Transcript The Gothic genre

The Gothic genre
As a “problem-atization”
Of the decayed aristocracy
What was “gothic”?
From around 1764 to
1830 in England, the
literary world thrilled
to a new kind of
popular fiction; yet
this new genre was
also always criticized
as bad, low, tasteless.
It has never been
read as high culture.
It was in sum, a guilty
pleasure.
Gothic?
While individual gothic novels are
quite different, still it is easy to
define a set of common motifs.
The gothic genre usually features
an old castle, preferably in ruins
and haunted by ghosts. The
supernatural aspect is a key
element, even if it is later
explained away. It is suspenseful
and scary. Did I mention the
emotion of terror? Back then the
genre was often called “terrorist
writing”.
Sublime terror
This terror is paradoxically
experienced by the reader as
entertaining, because it is
perceived from a position of
safety. The reader is quite
safe, curled up in a soft warm
bed reading late into the night
such frightening stories. This
combines aesthetic play with
the emotion of terror.
Edmund Burke
This conservative author defined
that whole paradox as an instance
of the Sublime: “Whatever is fitted
in any sort to excite the ideas of pain,
and danger, that is to say, whatever is
in any sort terrible, or is conversant
about terrible objects, or operates in a
manner analogous to terror, is a
source of the sublime; that is, it is
productive of the strongest emotion
which the mind is capable of feeling.”
…but, terror safely perceived.
“When we look on such hideous
objects, we are not a little
pleased to think we are in no
danger of them. We consider
them at the same time, as
dreadful and harmless; so that
the more frightful appearance
they make, the greater is the
pleasure we receive from the
sense of our own safety”
--Addison The Spectator
… sometimes the
Gothic genre features
a good woman
endangered in this
setting by men who
are corrupt aristocrats
or other anachronistic
roles from the past.
It was often written &
read by women, viz.,
Ann Radcliffe above
all.
Clichés
“. . . Analysis of the form often devolves into a
cataloguing of stock characters and devices
which are simply recycled from one text to
the next: conventional settings (one castle -preferably in ruins; some gloomy mountains
-- preferably the Alps; a haunted room that
locks only on the outside) and characters (a
passive and persecuted heroine, a sensitive
and rather ineffectual hero, a dynamic and
tyrannical villain, and evil prioress, talkative
servant(s)…”
 --Maggie Kilgour, The Rise of the Gothic Novel (4).
Gothic?
The setting is itself
where the term
“gothic” derives. The
castle was from the
Medieval era, a.k.a.,
the “Gothic” style in
architecture. Moreover
the common site of the
new genre of fiction is
not usually back in the
historical period of
medievalism, but rather
in the ruins today, circa
1770.
Cover page from
Castle of Otranto
1765 edition
A gothic
cathedral
from the
medieval
era:
Chartres
Chartres, circa 1194
Gargoyle on Notre Dame
St.
Michael’s
Mount,
Cornwall,
England
Medieval Knight
This embodiment of feudal
violence, of male brutality, and
paradoxically of chivalry came
back to haunt the Gothic
imagination.
Ancient armor can still be found
to this day preserved in old
estates of the nobility.
But imagine meeting this guy on
a moonless night in your
bedroom.
Lots of nooks
and crannies
to hide your
skeletons,
ghosts,
aristocrats….
More
gothic
gargoyles
Castle Cliché
The haunted
castle is today a
common cliché of
movies and comic
books. It was
invented by the
Gothic genre.
The Castle of Otranto
The 1st gothic novel in
English
By Horace Walpole, 1764
He was rich and
aristocratic enough to
build his own “castle” in a
retro-style that he called
“Gothick”
He also later subtitled his
novel: A Gothic Tale
Often read, imitated, &
parodied.
Gothic retro-style
“In the 1740s Horace Walpole
purchased Strawberry Hill, an estate
on the Thames near London, and
set about remodeling it in what he
called "Gothick" style, adding
towers, turrets, battlements, arched
doors, windows, and ornaments of
every description…. The project was
extremely influential, as people
came from all over to see
Strawberry Hill and returned to
Gothicize their own houses”
(Norton Anthology 577).
Walpole’s
Strawberry Hill
Or,
retro-gothic
pastiche in
architecture
Bad taste! I like it!
In fact visitors were also
impressed with how Walpole’s
taste was so bad and against
contemporary high class design!
The retro or faux “Gothic” design
was a busy mixture of any old
thing, and Walpole himself
admitted that it was a dubious
hobby, or again guilty pleasure.
Walpole’s Strawberry Hill
Walpole’s library
For such a simple and popular genre,
nevertheless, the gothic is still debated among
critics today.
What is its essence?
Why do people enjoy this kind
of “as if” terror?
Why were women reading &
writing Gothic fiction?
Did it serve Liberals or
Conservatives more?
Gothic Mind Map
Interpretations
Many interpretations of
the gothic genre from
scholars today focus on
psychoanalysis and/or
feminism.
Psychoanalysis treats of
the unconscious and
repressed aspects that
appear to be behind the
“uncanny” and disturbing
situations in such stories.
Uncanny Mind Map
Contesting the Gothic
This book by James Watt goes so far as to argue
that the Gothic genre is a modern invention, but
that back in the Romantic period, readers and
writers did not think of it as a single genre.
