The Gothic

(Pre-Gothic) Clive Bloom’s comments on mysterious imagination

• cites the 16th century “Isle of Demons” (1555) as an example of literary evidence of a “certain human need for the mysterious”

• Points out that the age of exploration was coming to an end leaving a vacuum of mystery that imagination would need to fill

(Pre-Gothic) Clive Bloom’s comments on macabre and the morbid

• comments on Daniel Defoe’s 1722 “Journal of the Plague Year” set in 1655

• “Defoe’s touch is light, anecdotal…terrors that would later characterise the Gothic”

(Pre-Gothic) Bloom’s comments on other Pre-Gothic poetry

• “Epithalamion”; Edmund Spencer’s 1594 ode “embodies the new taste for the dreary and for the expression of grief and sorrow complete with owls and goblins, but they are mere props. They lack the emotional importance attached to them in the later 18th century”

Why Pre-Gothic texts aren’t considered ‘Gothic literature’?

• they have some elements but do not satisfy the requirement for an aesthetic

• without this to tie the elements together “they fail to have the substance of true Gothic tale” (Bloom)

• aesthetic needed to take the form of a theoretical or philosophical core which is “necessary to save the best tales from becoming mere anecdotes” Bloom

Early Gothic (1764-1788): origins of Gothic

• began as a sophisticated joke, used as a subtitle by Wapole to mean ‘something barbarous’ or ‘deriving from the Middle Ages’

• Castle of Otranto is acknowledged as the first piece of Gothic literature

What inspired Castle of Otranto?

• dreams of a gigantic armoured fist appearing on a staircase

Mysteries of Udolpho

• took its title from the name of a fictional Italian castle

• created brooding aristocratic villain, resourceful virgin hero with unspeakable fate (archetypal characters)

• all of Radcliffe’s novels set in foreign lands with lengthy descriptions of sublime scenery

Height of Gothic (1788-1838): Radcliffe’s influence

• her fiction was a natural target for Jane Austen’s satire in Northanger Abbey

• her mysteries all turn out to have natural explanations. Coleridge complained about her ‘timidity’ in this aspect

• Gothic truly came alive in the thoughts and anxieties of her characters

Terror

• psychological fear and apprehension

Horror

• physical confrontation of something abhorrent

Sublime

• seeing something incomprehensible, provokes a sense of terror

• in Gothic literature: an experience, which goes far beyond appreciating natural beauty

The uncanny

• feeling of unease from something familiar or strange (i.e. dolls, clowns, robots)

Taboo

• behaviour that isn’t widely acceptable in society (i.e. lesbianism, homoeroticism, crime, incest)

Transgression

• pushing boundaries (i.e. Victor taking on the role of the Creator)

Supernatural

• something that defies nature and cannot be explained (i.e. inanimate objects coming to life)

Preternatural

• defies nature but can be explained (i.e. Mozart composing his first musical piece aged 5)

Doppelganger

• duality of self (used to draw attention to the inner conflict of a hero i.e. Victor and the Creature)

Otherness

• one group views another being or group as not belonging and/ or a threat (i.e. women being characterised in a way that portrays them as far different from men)

Oppositions

• using contrast to highlight key characteristics (i.e. sanity vs madness, light vs darkness)

Obscurity

• element of the experience of the sublime

• can be in physical or mental terms; associated with misunderstanding, misconception

  (i.e. the use of fog often used to obscure objects and reduce visibility changes outward appearances of the truth)

The liminal

• the boundary between two states

  (physical: person running through a passage, metaphor: present to past)

Subhuman

• behaviour that is way worse than human

Abhuman

• something part human in the process of turning into a monster (i.e. a vampire)

• “Gothic body”