- Strange places such as Transylvania (Dracula by Bram Stoker) or Sicily (A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe) or Spain (The Monk by Lewis) or Satis House (Great Expectations by Charles Dickens)
- A Time of Transition such as the interface between the middle ages and the renaissance, or when archaic and modern clash, or when something (eg a ghost) is out of its time “which is why a novel like Dracula is as full of the modern technology of its period – typewriters, shorthand, recording machines – as it is of vampires, destruction and death.”
- Power and constraint such as the archetypal damsel in distress threatened by a powerful villain (in Dracula or in The Mysteries of Udolpho). Gothic plots “are often driven by the exploration of questions of sexual desire, pleasure, power and pain ... full of same-sex desire, perversion, obsession, voyeurism and sexual violence.”
- Terror rather than Horror. For Ann Radcliffe, terror is driven by suspense whilst horror is driven by disgust; terror is about anticipation whereas horror is more explicit.
- Doubt and Uncertainty. “Gothic ... seeks to create in our minds the possibility that there may be things beyond human power, reason and knowledge.” But ‘may be’ is key.
Settings include castles, often ruined. Landscapes are expansive but often isolated, deserted and lifeless. There is often a hint of decay. The settings often mirror the internal landscape of the main characters. Hogle (2002, 2) suggests that these places are often antiquated (at least they seem to be so) and include "a castle, a foreign palace, an abbey, a vast prison, a subterranean crypt, a graveyard, a primeval frontier or island, a large old house or theatre, an aging city or urban underworld, a decaying storehouse, factory, laboratory, public building, or some new recreation of an older venue, such as an office with old filing cabinets, an overworked spaceship or a computer memory. Within this space, or a combination of such spaces, are hidden some secrets from the past (sometimes the recent past) that haunt the characters, psychologically, physically, or otherwise at the main time of the story."
Themes include the ideas of:
HOGLE, J., 2002. Introduction. In: J. HOGLE, ed, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-20.
- Justice and revenge. There is usually an inciting incident that involves a wrong that must be righted. Often the actions taken in the name of retribution are misplaced: the one who suffers is not the culprit. But somebody has to pay.
- Good and evil. Gothic novels usually foreground evil and can pose questions regarding our understanding of morality.
- Irregular and chaotic forces manipulating the intrinsic order of society and the natural world. Hogle (2002, 9) believes that Gothic novels foregrounds the fears of the middle-class for either “the very high or the decadently aristocratic and the very low or the animalistic, working class, underfinanced, sexually deviant, childish or carnivalesque.”
Other Gothic novels might include:
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Titus Groan and Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The madwoman in the attic, in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, is a very Gothic concept; it was predated by Sheridan LeFanu's A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family.
References:
No comments:
Post a Comment