Instead, they saw it as several distinct genres of
the “terrorist” fiction and also “romance” fiction
in general.
Some wrote gothic tales for Conservative ends.
Watt labels these “Loyalist” works, especially
those by Clara Reeves. These were opposed by
Lewis’s more subversive The Monk. Ironically
Lewis’s novel is taken to be a quintessential gothic
work today.
Ann Radcliffe
She was the most popular and
critically praised novelist among the
romance and gothic writers of her
day. While her personal life
suggests that she would write for
Liberal causes, nevertheless,
conservative critics praised her for
providing rational justice and
morality to this “dangerous” fantasy
that too many women and lower
class people were reading. Watt
wonders how we can generalize
about the Gothic genre.
The Rise of the Gothic Novel
This book by Maggie Kilgour is a brilliantly
written study published in 1995. It is
filled with interesting observations about
the texts, the readers, the critics, and the
theories.
Here I can merely note that she points
out the many contradictions between all
of the above. It seems that there is no
common consensus about the Gothic.
But undaunted, Kilgour provides her own
Maggie Kilgour:
“The gothic is thus
haunted by a reading of
history as a dialectical
process of alienation and
restoration, dismembering
and remembering, a
version of the secularised
myth of fall and return,
which . . . is central to
Romanticism” (15).
Decayed aristocracy
But again, my own view is that the
setting is not merely the privileged site
of the old feudal aristocracy, but the
castle is now significantly in ruins. The
active symbol and feeling here is of an
anachronistic past that continues to
haunt the present rise of the middle
class.
Whether or not the ancient aristocracy
is defended or subverted in a gothic
tale, it continues to exert a disturbing
“return of the repressed” effect.
“Faulty towers: Reform, Radicalism
and the Gothic Castle,
1760-1800”
by Frances A. Chiu
This scholar provides much
evidence to support my view
above. Chiu also reads this
anxious discourse about the
decayed aristocracy beyond the
gothic genre in both the
political reform arguments and
in books about actual ruined
castles of that period.
Faulty Towers, cont…
“The dungeons of Alnwick Castle
(Northumberland), for instance,
were ‘still remaining in all its
original horrors’ while those at
Flint Castle (North Wales) had
been maintained as recently as
1774 by the constable, the late
Lord Plymouth.
“… progressively minded readers
in the 1770s may have sensed
that modern day Britain had not
quite liberated herself from the
past.”
Faulty Towers, cont…
“Indeed, the fact that some of the
owners of these stately edifices went so
far as to personally identify themselves
with their abodes would have further
affirmed the castle, mansion or abbey
as an apt symbol of power. This would
have been especially so in the case of
Thomas Wenman Coke: a descendant
of the legal writer Edward Coke, he
proudly modeled the great hall of
Holkham House upon ‘the Example of
a Basilica, or Court of Justice.’ (Chiu)
Faulty Towers, cont…
“Conversely, the application of
human traits to the edifice
could also reinforce this
identification between man
and castle. As a testament to
the ‘towering ambition’ of the
‘lofty and deluded owners,’ the
Yorkshire-based Middleham
Castle is a ‘once haughty pile’
and not altogether unlike
Beeston Castle, which ‘stands
very loftily and proudly upon
an exceeding steep and high
rock’”
--Chiu
A true example !
The Death Tower of Castle
Csejthe in modern day
Hungary where countess
Elizabeth Bathory (born 1560
in Transylvania) tortured to
death about 600 girls in order
to bathe in their blood,
literally a bloodbath. She was
tried and found guilty, along
with her assistants, by
members of her own noble
family, then condemned to be
walled up until death in a
room of the same castle.
Real examples, cont….
The Gothic genre obviously
echoes such ancient histories of
vampiric Counts, mad noblemen,
and sadistic priests of the
Inquisition. While most gothic
tales are obviously supernatural
fantasies, they are loosely based
on historical realities. Also,
recall that Charles Dickens’ A
Tale of Two Cities opens with a
French aristocrat raping and
murdering a young peasant
woman in such a setting -- which
Dickens’ insisted was realism.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld “See how the pure light of heaven
is clouded by the dim glass of the
arched window, stained with the
gaudy colors of monkish tales
and legendary fiction; fit emblem
how reluctantly they admitted the
fairer light of truth amidst these
dark recesses... the low cells, the
long and narrow aisles, the
gloomy arches, the damp and
secret caverns which wind
beneath the hollow ground...
seem only fit for those dark
places of the earth in which are
the habitations of cruelty...
Farewell, ye once venerated seats!
Enough of you remains…to
remind us from what we have
escaped, and make posterity for
ever thankful for this fairer age of
liberty and light.”
Problematization While the gothic sometimes attacked
the aristocracy and the Catholic Church
(Lewis) and sometimes defended
tradition (Reeves), in every case it
always anxiously raised the problem of
the uncanny return of that anachronistic
and now residual remnant of violent
power, still resonant within the sublime
walls of the ruined castle, the dungeon,
the abbey; a figure of fabled might
waiting in eerie silence for the failure
of the new democratic experiment. The
gothic was the lingering nightmare in
the dawn of an enlightened bourgeoisie.
--Erick Heroux