Gothic Conventions

Background

• From what cultural background did the Gothic arise?

Prehistory: Enlightenment

Rembrandt, ‘Adoration of the Magi’, 1632

Enlightenment

IMMANUEL KANT, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784)

“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.”

What are Enlightenment values?

• Given the snippet of Kant you’ve looked at, and Joseph Wright’s picture: what do Enlightenment thinkers value?

• Hegel: thesis…

• So what do Gothic thinkers value?...

(Another direction: Romanticism – late 1700s – mid 19th))

And did those feet in ancient time.Walk upon Englands mountains green:And was the holy Lamb of God,On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,Shine forth upon our clouded hills?And was Jerusalem builded here,Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;Bring me my Arrows of desire:Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:Till we have built Jerusalem,In Englands green & pleasant Land.

William Blake, 1808

Origins: interest in folklore (brothers Grimm), reactions against neoclassicism and the Augustan poets in England, nationalistic pride/birth of nation state, opposition to industrialisation/urbanisation.

British poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats): individualism, poet as tortured genius, reverence for the natural world, idealism, physical and emotional passion, and an interest in the mystic and supernatural.

Thinkers: Opposition to order, rationality, classical/neoclassical art, childhood innocence corrupted by society.

‘Gothic’: a brief history• popular in German literature, which people in Britain did know.• Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto (1765), was subtitled

(I think) “a Gothic story”. • the word “Gothic” derives from “Goth,” the name of one of the

barbaric Germanic tribes that invaded the Roman Empire.• Gothic medieval cathedrals, feature a majestic, unrestrained

architectural style with often savage or grotesque ornamentation• The Gothic genre (in both literature and architecture) is therefore

associated with savagery and barbarism, but also power • developed in the late eighteenth-century as a reaction to the central

ideology of the Enlightenment that valorised human reason.

Gothic Architecture

Gothic Architecture as influence

• Picture is of Chartres Cathedral in France• The vaulting arches and spires reach to

heavens• bridge human and supernatural worlds,

reveals ambition for the eternal• sense of finite versus forces of the infinite• ornate decoration: profusion of wild carvings

depicting humanity in conflict with supernatural forces—demons, angels, gargoyles, and monsters

Themes, foci?• a fascination for the past, particularly — but not exclusively — the medieval

era: setting, architecture, violence.• a liking for the strangely eccentric, the supernatural, the magical, and the

sublime, sometimes subtly intermingled with the realistic• psychological insights, especially into sexuality, through (at best) fascinating

and intricate characterisation, or (at worst) stereotypical caricatures• representation and stimulation of fear, horror, the macabre and the sinister,

within the context of a general focus on the emotional rather than the rational

• frequently exotic settings and locations (versus a more 'domestic' gothic tradition)

• plots within plots, multiple narrators, overt symbolism.• supernatural and natural worlds in tension• the “dark side” of human nature, irrational or destructive desires, monsters

externalising our own dangerous repressed desires? • ‘fertile’, ‘eclectic’, ‘contradictory’?

Conventions• The Double or Doppelganger (German for “double-goer”)• Forbidden Knowledge or Power/ Faust Motif• Monster/Satanic Hero/Fallen Man• Beast Transformations• Demon Lovers/Femme Fatales/Vampires • Demons/Devils/Witches/Spirits/Angels• Ghosts• Dreams/Visions• Magic Talismans/ Cursed or Blessed Objects/Holy Relics• Graveyards/Churches/Ruins• Haunted Castle/House• Multiple Narrative/Spiral Narrative Method• Madness/Madmen/Characters Who Question Their Own Sanity • Blood• Other motifs

Later Directions• the classic “gothic horror” tale (e.g. Frankenstein, Dracula)• the historical romance — the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott

(1771-1832), for example.• the American tradition of domestic gothic fiction — Poe, William

Faulkner• fantasy fiction, as in the work of Mervyn Peake or Tolkien (1892-

1973)• the psychological thriller — some of Susan Hill's fiction…• idiosyncratic postmodern experiments: Angela Carter• some science fiction and science fantasy texts — H.G. Wells's

(1866-1946) The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), Gene Wolfe’s remarkable ‘The Urth of the New Sun’ tetralogy from the 1980s.

Summation:

• Gothic literature pictures the human condition as an ambiguous mixture of good and evil powers that cannot be understood completely by human reason.

• The Gothic perspective conceives of the human condition as a paradox, a dilemma of duality — humans are divided in the conflict between opposing forces in the world and in themselves.

• The Gothic writer sees the existence of inexplicable elements in humanity and the cosmos.

• They write in opposition to the Enlightenment: ‘Daring to know’ leads only to destruction.