Gothic fiction

Gothic fiction. Frightening or horrifying stories of various kinds have been told in all ages, but the literary tradition confusingly designated as ‘Gothic’ is a distinct modern development in which the characteristic theme is the stranglehold of the past upon the present, or the encroachment of the ‘dark’ ages of oppression upon the ‘enlightened’ modern era. This theme is embodied typically in enclosed and haunted settings such as castles, crypts, convents, or gloomy mansions, in images of ruin and decay, and in episodes of imprisonment, cruelty, and persecution. The first important experiment in the genre was Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764, subtitled A Gothic Story in the 2nd edn, 1765).

The great vogue for Gothic novels occurred in Britain and Ireland in the three decades after 1790, culminating in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). During this period, the leading practitioner was A. Radcliffe, whose major works The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797) were decorous in their exhibitions of refined sensibility and of virtue in distress. Udolpho in particular established the genre's central figure: that of the apprehensive heroine exploring a sinister building in which she is trapped by the aristocratic villain. Among several talented imitators of Radcliffe, the most striking is M. G. Lewis, whose novel The Monk (1796) cast aside Radcliffe's decorum in its sensational depictions of diabolism and incestuous rape.

The term ‘Gothic’ in this context means ‘medieval’, and by implication barbaric. In the late 18th cent. it was applied loosely to the centuries preceding the enlightened Protestant era that began with the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Radcliffe, Lewis, and Maturin set their novels in the Catholic countries of southern Europe in the 16th and 17th cents, alarming their readers with tales of the Spanish Inquisition. While drawing upon the imaginative liberties of greater English writers of the ‘Gothic’ age—principally Shakespeare's use of ghosts and omens, and Milton's portrait of Satan—the Gothic novelists deplored the arbitary power of barons and the hypocrisy of monks and nuns, and mocked the superstitious credulity of the peasants. In this sceptical Protestant attitude to the past, they differ significantly from the genuinely nostalgic medievalism of Pugin and other advocates of the later Gothic Revival in architecture.

Some of Radcliffe's contemporaries and immediate successors achieved comparable effects with more modern settings: Godwin in The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), his daughter M. Shelley in Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818), and J. Hogg in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), all evoked psychological torment, guilt, self-division, and paranoid delusion without employing medieval trappings.

By the 1820s the Gothic novel had given way to the more credible historical novels of Scott, its clichés by now provoking less terror than affectionate amusement, as in Jane Austen's parody, Northanger Abbey (1818). Some tales of terror, published by Blackwood's Magazine and the New Monthly Magazine, retained the Gothic flavour in more concentrated forms, and Polidori's story ‘The Vampyre’ (1819) launched the powerful new Gothic sub-genre of vampiric fiction, which commonly expresses middle-class suspicion of the decadent aristocracy. From these sources the first master of American Gothic writing, Poe, developed a more intensely hysterical style of short Gothic narrative, of which ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is the classic model. Since Poe's time American short- story writing, from Hawthorne to Joyce Carol Oates, has frequently resorted to Gothic themes.

In English and Anglo-Irish fiction of the Victorian period, the Gothic influence is pervasive, among both minor authors such as Bulwer-Lytton and Bram Stoker, and also some major figures: the novels of the Brontë sisters are strongly Gothic in flavour, C. Brontë's Villette (1853) being a late example of the overtly anti-Catholic strain. Dickens favoured such settings as prisons and gloomy houses, while his characterization employs a Gothic logic that highlights cursed families and individuals who are paralysed by their pasts: the significantly named Dedlock family in Bleak House (1852–3) and Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1860–1). Somewhat closer to the spirit of the original Gothic novels are the so-called sensation novels of the 1860s, notably W. Collins's The Woman in White (1860) and Le Fanu's Uncle Silas (1864). Le Fanu's ghost stories and tales of terror, along with those of E. Gaskell and others, are also significant contributions to the Victorian Gothic tradition. The last decades of the Victorian period witnessed a curious revival of Gothic writing by Irish- and Scottish-born authors in which the haunted house seemed to give way to the possessed body, as in R. L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Stoker's Dracula (1897). At the turn of the century, more traditional Gothic effects are found in such mystery stories as H. James's The Turn of the Screw (1898), and Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902).

In the first part of the 20th cent. the Gothic tradition was continued principally by writers of ghost stories, such as M. R. James and A. Blackwood, and by fantasy-writers, notably Merryn Peake. A major exception in the realm of higher literary achievement is the work of Faulkner, which renews and transcends the Gothic genre in its preoccupation with the doomed landowning dynasties of the American South. His novel Sanctuary (1931) is still a shocking exercise in Gothic sensationalism, surpassed by the tragic depth of his Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and by several of his shorter stories. Daphne du Maurier meanwhile opened a new vein of popular Gothic romance with Rebecca (1938), which revived the motif of the defenceless heroine virtually imprisoned in the house of a secretive master figure. The Hollywood cinema gave Gothic narrative a favoured place in the popular imagination through its adaptations of Dracula, Frankenstein, and other literary works.

In the 1960s, leading English novelists, including Murdoch, Fowles, and Storey, experimented with Gothic effects. As a taste for non-realistic forms of fiction established itself, Gothic settings and character types reappeared regularly in the repertoire of serious fiction. The novels and stories of Angela Carter, notably The Magic Toyshop (1967) and The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), imaginatively employ Gothic images of sexuality and domestic confinement to explore the concerns of contemporary feminism. Towards the end of the 20th cent. such novels as G. Swift's Waterland (1983) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) were clearly from the Gothic tradition. American writers specializing in Gothic fiction at this time included P. McGrath (The Grotesque, 1989), the popular horror-writer Stephen King, and the vampire romancer Anne Rice, who also has a cult following associated with the ‘Goth’ youth subculture.

The critical fortunes of Gothic writing have swung intermittently between derision of its hoary clichés and enthusiasm for its atmospheric, psychologically suggestive power. From either side, the Gothic tradition is usually considered a junior rival to the mainstream of fictional Realism. Walpole inaugurated the tradition in the hope that the lifelike solidity of realism might be reconciled with the imaginative range of romance. It fell to his greater successors—the Brontë sisters, Dickens, and Faulkner—to fulfil this promise. See also Ghost stories.