The Gothic genre

1
The Gothic genre

• As a problem-atization
• Of the decayed aristocracy

2
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.

3
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.

4
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.

5
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.

6
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

7

• 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.

8
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).

9
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.

10
Cover page from Castle of Otranto1765 edition
11

• A gothic cathedral from the medieval era
  Chartres

12
Chartres, circa 1194
13
Gargoyle on Notre Dame
14
St. Michaels Mount, Cornwall, England
15
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.
16
Lots of nooks and crannies to hide your
skeletons, ghosts, aristocrats.
17
More gothic gargoyles
18
Castle Cliché

• The haunted castle is today a common cliché of
  movies and comic books. It was invented by the
  Gothic genre.

19
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.

20
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).

21
Walpoles Strawberry Hill

• Or,
• retro-gothic pastiche in architecture

22
Bad taste! I like it!

• In fact visitors were also impressed with how
  Walpoles 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.

23
Walpoles Strawberry Hill
24
Walpoles library
25
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?
26
Gothic Mind Map
27
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.
28
Uncanny Mind Map
29
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 Lewiss more
subversive The Monk. Ironically Lewiss novel
is taken to be a quintessential gothic work today.
30
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.
31
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
32
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).
33
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.
34
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.
35
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.
36
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)
37
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
38
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.
39
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.
40
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
remainsto remind us from what we have escaped,
and make posterity for ever thankful for this
fairer age of liberty and light.
41
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