Gothic Literature 101

There are two types of Gothic literature – Gothic Romance and Gothic Horror. Gothic Horror tends to be of a later vintage than Gothic Romance. They stem from the same roots, having things in common, but are completely separate beasts.

Romantic Roots

All Gothic literature stems from the Romantic Movement which prevailed during the Nineteenth Century. The movement stressed natural environments, the individual in preference to the state and a general unbridling of individual passions and emotions. All Gothic literature therefore will showcase natural environments – woods; cliffs; mountains; oceans – pastoral environments and workers (i.e., shepherds, cowherds and woodcutters) and young lovers, usually doomed to be forever apart due to some trifling, but insuperable, circumstance. Additionally, there is always a lot of weather in these books, usually of the inclement kind!

Gothic Romance

Invariably, these will be set in some foreign locale – usually Italy, southern France or Spain, but sometimes Greece, Turkey or the Middle East – and will focus on some selfish elder relative of one of the young lovers who will intervene illegally in the rightful inheritance of their title or estate (or both). There is usually some document, or other talisman, which, if found, will reveal who gets to inherit what, and this becomes the focus of the narrative. That’s basically it. Rinse and repeat.

Along the way, in a hark-back to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” (1606), the evil relative will sometimes receive supernatural visitations, or visions, which will try their conscience, or threaten to expose them; the hero will end up imprisoned in an oubliette, or some other despicable place; and the heroine will become lost in a forest, before during and after which she will bathe her pillow in tears at regular intervals (Ann Radcliffe’s heroines were always doing this).

The narrative will be sidelined regularly by second-string characters who show up to tell a tale of things that they have experienced, or just heard about at second-hand, and – if you’re lucky – this will have some relevance to the over-arching plot. These secondary narratives are sometimes more interesting than the main story although they often seem to take place simply to pad out the action. These sub-plots will sometimes contain well-known tropes or characters, such as:

·        The Wandering Jew – a miserly figure from the Middle Ages doomed to wander the Earth because he is too selfish for Heaven and too wicked for Hell (usually it involves him having found some way to cheat the Devil and deny him his soul);

·        The Bleeding Nun – The ghost of a murdered holy woman who appears to presage some horrible event, usually a treacherous murder. She is sometimes the spirit of a young woman who disguised herself as a nun so as to be able to meet her lover; sometimes a nun who tried to facilitate the elopement, or other general getting-together, of young lovers and who was killed for her efforts; or sometimes the ghost of a holy woman who tried to act as the conscience of some wicked upper-class twit (and who was murdered for speaking up).

Lots of these stories were written from the late 1700s through to the end of the Victorian era and most of them are rubbish. The notable ones are Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) (which was written during a ten-week alcoholic bender and delivered, bloody and vomitous, to the publisher). Walpole’s Otranto is considered by many to be actually a spoof of the form despite it appearing so early in the canon, but that doesn’t lessen its appeal. An actual spoof which is a brilliant example of the form while simultaneously skewering the genre is Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817).

Gothic Horror

Gothic Horror takes all of the foregoing and ramps up the supernatural elements to 11. As before, there are usually young lovers denied consummation and large tracts of bosky wilderness; however, central to the horror of the story is the notion of an inversion of the natural order (this is, in itself, a supernatural, or pseudo-scientific, version of the older relative not allowing the legal inheritance process to take its proper course). Again, the roots of this trope go all the way back to Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. Hence, in Dracula (1897), the vampire is an unnatural perversion flouting God’s law; while in Frankenstein (1818), the characters’ woes stem from the fact that Victor Frankenstein finds a way to create life, something that only God should be able to do. Even Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde has this notion of tampering with the natural order of things at its core.

In Gothic Horror, the stakes are essentially raised. Rather than just the happiness of two besotted nincompoops, the fate of empires – even the world – rests upon the elimination of the unnatural cause of the horrific events. If Dracula is allowed to run amok, the world gets overrun with vampires; if Victor Frankenstein’s formula is published, the world gets saturated with stitched-together abominations; if the Beetle isn’t stopped from leaving London, many more young white women will get incinerated as sacrifices to its ancient gods.

·        Fallen Women – central to Victorian Gothic Horror is the idea of the woman who – through no fault of her own – is cast beyond the pale into social unacceptability. These women are usually the heroines of these tales, forced by circumstances to excuse themselves from polite society – Mina Harker is the classic version of this trope. By having the heroes side with her, regardless of the social stigma that they adopt by doing so, they prove themselves to be noble protectors in the Arthurian mould, something that was very big back then. There was also a frisson of risqué naughtiness inherent in them doing this – like being seen with a prostitute – that lent these stories an added level of excitement for the readers.

As with Gothic Romance, there are lots of titles to choose from, some good, some bad. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) is a vampire novella which helped inspire Dracula; Bram Stoker’s vampire novel was the sleeper in the year of its publication, beaten out by Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), which was the 50 Shades of Grey of its day (but not crap). Victorian Gothic Horror becomes increasingly more urban, springboarding off the crimes that were starting to take place within those environments: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1911) plays upon the notion of a predacious mentor along the lines of Trilby (1895) by George du Maurier; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) plays off the prevalent horrors of the medical dissection of dead bodies; Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the rue Morgue (1841) takes Gothic Horror and creates the prototype of the crime novel from the formula.

Thus, Gothic Horror paves the way for the Weird Fiction genre of the Edwardian era into the 1940s, itself the precursor to Science Fiction and Fantasy writing.