6/5/2023 0 Comments Sublime in gothic literatureHowever, these aren’t just décor critics agree that the aesthetics of Gothic point to ‘meaning’, if such a thing can be defined, such as the preoccupation with death, the significance of religion, etc. This is ‘shopping-list Gothic’: graveyards, churches, castles, candles, fog, arched windows, and so on. In particular, the Gothic ‘atmosphere’ is created by the aesthetics of the genre. The Gothic form accepts that we are fascinated with the wicked, the evil, or just the dank and gloomy, and plays on that. Readers like to be thrilled, scared, shocked and entertained, and the Gothic does all of these things. Yet romantic love is not usually a feature of the Gothic novel, which tends instead to depict the family as the source of both safety and terror: in Gothic, evil comes from within – inside the walls of your home, inside your family, and inside yourself. Gothic novels were considered to be bad for readers, especially young readers, since they were thrilling, shocking and romantic, and led young girls to aspire to be Gothic heroines. From terror Gothic – the popular novels of Ann Radcliffe, for example – to horror Gothic, such as the genuinely shocking The Monk, these books were everywhere, and were parodied in Jane Austen’s novel Northanger Abbey. What Walpole did was to spawn a monster which took over novels of the period. These tropes of Gothic are very important, and together make up what we understand to be Gothic, though one of the difficulties of discussing the genre is that a novel may feature a castle, or a ghost, or a dysfunctional family, for example, without being Gothic. Instead, we tend to focus on bits of it – the castle, or the supernatural, or the heroines, or the family, etc. I’ve written about this novel as a metaphor for Gothic itself: like the supernatural giant knight who can only be glimpsed in parts around Otranto, Gothic is so vast and sprawling that we can never see it all at once. One night in his castle, Walpole had a dream about a giant hand and helmet. So Gothic is rooted in aesthetics, in historical architecture, and also in church architecture and thus in ecclesiology, but it is also linked to earlier writing, such as the gloomy musings of the Graveyard poets. If you want to know more about how Gothic literature came into existence, a good start is to learn more about Walpole by visiting Strawberry Hill and having one of their excellent guided tours. But Walpole was very much an Englishman, and wanted to create something that was British as well as Gothic, and so he bought a small house in Strawberry Hill and turned it into a castle. Walpole had travelled widely in Europe, and was fascinated by the art and architecture of the Renaissance, which was the original ‘Gothic’ (to read more about this, have a look here). Scholars generally say that the first Gothic novel was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, in 1764, though there are other contenders around the same time. Instead, like Frankenstein’s monster, it was cobbled together from bits and pieces in a desire to create something new. It comes from many places: Gothic literature isn’t a monolithic literary creature which was born, fully formed, and continued to exist in the same form. Gothic, then, is an assortment of literary tropes, symbols and aesthetics, mixed up with a lot of history, psychology and religion. She was right, but I haven’t managed to rename it! However, I did spend a lot of time thinking about how Gothic developed and where it came from, as well as where it is going to. When I was writing my PhD thesis, my supervisor suggested to me that ‘Gothic’ is a virtually meaningless term now, and it would be great if I could come up with a new word for it. However, let me try to clear up some of the misconceptions about Gothic literature. You don’t have to agree with me, though: my conclusion is that Gothic is a lot of things, often not all of them at once, and is remarkably difficult to define. I thought I would try to collect some of these discussions into a blog post. I seem to spend increasing amounts of time discussing what is Gothic, and what isn’t.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |