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The Gothic genre. As a “problem-atization” Of the decayed aristocracy. What was “gothic”? .
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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.
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….
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.
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?
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.
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 interpretation:
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”byFrances 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’ ATale of Two Cities opens with a French aristocrat raping and murdering a young peasant woman in such a setting -- which Dickens’ insisted was realism.
“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.” Anna Laetitia Barbauld
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 Problematization
