The Gothic Novel

Gothic because of medieval setting

Gothic because of return to dark ages

as opposed to Enlightenment

Return to excluded genres (romance, fabulous tale) of the Middle Ages

Age of the sublime rather than of neoclassic harmony

Influential from the 1760's to 1820's• Explained gothic and unexplained (marvellous)

gothic• Superseded in 1820’s by Scott’s historical romance• 1850’s realistic rewritings (Brontes etc)• Related to

– Horror story (Stevenson, Wilde)

– Ghost stories

– Vampire story

– Science fiction

– Detective stories

Structural elements

• Character types– A pure virginal heroine – a villain (corrupt aristocrat or clergyman) perverted character– Debased families

• Situation – Persecution, – Imprisonment Claustrophobic situations – Flight, travel from place to place

• Setting– Sublime or picturesque scenery

• Frightening nature• Castles dungeons, ruins

– Mysterious, unfamiliar places– Exotic countries

From Edmund Burke

• “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”. “The ideas of pain, sickness, or death, fill the mind with strong emotions of horror; but life and health, though they put us in a capacity of being affected with pleasure, make no such impression by the simple enjoyment”

Gothic novel as coded history

• A social text

• Revolt against rationalism

• Revolt against middle-class values of stability, security, progress

• Collapse of old certainties, unrest.

• Rapidly changing social order, unrest

• Violence, revolution

Gothic novel as escape from history

• Bringing back what had been excluded• Going back to old genres

– Romance– The marvellous tale

• Revolt against realism– Fantasy– The supernatural– The irrational

The Gothic as moral /aesthetic reaction

• Reversal of customary binary pairs:

• Reversal of Richardson’s Pamela model

• Refusal to read for instruction and moral improvement.– Read to obtain a thrill

The gothic as a female genre

• Female authorship

• Female readership

• Female resourceful heroine

• Sublimation of female fantasies and fears

Psychoanalysis and the gothic

• Freud’s uncanny– Terror not of something external but of something

strangely familiar– Sublimation of something repressed – Travel structure: moving from stage to stage of

recognition , of bringing the repressed to the surface

• Sadistic and masochistic pulsions• Playing with terror and insanity• Imagination stimulated by what we can never

know

Freud’s The Uncanny (Unheimlich)

• The uncanny "is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression”.