What makes gothic potent

However like the majority of so-called movements, whether in art or literature, there was no conscious decision by a group of writers to form themselves into a collective with a clear manifesto or to create fiction in a particular style. The genre was defined retrospectively and it developed through a kind of artistic osmosis. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole - 97 is often regarded as the first true Gothic romance.

Walpole was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house in that fashion. Externally his property at Strawberry Hill in Richmond near London seemed to be a blend of two predominant styles: a style based on castles with turrets and battlements, and a style based on Gothic cathedrals with arched windows and stained glass.

The basic plot created other elements which became gothic staples, including a threatening mystery and an ancestral curse, as well as countless trappings such as hidden passages and oft-fainting heroines. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe — is a powerful tale with the key elements of the Gothic: a heroine in peril, a sinister count and a creepy castle. The Monk by Matthew Lewis — , published two years after Udolpho , continued to develop the dark themes of the emerging gothic oeuvre but the novel was condemned as being lewd with elements of the pornographic and the satanic.

Even today, the depiction of the gradual corruption of a monk, the rape of a virgin by a representative of religion, who later discovers he has committed incest, matricide and made a bargain with the Devil, can seem rather sordid.

However, this darkness was embraced by the growing audience for the gothic. Two-and-a-half centuries have passed since it was born into a Britain on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution's wrenching change, and while the genre has never really left Western culture, there's no doubting that this is boomtime for narratives that dare to peer into the darkest corners.

As Stephen King puts it, in words crying out for a gothic font, "We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. The past oozes into the present in AJ Elwood's The Cottingley Cuckoo Titan , based around the famous Cottingley fairy photograph hoax, while Lizzie Fry's The Coven Sphere imagines a world in which witchcraft is real, and a demagogue US president is out to hunt down its practitioners.

Feeling pre-apocalyptic? Sue Rainsford describes the lives of twins holed up on an abandoned commune in Redder Days Doubleday. Want a horror hybrid? All these titles and more are pitched by their publishers as "gothic", or even "Gothic", but if the choice of an upper or lowercase "G" seems neither here nor there, the vast elasticity of the term is amply instructive. It's applied to crime and thrillers, to romance, fantasy, historical adventure and sci-fi. It doesn't describe only novels and stories, either: films, fashion, videogames, music — all crowd under the same umbrella or should that be lacy black parasol?

It's no wonder that literary subgenres like Southern Gothic and Gothic Romance have emerged to counter the generality of a word that often seems to have become a catch-all for "dark". At the same time, gothic's very adaptability heightens its menace — just try to contain this beast.

Trace that back through history, and you'll find that some of the traits that seem the most contemporary are in fact constants, there from the beginning and still every bit as versatile.

As a stylistic descriptor, Gothic was first applied to architecture, and it was not a compliment. Coined by Italian artists during the Renaissance, it denoted a medieval aesthetic that they deemed barbaric picture flying buttresses and pointy arches and channelled, they felt, the spirit of the Goth tribes responsible for vandalising the Roman Empire's classical art in the early centuries of the Christian era. Its literary application dates back to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, a short, daft novel in which the fabric of a castle comes malevolently to life.

The novel was published in bearing the subtitle "A gothic story". The word's barbarous meaning was then fully intact, and so, too, were its intimations of medieval vintage. A preface purporting to be written by a translator duly explains how the tale, found in an old library, was published in Italian in but predates that by three or four centuries.

It's a knowing ruse and, for all that gothic writing sends shivers down the spine, knowingness is an integral part of its appeal — just look at Northanger Abbey , in which Jane Austen's heroine, addled by the fiction of early Gothic doyenne Ann Radcliffe, finds spectres of the genre popping up all over the place.

Her own forthcoming Plain Bad Heroines Borough Press , billed as a Sapphic Gothic romp of a novel, at once celebrates and sends up the mode. Because it offers a story within a story and uses two timeframes, Danforth relied for scaffolding on gothic details like a decaying manor house and creepy tower, a cursed object and oppressive, fog-shrouded landscape.

While Gothic literature maintains a healthy sense of its own melodramatic excesses, it's also giddy with potency: often, these narratives conjure up stories that cannot, for whatever reason, be laid to rest, exerting devastating power over reality, with the disquiet lingering even when rational explanations are found.

Through haunted houses, the gothic invades the realm of the domestic. And through dangers only half-glimpsed, it slyly bids us collaborate in creating customised terrors, all the better to keep us up at night.

So far this discussion suggests that both Hardy and Stoker are using their fictional creations to address concerns that their readers would have shared, including anxiety about the vulnerability of women, worry about the foreigner, and fear of atavism and degeneration. Nothing so far has touched on the link between the Gothic and horror, but this connection will illustrate what distinguishes the Gothic from realist works that employ Gothic material.

The connection is definitely present as scholars such as Botting and Allison Millbank 8 have noted, but merely pointing to the extent to which the Gothic is woven into the realistic novel is insufficient.

One of the first scholars to address the connection between the Gothic and realism as well as one of the first twentieth-century scholars to take the Gothic seriously is Leslie Fiedler whose classic Love and Death in the American Novel emphasizes the importance of both the Gothic and horror to the American literary experience:. In our most enduring books, the cheapjack machinery of the gothic novel is called on to represent the hidden blackness of the human soul and human society.

