Sublime and Gothic Novel

:The Philosoper David Hume wrote:” Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty” and Edmund Burke wrote A pilosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful in which he defined the Sublime as a delightful horror and wrote: “The idea of Sublime is not opposed to the idea of beautiful. It may be considered more like complementary since the Sublime is passion, movement, dynamism and energy inside the beauty of nature. It represents the strength of nature, its powerful essence. The Sublime is the troubled side of beauty.” The german philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgement wrote that the “Sublime is the mixture of horror and pleasure created either by what is great and immeasurable in time and space or by those natural scenery and phenomena underlining the frailty of man.” The sublime is the dark and dynamic side of beauty that can be admired if one’s safe and that makes humans attracted to it and leaves us astonished. As humans we possess a dynamic side and a good side which are complentary to each other. Thanks to our double nature we can appreciate the beauty of a meadow full of flowers, a serene sunny day with a light breeze that wishes past us or even the calm waves of the sea that kiss the sandy shore but at the same time thunderstorms, lighting, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis that are majestic,dynamic and unstoppable call to our rebellious and dynamic side. We are fascinated by them, we admire them because nature is powerful and free and unruly and no man can control it so we can only stand by and, in our safety, be amazed and astonished by its beauty.

Gothic Novel

The start of the idea of Sublime and the taste for the strange and mysterious and the fear of the triumph of evil over good and chaos over order create a new genre between 1760 and 1820. The Gothic novel is caracterized by the presence of monsters and supernatural creatures, usually the story are set at night and in ancient settings like isolated castles full of secret passages and hidden rooms. The weather is always gloomy with rain clouds, the full moon, mist and thunderstorms. The stories are full of omens, hauntings sounds, howling, chain noises and paranormal activities. The villain of the story is the embodiment of evil and even the main characters most of the time are overreachers that are the cause of their own tragic end.

Harry Potter and Gothic

Harry Potter is a fantasy book and can also be considered as a Bildungsroman because it starts with Harry as a child and it develops his story until he becomes an adult at 17.

In my opinion it cannot be described as gothic because reading it doesn’t leave you with a sense of terror and dread. It leaves you a sense of hope that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel and friendship.

This explains why following the series the books become darker and more complex. In the first two books harry has to become acquainted with a new reality, with his importance for the magical world and with new relations but as he grows up he loses that film that makes children see only the good in life he starts to recognize that life is the alternating between good times and bad experiences and that the people that are around you are not black or white. He discovers that sometimes people who you trusted in reality are backstabbers like Peter Pettigrew that would sell you out to save themselves and that people who you thought had your best interest at heart just want to manipulate you like Dumbledore and that most people are not what they seem like Severus Snape and Rita Skeeter. When you grow up there are terrors that you have to defeat like depression that is personificated by the dementors that suck away all happiness until all you have left is your worst memory and no hope or like your biggest fears impersonated by the boggarts that are magical creatures that shapeshift to take the shape of your worst fear (dementors for Harry, moon for Remus, failing for Hermione and the death of her family for Mrs Weasley). Death is a part of life so growing up Harry loses friends and family quickly and before their time because in real life people get sick or die in an accident or are killed and the horcruxes represent the errors that we make every time we do something that hurts others. Our hurtful actions leave a mark on the people around us and if we become only the sum of our bad actions when the people we hurt fix the mistakes we make we cease to exist. And the “monsters” that appear in Harry Potter are magical creatures or even ex magical people like the ghosts of the castle that are not scary but are really helpful or like Peeve the poltergeist that is a trickster and friend of the twins and the ghoul that lives in the attic above Ron’s bedroom. And the sublime that is the base of a Gothic novel plays no part in Harry Potter because Voldemort, Bellatrix Lestrange and the death eaters don’t convey fascination or delight.