Sage, Victor. “Gothic Novel.” Encyclopedia of the Novel. Paul Schellinger, et al, eds. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. Web.
The history of the Gothic novel, or Gothic romance as it was sometimes called, conventionally begins with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, subtitled A Gothick Story, in 1764. Walpole, who was a Whig member of parliament, concealed himself behind two personae, framing the story as a 15th-century manuscript by one "Onuphrio Muralto," translated by "William Marshall, Gent." The first reviewers sensed something fake, but they were unsure about the status of this "manuscript." The public, however, was enthusiastic, and after the first edition sold out in a matter of months, Walpole was prevailed upon to identify himself. Born appropriately illegitimate, the Gothic novel belatedly acquired its father and became a genre whose conventional end point in literary history is usually marked at around 1820 with the publication of Charles Maturin's tremendous anti-Catholic epic, Melmoth the Wanderer (although, of course, novels following in the Gothic tradition continue to be written and published today).
The Castle of Otranto anticipates many of the formal and thematic obsessions that would characterize the Gothic novel. It looks back to a feudal world in which the Lord of the Manor, Manfred, the first in a long line of Gothic villain-heroes, exercises seigneurial rights over the minds and bodies of his subjects. His castle, however, according to an ancient prophecy, is haunted by a gigantic ancient suit of armour, which falls on his sickly son, Conrad, and kills him. Manfred's obsession with primogeniture and the inability of his wife, Hippolita, to provide him with a son and heir lead Manfred to offer himself in a vaguely incestuous fashion to his one-time prospective daughter-in-law, Isabella. Isabella refuses him indignantly, and, pursued by the would-be rapist, flees into the subterranean vaults of the castle, taking refuge in the monastery church, sheltered there by a good priest. In the end, Manfred is revealed as the son of a usurper of the true line of Otranto, which is represented by a mysteriously articulate young peasant, Theodore, who saves and marries the harrassed Isabella and takes over his rightful estate.
The Castle of Otranto is permeated with many of the conventions of the Gothic romance that would flourish between 1764 and 1820: the antiquarian pretense that the author is merely the editor of a found manuscript; the setting in medieval, "superstitious" (Catholic) southern Europe, which, for an English Protestant audience, invokes darkness and otherness and the contemporary Jacobite threat; the running allusions to the gloom and tragedy of William Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth (another play with anti-Jesuit, anti-Jacobite associations) in the plot and setting; the conflation of villain and hero in the brooding figure of Manfred, who is subject to outbursts of rage and violence; a subtextual meditation on the decay of feudal and aristocratic rights in general, and of primogeniture in particular; a fictional acknowledgment of the rise of an ambitious 18th-century bourgeoisie (represented in part by Manfred himself) eager to exercise individual freedom in marriage and inheritance; the focus on victimized but often defiant women threatened with rape and incest; and the use of confined spaces---castles, dungeons, monasteries, and prisons---to symbolize extreme emotional states through labyrinthine images of confinement, burial, and incarceration. All of these Gothic modalities spring into existence, more or less fully formed, in Walpole's tale.
There is an intriguing contradiction between subject matter and language in Walpole's text that does not occur in later Gothic novels. Stylistically The Castle of Otranto is terse, dry, and witty, suffused with the rational virtues of 18th-century prose. Romantic expansiveness is entirely foreign to it, despite the melodrama of its events, which gives to the whole an air of genial spoof. Walpole wrote and spoke French extremely well and was personally close to several figures of the Enlightenment in France. He was not uncritical of the movement, however, and his antiquarianism and dilettantism stand in an equivocal relationship to Enlightenment scientific rationalism. On the other hand, beneath a facade of humorous scepticism, Walpole revealed serious interests in medieval art and architecture, neglected areas of historical scholarship, and alternative modes of awareness. In a famous account of the genesis of his novel from a dream, which proved interesting to André Breton and the French surrealists, Walpole shows that he was allowing his unconscious to dominate the writing process (see Breton, 1937).
