Context of the Gothic Genre

Early Gothic - 1760-1800

• Often set in foreign Catholic countries - seen as places of intense passion and otherness

• Intelligence, morality and reason

• Reason and logic

• Characterised by violence, excessive passion, and radical threats to domestic life

• In female Gothic, supernatural elements are revealed to have logical explanations - this emphasises real human threat as opposed to some foreign monster

The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole

• First Gothic novel

• Includes tropes like ghosts/revenant, gothic castles, secret passageways

• Isabella presented as a damsel in distress

The Mysteries of Udulpho - Ann Radcliffe

Distinguished between horror and terror

Romantic Gothic 1800-1830

• Interested in the power of nature, intense emotion, the power of the imagination (terror requires imagination as the threat is subtle and builds)

• Nature is all powerful and uncontrollable

• Ideas of the sublime, which suggests everything is boundless and cannot be understood, linked to feelings and emotion

• Often uses 3rd person omniscient narrators

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

• Fits more into early science fiction - explores the dangers of developing science

• Written in the Villa Diodati at the same time as Polidori wrote The Vampyre

Victorian / Mid-Century Gothic

• Gothic ceased to be as popular, so Gothic tropes became interwoven with real life

• Often included the transference of Gothic themes to urban settings - ‘urban gothic’ - which made it more terrifying as it was closer to home

• Bleak House - Charles Dickens

• The city was a place of evil and became a place of labyrinth entrapment, allowed for anonymity and secretive transgressions

• Reinforced conservative gender norms

• Poe brought Gothic into the city - urban gothic

• Influenced the 1860s rise of ‘sensation novels’ which focussed on threats to social order, including madness

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

• Byronic hero - dark and brooding Heathcliff

• Intense emotions

• Desolate landscapes

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

• Ghostly uncanny lady - Miss Havisham

• Decaying manor

The Tell Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe

• Suggests that monsters only exist in the mind - psychological horror and paranoia rather than supernatural horror

• Suggests horror lies within

Fin de Siecle - End of the Century Gothic 1890s

• Plays into contemporary fears

• A time of great uncertainty due to Queen Victoria’s age and health

• Degeneration of morals

• Actions that threaten Christian beliefs

• Plurality of self - doubles, doppelgangers, the uncanny

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

• Doubles, doppelgangers, the uncanny

• The ‘wildness within’

• Hidden desires and monstrosities

The Picture of Dorian Grey - Oscar Wilde

• Hidden truths

• Darkness within, the corruption of human nature

• Doubles, doppelgangers

• Urban gothic

Dracula - Bram Stoker

• The uncanny

• Urban gothic

• Foreign threat - fear of orientalism

• Supernatural threat vs psychological threat

• Supernatural vs science

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James

• Ghost story

• The uncanny

• Psychological horror

20th Century Gothic

• Subversion of gothic and social conventions

• Heroines granted agency

• Lessons about society

• Preoccupation with the instability of identity, breaking of taboos, the breakdown of traditional social structures

• Plays with narrative, form, and intertextual references

• Ghost stories were popular

• WWI saw a shift to realism and a lull in Gothic

• Re-examination of Gothic with the growth of post-structuralism, which suggesting that meaning is unstable

• Postmodern texts question the constructions we accept as truth and present marginalised figures for reconsideration

• They are self-aware in their use of the Gothic tradition

Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

• Ghost story

• The uncanny

• Human folly

• Female protagonist

The Bloody Chamber Collection - Angela Carter

• Female protagonists

• Subverting social norms

• Commenting on the rigid structure of society

• Taboo themes centred on female sexuality and girlhood

• Supernatural threats vs human threats

Southern Gothic

• Use of the macabre and the grotesque

• Explores social issues, particularly focussed on slavery and civil war

• The South is isolated from the rest of America and haunted by its history

• Blurring of the natural and supernatural

• Depictions of violence

• Decay

• Outsiders drive the story forward - ideas of the South as renegade/outsider society

• Focus on isolation and alienation due to division of society created by Jim Crow segregation laws