Context of the Gothic Genre

EARLY GOTHIC (1760-1800)

  • Age of Enlightenment

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

  • Revival of neoclassical principles of intelligence, morality and reason

  • Reason and logic seen to be the chief qualities of humanity

  • The French Revolution appeared to Brits to be political radicalism which threatened the entire social order - this caused Gothic to become 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 Monk - Matthew Gregory Lewis

  • 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

  • Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen

    • Satirising Gothic

    • Has a rational explanation

    • Subverts expectations of the Gothic

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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Plays with narrative, form, and intertextual references

  • 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

  • The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

    • Focuses on insanity and gender roles

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

  • Beloved - Toni Morrison

    • Inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner

  • A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams

  • To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

  • The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner