what is gothic literature essay

A Brief Introduction to Gothic Literature

Elements, Themes, and Examples from the Gothic Style

• Study Guides
• Authors & Texts
• Top Picks Lists
• Best Sellers
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

• Ph.D., English Language and Literature, Northern Illinois University
• M.A., English, California State University–Long Beach
• B.A., English, Northern Illinois University

The term Gothic originates with the architecture created by the Germanic Goth tribes that was later expanded to include most medieval architecture. Ornate, intricate, and heavy-handed, this style of architecture proved to be the ideal backdrop for both the physical and the psychological settings in a new literary genre, one that concerned itself with elaborate tales of mystery, suspense, and superstition. While there are several notable precursors, the height of the Gothic period, which was closely aligned with Romanticism , is usually considered to have been the years 1764 to about 1840, however, its influence extends to 20th-century authors such as V.C. Andrews, Iain Banks, and Anne Rice.

Plot and Examples

Gothic plotlines typically involve an unsuspecting person (or persons)—usually an innocent, naive, somewhat helpless heroine—who becomes embroiled in complex and oftentimes evil paranormal scheme. An example of this trope is young Emily St. Aubert in Anne Radcliffe’s classic Gothic 1794 novel, "The Mysteries of Udolpho," which would later inspire a parody in form of Jane Austen ’s 1817 "Northanger Abbey."

The benchmark for pure Gothic fiction is perhaps the first example of the genre, Horace Walpole’s "The Castle of Otranto" (1764). Although not a long tale in the telling, the dark, its oppressive setting combined with elements of terror and medievalism set the bar for an entirely new, thrilling form of literature.

Key Elements

Most Gothic literature contains certain key elements that include:

• Atmosphere : The atmosphere in a Gothic novel is one characterized by mystery, suspense, and fear, which is usually heightened by elements of the unknown or unexplained.
• Setting : The setting of a Gothic novel can often rightly be considered a character in its own right. As Gothic architecture plays an important role, many of the stories are set in a castle or large manor, which is typically abandoned or at least run-down, and far removed from civilization (so no one can hear you should you call for help). Other settings may include caves or wilderness locales, such as a moor or heath.
• Clergy: Often, as in "The Monk" and "The Castle of Otranto," the clergy play important secondary roles in Gothic fare. These (mostly) men of the cloth are often portrayed as being weak and sometimes outrageously evil.
• The paranormal : Gothic fiction almost always contains elements of the supernatural or paranormal, such as ghosts or vampires. In some works, these supernatural features are later explained in perfectly reasonable terms, however, in other instances, they remain completely beyond the realm of rational explanation.
• Melodrama : Also called “high emotion,” melodrama is created through highly sentimental language and instances of overwrought emotion. The panic, terror, and other feelings characters experience is often expressed in a way that's overblown and exaggerated in order to make them seem out of control and at the mercy of the increasingly malevolent influences that surround them.
• Omens : Typical of the genre, omens—or portents and visions—often foreshadow events to come. They can take many forms, such as dreams, spiritual visitations, or tarot card readings.
• Virgin in distress : With the exception of a few novels, such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s "Carmilla" (1872), most Gothic villains are powerful males who prey on young, virginal women (think Dracula). This dynamic creates tension and appeals deeply to the reader's sense of pathos, particularly as these heroines typically tend to be orphaned, abandoned, or somehow severed from the world, without guardianship.

Modern Critiques

Modern readers and critics have begun to think of Gothic literature as referring to any story that uses an elaborate setting, combined with supernatural or super-evil forces against an innocent protagonist. The contemporary understanding is similar but has widened to include a variety of genres, such as paranormal and horror. 

Selected Bibliography

In addition to "The Mysteries of Udolpho" and "The Castle of Otranto," there are a number of classic novels that those interested in Gothic literature will want to pick up. Here's a list of 10 titles that are not to be missed:

• "The History of the Caliph Vathek" (1786) by William Thomas Beckford
• "The Monk" (1796) by Mathew Lewis
• "Frankenstein" (1818) by Mary Shelley
• "Melmoth the Wanderer" (1820) by Charles Maturin
• "Salathiel the Immortal" (1828) by George Croly
• " The Hunchback of Notre-Dame " (1831) by Victor Hugo
• "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
• "Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood" (1847) by James Malcolm Rymer
• "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
• " Dracula " (1897) by Bram Stoker
• Gothic Literature
• "Dracula" - Based on the Novel by Bram Stoker
• Escape Literature
• What Is a Novel? Definition and Characteristics
• The 10 Most Romantic, Picturesque Castles From Around the World
• Spooky Nightmare Buildings
• What Is Burlesque Literature?
• 'Jane Eyre' Questions for Study and Discussion
• 'Dracula' Quotes
• An Introduction to Metafiction
• Biography of Bram Stoker, Irish Author
• Top 10 Books for High School Seniors
• Understanding Mystery Writing
• 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' Essay and Discussion Questions
• An Introduction to Gothic Revival Architecture
• The 7 Scariest Stories by Stephen King

Gothic Literature — Definition, Elements, and Examples

What is Gothic literature?

Gothic literature focuses on the darker aspects of humanity paired with intense contrasting emotions such as pleasure and pain or love and death. A classic example of a Gothic novel is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Gothic literature is often set around dilapidated castles, secluded estates, and unfamiliar environments.

Gothic works often includes characteristics like omens, the supernatural, and romance.

Gothic literature tends to incorporate revenge, family secrets, prophecies, psychological struggles, and "damsels in distress."

Gothic literature emerged in Europe during the 18th century and was inspired by Gothic architecture from the Middle Ages.

Like Romanticism, the Gothic style arose as a response to the Enlightenment. Gothic writers rebelled against the Enlightenment notion of understanding the world purely through logic. Romantics believed in individualism, idealism, and emotional passion, which they felt were positive ways to live.

Gothics agreed with the same ideas, yet they suggested the outcomes of following those ideas could have darker implications. As such, Gothic literature is often also identified as Dark Romanticism.

Gothic elements

Gothic literature in English typically contains characteristics like omens, the supernatural, romance, and anti-heroes.

The physical location of the setting within Gothic literature mimics or influences characters’ emotions. Since most Gothic stories are set in gloomy and foreboding places (old castles, cemeteries, dark forests, etc.) with ominous weather conditions (foggy, thunderstorms, etc.), the characters’ surroundings negatively impact them.

Writers often used omens to foreshadow future events that would disrupt the characters’ lives. These predictions came in the form of curses, nightmares, and/or visions and mostly forecast tragedy.

Plots often include supernatural elements like resurrection, spirits/ghosts, vampires, werewolves, etc. Some authors attempted to explain the existence of the supernatural, while others classified it as entirely paranormal. Regardless, the supernatural entities/events provide commentary on some aspect of the human condition.

Many Gothic novels incorporate a romantic relationship between the protagonist and another character. However, these relationships are often destined for doom and tragedy, highlighting the negative implications of lost love.

Villains often take the form of male characters in some position of power. Authors may present these characters as sympathetic to hide their deceptive nature.

Through exaggerated and hyperbolic emotional expressions , authors present their characters in a state of intense fear, anxiety, stress, etc. The characters often experience great emotional distress, madness, or psychosis.

The protagonist is often developed as an anti-hero . These characters drive the plot, but they often lack conventional heroic qualities. These characters were often seen as much more realistic than the typical hero/heroine.

The anti-villain is the reverse of the anti-hero. While these characters are considered villains, they often blur the line between good and evil.

Gothic authors often use a hero-villain as the antagonist. These characters are so complex that it becomes difficult to determine whether they are good or bad.

Distressed female characters tend to be characterized as the victims; their suffering from being alone or abandoned often becomes the central focus of the plot. As such, female characters become controlled by male characters who have power due to their authority or social position.

Characters experience psychological struggles that can lead to hallucinations, anxiety, and/or psychosis.

Gothic literature examples

Some of the most notable writers who incorporated Gothic elements in their works include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker:

Gothic Literature

By Stefan Schöberlein

From the early nineteenth century onward, Philadelphia spawned an abundance of mysterious tales starring shadowy strangers, fantastic happenings, and deadly conspiracies. Prominent genre writers including Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), George Lippard (1822-54), and Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) made the City of Brotherly Love the birthplace of American gothic literature.

Although the gothic arguably reached its first literary high point in the works of Charles Brockden Brown in the early 1800s, its prehistory in Philadelphia dates to the 1790s. Books such as Charlotte Temple (1791) and Rebecca (1792) by Susanna Rowson (1762-1824), though not considered gothic per se, already presented readers with many characteristic themes of the genre (such as vivid depictions of madness and adultery). Even William Bartram (1739-1823) in his famous travelogue of 1791 often lapsed from scientific verbiage into a much darker style, casting, for instance, Floridian crocodiles as lurking monsters with smoke bellowing from their nostrils.

Although the 1796 St. Herbert (published and taking place in New York) is generally considered to be the first gothic novel of the early American republic, Philadelphian Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) was undoubtedly the most influential. While novels like Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800), by Sally Barrell Keating Wood (1759-1855)—allegedly penned before Wieland —adopted European-style gothic plots, Brown proclaimed his novel to be an “American tale” and rooted the genre firmly in the United States. Wieland set the stage for what the gothic in the New World would be about: the perils of wilderness, the problematic indebtedness of the young democracy to old Europe, and the repressed legacies of war, colonization, and slavery.

Wieland tells the story of members of a German family living on a large estate by the Schuylkill River who—after the spontaneous combustion of the father—are haunted by ghostly voices that drive them to insanity, murder and, ultimately, flight to Europe. The tensions that the characters embody between European culture and American lands, violent past and republican present, and bucolic enclosure and untamed wildness remain unsettled—even after the novel’s convoluted plot is resolved. While the colonial past of Pennsylvania only plays a subliminal role in Brown’s first book, his later Edgar Huntly (1799) addresses it head-on: The spectral hints about the dispossession of native peoples that appeared Wieland become fully materialized. In trying to resolve a vicious murder, the eponymous narrator discovers a system of dark caves (a trope that Poe’s 1842 story “The Pit and the Pendulum” revisited) below Philadelphia. Becoming lost in this rocky subconscious, Huntly discovers bands of native peoples intent on getting revenge for the injustices of the past. In the violent conflicts that ensue, the novel again and again returns to a fundamental question: How can one inherit land if it was acquired through crime?

Orphans and Malicious Parent Figures

In the decades after Benjamin Franklin’s death in 1790, the Philadelphia gothic of Brown and his contemporaries negotiated the conflicting legacy of Republican values and the monarchic cultures of Europe. Rivaled perhaps only by the Disney movies of much later times, these novels are largely populated by either orphans or malicious parent figures. Many of Brown’s characters lose or have lost their guardians: The title character in Laura (1809) by Leonora Sansay (1773-?) succumbs to seduction after her parents’ death while the main protagonist in Kelroy (1812) by Rebecca Rush (1779-1850) is ultimately driven to illness and death by an evil, scheming mother. In the shadow of the influential image of American independence as akin to a child breaking away from tyrannical parents created by Thomas Paine (1737-1809) in Common Sense (1776), gothic authors began to expose how frail and conflicting these lines of separation could be. In the age of industrial capitalism and urban squalor, they seem to sense a resurgence of a monarchical past that the young republic hoped to leave behind—and what better place to examine this than in the birthplace of the Continental Congress?

With Robert Montgomery Bird , a local physician turned writer, the Philadelphia gothic found its second best-selling author. Often advancing themes from Brown—such as his vivid depictions of anti-Native American violence—Bird turned from setting his novels in Mexico ( Calavar , 1834; The Infidel , 1835) to writing gothic tales placed in and around Philadelphia. Among these, Sheppard Lee (1836) and Nick of the Woods (1837) remain his most successful publications. Where Brown’s fictions are somber and highly complex, Bird introduces satire into the Philadelphia gothic. From the conundrum of an Indian-killing, pacifist Quaker in Nick of the Woods to parodies of the two-party system (Whigs vs. Democrats) in Sheppard Lee , Bird playfully exposes the often self-contradictory nature of Philadelphia society in the age of Jacksonian democracy.

As comments on Philadelphia life, books like Bird’s Sheppard Lee or Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799), take their readers from the wilderness surrounding the city to the city itself. In contrast to the revolutionary past, these fictions portray the city as a metropolis of disease and crime, populated by thieves, beggars, and assassins. Bird’s fantastic tale of the body-swapping Sheppard Lee (1836) satirizes a society of empty ambition and pseudo-aristocratic pomp. George Lippard takes a step farther. His novel The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall (1845)—dedicated to Brown—depicts the city as a hotbed of sin ruled by a decadent elite who meet in an underground brothel to orchestrate their exploitation of Philadelphia. Reveling in seduction, drinking, gambling, and murder, this elite of Chestnut Street create a new Sodom behind a façade of republican morality. Lippard’s subterranean rulers of Philadelphia turn republican values on their head: Accompanied by the ringing of the bell of Independence Hall, journalism becomes blackmail, justice can be bought, and priests try to defile their own offspring.

The most successful American publication before Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Lippard’s graphic indictment of Philadelphia culminates in an apocalyptic dream-vision of hordes of Black and white slaves lining the streets while the new aristocracy of the Quaker City abolishes democracy and crowns a new king for the United States. The fame of Lippard’s novel spawned a boom of “mysteries” set in Philadelphia, such as the anonymously published Mysteries of Philadelphia (1848), Aristocracy, or Life in the City (1848) by Joseph A. Nunes (c. 1820-c. 1905), Mysteries and Miseries of Philadelphia (1854) by George Thompson (1823–c. 1873), and The Homeless Heir, or, Life in Bedford Street (1856) by “John the Outcast.” All mirror Lippard’s attack on Philadelphia’s moral shortcomings, but they often miss the labor activist’s more fundamental critique of high capitalism.

The Turmoil of Slavery

While this new aristocracy of money exposed by Lippard and his followers represented one of the major contradictions in American society, slavery was certainly another. Brown informed the readers of Wieland that dark secrets lay in the exploitation of forced African labor, but both Bird and Lippard addressed Philadelphia’s problematic relationship with slavery much more directly. One of Sheppard Lee ’s many narratives, for instance, takes readers into the slaveholding South, where a Philadelphia Quaker is to be lynched for alleged abolitionist activities—with the added irony that the Quaker is at best on the fence about the issue and has turned over fugitive slaves to the authorities just moments before. Lippard’s work includes frequent references to slaves “acquired” below the Mason–Dixon line who remain in bondage in Philadelphia, even though the institution had been outlawed there since 1780. In characters like the Creole slave boy “Dim” ( The Quaker City ), Lippard captures in gothic ornament the political climate of the years between Prigg v. Pennsylvania (an 1842 Supreme Court decision undermining local laws freeing slaves brought into the state) and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 . Philadelphia’s double-faced position on the issue culminated in an 1849 race riot, which Lippard fictionalized in characteristically stark images in his novella The Bank Director’s Son (1851). Although both Bird and Lippard were by no means free from racial prejudice—indeed their depictions of slaves often rehearse overtly racist stereotypes—they nonetheless brought the issue to the center of their works, reminding Philadelphia, as one of the major hubs of trade for the South, of its duplicitous role in perpetuating human bondage.

While Bird’s and Lippard’s satirical interventions into Philadelphian society were hugely successful, Edgar Allan Poe spent some of his most productive years (1838 to 1844) in the city and stands as its most influential gothic author. From “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) to his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), some of Poe’s most famous pieces were produced in Philadelphia. Even his renowned poem “The Raven” was originally written for a local literary journal, though it was declined and later published in a New York monthly. Well-acquainted with the local gothic tradition, Poe’s fictions show an indebtedness to Brown’s work, he positively reviewed Bird’s Sheppard Lee , and he became a personal friend of Lippard, who lent Poe financial support for his writing.

Nonetheless, Poe’s gothic differs markedly from his contemporaries. Modeling his writing on English and German high culture and reshaping it for a popular American taste, many of Poe’s tales (with the exception of his Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ) take place either in undisclosed locations or shadowy European mansions. Although certain events in Philadelphia’s history have been traced to Poe’s writings (such as a local insanity-defense trial that also inspired Lippard), none of his tales are specified as taking place in the city, and only one, the satiric “How to Write a Blackwood Article” (1838), even mentions Philadelphia. Instead of directly exposing local, social wrongs through gothic satire (as his benefactor Lippard had done) Poe’s fictions take a more psychological turn, brooding on issues of the mind, murderous urges, hallucinations, and the supernatural. Still, in Poe’s proto-modern gothic, we can sense the City of Brotherly Love lurking behind many seemingly European plots. In tales like “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), we might also hear the buzz of Philadelphia’s busy downtown streets, while pieces like “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) seem to echo Philadelphia’s past—in this case, the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 that also inspired Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799).

While the era of the American gothic appeared to come to a slow close with the deaths of Poe (1849) and Lippard (1854) and the rise of literary realism, some of its central themes had a remarkably resilient afterlife. Besides the continuing presence of Poe, the criminal underbelly of Lippard’s Philadelphia reappears in 1950s noir fiction. And while the Old Philadelphia Mystery Series (1998-2000), by Mark Graham (b. 1950), revisits a gritty, murderous Philadelphia of the past, one can also hear faint echoes of the violent rioters of The Bank Director’s Son or the drug-fueled robbers of Mysteries and Miseries of Philadelphia in works set in modern-day Philadelphia such as Steve Lopez ’s (b. 1953) Third and Indiana (1994) or Solomon Jones’s (b. 1967) Pipe Dream (2001). As deep as the mysterious caverns below the City of Brotherly Love may be, it appears that its lurid secrets never quite seem to stay down.

Stefan Schöberlein is a doctoral candidate at the English Department of the University of Iowa and the managing editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review .  (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2015, Rutgers University

Charles Brockden Brown, by William Dunlap

Library Company of Philadelphia Philadelphian Charles Brockden Brown proclaimed his novel Wieland (1798) to be an “American tale” and rooted the gothic genre firmly in the United States. Wieland set the stage for what the gothic in the New World would be about: the perils of wilderness, the problematic indebtedness of the young democracy to old Europe, and the repressed legacies of war, colonization, and slavery

This painting of Brown, an oil on canvas from 1803-04, is by William Dunlap, one of Brown’s closest friends and a playwright, a theater manager, and the first American art historian.

(Portrait used with the permission of its owner, Dr. Neil K. Fitzgerald. This image is not to be reproduced without explicit permission from its owner.)

Edgar Allan Poe House

Library of Congress This image shows the rear view of the Edgar Allan Poe House at 530 North Seventh Street in Philadelphia. The photograph is described by the Library of Congress as having been taken after 1933. The house today is part of the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, administered by the National Park Service. In 2014, 13,701 people came to see the Poe House, acccording to the park service.

Edgar Allan Poe, 1904

Edgar Allan Poe lived six years on North Seventh Street, where his former home now serves as the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site.

Poe’s gothic differs markedly from his contemporaries. Modeling his writing on English and German high culture and reshaping it for a popular American taste, many of Poe’s tales take place either in undisclosed locations or shadowy European mansions. Despite his time in Philadelphia and although certain events in Philadelphia’s history have been traced to Poe’s writings, none of his tales are specified as taking place in the city.

Cover of The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall

Library Company of Philadelphia

This image shows the cover of The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall (1845) by George Lippard, a friend of Edgar Allan Poe’s who wrote gothic tales about immorality, horror, and the debauchery of large cities.

The novel depicts Philadelphia as a hotbed of sin ruled by a decadent elite who meet in an underground brothel to orchestrate their exploitation of the city. Reveling in seduction, drinking, gambling, and murder, this elite of Chestnut Street create a new Sodom behind a façade of republican morality. Lippard’s subterranean rulers of Philadelphia turn republican values on their head: Accompanied by the ringing of the bell of Independence Hall, journalism becomes blackmail, justice can be bought, and priests try to defile their own offspring.

George Lippard, c. 1850

Library of Congress This daguerreotype portrait shows George Lippard, author of The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monks Hall (1845).

The Quaker City —dedicated to his friend Charles Brockden Brown—depicts Philadelphia of the era as ruled by a decadent elite who exploit the city. The Quaker City was among the best-selling American novels before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Related Topics

• City of Brotherly Love
• City of Firsts
• Philadelphia and the World
• Corrupt and Contented
• Athens of America

Time Periods

• Nineteenth Century to 1854
• North Philadelphia
• Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793
• Book Publishing and Publishers
• Bookselling
• Killers (The): A Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia
• Literary Societies
• Poetry and Poets
• Quaker City (The); Or, the Monks of Monk Hall
• Sheppard Lee
• Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale

Related Reading

Cohen, Matt, and Edlie L. Wong. “Introduction.” In The Killers: a Narrative of Real Life in Philadelphia , 1-42. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

Crow, Charles L. (Ed.). A Companion to American Gothic . Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation . New York City: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Kafer, Peter. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Looby, Christopher. “Introduction.” In Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself . New York: The New York Review of Books, 2008.

Ocker, J. W. “Pennsylvania: We Paused before the Heritage of Men, and Thy Star Trembled.” In Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe , 145-17. Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman Press. 2014

Otter, Samuel. Philadelphia Stories. America’s Literature of Race and Freedom . New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville . New York: Knopf, 1988.

Related Collections

• Charles Brockden Brown Papers George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library 5 College St Brunswick, Maine.
• Edgar Allan Poe Collection Harry Ransom Center 300 W. Twenty-First Street, Austin, Texas.
• Robert Montgomery Bird Collection, Accession 7459. Alderman Library University of Virginia Charlottesville, Va.

Related Places

• Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site
• Former House of Robert M. Bird
• Former House of Charles Brockden Brown
• Independence Hall
• Laurel Hill Cemetery (National Historic Landmark), burial site of R.M. Bird
• Philadelphia History Museum
• Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection
• The Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition
• The Early Writings of George Lippard, 1842-43
• Philadelphia Gothic (Digital Exhibit, Library Company of Philadelphia)

Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy

Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere Essay

Introduction.

It is accurate to say that a gothic horror story is defined as a frightening story that has echoes of the past and has a constant theme of gloom and the supernatural, which makes it dark and rather threatening. From any perspective and point of view, gothic fiction cannot be dismissed as merely escapist and sensational on the basis that it is more than having only these two elements in it. There are many useful prospective insights which cannot be termed and delimited to mere sensational and escapist ones.

Science fiction is fiction based and claims scientific discoveries and often deals with convincing technological events, such as, space travel or life on other planets. By taking into account the definitions of the attributes, you can clearly see that one of the criteria for a gothic horror story is the use of light and darkness to create a sinister atmosphere.

In the beginning of gothic fiction era, it was not long after the translation of mythological texts that artists began experimenting with ways to elevate and transport their audiences with the use of the sublime. One group in particular began using the ideas of terror, death, and the supernatural, in combination with that which is terrible in nature to create the sublime. This group became known as the “Graveyard Poets” or the “Graveyard School”. On why these poems are effective author Fred Botting (2001:39) states, “the awful obscurity of the settings of Graveyard poetry elevate the mind to ideas of wonder and divinity”. In other words it’s the sublime imagery that produces the required effect.

“Graveyard Poetry” became increasingly popular during the early 1700’s, and paved the way for what would officially become “Gothic” literature. It was not long before the sublime idea of terrible nature grew until it included even more of the supernatural such as fantastical beings, witchcraft, and other extraordinary phenomena (Kemp, 2001, WEB). These became the components that gave Gothic literature its very definition. The first author to utilize these elements in a large literary work was Horace Walpole in his novel, The Castle of Otranto. It was the first novel to receive the title of “Gothic”, and it was also one of the first to use and develop the sublime.

In the Preface to his second edition, Walpole strives to construct a structure by which the Gothic novel can be defined. He states that in Gothic texts, it is necessary to leave, “the powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms of invention, and thence of creating more interesting situations… to conduct the mortal agents… according to the rules of probability” (Walpole, 1964:7). In this description, Walpole is essentially offering a definition of the sublime as it is the sublime that elevates the “fancy” as it both fears and finds astonishment in the “boundless realms of invention”, but can delight in it as no real danger is found as it is “conducted” by “the rules of probability”. In this Walpole is demonstrating how the sublime is a necessary ingredient to the Gothic genre.

The Sublime in Gothic Fiction

Burke defined precisely what is to be considered sublime. Some of the main Characteristics that Burke (1834) identified as ones that lead to sublimity include: obscurity, eternity and infinity, the crowded and the confused, power, vastness, magnificence, darkness, and excessiveness. He also points out that its nature that primarily conveys the sublime. These guidelines laid out by Burke became the structure by which all Gothic scenes were constructed. In this work, Burke also gave justification to the continuance of the Gothic genre as he identifies and highly emphasizes terror as being the ruling attribute of the sublime. He declares terror to be the “ruling principle” in the sublime as he states:

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 (1834: 42).

However Burke does set down the limitation that the terror, “should have no idea of danger connected with it” as this would hinder the production of “delight” (1834:74). This lends an understanding to the Gothic text then, as it is the aim of the author of a Gothic text to produce terror so that it delights the reader (Hennelly, 2001, 19). The Gothic writers who came soon after Burke display how his ideas of the sublime greatly influenced their Gothic writing.

As more time has progressed and more thought given to the idea of the sublime, the Gothic has evolved, and has even produced a number of sub genres. In all of them, the sublime is a crucial element. As it is seen, this genre as a whole would not have been made possible if not for the sublime. Furthermore, without the sublime, a complete understanding of Gothic texts would be impossible.

While assessing this evolution, Richard Davenport-Hines pronounced, “Gothic is nothing if not hostile to progressive hopes”. The Gothic plot in Dorian Gray is ultimately hostile to the progressive hopes held out by the Paterian plot of self-actualization. (Davenport, 1998, 139)

The Element of Supernaturalism

Most of the gothic fiction involves the supernatural. The monster in “Frankenstein” and the vampire in “The Vampire of Kaldenstein” both have similar qualities. Both are obviously not human and look natural and strange. The creature is described as a “catastrophe” and his creator goes on to describe the monster in full. “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips”. This account of the monster really gives the reader a clear picture of how different the monster is. The vampire is described as “unusually tall, with a face of unnatural pallor”. The narrator also adds that the creature “cast no shadow”.

For the period of the closing years of the eighteenth century, England emerged and involved in the whirlpool of a collective unravelling. The contemporary philosophers provided the scholarly circles with such theories of inspiration and action that warranted their self-interested attitude and started to expose themselves as unendurable. The incongruity between the English philosophy in which “individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity” (Clery, 2002, 35) and real political and economic circumstances commenced to facade.

It is out of this sociological environment that the Gothic novel emerged: an innovative, shocking and fearful genre for a prospective time. The phantom of communal uprising is obvious in the mystical “spectres” of the Gothic: a ghastly way of life emerges as a haunted and disintegrative Gothic mansion; the thrashing of English societal distinctiveness stands the Gothic hero or heroine’s quest for individuality.

Although, the Gothic is frequently reproached or even rejected for its excessively histrionic situations and absolutely expected plots, but the unbelievable attractiveness of the genre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the regaining of gothic narratives within the past two decades, indicates to an elasticity that cannot be ignored.

The Gothic novel evolves onward rather abruptly as the rising obsession with individual awareness that starts in the early 18th century crash with the exceptional cultural apprehensions of the late 18th century. The sensations of the gothic fiction characters are exposed and externalized in a far-reaching new technique; their innermost fears and passions are literally modified as other characters, paranormal and weird phenomena, and yet lifeless objects. Simultaneously, the trait of the fright portrayed in these novels–fear of incarceration or snare, of individual breach and rape, of the victory of wickedness over good and pandemonium over order–appears to reproduce a particular historical time branded by growing disenchantment with illumination lucidity and by blood-spattered revolutions in France and America.

“The progressive myth of Frankenstein deserves the name of science-fiction, whereas Dracula can only be discarded as superstition fiction.” (Botting, 2001, 71) “We can account for Dracula’s success, and for its continuing success only in terms of the eternity of the opposition between Good and Evil, in terms of human nature, that is in the very terms in which the myth itself is couched — at the cost of dehistoricising the novel and the myth that has developed around it.

It is also unjust to the novel, by insisting on its obvious flaws, and neglecting the very qualities that have ensured its survival. For instance, Dracula, relying as it does on a multiplicity of texts and of points of view, is narratively more complex than Frankenstein, which is based on the traditional structure of embedded narratives; and to call it superstition-fiction means that we forget the advanced technology that amply compensates for the garlands of garlic — whereas Frankenstein’s bright idea was inspired by alchemy”. (Botting, 2001, 72)

The first factor included in a science fiction genre is the existence of aliens or strange creatures. The strange creature that was created in ‘Frankenstein’ was obviously the monster. “The Gothic, we find, as it enters the twentieth century just past, has performed an unusually intense enactment of the changing assumptions about signification that Baudrillard has traced in Western history since the fading of ‘the counterfeit’ from dominance.

In Frankenstein, the ghost of the counterfeit is shown giving way, as the culture did, to the sign as a manufacturable and mechanically reproducible ‘simulacrum’, the very next stage, the ‘industrial’ one, in our thinking about symbols.” (Botting, 2001, 157) The most vital criterion for a science fiction story is the connection with reality. It has to be relevant to earth or humanity and have something familiar that people can relate to.

Most of the theories developed to create the monster are realistic. Frankenstein has a combination of both elements which gives it a good diversity. The gothic component comes in mainly with the violence and romance, but the creation discovery is more science based. This makes ‘Frankenstein’ a good mix between the two genres, which makes the story more effective and helps it suit a wider audience. (Kilgour, 1997, 66)

Mystery Horror and suspense in Gothic Fiction and Their Significant Utility

A word or two should be said about the difference in meaning that the word ‘mystery’ has in American and British contexts. Writing of psychological ghost stories, Peter Penzoldt suggests that American authors prefer a natural explanation, while the English do not fear to intimate that there is more in the world than reason can account for. Glen Cavaliero, too, points to ‘the repeated tendency of English novelists to write about the supernatural or at any rate about mysterious and inexplicable events’. (Cavaliero, 1995, vi)

The Society considered its work in encouraging and directing restorations to be highly useful; yet none of its activities have been so offensive to succeeding generations. The encouragement which the Ecclesiologists gave to replacing medieval features by more ‘correct’ details was abused by many architects. But the Society must bear the responsibility for the wholesale destruction of great quantities of medieval art. Sir Kenneth Clark remarks: ‘It would be interesting to know if the Camden Society destroyed as much medieval architecture as Cromwell. If not it was from lack of funds, sancta paupertas, only true custodian of ancient buildings.’ (Clarke, 1962, p. 237)

The pattern of Gothic fiction, to a certain extent is the delineation of two apparently alternative spaces, the violation of boundaries between them, the overwhelming power of the more negative and deconstructive environment—is widely, almost universally shared by horror narratives, explicitly or inferentially. Horror narrative stresses the teleological implications of abjection; it is the ultimate literature of absence—from God, from substantial selfhood—and the ghost is its central character.

It is no wonder that Mary Shelley in Frankenstein parodies Paradise Lost; horror narrative records loss, paradise gone and certainly not to be regained. Kristeva goes on to note that “all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (Kristeva, 1982, 61). David Punter argues that “our knowledge of romantic-period Gothic drama can be informed by the politics of an increasingly plebeian theatre.” (Putner, 2000, 102)

Important Elements in Gothic Fiction

The gothic genre, as with all genres, is made up of many elements and concepts resulting in a massively broad and varied spectrum; including the supernatural, the sublime and horror to name but a few of the more common and generally fundamental ones. Some concepts may be clearly overt, and others will be more discreetly manipulated, but nevertheless a gothic text will more often than not include many of these elements. In terms of the supernatural in the gothic genre, it generally appears in the form of some kind of other than natural being or object, such as a vampire or ghost, which is frightening due to its refusal to adhere to the laws of nature, God or man.

Returning to Frankenstein, it could be argued that there is no element of the supernatural, or alternatively that the creature is supernatural by virtue of its being a composition of dead parts then re-animated by ungodly means.( Kilgour, 1997, 69)

Elements of the supernatural may seem to be almost an obligatory component of the gothic tale. On a closer examination, the word itself suggests also a rather deeper level of meaning: beyond that of the natural, rationally explainable world. In this expanded sense the supernatural relates to another favourite gothic, and Romantic, concept: the sublime. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was a particularly influential treatise in this context, focussing on the human reaction to an overwhelming experience that transcends everyday normality.

It is hardly surprising that Burke’s words had such an impact, as they succinctly state what so much gothic art was striving for with greater or lesser degrees of success. “Whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested on every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in manner, annihilated before him.” (Burke, 1834, 41)

The mystical and religious connotations should be clear; gothic writers also noted the link between this overwhelming, oceanic sensation and some degree of horror. In gothic narratives there are abundant examples of supernatural and sublime elements, sometimes overt and sometimes less so. There is a useful distinction to be drawn between those authors who tend to leave the supernatural elements unresolved and those who seek rational closure through explaining the apparent mystery.

The two words ‘gothic’ and ‘horror’ seem to belong together, so close is their relationship. Horror however does not have to be present in a gothic text; neither does its presence necessarily make a text gothic. As Clive Bloom indicates; “Horror is the usual, but necessarily the main ingredient of gothic fiction and most gothic fiction is determined in its plotting by the need for horror and sensation. It was Gothicism, with its formality, codification, ritualistic elements and artifice……that transformed the old folk tale of terror into the modern horror story.” (Bloom, 1998, 110)

Gothic Fiction as Fantastic Literature

There are certain well-known definitions as regards to fantasy or the fantastic and all of these are worth considering. Eric Rabkin’s Fantastic in Literature (1976) deals largely with the same subject matter. This particular piece opens with an examination of Alice’s surprised response to the talking plants in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”. Rabkin argues that the fantastic mode is established through the reversal of the ground rules: as he says, “One of the key distinguishing marks of the fantastic is that the perspectives enforced by the ground rules of the narrative world must be diametrically contradicted.” (Rabkin, 1976, p.8)

Victor Sage, in his “Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition”, narrates the method in which, in the Pauline solace convention concerning the seventeenth century, the aging house implied and worked as a connotative metaphor for the body’s unavoidable decomposition and as a trope of mortality and decay in a wide-ranging implication. Sage, to further elaborate the case, refers to a seventeenth-century Huguenot content that, employing the house far-fetched simile, depicts the body assaulted and devastated by degenerative powers:

“Death labours to undermine this poor dwelling from the first moment that it is built, besieges it, and on all sides makes its approaches; in time it saps the foundation, it batters us with several diseases and unexpected accidents; every day it opens a breach, and pulls out of this building some stones.” (Sage, 1988, p.1)

In literature, for the reader to become oriented, they must search for clues as to the equilibrium of the setting. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the reactions of his characters provide the reader with a backdrop of that reality. When events start to go askew, we look to these characters to show us just how far askew. Utterson serves as a neutral facilitator to obtain for the reader this feedback. Stevenson first establishes these characters as reliable, and then relies on their reactionary movements (testimony and actions) to illustrate the intensity of man’s dual natures. It is in these reactions that the reader can discern just how ordinary or outlandish the actions committed by Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde really are.

It also offers an outlet for the comparison of Jekyll/Hyde’s actions to the morals and attitudes of society. The actions of the Hyde persona deviate greatly from what Stevenson has established through characters such as Poole and Dr. Lanyon as Jekyll’s basic nature.

We are shown that the divergence between the characters of Jekyll and Hyde is not a miniscule one, but capable of creating disarray and disbelief. It works as a perfect illustration, and further supports my point. Stevenson most definitely relies on the intensity of his characters’ reactions to emphasize the tremendously disparate natures of Jekyll and Hyde. It adds enormous depth and magnitude that would be lost if the reader were only shown Jekyll and Hyde’s actions, but not the reactions yielded by them. (Attack, 2003, 90) We are also shown much about the balance of the world Stevenson created for his novel. Clearly, the balance has been thrown off.

The characters react with fear and terror at this maelstrom of reality gone asunder. Stevenson valiantly achieves this effect solely by demonstrating these reactions. Were we simply shown Hyde’s actions, and then informed that Hyde was acting in ways incongruent from Jekyll’s normal behaviour the effect would be nowhere near as poignant.

The Gothic fiction cannot be assumed or declared as escapist genre of literature rather it is filled with hidden eroticism that drags the reader into a daemonic and antiquated womb which is manifestly the author’s. The partisanship of the text and the reader is reduced by the hypothetical genuineness of the author’s objective.

The soundness of the text is thus focussed to a critic’s words not the incidence of the reader. Amplifying the Gothic, psychoanalysis seems to be late gothic story that has risen to help describe twentieth-century knowledge of contradictory aloofness from the panic of others and the precedent. This relevance of language eliminates the reader from the gothic fiction text. The text has unexpectedly become a caldron of depraved sensationalism contrasted with voyeurism and exhibitionism emphasized transvestism that demarcates the misuse of Christian moralism.

The Gothic fiction has had a massive effect and influence on many genres of literature since its beginning in the middle seventeenth century. Attractiveness of the Gothic genre has progressively amplified as the mistrust of the legends of the Age of Reason has been reached us. Nevertheless, literary criticism of the past as well as present has been dawdling to recognize the Gothic as a valid genre. Previously critics have traced the immensity of Gothic to revitalize a putrefying genre, but at present modern critics have found to shed new orientation into this literary mystery by diverse literary perspectives. Numerous opinions through the years have evaluated, but the most noteworthy of them is the psychoanalytical approach.

This strives to relate Freudian, Jungian, and post-Jungian notion and words to the Gothic text. Nonetheless, by implementing this perspective to a text it gives emancipation to the hazard of misreading a text. This assumption rules out the reader from the text whereas striking the author back into it. This decreases the soundness of the text by imagining the target of the author. Such readings and involving of literary tools concentrate on extraneous features of the text and lessen it to a medium to maintain ideas not in the actual text.

One of the reasons that this always has been, still is, and always will be one of the best examples of horror/gothic fiction, is because it exploits the universal disgust at human corpses. Whether they are whole, in pieces, fresh or decaying, it is safe to assume that almost anyone would be horrified and disgusted at the sight of them. Because Victor ‘dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave’ to gain body parts to create the monster, the monster is imagined, even with no further description, as hideously ugly, revolting, and probably unfeeling. This initial assumption definitely adds to the horror of the story, and also adds to the sympathy we perhaps feel later in the novel for the monster, at the way people judge him so cruelly.

Descriptions are highly detailed and create a vivid picture; often so detailed they could form a comprehensive travel guide. Conversely, as we move from Walton’s point of view to that of Victor these locations are made strange and foreign by the use of highly melodramatic and emotive language, ‘But it was augmented… the habitations of another race of beings’ , a practice common in both gothic and melodramatic writing.

The landscapes encountered are wild, barren and untamed and we move through a world of extremes; from the towering majesty of the Alps, via the wind swept remoteness of the Orkneys, to the barren wasteland of the Arctic and each step in Victor’s journey echoes his deteriorating sanity. This, combined with Shelley’s use of the weather to evoke a dark and brooding atmosphere overlies the narrative with an implication of the paranormal, leaving the reader always aware of a sensation of impeding doom.

The Creature is driven to his later actions by the behaviour of those around him and by a society who apportions worth on physical appearance and social standing. Where the Creature would give only love and affection, humanity gives him fear, repulsion and pain.

He is rejected by everyone, even by the old, blind elder De Lacy ‘Great God… Who are you’ but, even then, he retains his innate humanity. It is only after he is shot while saving the girl child from drowning that his personality begins to change ‘The feelings of kindness… gave place to hellish rage…’ and he begins to become the monster society perceives him to be. In responding to monstrous treatment he becomes monstrous.

Attack, Richard D., Victorian People and Ideas: A Companion for the Modern Reader of Victorian Literature, Norton, 2003. 89-91.

Bloom, C. (ed) Gothic Horror: A Reader’s Guide from Poe to King and Beyond, 1998. Macmillan. 110.

Botting Fred – editor: The Gothic. Publisher: D.S. Brewer. Cambridge, England. 2001. 39, 71, 72, 156-57.

Burke, Edmund: The Works of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke: With a Biographical and Critical Introduction. New York Public Library; 1834: Vol 1. p. 40-43, 74.

Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. vi.

Clark Sir Kenneth. The Gothic Revival: an Essay in the History of Taste. (Revised and Enlarged Edition; London: Constable, 1962.) p.237.

Clery, E.J. (2002) ‘The Genesis of “Gothic” Fiction.’ In: Hogle, J.E. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge Press. 34-36.

Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1998. 139.

Hennelly, M.M. (2001) ‘Framing the Gothic: From Pillar to Post- Structuralism’ College Literature 28(3), pp. 15-26.

Hogle, J.E. (ed) the Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 2003. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 243.

Kemp, J. (2001) A Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms. Web.

Kilgour, M. The Rise of the Gothic Novel, 1997. Routledge: London. 66-70.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. p.61.

Punter, David. Ed. A Companion to the Gothic. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000: 94–106.

Rabkin Eric. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976. p.8.

Shelley. M., 1998, Frankenstein (1818 Text), Oxford University Press, Reading.

Stevenson, Robert Louis; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Signet Classics), Signet Book; Reprint edition (1994).

Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Macmillan, 1988) p. 1.

Walpole, H. (1964) The Castle of Otranto; A Gothic Story. London: Oxford University Press. p7.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, May 11). Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gothic-fiction-history/

"Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere." IvyPanda , 11 May 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/gothic-fiction-history/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere'. 11 May.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere." May 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gothic-fiction-history/.

1. IvyPanda . "Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere." May 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gothic-fiction-history/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Gothic Fiction History: Horror Stories With Dark and Threatening Atmosphere." May 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/gothic-fiction-history/.

• Duality of Soul in Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by R.S. Stevenson
• Analysis of "Dr. Jekyll and the Emergence of Mr. Hyde"
• Doppelganger in Stevenson’s Novel “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
• Dualism in “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”
• What Lurks behind the Other Side of the Coin: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s Story, Explored
• The Real Nature of the Human Psyche in “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde“ by R. L. Stevenson
• Position Paper on "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"
• Human Character in «The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde»
• Monsters, Reflection of Creators: Frankenstein and Mr. Hyde
• "Death is the Mother of Beauty" by W. Stevens Review
• A Rose for Emily Literary Analysis
• The Forgotten Knight (Snatch)
• Irony in Frank O'Connor's "First Confession"
• Antebellum Slavery in Mark Twain’s World

Gothic Novel | Definition, Characteristics, History, Essay, Examples in Literature

Gothic Novel in Literature

Table of Contents

Gothic Novel Definition

Gothic Novel is a “genre of fiction characterized by mystery and supernatural horror, often set in a dark castle or other medieval setting.” Such novel is pseudo-medieval fiction with a prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror. Gothic novel is sometimes referred to as Gothic horror. It is a genre or mode of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance .

Gothicism ‘s origin is attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto , subtitled “A Gothic Story “. The Gothic novel was a branch of the larger Romantic movement that sought to stimulate strong emotions in the reader – fear and apprehension in this case.’ Such novel takes its name from medieval architecture, as it often hearkens back to the medieval era in spirit and subject matter and often uses Gothic buildings as a setting. The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror. It is an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole’s novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) are other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole.

Historical Background of Gothic

The Goths were one of the many Germanic tribes. They fought numerous battles with the Roman Empire for centuries. According to their own myths, as narrated by Jordanes, a Gothic historian from the mid 6th century, the Goths originated in what is now southern Sweden, but their king Berig led them to the southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Later Goths separated into twongroups, the Visigoths (the West Goths) and Ostrogoths (the East Goths). They were named so because of the place where they finally settled.

They reached the height of their utmost power around 5th century A.D., when they sacked Rome and captured Spain, but their history finally subsumed under that of the countries they conquered (“Goths”). During the Renaissance, Europeans rediscovered Greco-Roman culture. They began to regard a particular type of architecture, mainly those built during the middle Ages, as “gothic.” It was not because of any connection to the Goths, but because the ‘Uomo Universale’ considered these buildings “barbaric” and definitely not in that Classical style. Centuries more passed before “gothic” came to describe a certain type of novels . This was named so because all these novels seem to take place in Gothic-styled architecture which was mainly castles, mansions, and abbeys.

Gothic Novel Characteristics

Setting in a castle or Mansions

An atmosphere of mystery and suspense pervaded by threatening feeling

An ancient and obscure prophecy may be connected with the castle or its inhabitants (either former or present).

Character may have Omens, portents, visions.

Supernatural or otherwise inexplicable and dramatic events may occur.

Characters may have high, even overwrought emotion resulting in crying and emotional speeches.

Female characters are often in distress and are oppressed in order to gain sympathy of the readers.

Women are threatened by a powerful and tyrannical male.

The metonymy of gloom and horror. Metonymy is a subtype of metaphor, in which something (like rain) is used to stand for something else (like sorrow). For example, the film industry likes to use metonymy as a quick shorthand, so we often notice that it is raining in funeral scenes.

A peculiar glossary of the gothic novels for mystery, fear, terror, surprise, haste anger or largeness for creating the atmosphere.

Gothic Novel Examples

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is often regarded as the first true Gothic romance . Walpole was obsessed with medieval Gothic architecture, and built his own house, Strawberry Hill, in that form, sparking a fashion for Gothic revival. A few good examples of Gothic fiction are Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797). Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796) was the book that introduced more horrific elements into the English gothic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstei n (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) are fine examples of gothic novels .

• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a Gothic Novel

Gothic Novel: An Essay

The Gothic fiction , however, enjoyed its heyday from 1762 to 1820 and influenced and inspired the sensational writers of the late nineteenth century. Certain merits of the Gothic fiction have been recognised by the Freudian psychologists. Herbert Read in his book Surrealism remarks: “It is possible that Monk Lewis, Maturin and Mrs. Radcliffe should relatively to Scott, Dickens and Hardy occupy a much higher rank.” He had defended the Gothic fiction against the objections that the plots of these novels are fictitious, that the characters are unreal and the sentiments that excite are morbid,

“All these judgements merely reflect our prejudices. It is proper for a work of imagination to be fictitious, and for characters to be typical rather than realistic.”

Dr. D. P. Varma in his book “ The Gothic Flame ” observes : “The Gothic novel is a conception as vast and complex as a Gothic Cathedral. One finds in it the same sinister overtone and the same solemn grandeur.” According to Montague Summers ( The Gothic Quest ), Gothic was the essence of romanticism, and romanticism was the literary expression of supernaturalism. As a matter of fact, the Gothic fiction was a profound reaction against the long domination of reason and authority. The Gothic novelists enlarged the sense of reality and its impact on human beings. It acknowledged the nonrational in the world of things and events, occasionally in the realm of transcendental, ultimately and most persistently in the depth of the human being. The application of Freudian psychology to literature has altered our attitude to the Gothic romances. The suppressed neurotic and erotic of educated society are reflected in the Gothic romances.

“The scenes of no in the Gothic fiction may have been the harmless release of that innate sp of cruelty which is present in each of us, an impulse mysterious inextricable connected with the very forces of life and death”

(Prof. Varma)

The Gothic fiction has a resemblance to the Gothic Architecture . The weird and eerie atmosphere of Gothic fiction was derived from the Gothic architecture which evoked feelings of horror, wildness, suspense and gloom. The stimulation of fear and the probing of the mysterious provided the raison d’etre of the Gothic novelists who took an important part in liberating the emotional energies that had been so long restrained by common sense and good form.

A number of influences contributed to the growth of the Gothic novel in the eighteenth century. It developed against the spirit of the Age of Reason and the stern warning of Dr. Johnson. The Gothic novel owes particularly to the picturesque antiquarianism, ruins and graveyard sentiment. Kenneth Clark in The Gothic Revival says : The Gothic novelists were the natural successors to the Graveyard poets. In the 18th century , the ghost stories were wide in circulation and people showed interest in questions of life, death, the occult, magic and astrology. The popularity of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton intensified people’s belief in the supernatural. The Gothic novelists were inspired by the examples of Italy, France and Germany and by the oriental allegory or moral apologue of the east. Addison’s The Vision of Mirza (1711) and Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) gave some colour to Gothic romance .

Horace Walpole was the pioneer in Gothic fiction. Walpole’s sensitive imagination and dreaming mind absorbed the spirit of romanticism. His antiquarian interests caught the Gothic spirit–the romantic setting the continuous spell of horror, the colour of melancholy, awe and superstition which blossomed in The Castle of Otranto (1764). The Gothic romance is a horror novel in which we have walking skeletons, pictures that move out of their frames and their blood-curdling incidents. The ghostly machinery is often cumbrous but as a return to the romantic elements of mystery and fear, the book is noteworthy. Diana Neill, however, dismisses the book as amusing rather than frightening. Virginia Woolf in an article stated, “Walpole had imagination, taste, style in addition to a passion for the romantic past.” Miss Clara Reeve wrote many Gothic romances, the chief of them being

‘The Old English Baron’. She was the first Gothic novelist to make use of dreams. Miss Clara Reeve, however, lacked vivid imagination. Montague Summers condemns The Old English Baron as a “dull and didactic narrative told in a style of chilling mediocrity.”

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe , the wife of an Oxford graduate has been called “the Shakespeare of Romance writers”. Montague Summers refers to the sombre and sublime genius of Ann Radcliffe. Her romantic temperament, her passion for music and wild scenery, her love of solitude, her interest in the mysterious, her ability to arouse wonder and fear helped her in writing masterpiece in Gothic fiction. During the years 1789-1797, she wrote five romances Castles of Athlian and Dubayne , A Cicelian Romance , The Romance of the Forest , The Mysteries of Udolpho , The Italian Coleridge called The Mystery of Udolpho “the most interesting novel in the English language” . Its noble outline, its majestic and beautiful images harmonizing with the scenes exert an irresistible fascination. It gradually rises from the gentlest beauty towards the terrific and the sublime. Unlike other terror novelists, Mrs. Radcliffe rationalised the supernatural. We hear mysterious voices in the chamber of Udolpho, but we are told that they were the wanton tricks of a prisoner. She employed scenery for their own sake in the novel. Moreover, by her insight into the workings of fear, she contributed to the development of the psychological novel . She adopted the dramatic structure of the novel which influenced the Victorian novelists. Thus her influence percolated through Scott on the 19th century novel in its various aspects-psychological, romantic and structural.

