Gothic fiction
Gothic fiction, often referred to as Gothic horror, is a literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name of the genre is derived from the Renaissance-era use of the word "gothic", as a pejorative term meaning medieval and barbaric, which itself originated from Gothic architecture and in turn the Goths.
The first work to be labelled as Gothic was Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, later subtitled A Gothic Story. Subsequent 18th-century contributors included Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, William Thomas Beckford, and Matthew Lewis. The Gothic influence continued into the early 19th century, with Romantic works by poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron. Novelists such as Mary Shelley, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, and E. T. A. Hoffmann frequently drew upon Gothic motifs in their works as well.
Gothic aesthetics continued to be used in Victorian literature in novels by Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters, as well as in works by the American writers Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Later, Gothic fiction evolved through well-known works like Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Beetle by Richard Marsh, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. In the 20th-century, Gothic fiction remained influential with contributors including Daphne du Maurier, Stephen King, V. C. Andrews, Shirley Jackson, Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison.
Characteristics
Gothic fiction is characterised by an environment of fear, the threat of supernatural events, and the intrusion of the past upon the present. The setting typically includes physical reminders of the past, especially through ruined buildings that stand as proof of the transience of humans and their works, and the changeable and fickle nature of history. Characteristic gothic settings in the 18th and 19th centuries include castles, and religious buildings such as monasteries, convents, and crypts. The atmosphere is typically claustrophobic, and common plot elements include vengeful persecution, imprisonment, and murder. The depiction of horrifying events in Gothic fiction often serves as a metaphorical expression of psychological or social conflicts. The form of a Gothic story is usually discontinuous and convoluted, often incorporating tales within tales, changing narrators, and framing devices such as discovered manuscripts or interpolated histories. Other characteristics, regardless of relevance to the main plot, can include sleeplike and deathlike states, live burials, doubles, unnatural echoes or silences, the discovery of obscured family ties, unintelligible writings, nocturnal landscapes, remote locations, and dreams. In the late 19th century, Gothic fiction often involved demons, demonic possession, ghosts, and other kinds of evil spirits.Role of architecture
Gothic fiction is strongly associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of that same era. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, marked by harsh laws enforced by torture and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. The literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere, similar to the Gothic Revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the Neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment. Gothic ruins invoke multiple linked emotions by representing the collapse of human creations and inevitable decay– hence the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks.Including a Gothic building in a story serves several purposes. It implies that the story is set in the past, conveys a sense of isolation or dissociation from the rest of the world, indicates religious associations, and evokes feelings of awe. The architecture often served as a mirror for the characters and events of the story. The buildings in The Castle of Otranto, for example, are riddled with tunnels that characters use to move back and forth in secret. This movement mirrors the secrets surrounding Manfred's possession of the castle and how it came into his family.
History
Precursors
The components that would eventually combine into Gothic literature had a rich history by the time Walpole presented a fictitious medieval manuscript in The Castle of Otranto in 1764.The plays of William Shakespeare were also a crucial reference point for early Gothic writers, in an effort to bring credibility to their works, and to legitimize the emerging genre as serious literature to the public. His tragedies such as Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III incorporated plots revolving around the supernatural, revenge, murder, ghosts, witchcraft, and omens. These works, often set in medieval castles and written in dramatic pathos, were a huge influence upon early Gothic authors. Many early Gothic writers frequently quote, and make allusions to Shakespeare's works.
Another major influence among Gothic writers was John Milton's Paradise Lost, particularly his depiction of the tragic anti-hero character Satan. This character became a model for many charismatic Gothic villains and Byronic heroes. Milton's "version of the myth of the fall and redemption, creation and decreation, is, as Frankenstein again reveals, an important model for Gothic plots."
Alexander Pope also had a significant role in shaping Gothic fiction. Pope was the first significant poet of the 18th century to write a poem in an authentic Gothic manner. His poem, Eloisa to Abelard, is a tale of star-crossed lovers, one doomed to a life of seclusion in a convent, and the other in a monastery, abounds in gloomy imagery, religious terror, and suppressed passion. The influence of Pope's poem is found throughout 18th-century Gothic literature, including the novels of Walpole, Radcliffe, and Lewis.
Development of Gothic aesthetics
Gothic literature is often described with words such as "wonder" and "terror." This sense of wonder and terror that provides the suspension of disbelief so important to Gothic fiction—which, except for when it is parodied, even for all its occasional melodrama, is typically played straight, in a self-serious manner—requires the imagination of the reader to be willing to accept the idea that there might be something "beyond that which is immediately in front of us." The mysterious imagination necessary for Gothic literature to have gained any traction had been growing for some time even before the advent of the Gothic. The need for an outlet for this imagination came as the known world was becoming more explored, reducing the geographical mysteries of the world. The edges of the map were filling in, and no dragons were to be found. The human mind required a replacement. Clive Bloom theorizes that this void in the collective imagination was critical in developing the cultural possibility for the rise of the Gothic tradition.The setting of most early Gothic works was medieval, but this was a common theme long before Walpole. In Britain especially, there was a desire to reclaim a shared past. This obsession frequently led to extravagant architectural displays like Fonthill Abbey, and even mock tournaments were held. It was not merely in literature that a medieval revival made itself felt, the broader cultural fascination with the medieval era contributed to a society ready to accept a perceived medieval work in 1764.
The Gothic often uses scenery of decay, death, and morbidity to achieve its effects. However, Gothic literature was not the origin of this tradition; it was far older. Images like corpses, skeletons, and churchyards, now commonly associated with early Gothic fiction, were first popularized by the Graveyard poets. They were also present in novels such as Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, which contains comical scenes of plague carts and piles of corpses. Even earlier, poets like Edmund Spenser evoked a dreary and sorrowful mood in such poems as Epithalamion. These pre-Gothic works laid the emotional groundwork that Gothic fiction later expanded upon.
All aspects of pre-Gothic literature occur to some degree in the Gothic, but even taken together, they still fall short of true Gothic. What was needed to be added was an aesthetic to tie the elements together. Bloom notes that this aesthetic must take the form of a theoretical or philosophical core, which is necessary to "sav the best tales from becoming mere anecdote or incoherent sensationalism." In this case, the aesthetic needed to be emotional, and was finally provided by Edmund Burke's 1757 work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which "finally codif the gothic emotional experience." Burke's thoughts on the Sublime, Terror, and Obscurity helped shape Gothic fiction's emotional and psychological tone. These sections can be summarized thus: the Sublime is that which is or produces the "strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling"; Terror most often evoked the Sublime; and to cause Terror, we need some amount of Obscurity – we can't know everything about that which is inducing Terror – or else "a great deal of the apprehension vanishes"; Obscurity is necessary to experience the Terror of the unknown. Bloom asserts that Burke's descriptive vocabulary was essential to the Romantic works that eventually informed the Gothic.
The birth of Gothic literature was also thought to have been influenced by political upheaval. Researchers linked its birth with the English Civil War, culminating in the Jacobite rising of 1745 which was more recent to the first Gothic novel. The collective political memory and any deep cultural fears associated with it likely contributed to early Gothic villains as literary representatives of defeated Tory barons or Royalists "rising" from their political graves in the pages of early Gothic novels to terrorize the bourgeois reader of late eighteenth-century England.