OriginsOrigins

Type of prose fiction inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Is the Gothic an inversion of Is the Gothic an inversion of Romanticism?Romanticism?

Romanticism/Transcendentalism Associated with the

outdoors and nature

Looks upward toward goodness, nature, air, sky

Being one with nature: human beings have a“God within”

Gothic Associated with

enclosed, man-made structures falling into decay

Looks beneath a surface reality to evil or turmoil beneath

Duality or doubleness

Negative emotional states and drives

PurposesPurposes

To create terror

To open fiction to the realm of the irrational—perverse impulses, nightmarish terrors, obsessions—lying beneath the surface of the civilized mind

To demonstrate the presence of the uncanny existing in the world that we know rationally through experience.

CharacteristicsCharacteristics

An atmosphere of gloom, terror, or mystery.

 Elements of the uncanny (unheimlich) that challenge reality Mysterious events that cause the protagonist

to question the evidence of his or her senses The presence of seemingly supernatural

beings.

Characters and ActionsCharacters and Actions

Events, often violent or macabre, that cannot be hidden or rationalized despite the efforts of the narrator.

Focus on death and the events surrounding death; the living may seem half-dead and the dead half-alive.

Characters act from negative emotions: fear, revenge, despair, hatred, anger.

CharacteristicsCharacteristics

A disturbed or unnatural relation between the orders of things that are usually separate: Life/death Good/evil Dream/reality Rationality/madness Light/dark

 

CharacteristicsCharacteristics

A hidden or double reality beneath the surface of what at first appears to be a single narrative.

As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, a primary feature of the Gothic is that the self is “massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access” (12): air, life, knowledge, the rational self.

SettingSetting

An exotic setting isolated in time or space from contemporary life, often a ruined mansion or castle.

The building Associated with past violence Hidden doors Subterranean secret passages Concealed staircases, and other such features.

Gothic Narrative Gothic Narrative StrategiesStrategies

Interrupted narrative form.

Stories may use multiple starts, frame stories, interruptions of stories, letters or inserted texts, repetition, and omissions of relevant key details.

Narrators may have partial knowledge from which they piece together an imperfect explanation of what cannot be rationally explained.

Gothic Narrative Gothic Narrative StrategiesStrategies

Fragmentary narration (letters, multiple narrators)

Barrier between the surface reality and the turbulent reality beneath the surface.

Doubleness (double characters, parallel chambers, mind divorced from body) where singleness should be.

Exposure of what was once hidden. 

Sedgwick on the Gothic Sedgwick on the Gothic

Something is going on inside the isolation (the present, the continuous consciousness, the dream, the sensation itself).

Something intensely relevant is going on impossibly out of reach.

Three main elements: what’s inside, what’s outside, and what separates them (barriers)

BarriersBarriers

Often a physical barrier symbolizes a barrier to the information that provides a key to the truth or explanation of the events. 

Sometimes the truth is revealed through an artifact that breaches the barrier between what is known and what is unknown

ExamplesExamples

A document telling a family secret A key that opens a secret room An object or even a creature imprisoned

behind the wall

What would this be in “The Tell-Tale Heart”? What would it be in “The Fall of the House of

Usher”?

Fuseli, Fuseli, ““The NightmareThe Nightmare””

PoePoe

Thoughts? Questions?

More on the Gothic and quotations from Sedgwick: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/novel.htm

1928 Avant-Garde version of “The Fall of the House of Usher”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aav1T9xqIIY