No wonder our authors mock themselves as they use such devices …. However shoddily or ironically treated, horror is essential to our literature. It is not merely a matter of terror filling the vacuum left by the suppression of sex in our novels, of Thanatos standing in for Eros. Knowing what might drive these unpleasant circumstances into full-blown Gothic horror will help discriminate the Gothic from realism, however.

This chapter will investigate the Gothic within Victorian realism on the basis of this key principle: that it is not where the Gothic might be found that is important, but why it is found there, what it is employed to do, and under what conditions it achieves this. If we begin to uncover at least a few of the different epistemologies of realism where the Gothic has an influence this will allow us to develop a much deeper understanding of the generic relationships between realism and the Gothic.

Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain and Hardy too confront readers with unpleasant and inescapable realities: The ordinary humans in this realist fiction suffer from a variety of physical and mental illnesses as well as from poverty and unemployment. Romantic love does not transport them beyond their ordinary circumstances; family members and friends are indifferent to their suffering; the people who should love and protect them are often responsible for their suffering and may even take gleeful delight in it ; and even loving individuals are powerless to protect those they love from harm.

In addition, while earlier literature and art had sometimes reminded viewers and readers of the pains of the flesh, such memento mori were generally created within a religious or heroic context that also encouraged the search for something beyond mere material existence. Physical death was unavoidable, but there was something beyond—either immortality or glory—that is no longer in evidence in realism. The Gothic at the end of the nineteenth century and after goes one step further and focuses on the most graphic, painful and degrading aspects of death, disease and sexuality.

At mid-century Edgar Allan Poe is also an expert at evoking horror. And of course there is always the vampire, that creature from the grave who nonetheless returns to impact the living. The existence of the vampire is a reminder of things worse than death and disease, it seems.

Botting provides a succinct overview of some reasons for this transformation that took place during the period when Stoker and Hardy were writing:. Along similar lines, the work of criminologists like Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau attempted to discriminate between humans: some were more primitive and bestial in their nature than others.

Anatomical, physiological and psychological theories were brought to bear on identifications of criminal types, those genetically determined to be degenerate and deviant.

Atavism and recidivism, the regression to archaic or primitive characteristics, dominated constructions of deviance and abnormality. Often writers used this scientific language to depict the real horrors they saw, and many of the horrors reveal that nineteenth-century confidence in science, technology and rationalism was illusory.

Hardy demonstrates that being human can be painful and reveals the extent to which vulnerable people are often hurt. The result is that her former lover kidnaps their child while the man who had rescued both her and that child is frantic at the loss. They would merely see such pain as part of the human condition.

His characters are creatures of the flesh rather than intellectual beings. The mouth … was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips …. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed …. Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lap on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse ….

The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.

Because Dracula is rarely on stage, readers see him less through his relationships with the other characters than through the odor of a corrupt and moldering body that he leaves behind. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness …. At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight …. With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone.

In almost every case, the humans are frozen with either horror or revulsion on their encounter with the vampire, revulsion that reinforces the fact that the vampire is a creature only of the material body. Immortal, yes, but creatures entirely associated with the earth in which their bodies were buried.

Dracula on the other hand immerses readers in the looks and smells of mere animal existence and reminds them there is nothing beyond.

Darwin linked humans to the animal world and consistently rejected a separate act of creation for humans. The Crew of Light believes in its triumph over Dracula, but Stoker probably did not. No matter what humans may hope for, they are constrained by their animal bodies. In the process, it has also argued that the Gothic at the end of the nineteenth century was connected to realism though it is certainly not synonymous with it.

As the nineteenth century transitioned to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Gothic continues to be set in familiar locations and to be identified by horror rather than with terror. If it were possible to extend this essay into a full exploration of the connection between Gothic and horror, it would of necessity need to examine far more than these two works, and it would certainly need to look at the evolution of what causes fear in people today.

One example, though, points to the continued evolution of the links among Gothic, realism and horror, and that is the shift from the vampire who uses seductive language to woo his or her victims to the zombie, a creature that is little more than a dead body with a need to satisfy physical hunger.

While Stoker gives Dracula little to say, his vampire retains elements of his former humanity, including the wish to fit in among the crowds in London and his pride in his heroic past. In fact, the only threats to their humanity lie in other humans and the possibility that they may become violent predators as well. Meanwhile, readers and viewers are aware that the zombie apocalypse is set in the cities of today, whether London, Los Angeles or Atlanta. What produced this change?

The earliest Gothic literature featured a limited cast of characters often confined to family members and had them interact in deserted landscapes that emphasized the influence of the past over the present. Supernatural events and people sometimes explained were common. By the end of the nineteenth century, the fantastic events and exotic settings were often replaced by frightening situations in domestic settings with which readers could identify. Fear is an essential component of the Gothic, but the source of that fear differs enormously.

Hurley, who writes on the horror of Gothic bodies, observes that the Gothic emerges during periods of genuine psychic crisis:.

The Gothic is rightly, if partially, understood as a cyclical genre that reemerges in times of cultural stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its readership by working through them in displaced sometimes supernaturalized form. Those fears originated in the changes that were taking place in the patriarchal family as the absolute power associated with fathers began to erode and later became fear of the stranger with whom one might rub elbows in overcrowded cities where people of all cultures interact.

The horrors depicted in these works are poignant reminders that the past is always with us even though Stoker emphasizes Gothic horror and Hardy features plausible human behaviour. Similar fears continue to dominate twentieth and twenty-first century literature and popular culture as well. Readers today may be more sophisticated, but fear being dragged back into the swamp from which enlightened humanity so recently emerged.

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