In recent decades, the influence of the Gothic has recaptured critical attention.
Scholars have devoted themselves to reexamining the genre’s emergence, popularity, decline, as well as its formulaic content and its dark nature. The Gothic genre made its debut in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764 as a new, original and even radical literary form, but soon degenerated into a stereotype and served as material for the satire in Northanger Abbey in 1803. The Gothic genre was extremely popular from roughly 1760 to 1820, with a rapid rise and fall. It is indeed not an easy task to give the Gothic genre an explicit definition. It can be viewed as a prelude to Romanticism, which includes many Gothic elements. From a historical viewpoint, it can also be seen as a reflection of the terror coming from the serious violations against
monarchical orders, such as the French Revolution.7 With its involvement with the
6 Karen F. Stein offers another list of Gothic novels by women during this period: Doris Lessing’s The Four Gated City (1969) and the Summer before the Dark (1973), Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s Falling (1973), and Sheila Ballantyne’s Norma Jean the Termite Queen (1975).
7 In addition to the connection with French Revolution, Kilgour, in her book The Rise of the Gothic Novel, argues that the Gothic genre was originally “a part of the legacy of the English Revolution of
Huang 8 dark aspect of humanity and society, it is always associated with psychological or criminal fiction. With its abundant descendants which flourished after its supposed
“demise,” the term Gothic has come to include an increasingly wider scope of works and categories, making it even more difficult to clarify the genre.
Consequently, it appears to be easier to analyze the Gothic genre through its conventions than its nature. The research into the form of the Gothic thus takes an
“inventory approach” (Delamotte 7).8 Academics tend to initiate their examination from conventional settings (for example, castles in ruin, haunted house with secret locked chambers, and gloomy yet sublime natural spectacles), characters (a
persecuted heroine who is innocent and intelligent; a tyrannical hero who sometimes is also a villain; a villainess, and a talkative servant), and devices ( plots such as a heroine, leaving where she grows up, undertakes a journey to an unknown place in which she encounters a threatening male) that are apparently repeated elements in the Gothic novels. However, analyzing the shared characteristics of a certain genre does not mean lifting the veil of its mystery, but might result in difficulties in constructing its unity from these fragmented pieces. Maggie Kilgour comments:
At times the Gothic seems hardly a unified narrative at all, but a series of framed conventions, static moments of extreme emotions—displayed by characters or in the landscape, and reproduced in the reader—which are tenuously strung together in order to be temporized both through and into narrative, but which do not form a coherent and continuous whole. (5) Hence, the inventory approach to the Gothic has led to many debates. To get out of the impasse, re-investigating the original prototype of the Gothic in the eighteenth century is one workable alternative.
1688” (13).
8 According to David Punter, Eino Railo’s The Haunted Castle (1927), with its listing of themes and settings as one approach to study Gothic fiction, could be considered the beginning of the trend. (16)
Huang 9 The goal of the Gothic genre is not primarily to portray realistic characters or events but to arouse the extreme emotions of its readers by putting them in a thrilling, suspenseful and uncertain atmosphere, which explains why in the late eighteenth century it was believed that reading Gothic novels would bring about a corrupting influence on the morals of the readers.9 It was generally feared by earlier
conservative moralists that readers of the Gothic narratives, fascinated with the escapist imagination or indulging in mental stimulation, will ultimately lose family values and detach themselves from the social order and norms. The worries of the moralists are that the Gothic awakens something repressed in the human mind that is also contrary to the dominant principles of social values. Devendra P. Varma
comments,
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have been recognized as, in all essentials, dominated by a strict concept of reason…. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a new recognition of the heart’s emotions and a reassertion of the numinous. It was these factors that produced the
‘Gothic’ horror. (210)
The horrors born from the revival of those restrained emotions turn to be the source of the Gothic power of subversion. With the potential to recover a suppressed primitive and barbaric imaginative freedom, Gothic novels symbolize a threat to the tyranny of reason and to the constraining aesthetic ideal of order. Moreover, in psychoanalytical terms, the Gothic that reflects the return of the repressed is where “subconscious
9 In Gothic, Botting quotes T. Row’s statements in Gentleman’s Magazine (1767) to demonstrate the common thinking about moral degeneration at that time: “Tis not only a most unprofitable way of spending time, but extremely prejudicial to their morals, many a young person being entirely corrupted by the giddy and fantastical notions of love and gallantry, imbibed from thence”(26). In The Rise of the Gothic Novel, Kilgour refers to a review of “Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle” in Analytical Review (1788) to show similar ideas: “The false expectations these wild scenes excite, tend to debauch the mind, and throw an insipid kind of uniformity over the moderate and rational prospects of life, consequently adventures are sought for and created, when duties are neglected and content despised”
(7).
Huang 10 psychic energy bursts out from the restraints of conscious ego” (Kilgour 3). However, while the psychoanalytical approach to the Gothic has been adopted by many scholars, we need to explain further why the Gothic particularly enchants women.
John Frow, speculating on the nature of genre, once asked in his article,
“Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need: Genre Theory Today,” whether genres are theoretical or historical; through studying the proposals of Tzvetan Todorov and Hans Robert Jauss, he concludes:
If genres are actual and contingent forms rather than necessary and essential forms, they are nevertheless not arbitrary. And this in turn means that the
“internal” organization of genre can be understood in terms of particular historical codifications of discursive properties. (1629)
Accordingly, we must reconsider the social background of the late eighteenth century with the rise of female interest in the Gothic in order to understand the nature of the genre.