This rich and somewhat contradictory relationship between the French Enlightenment and the Gothic novel is an enduring theme in the survival of the Gothic beyond its first phase as an 18th-century genre into the 19th and 20th centuries (see Botting, 1993). Ann Radcliffe's novels feature what came to be known as "the explained supernatural," initiating a rhetorical tradition in the later Gothic that deliberately uses "explanation" and the apparatus of reason as a teasing device to provoke doubt and edge the reader toward the inexplicable.
Mid-18th-century aesthetics in England were founded on Pierre Corneille's Horace---a polished, witty, decorous, and above all conscious writing that is built on an aesthetics of product. But the Longinian tradition of the sublime, revived also in midcentury by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful(1757), demands an aesthetics of process, foregrounding the affective relationship between reader and text. The birth of sensibility as a value, which derives partly from the Enlightenment, signified a new interest in the emotions. The neo-romanticism of Burke's treatise became a blueprint for the style of the later Gothic novel after Walpole, an aesthetics of terror and horror, which laid down a set of rhetorical conditions and models (including John Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost) for the excitement of awe in the reader. The rhetoric of obscurity and the perverse, sadomasochistic seduction of the reader into a gloomy excess of anticipation, so typical of the later Gothic novel, is codified in Burke's treatise and becomes a fashionable mode in the poetry, prose, and the visual arts of the later 18th century (see Fiedler, 1966; Mishra, 1994).
All these features crystallized in the following well-known passage from the most famous Gothic novel of all, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho(1794), in which the abducted Emily gazes for the first time at the castle in which she is to be imprisoned:
"There," said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, "is Udolpho."
Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle which she understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the Gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those, too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity; and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the carriages soon after began to ascend.
Although the setting is the 16th-century Italian Appenines, the feeling is purely contemporary 18th century: the whole passage is a narrative enactment of Burkean aesthetics with its references to sublime Alpine painting (Salvator Rosa is the model) and the Miltonic connection between the apparently Satanic Montoni, Emily's abductor, and the ruined phallic towers of the castle. A liminal moment comparable in foreboding to the entry of Duncan into Macbeth's castle, this description would echo down through the Gothic tradition.
All the descriptive terms of this passage act as emotional triggers, telling the reader what to feel as much as describing an object, and none more so than the term Gothic itself. But by the 1790s, the label Gothic had become a complex term, encompassing quite contradictory meanings that polarize roughly between the Tory and Whig elements of the readership, dependent on which historiographical tradition one supposes to be foremost in a reader's mind. To the Tory readership Radcliffe's phrase "Gothic greatness" conjures up patriotic images of the Plantagenets, high Anglo-Catholic ritual, and past victories against the French--- "banners," as another Gothic novelist, William Beckford, puts it, "from haughty Gallia torn." Henry VII's chapel in Westminster Abbey was Gothic in this sense. To another sort of reader, "Gothic greatness" would mean "primitive, rugged but barbaric," and this in turn would split into either an honorific or pejorative sense. The honorific sense came from the Whig tradition of historiography, in which the Goths were portrayed as a progressive, democratic, Germanic, freedom-loving people who removed from Europe the yoke of the Holy Roman Empire and laid the foundations of the English Constitution and the Common Law; but equally, if readers were to take their bearings from the Italian Renaissance historiographic tradition, "Gothic greatness" would have a much more oxymoronic flavor and mean "barbarously out of scale, crude, precivilized, preclassical, un-English, and belonging to the Dark Ages," and it could inspire a feeling of threat or opposition rather than a latent or overt patriotism. Equally, it might be possible to feel a confused but still nationalistic mixture of these things, as Samuel Coleridge tended to do (see Sage, 1990; Kliger, 1945; Miles, 1993).
After Walpole, the Gothic retreated to the magazines and miscellanies, but two decades later, in the 1780s, the Minerva Press, backed by the new circulating libraries, began to pour out Gothic three-deckers to a formula that derived from Walpole but that lacked his comic astringency of tone (see Blakey, 1939). By the end of the 1790s the demand for such books had grown into an addiction, a fact reflected by Jane Austen's famous parody of the Gothic novel, Northanger Abbey, the satirical parts of which were probably written in 1800 but not published until after the author's death in 1818, when it became one of the texts that helped to mark the death-knell of the genre's first phase. This text is a parody of both the Radcliffean Gothic and of patriarchal attempts in the magazines to control the female addiction to reading, which was commonly likened to gin drinking. It is interesting to note that Isabella Thorpe's list of "Horrid Novels" was thought to have been made up by Jane Austen until the 1920s, when Michael Sadleir demonstrated the existence of all of these once popular, but quickly forgotten, texts (see Sadleir, 1927).
Two years after The Mysteries of Udolpho, Matthew Gregory Lewis, another Whig member of parliament, published The Monk(1796). Set in 16th-century Spain, The Monk's blend of Catholic superstition, incest, rape, murder, and Faustian metaphysics proved a succès de scandale. Lewis was forced to withdraw the book and edit it after a review, often attributed to Coleridge, accused him of blasphemy, a crime punishable by imprisonment (see Parreaux, 1960). In 1797 Ann Radcliffe replied to Lewis with The Italian, half of which is set near Naples and half in the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition. The Gothic genre was now fully established. By 1800 the Marquis de Sade was announcing that these novels were "the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe," a remark that has proven highly influential in later critical debate, initiating a tradition of linking the Gothic novel with the French Revolution (see Paulson, 1983).
Politically the 1790s were a turbulent decade, and Gothic novels were the focus of various crosscurrents in contemporary culture: English antiquarianism, Whig dilettantism, German influences from the Sturm und Drang, homosexuality, anti-Jacobitism; occult and radical secret societies such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati from southern Germany; anti-Catholicism, Godwinianism, conservative English nationalism, French revolutionary propaganda, among many others. In 1798 Richard Sheridan's Drury Lane Theatre performed The Castle Spectre, a Gothic drama by M.G. "Monk" Lewis. William Pitt's government, nervous at the possibility of revolutionary subversion and propaganda, financed several magazines and kept a close eye on literary and popular culture.
During this decade many foreign writers visited London, some of them destined to contribute to other streams of the Gothic. Among them was perhaps the most remarkable and obscure, the deeply romantic Polish count, Jan Potocki. He drew inspiration for his extraordinary masterpiece, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805), from a stay in London at this time, catching the currency of the Gothic idiom and transporting it to a Spanish and Islamic context, "a la Radcliffe," as he wrote in a letter to a friend. Likewise, the American writer Charles Brockden Brown took his inspiration from the English Gothic novelists, particularly William Godwin, and began, in his extraordinary Wieland (1798), a powerful tradition in American Gothic writing that survived throughout the 19th century in Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to say nothing of Henry James. Brockden Brown was very much a mediator between the earlier generation and the young romantics: Thomas Love Peacock said at the time that Wieland was one of the deepest influences on Percey Shelley. John Keats, Walter Scott, and William Hazlitt read Brockden Brown, and Mary Shelley was reading him just before embarking on Frankenstein (see Punter, 1996).
Thus there are both conservative and radical strains of the Gothic novel. Godwin, for example, in Caleb Williams (1794) and St. Leon (1799), adapted the Burkean sublime to his own political radicalism, and Mary Wollstonecraft also showed the influence of Gothic novels in Maria (1798). But it was their daughter, Mary Shelley, who produced one of the most popular novels of the Gothic tradition: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) was a book Shelley afterward referred to as her "hideous progeny," a remark sometimes taken as an allusion not simply to the monster but to a number of tragic miscarriages and infant deaths she had to suffer in life. Famously, the book was conceived in 1816 at the Villa Diodati, in the company of her husband, Percey Shelley---who had been discussing the work of Signor Galvani---Lord Byron, and Dr John Polidori, whose contribution to this competition to produce a horror story was one of the early vampire tales.
