I.
Elements of Gothic Literature[1]
a. Obviously the Gothic has been part of society long before the first gothic novel, yet Gothic fiction still supported cultural norms and maintained the clear distinctions between good and evil
b. Gothic tales usually take place in a castle, an old mansion, an abbey, a vast prison, a subterranean crypt, a graveyard, a decaying storehouse or factory, etc.
c. Within this space, or a combination of such spaces, are hidden some secrets from the past that haunt the characters psychologically and physically.
d. These hauntings can take many forms, but they frequently assume the features of ghosts, specters, or monsters (mixing features from different realms of being, often life and death) that rise from the antiquated space, or sometimes invade it from alien realms, to manifest unresolved crimes or conflicts that can no longer be successfully buried from view.
e. The readership of Gothic literature began as and remains mostly middle-class and Anglo Saxon, primarily because Gothic fictions have most often been about middle class people caught between the attractions and terrors of a past once controlled by overweening aristocrats or priests and forces of change that would reject such a past yet still remain held by aspects of it. This tug-of-war forces characters and readers to acknowledge “unconscious” fears of the self and of deep-seated social and historical dilemmas.
f. This fear of deep-seated social fears can best be described by looking at the era in which the Gothic novel was introduced. [2]This fiction began primarily in Great Britain during the period in which Britain was attempting to form a national identity. The Marquis de Sade described the gothic novel of the early 1800s as “the necessary fruit of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe” (qtd. in Jones 9). It was an ideologically and aesthetically radical or revolutionary form in which societal taboos are examined and violated, and through its symbolic acts of inversion and indirection, it became the primary, if not only, aesthetic media with which to represent and respond to current events.
The major identifying feature of British national identity at the time was Protestantism; therefore, the gothic novel worked to present others as untrustworthy foreigners, usually Catholic Europeans, particularly from France, Italy, and Spain. By imagining the European Other as Catholic, superstitious, barbarous, irrational, chaotic, rooted in the past, the Gothic novel allowed the Britain audience conversely to identify itself as Protestant, rational, ordered, stable, and modern (Jones 9).
g. One example of this is Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, published in 1796. After reading this novel, Samuel Taylor Colderidge believed it to be “a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale” (qtd. in Jones 2). This novel deems Catholics as indulgent in homoeroticism, blasphemy, transvestitism, Satanism, rape, murder, incest, and necrophilia. The Monk, then, lays the blame for crimes and perversions it so gleefully presents squarely at the door of the Catholic church.
h. Despite this desire to overthrow old regimes and social customs, however, most Gothic fiction centers around characters who are still very much affected psychologically by those old forces that have become repressed memories locked away in the deep recesses of the unconscious.
i. For example, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto also “sees its characters and readers as torn between the enticing call of aristocratic wealth and sensuous Catholic splendor, beckoning back toward the Middle Ages and the Reniassance, on the one hand, and a desire by the middle class to reach these old heights of dominance and overthrow them at the same time.
i. As a result, that which the middle-class, the social group characters of gothic fiction often represent, loathed and feared was ironically part of their identity; however, this anomaly in fiction took the form of the seemingly unreal—the alien, the ghost, Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, etc.—which allowed characters to confront yet remain removed from their psychological fears.
i. Freud refers to these strange and ghostly figures as “the Uncanny,” that which is deeply and internally familiar (the most infantile of our desires and fears) as it appears to us in seemingly external, repellant, and unfamiliar forms.
ii. Julia Kristeva refers the them as “abjections”—all that is in-between, ambiguous, composite—in our beings that prevent us from declaring a coherent and independent identity to ourselves and to others (I.e., Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
iii. In accordance with this basic idea, many common themes, images and motifs have surfaced in Gothic fiction:
1. Mad Science: In gothic fiction and later in horror films, particularly of the 1930s and 1940s, the horror genre supported the belief that science is dangerous. According to film theorist Andrew Tudor, “science is posited as a primary source of disorder, and in many horror works, that image is given flesh in the person of the mad scientist. Ex: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
2. Vampires: Throughout gothic fiction and horror film history, vampires have been symbols for an array of institutions and ideas. Vampires have been symbols for pestilence, disease, or invasion; for colonialism or nationalism (vampires and nationalists share the same language, the rhetoric of ‘blood and soil’; for gender relations or sexuality; for sexual repression, perversion, or dissidence; for class relations as the embodiment of aristocracy or as a metaphor for the ‘bloodsucking’ process of capitalism. Ex: Bram Stoker’s Dracula
3. Madness: Due to an inability to fit cohesively within society’s definition of “normal” or of acceptable behavior, main characters slip into insanity and allow the id of their personalities (or doppelganger) to take control of their lives. The doppelganger in gothic fiction and film refers to the second self or mirror image of the character who disregards societal limitations and is free to act on his own free will—often, as in the case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, by killing others.
j. These psychological fears can go beyond middle-class desires/fears about the aristocracy; they can also deal with the cultural problem of gender distinctions.
i. In Gothic fiction, women are the figures most fearfully trapped between contradictory pressures and impulses. Women were often oppressed and made into the “other,” ultimately becoming an object of exchange or the merest tool of child-bearing between men. Ann Radcliffe and other female writers, however, transformed this scene of female confinement and made it into a journey of women coming into some power and property by their own and other feminine agency, albeit within a still-antiquated and male dominated world full of terrors for every female.
1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”
ii. Another Gothic subject focused on the recovery of a lost or hidden maternal origin by both women and men. The confinement of women by patriarchy is based fundamentally on an attempt to repress, as well as a quest to uncover, a potentially “unruly female principle” that antiquated patriarchal enclosures have been designed to contain and even bury.
1. Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”
iii. Gothic fiction often shows it readers, however, that the female “other” is actually a part of the male psyche through the male’s unconscious memory that he has been inside and outside his mother whom he now fears and desires. The Gothic, then, is quite consistently about the connection of abject monster figures to the primal and engulfing morass of the maternal.
1. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein