Literary Movement Series: Gothic Literature

Flying buttresses and soaring peaks.  Pointed arches and dark moors.  These are images that spring to mind when we think of the word "Gothic."  And the architecture and setting of medieval times is essential to the understanding of Gothic literature.

A Gothic work combines horror and romance, but not necessarily the romance one associates with Nora Roberts.  The horror is conveyed in the subject, setting, or conflict of the piece, while the romance can be a literal one between characters, or an idealized goal.

Another aspect of Gothic literature is the extreme.  Extreme emotions and reactions are documented.  Some of the reactions are decidedly unexpected for the circumstance--thrill to fear, joy from pain.  Think of Mina's reactions to Dracula in Stoker's book, or Frankenstein's ignorance of his Elizabeth's pain in Shelley's.  In modern fiction we would call such encouraged reactions to negative circumstances evidence of a psychopath, but such is not the case in romantic lit.

Why such dark settings and horrible happenings?  The early Gothic writers reacted to their surroundings--the medieval ruins and the dark and terrifying times they represent, the inevitable decay that comes with being human as represented by these crumbling edifices.  (From the latter you can see the correlation to creating someone who is immortal, i.e. Dracula.)

The first Gothic romance is said to be Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto.  Walpole published this work from his own printing press at his Gothic revival home, Strawberry Hill, in 1764--seventy some-odd years before the Victorian-era Gothics we associate with the movement today.  It was in those Victorian times that the most famous Gothic works came to press--Dracula by Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley was actually written earlier in the century, during the Romantic period (the subject of Tuesday's post!).

It was also at this time that we cross the Atlantic for the birth of American Gothic, launched by the father of the detective novel, Edgar A. Poe.  Many point to Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum as the ultimate example of early American Gothic literature.  I, however, see a stronger strain of the new style in such works as The Black Cat.  In Pit and Pendulum, Poe tackles the external theme of the Spanish Inquisition, pain imposed on the body, and supernatural intervention (e.g. rats eating away the rope to free the victim from the pendulum).  In Black Cat, Poe turns the terror inside the human body.  The setting is still strongly atmospheric--a dark basement, a one-eyed cat named out of ancient mythology, a devoted wife, a house consumed (literally, by fire) by the evil within its walls.  But it is the inner turmoil that separates this work from, say, Stoker's Dracula, where all the fighting (save the revenge and love themes) is physical.  Poe's narrator is overcome with the nightmare emanating from his revived cat, and kills his wife.  It is at this point the here-to-fore tormented narrator becomes calm and calculating--meticulously describing the way he bricks his wife's body within the basement wall.

"I quivered not in a muscle.  My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence."

Courtesy: the V&A online, by Alphonse Legros

(A brief aside: the turn to an internal conflict may be attributed to the coming importance of psychology in the 19th century.  The first sketches of the modern field can be seen in 1802 with Pierre Cabanis, though the first center of psychological study was not founded until 1879, by Wilhelm Wundt; and Sigmund Freud did not begin his work until the 1890s.)

It is no wonder the Gothic and horror-filled mind of Poe birthed the first detective novel, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841).  And Gothic mores are still rampant in the mystery works produced today.  Think of the depressed and hard-luck atmosphere in James Lee Burke's work, the twisted romances portrayed by Daphne du Maurier, or the social commentary and even neo-Gothic dress in Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy. 

The most famous socially aware crime novel of our time is To Kill a Mockingbird.  And Pulitzer Prize-winner Harper Lee was very much a writer in the Southern Gothic style.  She took the post-slavery South, added crime (rape, murder), social problems (segregation, ignorance, prejudice), compelling characters (child narrator, single father lawyer, misunderstood and mentally handicapped neighbor), and Gothic symbols (dark oak tree with hidden secrets, mob-rule violence, villains and heroes), and created a lasting work of fiction.

How do you incorporate Gothic literature values in your work?  Were you aware of the Gothic literary movement's presence in your work before reading this?


Next in Series:
Tuesday, Romantics
Thursday, Beat Generation

Photograph identification:
Top, left: Westminster Abbey, London
Second, right: Bath Abbey, Bath, England
Third, left: Strawberry Hill, near London