The plot of Frankenstein---the story of a scientist who, having discovered the secret of artificial reproduction from corpses, creates a being, and then, revolted by its apparent monstrosity, morally and physically abandons it---has become nothing less than a modern myth in the postwar period. Given the discovery of the atom bomb, the subsequent Cold War and arms race, developments in genetics and computers, and the ethical issues raised by all these matters, this complex and ambiguously horrifying story codifies in miniature many contemporary concerns. It has acquired a resonance through reproduction in a number of popular cultural forms---Hammer Films, Hollywood versions (a stage play ran continuously until the 1880s), comics, radio plays---and the novel still appears to many to speak to us directly of our own condition in the face of technology.
By 1820 the excesses of the earlier genre began to be thought of as somewhat Grand Guignol. Perhaps this was due to the effect of parodies such as Austen's Northanger Abbey and Peacock's Nightmare Abbey(1818) or the Enlightenment relativism of Walter Scott and the rise of his new genre, the historical romance, which had begun to seem more modern to a post-Napoleonic, postheroic age. After 1820 the radicalism, confusion, and anarchy of the old Gothic novel, with its deliberately fantastic treatment of history, gave way to the new standards of technical accuracy and historical research of the Waverly era (roughly 1820-37). The Minerva Press gave up the Gothic and turned to children's books. The publication of the Dublin Calvinist Pastor Charles Maturin's hyperbolic, Faustian Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which enjoyed particular success in France, conventionally marks the end of the first phase of the Gothic novel.
It is at this historical point that the Gothic novel broke up and became (in today's common parlance) "the Gothic" ---a scattered but now permanent and widely influential aspect of literary sensibility rather than a homogenous genre or concerted movement. In the 1830s a polarization occurred between popular forms: the "penny dreadfuls" of writers such as G.W.M. Reynolds and the Newgate novels of Harrison Ainsworth, and the popular stage melodrama, on the one hand; on the other, the literary tradition of historical romance dominated by Scott. Ann Radcliffe survived into the Victorian period as a writer's writer, or a clumsy forerunner of romanticism (the young Wilkie Collins read her as part of a "hash of diablerie"), but Christopher North's Blackwoods and Henry Colburn's New Monthly Magazine had kept alive the Gothic flame, and by the 1840s both Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters were showing unmistakable signs of the Gothic influence.
In the Dublin University Magazine of the 1830s, the ballads and plays of Friedrich von Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann were systematically translated by James Clarence Mangan. The Dublin University Magazine probably is where Charlotte Brontë first became acquainted with the German wildness that formed a model for her own fictional tone. Later, from the 1840s onward, this magazine was edited and owned by Sheridan Le Fanu, one of the great Victorian masters of the Gothic horror tale. In America, Poe, following Radcliffe and Brockden Brown, began to produce his tales in magazines. In Scotland, defiant of the Enlightenment rationalism of Scott, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, used the Gothic convention of the doppelgänger (or double, probably also derived from Hoffmann) to satirize the growth of evangelical Calvinism in his The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), a truly schizophrenic text. Eventually Dickens planned a similar confessional climax for his last, unfinished doppelgänger novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).
By the mid-19th century the Gothic novel was apparently extinct and the term Gothic, if used at all, was predominantly an architectural term. But paradoxically, this diversified underground role, the diffusion of a genre into a popular discourse that had no need to name itself, guaranteed its literary survival. The cultural conditions in which the novels had originally appeared---the unease about Enlightenment modes of thought, empirical science, and the epistemological doubt inherited from Hume and the 18th century; the economic independence of women as readers and writers; Catholic emancipation; the increasingly shrill assertion of Protestant rationality (see Gordon, 1983; Sage, 1988); the taboo on superstition; the sublime; the split self; and the curiosity about the nature of fantasy and sexual excitement---all these conditions, far from passing away, had intensified in the Victorian period.
