, substituting an out-of-the-way motel for a castle and explicitly invoking Sigmund Freud . The horror genre grew with the (arguably) gothic novel The Exorcist (1971), by William Peter Blatty (1928-2017), and with Rosemary’s Baby (1967), by Ira Levin (1929-2007). The novel transplants to a New York City apartment building the hidden secret, supernatural menace, and conspiracies against the heroine of early gothics. Although the horror market withered in the 1990’s, four best-selling authors continued in the gothichorror vein: Dean R. Koontz (born 1945), Straub, Stephen King (born 1947), and Anne Rice (born 1941). While much of Koontz’s horror is better classified as horror-adventure, lacking the brooding neuroses and doubts about rationality prevalent in gothic fiction, gothic aspects do dominate his novels Whispers (1980), Shadowfires (1987), Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Prodigal Son (2005; with Kevin J. Anderson), Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: City of Night (2005; with Edward Gorman), and Dean Koontz’s Frankenstein: Dead or Alive (2007; with Gorman). Koontz’s Demon Seed (1973) exemplifies the techno-gothic: A threatening setting and pursuing lover combine in a robot intelligence, which runs the house and wants to impregnate the heroine. Rice explores the gothic’s lush, dangerous sexuality and burden of the past in the novels of the Vampire Chronicles, including Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), Memnoch the Devil (1995), Blood and Gold: Or, The Story of Marius (2001), and Blood Canticle (2003).

Straub’s Julia (1975; also known as Full Circle), is a drawing-room gothic novel, focusing on the haunting— supernatural, mentally pathological, or both—of a woman dominated by her husband and his disturbing, enmeshed family. In Ghost Story (1979), Shadowland (1980), and others, Straub widens the focus, exploring and critiquing the small town, boys’ school, or suburban setting while developing gothic themes, including dangerous secrets, guilt, ambivalent eroticism, and a threat from the past. In Lost Boy, Lost Girl (2003), the threats include a pedophile serial killer, a haunted house, and a missing man’s obsession with his dead mother. Straub explores other genres as well, especially the mystery, but maintains a gothic tone and intensity.

Similarly, King ’s early work is more strictly gothic, such as ’Salem’s Lot (1975), in which vampires spread through a small town in Maine, and The Shining (1977), a story of madness and terror in an isolated, empty hotel. However, many later works, even mimetic ones such as Gerald’s Game (1992), Dolores Claiborne (1993), Bag of Bones (1998), From a Buick Eight (2002), and Cell (2006), continue gothic themes and often a gothic tone. King is the undisputed best-selling author of the genre, having sold more than 330 million copies of his novels. Straub and King, admirers of one another’s work, have collaborated on two fantasy novels, The Talisman (1984), and a sequel, Black House (2001).

The prolific Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938), author of more than fifty novels, has created several memorable gothic works, including a Gothic Saga series comprising Bellefleur (1980) and its sequels. Another memorable work is Zombie (1995), an exploration of the mind of a serial killer, based on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer. New voices on the gothic-novel scene include Donna Tartt (born c. 1964), author of The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002), and Elizabeth Kostova (born 1964), whose first novel, The Historian (2005), became a best seller and was translated into close to thirty languages.

Along with terror and horror, sentimental and romantic elements were established in the original gothic in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, Susanna Rowson (1762-1824), and the Brontë sisters. In 1938, Rebecca , by Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989), the story of a young woman’s marriage to a wealthy English widower with a secret, conveyed many gothic conventions to a new audience, paving the way for the genre of gothic romance. Combining mystery, danger, and romantic fantasy, such books tend to feature innocent but admirable heroines, a powerful male love interest and his isolated estate, ominous secrets (often linked to a woman from the love interest’s past, as in Rebecca), and exotic settings that are remote in place and time.

In the early 1960’s, editor Gerald Gross of Ace Books used the term “gothic” for a line of paperbacks aimed at women, featuring primarily British authors such as Victoria Holt (pseudonym for Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, 1906-1993), Phyllis A. Whitney (1903-2008), and Dorothy Eden (1912-1982). The mystery and love plots are inextricable, and the novels feature many gothic elements, including besieged heroines; strong, enigmatic men; settings that evoke an atmosphere of tension and justified paranoia; heightened emotional states; doubled characters (including impersonation); and lurid, sometimes cruel, sexuality. In the 1970’s and later, erotic elements flourished and became more explicit, resulting in the new category of the erotic gothic.

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Source : Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction . 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010. Bibliography Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. Ellis, Markman. The History of Gothic Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Frank, Frederick S. Guide to the Gothic. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1984. _______. Guide to the Gothic II. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. Geary, Robert F. The Supernatural in Gothic Fiction: Horror, Belief, and Literary Change. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Haggerty, George E. Queer Gothic. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, eds. The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. New York: Routledge, 2007. Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. Reprint. New York: Routledge, 1997. Mussell, Kay. Women’s Gothic and Romantic Fiction: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. Norton, Rictor, ed. Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764-1840. Reprint. New York: Leicester University Press, 2006. Punter, David, and Glennis Byron. The Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Punter, David, ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England—Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1987. Wright, Angela. Gothic Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Gothic Literature — Definition, Elements, and Examples

What is Gothic literature?

Gothic literature focuses on the darker aspects of humanity paired with intense contrasting emotions such as pleasure and pain or love and death. A classic example of a Gothic novel is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Gothic literature is often set around dilapidated castles, secluded estates, and unfamiliar environments.

Gothic works often includes characteristics like omens, the supernatural, and romance.

Gothic literature tends to incorporate revenge, family secrets, prophecies, psychological struggles, and "damsels in distress."

Gothic literature emerged in Europe during the 18th century and was inspired by Gothic architecture from the Middle Ages.

Like Romanticism, the Gothic style arose as a response to the Enlightenment. Gothic writers rebelled against the Enlightenment notion of understanding the world purely through logic. Romantics believed in individualism, idealism, and emotional passion, which they felt were positive ways to live.

Gothics agreed with the same ideas, yet they suggested the outcomes of following those ideas could have darker implications. As such, Gothic literature is often also identified as Dark Romanticism.

Gothic elements

Gothic literature in English typically contains characteristics like omens, the supernatural, romance, and anti-heroes.

The physical location of the setting within Gothic literature mimics or influences characters’ emotions. Since most Gothic stories are set in gloomy and foreboding places (old castles, cemeteries, dark forests, etc.) with ominous weather conditions (foggy, thunderstorms, etc.), the characters’ surroundings negatively impact them.

Writers often used omens to foreshadow future events that would disrupt the characters’ lives. These predictions came in the form of curses, nightmares, and/or visions and mostly forecast tragedy.

Plots often include supernatural elements like resurrection, spirits/ghosts, vampires, werewolves, etc. Some authors attempted to explain the existence of the supernatural, while others classified it as entirely paranormal. Regardless, the supernatural entities/events provide commentary on some aspect of the human condition.

Supernatural elements in Gothic literature

Many Gothic novels incorporate a romantic relationship between the protagonist and another character. However, these relationships are often destined for doom and tragedy, highlighting the negative implications of lost love.

Villains often take the form of male characters in some position of power. Authors may present these characters as sympathetic to hide their deceptive nature.

Through exaggerated and hyperbolic emotional expressions , authors present their characters in a state of intense fear, anxiety, stress, etc. The characters often experience great emotional distress, madness, or psychosis.

The protagonist is often developed as an anti-hero . These characters drive the plot, but they often lack conventional heroic qualities. These characters were often seen as much more realistic than the typical hero/heroine.

The anti-villain is the reverse of the anti-hero. While these characters are considered villains, they often blur the line between good and evil.

Gothic authors often use a hero-villain as the antagonist. These characters are so complex that it becomes difficult to determine whether they are good or bad.

Distressed female characters tend to be characterized as the victims; their suffering from being alone or abandoned often becomes the central focus of the plot. As such, female characters become controlled by male characters who have power due to their authority or social position.

Characters experience psychological struggles that can lead to hallucinations, anxiety, and/or psychosis.

Gothic literature examples

Some of the most notable writers who incorporated Gothic elements in their works include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker:

Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere Essay

Introduction, the sublime in gothic fiction, the element of supernaturalism, mystery horror and suspense in gothic fiction and their significant utility, important elements in gothic fiction, gothic fiction as fantastic literature.

It is accurate to say that a gothic horror story is defined as a frightening story that has echoes of the past and has a constant theme of gloom and the supernatural, which makes it dark and rather threatening. From any perspective and point of view, gothic fiction cannot be dismissed as merely escapist and sensational on the basis that it is more than having only these two elements in it. There are many useful prospective insights which cannot be termed and delimited to mere sensational and escapist ones.

Science fiction is fiction based and claims scientific discoveries and often deals with convincing technological events, such as, space travel or life on other planets. By taking into account the definitions of the attributes, you can clearly see that one of the criteria for a gothic horror story is the use of light and darkness to create a sinister atmosphere.

In the beginning of gothic fiction era, it was not long after the translation of mythological texts that artists began experimenting with ways to elevate and transport their audiences with the use of the sublime. One group in particular began using the ideas of terror, death, and the supernatural, in combination with that which is terrible in nature to create the sublime. This group became known as the “Graveyard Poets” or the “Graveyard School”. On why these poems are effective author Fred Botting (2001:39) states, “the awful obscurity of the settings of Graveyard poetry elevate the mind to ideas of wonder and divinity”. In other words it’s the sublime imagery that produces the required effect.

“Graveyard Poetry” became increasingly popular during the early 1700’s, and paved the way for what would officially become “Gothic” literature. It was not long before the sublime idea of terrible nature grew until it included even more of the supernatural such as fantastical beings, witchcraft, and other extraordinary phenomena (Kemp, 2001, WEB). These became the components that gave Gothic literature its very definition. The first author to utilize these elements in a large literary work was Horace Walpole in his novel, The Castle of Otranto. It was the first novel to receive the title of “Gothic”, and it was also one of the first to use and develop the sublime.

In the Preface to his second edition, Walpole strives to construct a structure by which the Gothic novel can be defined. He states that in Gothic texts, it is necessary to leave, “the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations… to conduct the mortal agents… according to the rules of probability” (Walpole, 1964:7). In this description, Walpole is essentially offering a definition of the sublime as it is the sublime that elevates the “fancy” as it both fears and finds astonishment in the “boundless realms of invention”, but can delight in it as no real danger is found as it is “conducted” by “the rules of probability”. In this Walpole is demonstrating how the sublime is a necessary ingredient to the Gothic genre.

Burke defined precisely what is to be considered sublime. Some of the main Characteristics that Burke (1834) identified as ones that lead to sublimity include: obscurity, eternity and infinity, the crowded and the confused, power, vastness, magnificence, darkness, and excessiveness. He also points out that its nature that primarily conveys the sublime. These guidelines laid out by Burke became the structure by which all Gothic scenes were constructed. In this work, Burke also gave justification to the continuance of the Gothic genre as he identifies and highly emphasizes terror as being the ruling attribute of the sublime. He declares terror to be the “ruling principle” in the sublime as he states:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime (1834: 42).

However Burke does set down the limitation that the terror, “should have no idea of danger connected with it” as this would hinder the production of “delight” (1834:74). This lends an understanding to the Gothic text then, as it is the aim of the author of a Gothic text to produce terror so that it delights the reader (Hennelly, 2001, 19). The Gothic writers who came soon after Burke display how his ideas of the sublime greatly influenced their Gothic writing.

As more time has progressed and more thought given to the idea of the sublime, the Gothic has evolved, and has even produced a number of sub genres. In all of them, the sublime is a crucial element. As it is seen, this genre as a whole would not have been made possible if not for the sublime. Furthermore, without the sublime, a complete understanding of Gothic texts would be impossible.

While assessing this evolution, Richard Davenport-Hines pronounced, “Gothic is nothing if not hostile to progressive hopes”. The Gothic plot in Dorian Gray is ultimately hostile to the progressive hopes held out by the Paterian plot of self-actualization. (Davenport, 1998, 139)

Most of the gothic fiction involves the supernatural. The monster in “Frankenstein” and the vampire in “The Vampire of Kaldenstein” both have similar qualities. Both are obviously not human and look natural and strange. The creature is described as a “catastrophe” and his creator goes on to describe the monster in full. “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips”. This account of the monster really gives the reader a clear picture of how different the monster is. The vampire is described as “unusually tall, with a face of unnatural pallor”. The narrator also adds that the creature “cast no shadow”.

For the period of the closing years of the eighteenth century, England emerged and involved in the whirlpool of a collective unravelling. The contemporary philosophers provided the scholarly circles with such theories of inspiration and action that warranted their self-interested attitude and started to expose themselves as unendurable. The incongruity between the English philosophy in which “individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity” (Clery, 2002, 35) and real political and economic circumstances commenced to facade.

It is out of this sociological environment that the Gothic novel emerged: an innovative, shocking and fearful genre for a prospective time. The phantom of communal uprising is obvious in the mystical “spectres” of the Gothic: a ghastly way of life emerges as a haunted and disintegrative Gothic mansion; the thrashing of English societal distinctiveness stands the Gothic hero or heroine’s quest for individuality.

Although, the Gothic is frequently reproached or even rejected for its excessively histrionic situations and absolutely expected plots, but the unbelievable attractiveness of the genre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the regaining of gothic narratives within the past two decades, indicates to an elasticity that cannot be ignored.

The Gothic novel evolves onward rather abruptly as the rising obsession with individual awareness that starts in the early 18th century crash with the exceptional cultural apprehensions of the late 18th century. The sensations of the gothic fiction characters are exposed and externalized in a far-reaching new technique; their innermost fears and passions are literally modified as other characters, paranormal and weird phenomena, and yet lifeless objects. Simultaneously, the trait of the fright portrayed in these novels–fear of incarceration or snare, of individual breach and rape, of the victory of wickedness over good and pandemonium over order–appears to reproduce a particular historical time branded by growing disenchantment with illumination lucidity and by blood-spattered revolutions in France and America.

“The progressive myth of Frankenstein deserves the name of science-fiction, whereas Dracula can only be discarded as superstition fiction.” (Botting, 2001, 71) “We can account for Dracula’s success, and for its continuing success only in terms of the eternity of the opposition between Good and Evil, in terms of human nature, that is in the very terms in which the myth itself is couched — at the cost of dehistoricising the novel and the myth that has developed around it.

It is also unjust to the novel, by insisting on its obvious flaws, and neglecting the very qualities that have ensured its survival. For instance, Dracula, relying as it does on a multiplicity of texts and of points of view, is narratively more complex than Frankenstein, which is based on the traditional structure of embedded narratives; and to call it superstition-fiction means that we forget the advanced technology that amply compensates for the garlands of garlic — whereas Frankenstein’s bright idea was inspired by alchemy”. (Botting, 2001, 72)

The first factor included in a science fiction genre is the existence of aliens or strange creatures. The strange creature that was created in ‘Frankenstein’ was obviously the monster. “The Gothic, we find, as it enters the twentieth century just past, has performed an unusually intense enactment of the changing assumptions about signification that Baudrillard has traced in Western history since the fading of ‘the counterfeit’ from dominance.

In Frankenstein, the ghost of the counterfeit is shown giving way, as the culture did, to the sign as a manufacturable and mechanically reproducible ‘simulacrum’, the very next stage, the ‘industrial’ one, in our thinking about symbols.” (Botting, 2001, 157) The most vital criterion for a science fiction story is the connection with reality. It has to be relevant to earth or humanity and have something familiar that people can relate to.

Most of the theories developed to create the monster are realistic. Frankenstein has a combination of both elements which gives it a good diversity. The gothic component comes in mainly with the violence and romance, but the creation discovery is more science based. This makes ‘Frankenstein’ a good mix between the two genres, which makes the story more effective and helps it suit a wider audience. (Kilgour, 1997, 66)

A word or two should be said about the difference in meaning that the word ‘mystery’ has in American and British contexts. Writing of psychological ghost stories, Peter Penzoldt suggests that American authors prefer a natural explanation, while the English do not fear to intimate that there is more in the world than reason can account for. Glen Cavaliero, too, points to ‘the repeated tendency of English novelists to write about the supernatural or at any rate about mysterious and inexplicable events’. (Cavaliero, 1995, vi)

The Society considered its work in encouraging and directing restorations to be highly useful; yet none of its activities have been so offensive to succeeding generations. The encouragement which the Ecclesiologists gave to replacing medieval features by more ‘correct’ details was abused by many architects. But the Society must bear the responsibility for the wholesale destruction of great quantities of medieval art. Sir Kenneth Clark remarks: ‘It would be interesting to know if the Camden Society destroyed as much medieval architecture as Cromwell. If not it was from lack of funds, sancta paupertas, only true custodian of ancient buildings.’ (Clarke, 1962, p. 237)

The pattern of Gothic fiction, to a certain extent is the delineation of two apparently alternative spaces, the violation of boundaries between them, the overwhelming power of the more negative and deconstructive environment—is widely, almost universally shared by horror narratives, explicitly or inferentially. Horror narrative stresses the teleological implications of abjection; it is the ultimate literature of absence—from God, from substantial selfhood—and the ghost is its central character.

It is no wonder that Mary Shelley in Frankenstein parodies Paradise Lost; horror narrative records loss, paradise gone and certainly not to be regained. Kristeva goes on to note that “all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (Kristeva, 1982, 61). David Punter argues that “our knowledge of romantic-period Gothic drama can be informed by the politics of an increasingly plebeian theatre.” (Putner, 2000, 102)

The gothic genre, as with all genres, is made up of many elements and concepts resulting in a massively broad and varied spectrum; including the supernatural, the sublime and horror to name but a few of the more common and generally fundamental ones. Some concepts may be clearly overt, and others will be more discreetly manipulated, but nevertheless a gothic text will more often than not include many of these elements. In terms of the supernatural in the gothic genre, it generally appears in the form of some kind of other than natural being or object, such as a vampire or ghost, which is frightening due to its refusal to adhere to the laws of nature, God or man.

Returning to Frankenstein, it could be argued that there is no element of the supernatural, or alternatively that the creature is supernatural by virtue of its being a composition of dead parts then re-animated by ungodly means.( Kilgour, 1997, 69)

Elements of the supernatural may seem to be almost an obligatory component of the gothic tale. On a closer examination, the word itself suggests also a rather deeper level of meaning: beyond that of the natural, rationally explainable world. In this expanded sense the supernatural relates to another favourite gothic, and Romantic, concept: the sublime. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was a particularly influential treatise in this context, focussing on the human reaction to an overwhelming experience that transcends everyday normality.

It is hardly surprising that Burke’s words had such an impact, as they succinctly state what so much gothic art was striving for with greater or lesser degrees of success. “Whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested on every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in manner, annihilated before him.” (Burke, 1834, 41)

The mystical and religious connotations should be clear; gothic writers also noted the link between this overwhelming, oceanic sensation and some degree of horror. In gothic narratives there are abundant examples of supernatural and sublime elements, sometimes overt and sometimes less so. There is a useful distinction to be drawn between those authors who tend to leave the supernatural elements unresolved and those who seek rational closure through explaining the apparent mystery.

The two words ‘gothic’ and ‘horror’ seem to belong together, so close is their relationship. Horror however does not have to be present in a gothic text; neither does its presence necessarily make a text gothic. As Clive Bloom indicates; “Horror is the usual, but necessarily the main ingredient of gothic fiction and most gothic fiction is determined in its plotting by the need for horror and sensation. It was Gothicism, with its formality, codification, ritualistic elements and artifice……that transformed the old folk tale of terror into the modern horror story.” (Bloom, 1998, 110)

There are certain well-known definitions as regards to fantasy or the fantastic and all of these are worth considering. Eric Rabkin’s Fantastic in Literature (1976) deals largely with the same subject matter. This particular piece opens with an examination of Alice’s surprised response to the talking plants in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”. Rabkin argues that the fantastic mode is established through the reversal of the ground rules: as he says, “One of the key distinguishing marks of the fantastic is that the perspectives enforced by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted.” (Rabkin, 1976, p.8)

Victor Sage, in his “Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition”, narrates the method in which, in the Pauline solace convention concerning the seventeenth century, the aging house implied and worked as a connotative metaphor for the body’s unavoidable decomposition and as a trope of mortality and decay in a wide-ranging implication. Sage, to further elaborate the case, refers to a seventeenth-century Huguenot content that, employing the house far-fetched simile, depicts the body assaulted and devastated by degenerative powers:

“Death labours to undermine this poor dwelling from the first moment that it is built, besieges it, and on all sides makes its approaches; in time it saps the foundation, it batters us with several diseases and unexpected accidents; every day it opens a breach, and pulls out of this building some stones.” (Sage, 1988, p.1)

In literature, for the reader to become oriented, they must search for clues as to the equilibrium of the setting. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the reactions of his characters provide the reader with a backdrop of that reality. When events start to go askew, we look to these characters to show us just how far askew. Utterson serves as a neutral facilitator to obtain for the reader this feedback. Stevenson first establishes these characters as reliable, and then relies on their reactionary movements (testimony and actions) to illustrate the intensity of man’s dual natures. It is in these reactions that the reader can discern just how ordinary or outlandish the actions committed by Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde really are.

It also offers an outlet for the comparison of Jekyll/Hyde’s actions to the morals and attitudes of society. The actions of the Hyde persona deviate greatly from what Stevenson has established through characters such as Poole and Dr. Lanyon as Jekyll’s basic nature.

We are shown that the divergence between the characters of Jekyll and Hyde is not a miniscule one, but capable of creating disarray and disbelief. It works as a perfect illustration, and further supports my point. Stevenson most definitely relies on the intensity of his characters’ reactions to emphasize the tremendously disparate natures of Jekyll and Hyde. It adds enormous depth and magnitude that would be lost if the reader were only shown Jekyll and Hyde’s actions, but not the reactions yielded by them. (Attack, 2003, 90) We are also shown much about the balance of the world Stevenson created for his novel. Clearly, the balance has been thrown off.

The characters react with fear and terror at this maelstrom of reality gone asunder. Stevenson valiantly achieves this effect solely by demonstrating these reactions. Were we simply shown Hyde’s actions, and then informed that Hyde was acting in ways incongruent from Jekyll’s normal behaviour the effect would be nowhere near as poignant.

The Gothic fiction cannot be assumed or declared as escapist genre of literature rather it is filled with hidden eroticism that drags the reader into a daemonic and antiquated womb which is manifestly the author’s. The partisanship of the text and the reader is reduced by the hypothetical genuineness of the author’s objective.

The soundness of the text is thus focussed to a critic’s words not the incidence of the reader. Amplifying the Gothic, psychoanalysis seems to be late gothic story that has risen to help describe twentieth-century knowledge of contradictory aloofness from the panic of others and the precedent. This relevance of language eliminates the reader from the gothic fiction text. The text has unexpectedly become a caldron of depraved sensationalism contrasted with voyeurism and exhibitionism emphasized transvestism that demarcates the misuse of Christian moralism.

The Gothic fiction has had a massive effect and influence on many genres of literature since its beginning in the middle seventeenth century. Attractiveness of the Gothic genre has progressively amplified as the mistrust of the legends of the Age of Reason has been reached us. Nevertheless, literary criticism of the past as well as present has been dawdling to recognize the Gothic as a valid genre. Previously critics have traced the immensity of Gothic to revitalize a putrefying genre, but at present modern critics have found to shed new orientation into this literary mystery by diverse literary perspectives. Numerous opinions through the years have evaluated, but the most noteworthy of them is the psychoanalytical approach.

This strives to relate Freudian, Jungian, and post-Jungian notion and words to the Gothic text. Nonetheless, by implementing this perspective to a text it gives emancipation to the hazard of misreading a text. This assumption rules out the reader from the text whereas striking the author back into it. This decreases the soundness of the text by imagining the target of the author. Such readings and involving of literary tools concentrate on extraneous features of the text and lessen it to a medium to maintain ideas not in the actual text.

One of the reasons that this always has been, still is, and always will be one of the best examples of horror/gothic fiction, is because it exploits the universal disgust at human corpses. Whether they are whole, in pieces, fresh or decaying, it is safe to assume that almost anyone would be horrified and disgusted at the sight of them. Because Victor ‘dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave’ to gain body parts to create the monster, the monster is imagined, even with no further description, as hideously ugly, revolting, and probably unfeeling. This initial assumption definitely adds to the horror of the story, and also adds to the sympathy we perhaps feel later in the novel for the monster, at the way people judge him so cruelly.

Descriptions are highly detailed and create a vivid picture; often so detailed they could form a comprehensive travel guide. Conversely, as we move from Walton’s point of view to that of Victor these locations are made strange and foreign by the use of highly melodramatic and emotive language, ‘But it was augmented… the habitations of another race of beings’ , a practice common in both gothic and melodramatic writing.

The landscapes encountered are wild, barren and untamed and we move through a world of extremes; from the towering majesty of the Alps, via the wind swept remoteness of the Orkneys, to the barren wasteland of the Arctic and each step in Victor’s journey echoes his deteriorating sanity. This, combined with Shelley’s use of the weather to evoke a dark and brooding atmosphere overlies the narrative with an implication of the paranormal, leaving the reader always aware of a sensation of impeding doom.

The Creature is driven to his later actions by the behaviour of those around him and by a society who apportions worth on physical appearance and social standing. Where the Creature would give only love and affection, humanity gives him fear, repulsion and pain.

He is rejected by everyone, even by the old, blind elder De Lacy ‘Great God… Who are you’ but, even then, he retains his innate humanity. It is only after he is shot while saving the girl child from drowning that his personality begins to change ‘The feelings of kindness… gave place to hellish rage…’ and he begins to become the monster society perceives him to be. In responding to monstrous treatment he becomes monstrous.

Attack, Richard D., Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature, Norton, 2003. 89-91.

Bloom, C. (ed) Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond, 1998. Macmillan. 110.

Botting Fred – editor: The Gothic. Publisher: D.S. Brewer. Cambridge, England. 2001. 39, 71, 72, 156-57.

Burke, Edmund: The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke: With a Biographical and Critical Introduction. New York Public Library; 1834: Vol 1. p. 40-43, 74.

Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. vi.

Clark Sir Kenneth. The Gothic Revival: an Essay in the History of Taste. (Revised and Enlarged Edition; London: Constable, 1962.) p.237.

Clery, E.J. (2002) ‘The Genesis of “Gothic” Fiction.’ In: Hogle, J.E. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. 34-36.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1998. 139.

Hennelly, M.M. (2001) ‘Framing the Gothic: From Pillar to Post- Structuralism’ College Literature 28(3), pp. 15-26.

Hogle, J.E. (ed) the Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 2003. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 243.

Kemp, J. (2001) A Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms. Web.

Kilgour, M. The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 1997. Routledge: London. 66-70.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. p.61.

Punter, David. Ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000: 94–106.

Rabkin Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976. p.8.

Shelley. M., 1998, Frankenstein (1818 Text), Oxford University Press, Reading.

Stevenson, Robert Louis; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Signet Classics), Signet Book; Reprint edition (1994).

Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Macmillan, 1988) p. 1.

Walpole, H. (1964) The Castle of Otranto; A Gothic Story. London: Oxford University Press. p7.

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Gothic Novel | Definition, Characteristics, History, Essay, Examples in Literature

Gothic Novel in Literature

Table of Contents

Gothic Novel Definition

Gothic Novel is a “genre of fiction characterized by mystery and supernatural horror, often set in a dark castle or other medieval setting.” Such novel is pseudo-medieval fiction with a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Gothic novel is sometimes referred to as Gothic horror. It is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance .

Gothicism ‘s origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto , subtitled “A Gothic Story “. The Gothic novel was a branch of the larger Romantic movement that sought to stimulate strong emotions in the reader – fear and apprehension in this case.’ Such novel takes its name from medieval architecture, as it often hearkens back to the medieval era in spirit and subject matter and often uses Gothic buildings as a setting. The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror. It is an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole’s novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) are other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole.

Historical Background of Gothic

The Goths were one of the many Germanic tribes. They fought numerous battles with the Roman Empire for centuries. According to their own myths, as narrated by Jordanes, a Gothic historian from the mid 6th century, the Goths originated in what is now southern Sweden, but their king Berig led them to the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Later Goths separated into twongroups, the Visigoths (the West Goths) and Ostrogoths (the East Goths). They were named so because of the place where they finally settled.

They reached the height of their utmost power around 5th century A.D., when they sacked Rome and captured Spain, but their history finally subsumed under that of the countries they conquered (“Goths”). During the Renaissance, Europeans rediscovered Greco-Roman culture. They began to regard a particular type of architecture, mainly those built during the middle Ages, as “gothic.” It was not because of any connection to the Goths, but because the ‘Uomo Universale’ considered these buildings “barbaric” and definitely not in that Classical style. Centuries more passed before “gothic” came to describe a certain type of novels . This was named so because all these novels seem to take place in Gothic-styled architecture which was mainly castles, mansions, and abbeys.

Gothic Novel Characteristics

Setting in a castle or Mansions

An atmosphere of mystery and suspense pervaded by threatening feeling

An ancient and obscure prophecy may be connected with the castle or its inhabitants (either former or present).

Character may have Omens, portents, visions.

Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable and dramatic events may occur.

Characters may have high, even overwrought emotion resulting in crying and emotional speeches.

Female characters are often in distress and are oppressed in order to gain sympathy of the readers.

Women are threatened by a powerful and tyrannical male.

The metonymy of gloom and horror. Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which something (like rain) is used to stand for something else (like sorrow). For example, the film industry likes to use metonymy as a quick shorthand, so we often notice that it is raining in funeral scenes.

A peculiar glossary of the gothic novels for mystery, fear, terror, surprise, haste anger or largeness for creating the atmosphere.

Gothic Novel Examples

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is often regarded as the first true Gothic romance . Walpole was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for Gothic revival. A few good examples of Gothic fiction are Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) was the book that introduced more horrific elements into the English gothic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstei n (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are fine examples of gothic novels .

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a Gothic Novel

Gothic Novel: An Essay

The Gothic fiction , however, enjoyed its heyday from 1762 to 1820 and influenced and inspired the sensational writers of the late nineteenth century. Certain merits of the Gothic fiction have been recognised by the Freudian psychologists. Herbert Read in his book Surrealism remarks: “It is possible that Monk Lewis, Maturin and Mrs. Radcliffe should relatively to Scott, Dickens and Hardy occupy a much higher rank.” He had defended the Gothic fiction against the objections that the plots of these novels are fictitious, that the characters are unreal and the sentiments that excite are morbid,

“All these judgements merely reflect our prejudices. It is proper for a work of imagination to be fictitious, and for characters to be typical rather than realistic.”

Dr. D. P. Varma in his book “ The Gothic Flame ” observes : “The Gothic novel is a conception as vast and complex as a Gothic Cathedral. One finds in it the same sinister overtone and the same solemn grandeur.” According to Montague Summers ( The Gothic Quest ), Gothic was the essence of romanticism, and romanticism was the literary expression of supernaturalism. As a matter of fact, the Gothic fiction was a profound reaction against the long domination of reason and authority. The Gothic novelists enlarged the sense of reality and its impact on human beings. It acknowledged the nonrational in the world of things and events, occasionally in the realm of transcendental, ultimately and most persistently in the depth of the human being. The application of Freudian psychology to literature has altered our attitude to the Gothic romances. The suppressed neurotic and erotic of educated society are reflected in the Gothic romances.

“The scenes of no in the Gothic fiction may have been the harmless release of that innate sp of cruelty which is present in each of us, an impulse mysterious inextricable connected with the very forces of life and death”

(Prof. Varma)

The Gothic fiction has a resemblance to the Gothic Architecture . The weird and eerie atmosphere of Gothic fiction was derived from the Gothic architecture which evoked feelings of horror, wildness, suspense and gloom. The stimulation of fear and the probing of the mysterious provided the raison d’etre of the Gothic novelists who took an important part in liberating the emotional energies that had been so long restrained by common sense and good form.

A number of influences contributed to the growth of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. It developed against the spirit of the Age of Reason and the stern warning of Dr. Johnson. The Gothic novel owes particularly to the picturesque antiquarianism, ruins and graveyard sentiment. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival says : The Gothic novelists were the natural successors to the Graveyard poets. In the 18th century , the ghost stories were wide in circulation and people showed interest in questions of life, death, the occult, magic and astrology. The popularity of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton intensified people’s belief in the supernatural. The Gothic novelists were inspired by the examples of Italy, France and Germany and by the oriental allegory or moral apologue of the east. Addison’s The Vision of Mirza (1711) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) gave some colour to Gothic romance .

Horace Walpole was the pioneer in Gothic fiction. Walpole’s sensitive imagination and dreaming mind absorbed the spirit of romanticism. His antiquarian interests caught the Gothic spirit–the romantic setting the continuous spell of horror, the colour of melancholy, awe and superstition which blossomed in The Castle of Otranto (1764). The Gothic romance is a horror novel in which we have walking skeletons, pictures that move out of their frames and their blood-curdling incidents. The ghostly machinery is often cumbrous but as a return to the romantic elements of mystery and fear, the book is noteworthy. Diana Neill, however, dismisses the book as amusing rather than frightening. Virginia Woolf in an article stated, “Walpole had imagination, taste, style in addition to a passion for the romantic past.” Miss Clara Reeve wrote many Gothic romances, the chief of them being

‘The Old English Baron’. She was the first Gothic novelist to make use of dreams. Miss Clara Reeve, however, lacked vivid imagination. Montague Summers condemns The Old English Baron as a “dull and didactic narrative told in a style of chilling mediocrity.”

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe , the wife of an Oxford graduate has been called “the Shakespeare of Romance writers”. Montague Summers refers to the sombre and sublime genius of Ann Radcliffe. Her romantic temperament, her passion for music and wild scenery, her love of solitude, her interest in the mysterious, her ability to arouse wonder and fear helped her in writing masterpiece in Gothic fiction. During the years 1789-1797, she wrote five romances Castles of Athlian and Dubayne , A Cicelian Romance , The Romance of the Forest , The Mysteries of Udolpho , The Italian Coleridge called The Mystery of Udolpho “the most interesting novel in the English language” . Its noble outline, its majestic and beautiful images harmonizing with the scenes exert an irresistible fascination. It gradually rises from the gentlest beauty towards the terrific and the sublime. Unlike other terror novelists, Mrs. Radcliffe rationalised the supernatural. We hear mysterious voices in the chamber of Udolpho, but we are told that they were the wanton tricks of a prisoner. She employed scenery for their own sake in the novel. Moreover, by her insight into the workings of fear, she contributed to the development of the psychological novel . She adopted the dramatic structure of the novel which influenced the Victorian novelists. Thus her influence percolated through Scott on the 19th century novel in its various aspects-psychological, romantic and structural.

Matthew Gregory Lewis made a spine-chilling and blood-curdling use of magic and necromancy and pointed the grim and ghastly themes in lurid colours. His The Monk absorbed the ghastly and crude supernaturalism of the German Romantic movement in English fiction. It is melodrama epitomised. He indulges in crude supernaturalism rising to a grotesque climax borrowed from Dr. Faustus , when a demon rescues the villain-hero from execution only to fly high in the air with him and drop him to his death cm jagged rocks.

Beckford’s Vathek is wholly a fantasy. Its air of mystery arises from supposedly unnatural causes, while a sense of horror is heightened for artistic effect. Its gorgeous style and stately descriptions, its exaltation of both poetic and moral justice relate it to the Gothic romance,

Charles Robert Maturin wrote a number of nicely constructed Gothic romances : The Fatal Revenge (1807), The Wild Irish Boy (1808). The Mebsian Chief (1872), Melmoth , The Wanderer (1820). Maturin dispensed with the spine-chilling paraphernalia of the Terror School and concentrated his attention on the suggestive and psychological handling of the stories. His acute insight into character, vivid descriptive faculty and sensitive style of writing are in the tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe; but by his unabashed of the supernatural he treads in the footsteps of Lewis. He introduces horror in the novel by the clever Radcliffian device of reticence and suggestion. His Melmoth the Wanderer may be called the swan song of Gothic fiction . After it the fashion gradually died away. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a remarkable Gothic novel. She employed the pseudo-scientific technique in depicting horrors in the novel. William Godwin wrote two horror novels Caleb Williams and St. Leon. He neither imitates the suggestive method of Mrs. Radcliffe, nor the gruesome horrors of Gregory Lewis, but he creates physical realistic horrors in his novels.

Gothic Literature in the Romantic Period

In both Gothic and romantic creeds there is a tendency to slip imperceptivity from the real into the other world, to demolish barriers between the physical and the psychic or supernatural. Wordsworth’s Guilt and Sorrow , Peter Bell , Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner , Kubla Khan , Christabel , Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Mercy , Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas are some Gothic poems influenced by the technique and devices of the Gothic fiction.

Gothic Literature in the Victorian Period

The Gothic romances have great influence on the Victorian and modern fiction. The sensational novels of Bulwar Lytton, Wilkie Collins in their emphasis on mystery and terror are a direct descent from the Gothic novels. The Bronte sisters luxuriously used the suggestive method of Radcliffe for creating the Gothic atmosphere in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre . Walter de la Mare’s Poem The Listeners is full of gothic setting.

Gothic Literature in the Modern Period

In modern times, the fantasy of H. G. Wells , and C. S. Lewis, J . K Rowling, Edgar Allan Poe shows us worlds unknown, monstrous and horrible. The modern detective novels of Edgar Wallace and Peter Cheney are influenced by the Gothic romances. They provided a pattern and also inspired the sensational writers of to-day with the incentive that set them on the sinister paths of crime fiction.

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A Look at The Gothic Components in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Categories: The Picture of Dorian Gray

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Published: Jun 29, 2018

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Robbins, R., Wolfreys, J., & Womack, K. (2000). ‘Withered, Wrinkled, and Loathsome of Visage’: Reading the Ethics of the Soul and the Late-Victorian Gothic in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, 168-181. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230598737_9)
Poteet, L. J. (1971). " Dorian Gray" and the Gothic Novel. Modern Fiction Studies, 17(2), 239-248. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/26279102)
Scheible, E. (2014). Imperialism, Aesthetics, and Gothic Confrontation in The Picture of Dorian Gray. New Hibernia Review, 18(4), 131-150. (https://www.pdcnet.org/nhr/content/nhr_2014_0018_0004_0131_0150)
Ethridge, K. L. (2014). The Queer Gothic Hero's Journey in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. (https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/48/)
Stegner, P. (2007). Oscar Wilde's Gothic: The Presence of Edgar Allan Poe in The Picture of Dorian Gray (Doctoral dissertation, University of Idaho). (https://www.worldcat.org/title/oscar-wildes-gothic-the-presence-of-edgar-allan-poe-in-the-picture-of-dorian-gray/oclc/262480261)

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Understanding the Gothic Elements in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre

05.16.2023 // By Tome Tailor

Charlotte Bronte’s seminal work, Jane Eyre, is not only a classic of Victorian literature, but it also has fascinating elements of gothic fiction. Published in 1847, the novel narrates the tale of an orphan, Jane, who grows up to become a governess and falls in love with her employer, Mr. Rochester. Throughout the novel, several gothic elements are apparent, which make the story incredibly captivating and intense.

In this article, we will explore the different ways in which Charlotte Bronte incorporated gothic elements into Jane Eyre, emphasizing the dark and supernatural atmosphere, eerie settings, and psychological torment suffered by the characters.

An Atmosphere Shrouded in Darkness and the Supernatural

One of the most prominent features of gothic fiction is the presence of a dark and malevolent atmosphere, often involving elements of the supernatural. In Jane Eyre, this is evident from the very beginning when young Jane is locked in the Red Room after an altercation with her cousin John Reed. The Red Room is described as a mysterious, haunted place where Jane’s uncle had died, and she is terrified by her own imagination, believing that she sees her uncle’s ghost.

Throughout the novel, Jane continuously encounters mysterious occurrences and eerie events that suggest supernatural forces at work. For example, the mysterious laughter she hears at Thornfield, which is later revealed to be Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s secret wife imprisoned in the attic. Additionally, Jane experiences prophetic dreams and communicates with Mr. Rochester through telepathy, further fueling the sense of the supernatural.

These dark and mysterious elements in the atmosphere of the novel serve primarily to heighten the tension and underscore the psychological struggles faced by the characters, most notably Jane and Mr. Rochester.

Eerie Settings and Melancholic Landscapes

Gothic literature often involves eerie, isolated, and decrepit environments, which function to heighten the feelings of fear, mystery, and apprehension. In Jane Eyre, the primary setting of the novel is the gloomy Thornfield Hall, an imposing and mysterious place described as a “dark, low, and ancient” building with a “narrow, winding approach”.

Thornfield Hall embodies many of the characteristics of a traditional gothic setting, with its secret rooms, hidden passageways, and the haunting presence of Bertha Mason. The house itself seems to possess an inherent menace, and at times, it seems as if Thornfield is a malevolent force that seeks to manipulate and torment the characters.

Apart from Thornfield Hall, the novel is also abundant with melancholic landscapes that further enhance the gothic elements. This is particularly evident in the dreary and wild moors surrounding the house, which are mentioned several times throughout the novel. The desolate and harsh landscapes complement the dark, foreboding atmosphere and serve as a metaphor for the turmoil faced by the characters.

Psychological Torment and Emotional Turmoil

Characters in gothic fiction often experience deep psychological torment and emotional turmoil, which is reflected in their actions and relationships with others. In Jane Eyre, both the protagonist, Jane, and her employer, Mr. Rochester, face tremendous internal conflict and suffer greatly as a result.

Jane struggles with her self-identity and yearns for a sense of belonging, as she faces discrimination and maltreatment from various individuals in her life, including her cruel aunt, Mrs. Reed, and her hypocritical headmaster, Mr. Brocklehurst. Additionally, her moral conscience is challenged when she discovers Mr. Rochester’s dark secret and must decide whether to stay with him or follow her principles.

Similarly, Mr. Rochester is a man haunted by his past and tormented by his actions. He lives with the immense guilt and shame of imprisoning his mentally unstable wife, Bertha Mason, and attempts to atone for his sins by attempting to develop a relationship with Jane, believing her purity and goodness can redeem him.

These psychological struggles enhance the gothic tone of the novel by providing a depth to the characters and exploring themes of morality, love, and redemption.

In summary, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is rich in gothic elements that contribute to the dark and intense atmosphere that pervades the novel. The presence of the supernatural, eerie settings, and psychological torment experienced by the characters makes Jane Eyre a fascinating study in gothic fiction. These elements enhance the characters’ depth and the novel’s themes, creating a captivating and timeless work of literature.

If you haven’t read or listened to Jane Eyre yet, now is the time to dive into this immersive gothic tale. Click here to buy it on Amazon and begin your journey through the mysterious world of Thornfield Hall.

Gothic Literature : the Characteristics of Gothic Fiction

This essay about the enduring influence and characteristics of Gothic prose, exploring its themes of dread, obscurity, and the paranormal. It examines the genre’s distinct settings, brooding ambiance, supernatural elements, and intricate characters, illustrating how Gothic literature delves into the darker aspects of human nature and our fascination with the eerie. Through examples from notable works like “Rebecca,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “Wuthering Heights,” the essay underscores the genre’s enduring relevance in captivating readers with tales that blur the lines between reality and the supernatural.

How it works

Gothic prose, originating in the midst of the 18th century, persists as among the most enduring and adaptable literary categories in Western culture, exerting influence over literature, cinema, and art up to the present. Anchored in an intrigue with medievalism, the paranormal, and the enigmatic, Gothic narratives are renowned for their distinctive fusion of dread and amour, probing into human cognition through motifs of dread, obscurity, and the unexplainable. Gothic literature’s traits encompass distinct locales, ambiance and mood, otherworldly components, and intricate personages, all serving to evoke the reader’s profound anxieties and challenge the demarcations between reality and the paranormal.

Among the most conspicuous attributes of Gothic prose is its setting. Gothic narratives frequently unfold in desolate, distant settings that parallel the somber themes and lugubrious narratives that propel the storyline. Antediluvian fortresses, dilapidated manors, secluded hamlets, and ominous woodlands abound. These settings transcend mere stage settings for the unfolding events; they are integral to the ambiance and often mirror the inner turmoil of the characters or function as a metaphor for degeneration and descent. As exemplified by the decrepit manor of Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” symbolizing the decay of antiquated aristocratic customs and the haunting legacy of the past on the present.

Ambiance and mood are equally pivotal in Gothic prose, often characterized as brooding, lugubrious, and taut. This ambiance is meticulously crafted through elaborate portrayals of setting, weather, and milieu, fostering a sense of apprehension and impending disaster. The utilization of gloomy, vivid imagery serves to construct a backdrop conducive to tales of terror and anguish. An archetypal instance can be discerned in Edgar Allan Poe’s oeuvre, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where the atmosphere is palpably tense and ominous, mirroring the psychological intricacy and instability of its characters.

Supernatural components constitute another hallmark of Gothic prose. These may encompass specters, fiends, accursed individuals, and other fantastical entities. Frequently, these supernatural elements are deployed to delve into motifs of madness, existential dread, and the human psyche. However, what sets many Gothic tales apart is the ambiguity surrounding whether these elements are truly supernatural or figments of a character’s tormented psyche. This ambiguity is a central feature in Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” where the authentic nature of the phantoms remains nebulous, blurring the delineations between the paranormal and the psychological.

The personages in Gothic prose are intricate and often tormented by past transgressions or calamities, fueling the psychological tension in the narrative. Gothic protagonists are typically flawed, plagued by secrets, or burdened by remorse. Heroines, conversely, frequently find themselves in jeopardy, confronting mysterious or supernatural forces. These personages transcend mere victims or malefactors; they are profoundly developed, with their anxieties and aspirations frequently propelling the narrative forward. Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” furnishes a vivid illustration of Gothic characters with its portrayal of the tormented Heathcliff and the tragic figure of Catherine Earnshaw, whose passionate, doomed liaison is punctuated by jealousy, retribution, and reclamation.

To conclude, Gothic prose offers a profound exploration of the somber facets of human nature and our captivation with the eerie. Through its ominous settings, mood-infused narratives, otherworldly elements, and intricate personages, the genre probes into the abysses of terror, fixation, and the paranormal. These facets converge to ensure that Gothic prose endures in captivating and terrifying readers, underscoring that our deepest apprehensions do not solely stem from the phantasms lurking in the shadows, but from what lurks within ourselves. This genre remains profoundly pertinent as it delves into motifs that are universally human: dread, demise, the enigmatic, and the supernatural, all interwoven into tales that are as gripping today as they were upon their inception.

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The best new science fiction books of May 2024

A new Stephen King short story collection, an Ursula K. Le Guin reissue and a celebration of cyberpunk featuring writing from Philip K. Dick and Cory Doctorow are among the new science fiction titles published this month

By Alison Flood

A new short story collection from Stephen King, You Like It Darker, is out in May

Shane Leonard

Every month, I trawl through publishers’ catalogues so I can tell you about the new science fiction being released. And every month, I’m disappointed to see so much more fantasy on publishers’ lists than sci-fi. I know it’s a response to the huge boom in readers of what’s been dubbed “ romantasy ”, and I’m not knocking it – I love that sort of book too. But it would be great to see more good, hard, mind-expanding sci-fi in the offing as well.

In the meantime, there is definitely enough for us sci-fi fans to sink our teeth into this month, whether it’s a reissue of classic writing from Ursula K. Le Guin, some new speculative short stories from Stephen King or murder in space from Victor Manibo and S. A. Barnes.

Last month, I tipped Douglas Preston’s Extinction and Sofia Samatar’s The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain as books I was looking forward to. I can report that they were both excellent: Extinction was a lot of good, clean, Jurassic Park -tinged fun, while Samatar’s offering was a beautiful and thought-provoking look at life on a generation ship.

The Language of the Night: Essays on writing, science fiction, and fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin

There are few sci-fi and fantasy writers more brilliant (and revered) than Ursula K. Le Guin. This reissue of her first full-length collection of essays features a new introduction from Hugo and Nebula award-winner Ken Liu and covers the writing of The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea , as well as her advocacy for sci-fi and fantasy as legitimate literary mediums. I’ve read some of these essays but not all, and I won’t be missing this collection.

Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen

This isn’t science fiction, not quite, but it is one of the best and most important books I have read for some time. It sees Jacobsen lay out, minute by minute, what would happen if an intercontinental ballistic missile hit Washington DC. How would the US react? What, exactly, happens if deterrence fails? Jacobsen has spoken to dozens of military experts to put together what her publisher calls a “non-fiction thriller”, and what I call the scariest book I have possibly ever read (and I’m a Stephen King fan; see below). We’re currently reading it at the New Scientist Book Club, and you can sign up to join us here .

Read an extract from Nuclear War: A scenario by Annie Jacobsen

In this terrifying extract from Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario, the author lays out what would happen in the first seconds after a nuclear missile hits the Pentagon

The Big Book of Cyberpunk (Vol 1 & 2)

Forty years ago, William Gibson published Neuromancer . Since then, it has entranced millions of readers right from its unforgettable opening line: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel…”. Neuromancer gave us the literary genre that is cyberpunk, and we can now welcome a huge, two-volume anthology celebrating cyberpunk’s best stories, by writers from Cory Doctorow to Justina Robson, and from Samuel R. Delaney to Philip K. Dick. I have both glorious-sounding volumes, brought together by anthologist Jared Shurin, on my desk (using up most of the space on it), and I am looking forward to dipping in.

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

You could categorise Stephen King as a horror writer. I see him as an expert chronicler of the dark side of small-town America, and from The Tommyknockers and its aliens to Under the Dome with its literally divisive trope, he frequently slides into sci-fi. Even the horror at the heart of It is some sort of cosmic hideousness. He is one of my favourite writers, and You Like It Darker is a new collection of short stories that moves from “the folds in reality where anything can happen” to a “psychic flash” that upends dozens of lives. There’s a sequel to Cujo , and a look at “corners of the universe best left unexplored”. I’ve read the first story so far, and I can confirm there is plenty for us sci-fi fans here.

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

Not sci-fi, but fiction about science – and from one of the UK’s most exciting writers (if you haven’t read The Essex Serpent yet, you’re in for a treat). This time, Perry tells the story of Thomas Hart, a columnist on the Essex Chronicle who becomes a passionate amateur astronomer as the comet Hale-Bopp approaches in 1997. Our sci-fi columnist Emily Wilson is reviewing it for New Scientist ’s 11 May issue, and she has given it a vigorous thumbs up (“a beautiful, compassionate and memorable book,” she writes in a sneak preview just for you guys).

Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes

Dr Ophelia Bray is a psychologist and expert in the study of Eckhart-Reiser syndrome, a fictional condition that affects space travellers in terrible ways. She’s sent to help a small crew whose colleague recently died, but as they begin life on an abandoned planet, she realises that her charges are hiding something. And then the pilot is murdered… Horror in space? Mysterious planets? I’m up for that.

In Hey, Zoey, the protagonist finds an animatronic sex doll hidden in her garage

Shutterstock / FOTOGRIN

Hey, Zoey by Sarah Crossan

Hot on the heels of Sierra Greer’s story about a sex robot wondering what it means to be human in Annie Bot , the acclaimed young adult and children’s author Sarah Crossan has ventured into similar territory. In Hey, Zoey , Dolores finds an animatronic sex doll hidden in her garage and assumes it belongs to her husband David. She takes no action – but then Dolores and Zoey begin to talk, and Dolores’s life changes.

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler

Davi has tried to take down the Dark Lord before, rallying humanity and making the final charge – as you do. But the time loop she is stuck in always defeats her, and she loses the battle in the end. This time around, Davi decides that the best thing to do is to become the Dark Lord herself. You could argue that this is fantasy, but it has a time loop, so I’m going to count it as sci-fi. It sounds fun and lighthearted: quotes from early readers are along the lines of “A darkly comic delight”, and we could all use a bit of that these days.

Escape Velocity by Victor Manibo

It’s 2089, and there’s an old murder hanging over the clientele of Space Habitat Altaire, a luxury space hotel, while an “unforeseen threat” is also brewing in the service corridors. A thriller in space? Sounds excellent – and I’m keen to see if Manibo makes use of the latest research into the angle at which blood might travel following violence in space, as reported on by our New Scientist humour columnist Marc Abrahams recently.

The best new science fiction books of March 2024

With a new Adrian Tchaikovsky, Mars-set romance from Natasha Pulley and a high-concept thriller from Stuart Turton due to hit shelves, there is plenty of great new science fiction to be reading in March

In Our Stars by Jack Campbell

Part of the Doomed Earth series, this follows Lieutenant Selene Genji, who has been genetically engineered with partly alien DNA and has “one last chance to save the Earth from destruction”. Beautifully retro cover for this space adventure – not to judge a book in this way, of course…

The Downloaded by Robert J. Sawyer

Two sets of people have had their minds uploaded into a quantum computer in the Ontario of 2059. Astronauts preparing for the world’s first interstellar voyage form one group; the other contains convicted murderers, sentenced to a virtual-reality prison. Naturally, disaster strikes, and, yup, they must work together to save Earth from destruction. Originally released as an Audible Original with Brendan Fraser as lead narrator, this is the first print edition of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning Sawyer’s 26 th novel.

The Ferryman by Justin Cronin

Just in case you still haven’t read it, Justin Cronin’s gloriously dreamy novel The Ferryman , set on an apparently utopian island where things aren’t quite as they seem, is out in paperback this month. It was the first pick for the New Scientist Book Club, and it is a mind-bending, dreamy stunner of a read. Go try it – and sign up for the Book Club in the meantime!

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Geoffrey Mak Still Hasn’t Lost Hope in the Personal Essay

By jake nevins, photographed by acudus aranyian, may 7, 2024.

Geoffrey Mak, photographed by Acudus.

Last month, when I spoke to the writer and critic Geoffrey Mak about his debut collection of essays, Mean Boys , a white flower petal floated into his coffee just as he explained how he came to reconcile with his father, a firebrand conservative minister who features prominently in one of the book’s standout pieces, a tough but largely merciful account of their strained relationship and the indignities of the Evangelical church. It was a storybook moment that struck me as almost inappropriately mawkish, since Mak is not one for heavy sentiment. In Mean Boys , he applies a fierce intellect and a certain defiant posture to subjects as varied as edgelords, art fairs, raves, agitprop, organized religion, and mass murderers, but the conclusions reached are rarely tidy or comforting. Paranoia, distrust, and violence, Mak argues, are the defining sensibilities of these strange times. But we nevertheless retain our capacity for joy and intimacy, to be found, perhaps, in the random kindness of a stranger on the dance floor, or in the act of writing itself. “When I write, I care less about admiration and more about connection,” Mak explained. “And this very rich expansion of the soul can only happen with the personal essay.” Just before his book’s release, he and I got together downtown to talk about pain, pleasure, Trump, trad caths, and the Kardashians.

NEVINS: I finished the title essay last night. I feel like I should tell you up front that a very dear friend of mine grew up with Elliot Rodger and is mentioned by name in his manifesto. She’s actually working on this short in which she imagines his mother getting the call about the murders. So that was heavy on my mind as I was reading.

MAK: Oh, wow. Yeah, the mom. I tried not to do the whole “what went wrong” thing. I don’t think anyone wanted my speculation. But I felt really bad for her because like, she wasn’t that Asian parent who wouldn’t give positive affirmation. She really did, and she really had a kind of infinite patience. I don’t think Elliot was going out of his way to portray her well and she still came out pretty loving. So I feel really bad for her. Yeah, I would definitely watch this short.

NEVINS: I’ll keep you posted. Anyway, I was reading the title essay through the lens of your author’s note, in which you kind of riff on the uses and abuses of the personal essay. I’m curious to know what the utility of the form is for you, particularly in regard to these pieces.

MAK: Oh my gosh, I’m so opinionated on this. Where do I start? The personal essay now is really evolving. There are usually two directions it takes. I mean, everybody hates it. So the question is, “How do we make this less hateable?” And you either have one of two choices, which is to make it more like fiction or to make it more like journalism. And I think the pressure to push it in the direction of journalism is to back it up with research or reporting. So it’s like, this was my childhood in the church. Now I’m going to give you the history of the Presbyterian Church in America over the last couple centuries, and then I’m going to go back to myself.

NEVINS: And then in section four, we’ll do some scene work and actually go back to the church you had disavowed…

MAK: Yes, we’ve all read it. And I do really enjoy these essays. But specifically with Elliot Roger, I wanted to ask the question of what role pain has to do in our self-reported personal essays? Because I think our culture gives enormous authority to pain, but that also depends on who you are. If your pain is femme, queer, or non-white, it’s going to be respected as a source of authority. But we don’t seem to give a lot of aesthetic value or respect to stories of class deprivation. And then, in terms of status deprivation, there’s almost no discussion whatsoever because I don’t think our culture understands that status is real. But instead of using pain as a badge, there are other ways to represent it in literature, such as using it to disarm yourself and to become more open to relationships. I mean, something that really excites me about writing a memoir is the intense intimacy I will have with strangers I might never meet. I wanted to open the door to strange and intense intimacies. When I write, I care less about admiration and more about connection. And this very rich expansion of the soul can only happen with the personal essay. It’s special to me.

NEVINS: Yeah, I agree with that. I’m curious if it is any more or less strange than the intimacies that you write about experiencing more fleetingly while, say, K-holed on a dance floor. Those people will presumably know far less about you than your readers.

MAK: That’s true. But I am pretty much an open book. My boyfriend was like, “I’ve never met someone so unembarrassable before.” I write pretty openly about these years-long dry spells where I just wasn’t having any sex. And I think what happened during those years is that my brain and body and soul became really sensitive to opportunities for other kinds of intimacy other than sex. I think that wouldn’t have been the case if I were having a regular sex life. There are so many kinds of intimacy. I was listening to a lecture by the poet, Jorie Graham, and she was talking about how there’s a layer of intelligence in the human mind that is universal, and that’s the sensory one. Another thing about intimacy is that it doesn’t actually require knowledge. So when you’re on the dance floor, you’re radically intimate with all of these people moving together in the same direction, like a flock of birds. It’s really intimate to feel intense, purposeless joy.

NEVINS: I loved the section about how you assume a sort of maternal posture on the dance floor as the person whose job it was to sort of track everyone else’s highs. You and McKenzie Wark are writing more perceptively about nightlife than most people.

MAK: That book’s [ Raving ] amazing.

NEVINS: Yeah, that book’s great. But it does feel like the exception, since a lot of nightlife writing is just like, name-droppy.

MAK: That’s true. Speaking of, I feel a little bad. I wrote a lot about my dad and I didn’t write a lot about my mom, and I’m actually much closer to my mother.

NEVINS: Well, that doesn’t surprise me after reading about your dad.

MAK: I know…

NEVINS: Has he read it?

MAK: He got the book on Sunday.

NEVINS: You couldn’t get him a galley?

MAK: I didn’t want to because I wanted to give him a finished copy. I was like, “Is it okay if you don’t read certain essays?” And he was like, “Geoff, it’s fine. It’s not going to be a big deal.” I can’t imagine him opening the table of contents and reading the title, My Father, the Minister and not reading it immediately.

NEVINS: It’s so hard, but we’re powerless. When I was 18 and had just moved to New York, I wrote this cringe essay in New York Magazine about getting paid for sex by a very famous artist who was 50 years older than me. It was my very first byline and I didn’t name him. I was like, “Mom, I was published in New York Magazine. But you can’t read it.” I assume she went online and read it anyway.

MAK: If I was more assertive about it, I think my dad would’ve respected it. But I mean, it’s a little bit selfish for me because it actually doesn’t make a huge difference. I wanted to protect him from certain things, but if he’s like, “It’s not a big deal,” then I’d be like, “Yeah, you know yourself. I’ll trust you.” It’s tricky because there’s the essay in the book about my father and then there’s the New Yorker one, which is basically the same exact material, but kind of truncated. But in the New Yorker one, I wanted to celebrate my dad. I wanted to tell the world that it was possible for a firebrand conservative to actually change his mind. But when I wrote the one in the book, I was in utter rage. The one in the book makes me look good. I’m the wronged one. I’m the one with the emotional strength to be like, “I forgive you.” But in the New Yorker one, I look really bad. I’m the burnout, the drug addict. I’m the one who goes home penniless and my dad says, “Yeah, I’ll take you in.” I think it’s a fuller story.

NEVINS: Well, having read them both, I think this raises interesting questions about form. Narratively, in the container of the personal essay, did you not feel that both of these truths could coexist? By which I mean, do you feel that particular story, as it exists on the page, requires the tension of a character who’s plainly virtuous and one who’s not?

MAK: Well, the two of them together is a story of mutual forgiveness and at the end of the book version, I had this epiphany that we forgive people not because we think they can earn it one day. That’s not how forgiveness works. If you can earn forgiveness, that’s just called penance. What forgiveness really means is that we forgive someone because they can never earn it. There’s this moment where I call my father a coward. It’s pretty harsh, but I had asked him if he’d tell his church about me and he said no. So this kind of really intense failure is actually why I forgive him.

NEVINS: There’s no way a flower petal just fell into your coffee.

MAK: Right as we got to the moment of forgiveness. And to see him change made me radically optimistic about what the human heart is capable of. This isn’t in the book, but I did return to Christianity. Watching my dad model what a Christian was capable of made it quite appealing to me. I left Christianity and embraced queerness. And then when I came back to Christianity, I didn’t leave queerness. I brought it with me. I began reading some hard theology, and by “hard theology” I mean theology that’s meant for theologians. Liberals and leftists really hate Christians. And I’m not surprised. They have reason to. I hate them too. But all of the criticisms that the left has of Christianity, theology has answered them. People just don’t care enough to read it. It’s easier to have a target that’s demonized, and what’s more easy to demonize than the Evangelical church. I mean, they’re awful. But my whole life has been about finding tiny minorities that I could find a home in. I was never going to find a big movement that I felt was speaking to me. So there were the raves, there was theology, there was X, Y, and Z. But the stuff is out there, and it’s really thrilling.

NEVINS: This makes me curious to hear your thoughts on what you might call the kind of shallow iteration of religiosity coursing through downtown New York these days, which seems to me more reactionary than genuinely inquisitive.

MAK: Oh my god, yeah. Well, it is a little reactionary. Obviously, edgelords are a really big theme in the book. It’s hard to say what’s really going on there. Okay, tinfoil hat coming on. I had this epiphany when I was watching The Kardashians . You have this family that’s probably voting liberal. I mean, Caitlin isn’t, but I think most of the family is. But the show itself is a resounding endorsement of conservative ways of being, so to have this culture so loud and syndicated everywhere is to really promote a conservative way of life. And then I began to think of Trad Caths and like, you have all of these people in Dimes Square who are certainly voting liberal.

NEVINS: Well, if they’re voting at all.

MAK: Right, or they’re not voting. But them doing the hard work of stylizing Christianity and Catholicism and making it look cool is actually endorsing a kind of conservative constituency. I can’t not have a little bit of affection for the Trad Cath movement. I kind of love it on some level. I think it’s hilarious. Some people say to me, “Oh, but they’re not real.” They’re not real practitioners, they don’t actually believe. And I’m just like, “I’m not here to police that. I’m not ever here to police who’s the real Catholic, who’s the real trans, who’s the real leftist.” We can have rings of participation and intensities and seriousness.

NEVINS: Well, it’s interesting you say that. It’s such a rhetorical cudgel, but in the last several months I’ve experienced being told I’m not a “real Jew” for being pro-Palestine, which is really frustrating because I’m not only proud to be Jewish, but I also very much partake in all its cultural traditions, which I understand to be a spirit of community and fellowship and intellectual inquiry.

MAK: Who’s saying that to you?

NEVINS: Well, it mostly comes from Zionists. And I hate to create some sort of hierarchy, but the people saying that are certainly not any more observant than I am. They just seem to think that Zionism endows them with some totally arbitrary authority to decide who really is and isn’t Jewish. So I very much appreciate that despite having returned to Christianity yourself, you don’t take it upon yourself to police its other variants.

MAK: I kind of love the Praying shirts without the praying. I don’t have one. The moment’s a little bit over. But I have a little bit of affection.

NEVINS: I want to talk about Edgelords real quick because I think it’s a really impressive and expansive essay. Forgive me if I’m misstating the thesis, but—

MAK: I mean, it’s kind of messy. There are multiple theses.

NEVINS: Chief among them is that you’re identifying paranoia as the spirit of our age. Sometimes it can feel like we’re too close to an era or a scene to really assess it accurately. You write about the ways you were driven to what you call “madness.” I’m curious how you came to this organizing theory of the times.

MAK: Oh my gosh, there’s so much to say. There was a fundamental shift in how politics mobilized culture for its own advantages. There’s this excellent book, Kill All Normies by Angela Nagle. And if anybody reads it now, they’ll be like, “Duh, this is obvious.” But it really wasn’t when it came out. And basically the observation is that before, we thought politics would get to the center of culture and move out from there, just sending out the signals from the center and it’ll reach everyone eventually. And what Nagle tracked was that culture didn’t work top-down anymore. It actually worked bottom-up. You had very obscure communities that were disparate, fragmented, but they were meeting each other online, such as gamers, and they were interacting regularly, and they were organically growing really intense political beliefs and affinities. So if you look at Hillary versus Trump, they didn’t work from the center. Well, Trump was better at doing this than Hillary, but Trump was like, “I’m going to endorse the gamers and then I’ll get them on my side. I’m not going to create the gamers. I’m not going to tell them what to do. I’m just going to look for these obscure things.” So sometimes he would tweet things that only 200 people were meant to see.

NEVINS: Just so I’m understanding correctly, you’re suggesting that, as opposed to dictating to what might be a potential voting bloc or constituency, his politics were instead kind of subordinated to theirs?

MAK: He would pick people who already agreed with him.It was more about signals. Suddenly, signals became really important in a way that I don’t think they were before. I mean, the trans bathroom thing. That was really a Tumblr thing. Just a lot of young people on Tumblr were getting really up in arms about it. And then I think the Democratic Party was like, “Oh, it’s burgeoning in the underground, we need to get ahead of this now.” And then they did. So suddenly this very obscure Tumblr thing became a national discussion. That is kind of how culture works now, but it’s also due to the collapse of the mainstream-underground binary. Now, everyone kind of has their own micro-tribe, which is utterly illegible to other micro-tribes even though they might live a couple blocks away from each other. I mean, we feel that in New York, even just looking at Tribeca versus the Lower East Side. The art worlds that exist in the two are so different, yet they’re so close. And then, to go back to the point about paranoia, the Cambridge Analytica revelations were almost as big as the NSA revelations to me. I don’t think my friends cared as much as I did. But for some reason, I was just really locked onto it. To see how the campaign was explicitly stoking paranoia in their favor was absolutely alarming to me. And then I began to look at the culture and see all of these patterns of paranoia, and this was also happening concurrently with my own psychological degradation. It’s so funny, because the paranoid would see patterns, but as a paranoid, I began to see patterns of paranoia, which actually is what Eve Sedgwick writes about—how paranoia simply looks for itself. I actually see Mean Boys as a more morally and psychologically advanced text than Edgelords . In a way, M ean B oys rejects paranoia and decides to welcome in something that is toxic and harmful, which one might call a reparative gesture. The paranoid always pushes things out, and instead, I wanted to let something in, but without compromising judgment.

