The Gothic Novel

1
The Gothic Novel

• Gothic because of medieval setting
• Gothic because of return to dark ages
• as opposed to Enlightenment
• Return to excluded genres (romance, fabulous
  tale) of the middleages
• Age of the sublime rather than of neaoclassic
  harmony

2
Influential from the 1760's to 1820's

• Explained gothic and unexplained (marvellous)
  gothic
• Superseded in 1820s by Scotts historical
  romance
• 1850s realistic rewritings (Brontes etc)
• Horror story (Stevenson, Wilde))
• Ghost story
• Vampire story
• Science fiction
• Detective story

3
Structural elements

• Character types
• A pure virginal heroine
• a villain (corrupt aristocrat or clergyman)
  perverted character
• Debased families
• Situation
• Persecution,
• Imprisonment Claustrophobic situations
• Flight, travel from place to place
• Setting
• Sublime or picturesque scenery
• Frightening nature
• Castles dungeons, ruins
• Mysterious, unfamiliar places
• Exotic countries

4
From Edmund Burke

• 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. The ideas of pain, sickness, or death,
  fill the mind with strong emotions of horror but
  life and health, though they put us in a capacity
  of being affected with pleasure, make no such
  impression by the simple enjoyment

5
Gothic novel as coded history

• A social text
• Revolt against rationalism
• Revolt against middle-class values of stability,
  security, progress
• Collapse of old certainties, unrest.
• Rapidly changing social order, unrest
• Violence, revolution

6
Gothic novel as escape from history

• Bringing back what had been excluded
• Going back to old genres
• Romance
• The marvellous tale
• Revolt against realism
• Fantasy
• The supernatural
• The irrational

7
The Gothic as moral /aesthetic reaction

• Reversal of customary binary pairs
• Reversal of Richardsons Pamela model
• Refusal to read for instruction and moral
  improvement.
• Read to obtain a thrill

8
The gothic as a female genre

• Female authorship
• Female readership
• Female resourceful heroine
• Sublimation of female fantasies and fears

9
Psychoanalysis and the gothic

• Freuds uncanny
• Terror not of something external but of something
  strangely familiar
• Sublimation of something repressed
• Travel structure moving from stage to stage of
  recognition , of bringing the repressed to the
  surface
• Sadistic and masochistic pulsions
• Playing with terror and insanity
• Imagination stimulated by what we can never know

10
Freuds The Uncanny (Unheimlich)

• The uncanny "is in reality nothing new or alien,
  but something which is familiar and
  old-established in the mind and which has become
  alienated from it only through the process of
  repression.