By midcentury, the advent of Charles Darwin and the fears of social, cultural, and psychological regression that evolutionary thought brought to the Victorian imagination added new layers and contexts to the discourse of the Gothic---new dreams of horror, darkness, and the unspeakable. Dickens' novels from Bleak House (1853) on are an excellent index of the diffusion of the Gothic into an insistent strain of obscurity and terror: Dickensian London is a labyrinth of dark courts and filthy alleyways, the Thames is a polluted Styx of floating corpses, and the selves of his characters are frequently distorted or split. Later Victorian Gothic writing developed the Darwinian theme more explicitly. The allegory of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a meditation on the nature of the psyche, a near-perfect anticipation of Sigmund Freud's early work on the ego and the id. Stevenson heralds a connection between the late Victorian and the modern sense of an irrevocable split in the definition of the self. Drawing on the German Gothic writer Hoffmann, Freud eventually codified his own responses to horror in his essay "Das Unheimliche" (1919; "The 'Uncanny'"), which forms an endpoint of 19th-century tradition and also a starting point for any thoughts about the modernity of the Gothic. From this point a line runs out into the modernist period via imperialism (Castle, in Brown and Nussbaum, 1987). Some Victorian Gothic, though, was recycled into German Expressionism and eventually into the postwar movies of Berlin-trained Alfred Hitchcock (see Castle, 1987).
This process of diffusion meant that the presence of the Gothic in Victorian writing was taken for granted, thanks to the currency of the magazines and the work of romantics such as Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats. Even Scott, by an interesting paradox, contributed to the creation of a Gothic narrative vocabulary through the immense popularity of his early Border ballads. It became de rigueur for any Victorian writer worth his or her salt to attempt the macabre or bizarre in a tale. Recent scholarly attention has been directed toward the popular "sensation" novel of the 1860s, a blend of realism, melodrama, and Gothic, whose name refers to its powerful affective designs on the reader's nerves, a feature that replays the connection between the original Gothic novel and the Burkean tradition of affective aesthetics. Le Fanu's masterpiece of the Victorian Gothic, Uncle Silas (1864), was marketed in this best-selling genre. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (1860), another sensation novel, also has strong Gothic elements, his command of suspense earning him the title of "Mrs. Radcliffe brought down to date."
Medieval fantasy of all kinds became a Victorian obsession in poetry, narrative, architecture, crafts, and the iconography of the visual arts. Some of these elements are clearly visible in the greatest example of the 19th-century Gothic, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), perhaps the most reproduced and recycled of all the Gothic texts. Stoker's arch-vampire, the undead Count Dracula, like Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, has entered the contemporary popular consciousness of the 20th century, in this case as a modern myth of vampirism, a reference point for nightmares from the 1960s onward---whether they be Cold War fantasies of invasion or infiltration from within, fantasies about sexual diseases, homosexuality, drugs, the transfer of bodily fluids, or new technologies of the body.
The postwar period has seen a remarkable revival of interest in the interpretation and the practice of the Gothic tradition, which is often now seen as a whole. In the last 20 years, serious critical commentary on the Gothic has expanded exponentially. Debate is keen about how "subversive" the Gothic is. Every college has its course on horror and the Gothic. Nowadays, every station concourse, supermarket, bookstore, and airport bookstall carries a category of pulp fiction called "Horror" or "Gothic" that includes an unpredictable mixture of the popular and high literary: Julio Cortázar or Tommaso Landolfi rub shoulders with Ramsay Campbell, William Gibson, and Angela Carter. Indeed, the world's greatest-selling contemporary writers---Anne Rice and Stephen King---are also the most direct descendants of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, and Bram Stoker, all of whom are integral to the global recycling of traditional myths that is the modern Gothic (see Sage and Lloyd Smith, 1996).
Victor Sage
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