NEVINS: There was something really sobering about Mean Boys . You render Elliot Rodger almost grossly human, but I didn’t feel as though you were subject to his manipulations, which I guess is what people worry about when they clutch their pearls about writers “humanizing” bad guys.

MAK: I think it goes back to forgiveness. I’ll never say I forgive Elliot Rodger. I was not the one who was harmed. But I think there’s an affect that doesn’t have a name, where you hold love and judgment together without one diminishing the other.

NEVINS: Well, you could call that love.

MAK: You’re right. I love that. That’s just love.

NEVINS: Anyway, what are you reading these days?

MAK: I’m literally four pages in, but I am reading Then the War by Carl Phillips. I’m reading a lot of poetry these days. Oh my god, so good. He’s kind of a poet for sentence writers. I think prose writers really like him. And being a prose writer myself, I really like it.

NEVINS: I feel that way about Vijay Seshadri.

MAK: Oh, I should read them. I’ve been reading a lot of Louise Glück.

NEVINS: That makes sense.

MAK: Does it? That’s so funny. I’ve been reading the collections back to back. It’s funny because when you get a 70-page poetry book in the mail, you really can read in one sitting. So I’m just inhaling it. What are you reading?

NEVINS: I just finished Adelle Waldman’s new novel. It’s been like, 10 years since her last one.

MAK: Since [ The Love Affairs of ] Nathaniel P.

NEVINS: I fucking love that book.

MAK: Oh my god, the best. One of the people I dedicate my book to is allegedly the man that Nathaniel P. Is based off of.

NEVINS: Wait, oh my god.

MAK: Yeah, it’s him.

NEVINS: Well, we won’t name him on the record. But if anyone’s curious, go buy Geoff’s book.

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Gothic Novel
The Gothic Novel: A Selection of Critical Essays by Victor Sage
What Is a Gothic Novel? (Definition, History & Examples)
50+ Must-Read Gothic Novels and Stories
Gothic Novel Extract.
What is the "Gothic novel"? by francesca fra

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Olalla by Robert Louis Stevenson
What Makes a Movie Gothic?
Drawing A Gothic Novel Cover
Gothic Novel in English Literature Definition, Features and Examples II What is Gothic Literature?
ESSAY GOTHIC DENIM Bleach Black
Black Magic: a Tale of the Rise and Fall of the Antichrist by Marjorie Bowen

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Gothic novel
Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric machinery continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great Expectations. In the second half of the ...
Learn About Gothic Literature With Elements and Examples
Atmosphere: The atmosphere in a Gothic novel is one characterized by mystery, suspense, and fear, which is usually heightened by elements of the unknown or unexplained.; Setting: The setting of a Gothic novel can often rightly be considered a character in its own right.As Gothic architecture plays an important role, many of the stories are set in a castle or large manor, which is typically ...
What Is a Gothic Novel? (Definition, History & Examples)
The gothic novel is one of the oldest and most studied forms of 'genre' or 'formula fiction.' It got its start around the middle of the 18th century in Great Britain and encompasses novels and stories that could be described as a mix of horror, mystery, adventure, psychological thriller and historical fiction.
Writing and Understanding Gothic Literature [With Examples]
Gothic literature is a genre of literature that combines dark elements, spooky settings, conflicted and disturbed characters into a whimsically horrific, often romantic, story. It's the darkest portion of Dark Romanticism, emerging soon after the Romantic literary era. Brief history lesson for gothic literature: Romanticism deals heavily with ...
Gothic Literature: A Definition and List of Gothic Fiction Elements
What Is Gothic Literature? Gothic literature is a deliciously terrifying blend of fiction and horror with a little romance thrown in. The Gothic novel has a long history, and although it has changed since 1765 when it began with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, it has maintained certain classic Gothic romantic elements.
Definition of Gothic Literature
In the most general terms, Gothic literature can be defined as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic narrative devices, and an overall atmosphere of exoticism, mystery, fear, and dread. Often, a Gothic novel or story will revolve around a large, ancient house that conceals a terrible secret or serves as the refuge of an especially frightening and ...
Gothic Novels and Novelists
The gothic novel is a living tradition, a form that enjoys great popular appeal while provoking harsh critical judgments. ... (1989), in which he contributed an essay outlining some of the characteristics of the new gothic. While resisting any attempt at rigid definition (the gothic, he says, is "an air, a tone, a tendency"; it is "not a ...
Gothic Literature Gothic Themes, Settings, and Figures
Gothic literature has influenced and inspired several subgenres of literature, including the supernatural tale, the ghost story, horror fiction, and vampire literature.
Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror (primarily in the 20th century), is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. ... In an essay on Radcliffe, Walter Scott, writes of the popularity of Udolpho at the time, "The very name was fascinating, and the public, who rushed upon it with all the eagerness of curiosity, rose from it with ...
Jane Eyre: Mini Essays
The Gothic tradition utilizes elements such as supernatural encounters, remote locations, complicated family histories, ancient manor houses, dark secrets, and mysteries to create an atmosphere of suspense and terror, and the plot of Jane Eyre includes most of these elements. Lowood, Moor House, and Thornfield are all remote locations, and Thornfield, like Gateshead, is also an ancient manor ...
Gothic Literature Essays and Criticism
Gothic fiction is a literature of nightmare. Among its conventions are found dream landscapes and figures of the subconscious imagination. Its fictional world gives form to amorphous fears and ...
Gothic Literature Critical Essays
Gothic Literature, the fourth set in the Gale Critical Companion Collection, consists of three volumes. Each volume includes a detailed table of contents, a foreword on the subject of Gothic ...
Gothic Literature
What is Gothic literature? Gothic literature focuses on the darker aspects of humanity paired with intense contrasting emotions such as pleasure and pain or love and death. A classic example of a Gothic novel is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Gothic literature is often set around dilapidated castles, secluded estates, and unfamiliar environments.
Gothic Literature
Gothic Literature Essay. Gothic literature originated in the early nineteenth century. Writers of such works combined some elements of the medieval literature considered too fanciful and modern literature classified as too limited to realism. The settings reflected elements of horror and fear. They consisted of gloomy dungeons, underground ...
Gothic Fiction: Themes and Key Elements
The Sublime in Gothic Fiction. Burke defined precisely what is to be considered sublime. Some of the main Characteristics that Burke (1834) identified as ones that lead to sublimity include: obscurity, eternity and infinity, the crowded and the confused, power, vastness, magnificence, darkness, and excessiveness.
Gothic Novel
Gothic Novel: An Essay. The Gothic fiction, however, enjoyed its heyday from 1762 to 1820 and influenced and inspired the sensational writers of the late nineteenth century. Certain merits of the Gothic fiction have been recognised by the Freudian psychologists.
(PDF) An Overview of Gothic Fiction
Cooper "a Gothic fiction is a fiction that primarily represents fear, the fearful, and. the abject, even if the representation is comic" (2010: 6). Gothic is about generating. an exaggerated ...
To Kill a Mockingbird: Literary Context Essay: To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird belongs to the literary tradition of the Southern Gothic, a genre that became prominent in the twentieth century and furthers the Gothic tradition of exploring the macabre violence lurking beneath the apparently tranquil surface of reality. As in Gothic novels, the Southern Gothic genre derives tension from the suppression of dark urges, secrets, and past ...
Southern Gothic Literature
7. Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation.
Gothic literature guide for KS3 English students
The Twilight Saga is a series of novels and one novella by the author Stephenie Meyer. This series covers many of the traditional Gothic elements together with a love story, supernatural beings ...
Jane Eyre: Literary Context Essay: Jane Eyre and the Gothic Tradition
In writing Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë drew influence from the Gothic literary tradition that had been growing in popularity for decades.Scholars generally consider Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto to be the first Gothic novel, followed by Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Instead of looking for a uniform plot or structure, scholars group Gothic novels ...
Elements of a Traditional Gothic Novel in The Picture of Dorian Gray
What many people don't know about Gothic novels is that they are often based off of Romanticism, a validation of strong emotion and imagination. Basically, Gothic novels combine horror and romance, and do so in a psychological way. A Gothic novel is defined as a novel that deals with frightening or supernatural objects.
Understanding the Gothic Elements in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
Gothic literature often involves eerie, isolated, and decrepit environments, which function to heighten the feelings of fear, mystery, and apprehension. In Jane Eyre, the primary setting of the novel is the gloomy Thornfield Hall, an imposing and mysterious place described as a "dark, low, and ancient" building with a "narrow, winding ...
Gothic Literature : The Characteristics Of Gothic Fiction
This essay about the enduring influence and characteristics of Gothic prose, exploring its themes of dread, obscurity, and the paranormal. It examines the genre's distinct settings, brooding ambiance, supernatural elements, and intricate characters, illustrating how Gothic literature delves into the darker aspects of human nature and our fascination with the eerie.
The best new science fiction books of May 2024
The Language of the Night: Essays on writing, science fiction, and fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin. There are few sci-fi and fantasy writers more brilliant (and revered) than Ursula K. Le Guin.
Geoffrey Mak Still Hasn't Lost Hope in the Personal Essay
Last month, when I spoke to the writer and critic Geoffrey Mak about his debut collection of essays, Mean Boys, a white flower petal floated into his coffee just as he explained how he came to reconcile with his father, a firebrand conservative minister who features prominently in one of the book's standout pieces, a tough but largely merciful account of their strained relationship and the ...