Matthew Gregory Lewis made a spine-chilling and blood-curdling use of magic and necromancy and pointed the grim and ghastly themes in lurid colours. His The Monk absorbed the ghastly and crude supernaturalism of the German Romantic movement in English fiction. It is melodrama epitomised. He indulges in crude supernaturalism rising to a grotesque climax borrowed from Dr. Faustus , when a demon rescues the villain-hero from execution only to fly high in the air with him and drop him to his death cm jagged rocks.

Beckford’s Vathek is wholly a fantasy. Its air of mystery arises from supposedly unnatural causes, while a sense of horror is heightened for artistic effect. Its gorgeous style and stately descriptions, its exaltation of both poetic and moral justice relate it to the Gothic romance,

Charles Robert Maturin wrote a number of nicely constructed Gothic romances : The Fatal Revenge (1807), The Wild Irish Boy (1808). The Mebsian Chief (1872), Melmoth , The Wanderer (1820). Maturin dispensed with the spine-chilling paraphernalia of the Terror School and concentrated his attention on the suggestive and psychological handling of the stories. His acute insight into character, vivid descriptive faculty and sensitive style of writing are in the tradition of Mrs. Radcliffe; but by his unabashed of the supernatural he treads in the footsteps of Lewis. He introduces horror in the novel by the clever Radcliffian device of reticence and suggestion. His Melmoth the Wanderer may be called the swan song of Gothic fiction . After it the fashion gradually died away. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is a remarkable Gothic novel. She employed the pseudo-scientific technique in depicting horrors in the novel. William Godwin wrote two horror novels Caleb Williams and St. Leon. He neither imitates the suggestive method of Mrs. Radcliffe, nor the gruesome horrors of Gregory Lewis, but he creates physical realistic horrors in his novels.

Gothic Literature in the Romantic Period

In both Gothic and romantic creeds there is a tendency to slip imperceptivity from the real into the other world, to demolish barriers between the physical and the psychic or supernatural. Wordsworth’s Guilt and Sorrow , Peter Bell , Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner , Kubla Khan , Christabel , Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Mercy , Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas are some Gothic poems influenced by the technique and devices of the Gothic fiction.

Gothic Literature in the Victorian Period

The Gothic romances have great influence on the Victorian and modern fiction. The sensational novels of Bulwar Lytton, Wilkie Collins in their emphasis on mystery and terror are a direct descent from the Gothic novels. The Bronte sisters luxuriously used the suggestive method of Radcliffe for creating the Gothic atmosphere in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre . Walter de la Mare’s Poem The Listeners is full of gothic setting.

Gothic Literature in the Modern Period

In modern times, the fantasy of H. G. Wells , and C. S. Lewis, J . K Rowling, Edgar Allan Poe shows us worlds unknown, monstrous and horrible. The modern detective novels of Edgar Wallace and Peter Cheney are influenced by the Gothic romances. They provided a pattern and also inspired the sensational writers of to-day with the incentive that set them on the sinister paths of crime fiction.

Hello, Viewers! Besides being the Founder and Owner of this website, I am a Government Officer. As a hardcore literary lover, I am pursuing my dream by writing notes and articles related to Literature. Drop me a line anytime, whether it’s about any queries or demands or just to share your well-being. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by!

Related posts:

• Hamartia | Definition, Examples in Tragedy, Hamartia and Hubris
• Elegy | Definition, Characteristics, Types, History, Examples, and Importance in Literature
• Bildungsroman | Meaning, Example
• What is Tragedy? Aristotelian definition of tragedy
• Theatre of The Absurd | Definition, Examples, Characteristics, History

2 thoughts on “Gothic Novel | Definition, Characteristics, History, Essay, Examples in Literature”

It was very much informative and easy to understand. Thank you for posting!

Sincerely Welcome my dear

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Advertisement

Supported by

Leigh Bardugo’s Latest Travels to Renaissance Spain

In “The Familiar,” the blockbuster fantasist conjures a world of mystical intrigue and romance.

• Share full article

By Danielle Trussoni

Danielle Trussoni is the author of seven books. Her new novel, “The Puzzle Box,” will be published this fall.

• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

THE FAMILIAR, by Leigh Bardugo

For those unacquainted with Catholic demonology, a familiar, or “familiar spirit,” as the phrase shows up in the Bible, is an otherworldly creature indentured to a master, usually whoever’s summoned it — a witch or necromancer or, in the case of Aladdin, a lucky rube who finds a bottle in need of a shine.

In Leigh Bardugo’s richly drawn novel of magic and eternal love “The Familiar,” the Aladdin of the story is Luzia, a scullion girl working for fallen nobility in 16th-century Spain. Spells and enchantments come to Luzia with ease, initially manifesting as small remedies to household gaffes: A burned loaf of bread is suddenly edible; a ripped seam repairs itself. She’s wildly gifted, but has little control of her abilities.

Enter Guillén Santángel, a familiar bound to serve Victor de Paredes, an ambitious tradesman known throughout Madrid for his astonishing luck. The de Paredes family has owned Santángel for three generations, employing him as an invaluable henchman, fixer and bringer of otherworldly good fortune. Known as El Alacrán, the scorpion, Santángel is an indomitable force with a voice like “ashes gone cold” who looks “at once beautiful and like he was dying, as if a sheet had been laid over a particularly handsome corpse.” When de Parades selects Luzia to compete as his “holy champion” in a torneo of magic at the luxurious La Casilla, a contest with life-or-death stakes, Santángel is enlisted to guide her. In the process, he becomes her protector, mentor and friend.

Luzia, described by one character as a wolf who has “taken the shape of a girl,” makes for an unlikely sorceress. She lacks formal education, and is as ignorant of her potential as she is of her origins. Luzia’s ancestors were, it turns out, converso s, Jews forced to convert to Catholicism but still considered “the embodiment of everything the Inquisition reviled.” Although her parents are dead, Luzia’s aunt has taught her the “precious, perilous scraps of language” that form the basis of her spells, a music she hears but doesn’t fully understand. At La Casilla, Luzia must hide her origins and her intelligence. She dresses with prim severity in a plain black dress and a white ruff like a Renaissance-era Coco Chanel, hoping to seem less threatening.

Luzia may disguise herself, but her talent shatters any hope that she will go unnoticed. She’s a sensation from the first, drawing the ire of ruthless competitors. Navigating the torneo ’s Machiavellian politics is no easy feat, and it doesn’t help that she’s falling for Santángel. He’s pretty hard to resist. Equals in magic and subterfuge, they are both trapped in their own ways. He, too, is lonely; immortality has nearly killed him, leaving him to forget the “pleasure of warm skin, conversation, the glimmering of connection.” Their growing intimacy forms a bond that will save them both.

Bardugo, whose Gothic fiction includes “ Ninth House ” and the Y.A. novels “ Shadow and Bone ” and “Six of Crows,” is perfectly at home in the 16th century. Her prose mirrors the Baroque setting, her sentences lush and embroidered with pearls. Subplots proliferate, characters appear and retreat, and points of view shift from one person to the next, creating a panopticon around Luzia and Santángel. Reading Bardugo is an immersive, sensual experience: There are orange-blossom scented dreams, jewel-encrusted velvet dresses, fabrics dyed “with turmeric and berries from Persia more purple than a bruise,” a pomegranate’s “perfect glossy seeds, begging to be eaten.” One can’t help sinking into Luzia and Santángel’s world and wishing never to leave.

THE FAMILIAR | By Leigh Bardugo | Flatiron Books | 400 pp. | $29.99

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .