Traditional , American, and ModernSources for this presentation include: The Gothic Experience, Gothic Undercurrents,

Elements of the Gothic Novel, and Gothic, Novel, and Romance: Brief Definitions

Gothic Literature

Traditional European Gothic Literature

DefinitionGothic literature is a style that explores humanity's fear and fascination with the unknown. Although it originated in Germany, it was revived in the 1700's and was popular through the early nineteenth century. Authors of such novels set their stories in the medieval period, often in a gloomy castle replete with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels, and made plentiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural

occurrences; their principal aim was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery, cruelty, and a variety of horrors. The term "gothic" has also been extended to denote a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom or terror, represents events which are uncanny, or macabre, or melodra-matically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states.

(Definition adapted from M. H. Abrams's A Glossary of Literary Terms: Eighth Edition, pp. 117-118 and “The Black Cat as Gothic

Literature” by Caleb Guad)

An atmosphere of gloom, terror, or mystery

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

The building may be associated with past violence and contains hidden doors, subterranean secret passages, concealed staircases, and other such features.

Events, often violent, terrifying or macabre,

that cannot be hidden or rationalized despite the efforts of the narrator.

A disturbed or unnatural relation between the orders of things that are usually separate,

such as life and death, good and evil, dream life and reality, or rationality and madness.

A hidden or double reality beneath the surface of what at first appears to be a single narrative. The narrative arc of the Gothic story leads to an exposure of what was once hidden, breaking down the barrier between the surface reality and the reality beneath the surface.

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: a document telling a family secret, a key that opens a secret room, or even a creature imprisoned behind the wall.

An interrupted narrative form that relies on multiple methods to tell the tale —

inserted documents, letters, dreams, fragments of the story told by several narrators

Elements of the uncanny that challenge reality,

including mysterious events that cause the protagonist to question the evidence of his or her senses and the presence of seemingly supernatural beings.

Traditional Gothic Elements

labyrinths, dark corridors, and winding stairs

a castle, ruined or intact, haunted or not

shadows, a beam of moonlight in the blackness, a flickering candle, or the only source of light failing (a candle blown out or an electric failure)

ruined buildings which are sinister or which arouse a pleasing melancholy

extreme landscapes

like rugged mountains or dark forests

or

icy wastes and extreme weather

omens and ancestral curses

magic, supernatural manifestations, or the suggestion of the supernatural

a passion-driven, willful villain-hero or villain

The Villain/Antagoinist

A woman who is in distress and who is often threatened by a powerful, impulsive, tyrannical male or entity.

The Heroine/

Protagonist

a hero whose true identity is revealed by the end of the novel

“The Faceless One” by Steve Ditko,1957, This Magazine Is Haunted, #12

The Hero/Protagonist

The OutsiderWhether the stationary figure who represses his difference, or the wandering figure who seeks for some kind of salvation, or else the individual who for whatever reason moves entirely outside the norm, the outsider is driven by strange longings and destructive needs. While everyone else appears sane, he is insane; while everyone else appears bound by legalities, he is trying to snap the pitiless constrictions of the law; while everyone else seems to lack any peculiarities of taste or behaviour, he feels only estrangement, sick longings, terrible surges of power and devastation. he is beyond the moderating impulses in society, and he must be punished for his transgression. He is gloomy and melancholy, full of self-pity and self-hatred.

from http://missransom.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/elements_of_the_gothic.pdf

American Gothic literature plunges its characters into mystery, torment, and fear in order to pose disturbing questions to our familiar and comfortable ideas of humanity, society, and the cosmos.

American Gothic

American Gothic is similar to traditional European Gothic in that it evokes an atmosphere of terror and a sense of horror, but does not cross the line into the kind of graphic violence of the slasher film or horror story.

American Gothic Fiction isa subgenre of Gothic Fiction

American Gothic writers explored the dark side of nineteenth-century America.

elements specific to American Gothic include:

• rational vs. irrational• puritanism• guilt• strangeness within the

familiar • ghosts• monsters• family misery• interest in the occult• abuse of reason and science• the sentimentalizing of death

• a sense of darkness at the edge of the frontier

• fanatical quasi-Christian religious cults

• ritual murders • strange motifs like

ventriloquism• nearly post-apocalyptic

scenarios• the image of America is a

“ship of state” [a country that handled like a ship on course]

Early American Gothic writers were particularly concerned with frontier wilderness anxiety and the lasting effects of a Puritanical society.

The roots of American Gothic concepts lay in a past riddled with slavery, a fear of racial mixing (miscegenation), hostile relations with Native American Indians whose rituals were misunderstood, the eventual killing off of Native Americans, and the daunting wilderness present at the American frontier.

Background

Native Americans were losing most of the power‹--and virtually all of the land--that they once held. How could all of these conditions exist, many asked, in the world's one modern nation created with the explicit purpose of establishing freedom and equality for all?

In the late nineteenth-century America, almost 15 percent of the population was legally considered property (there were about 900,000 slaves in 1800 and about 3,200,000 by 1850). Only white, male property owners could vote.

Women were largely confined to the home and certainly not expected to rise to positions of social authority.

Puritanism in America occurred approximately between 1620-1729. Puritans had strict religious beliefs that many times ended in disastrous outcomes (such as burning or hanging innocent people). They believed people were born evil (something called “original sin”) and that it was decided at birth whether or not a person would go to heaven or hell, which was an everlasting fiery torment. Even if a person did good all of his life, he would go to hell if it had been predetermined (but of course, no one had any way of knowing his fate). Those who were predetermined to go to heaven might still end up in hell if they sinned just one time. As a result, Puritans were very concerned with what should be considered evil, witchcraft, and sinful (such as playing cards and dancing).

Puritans thought of non-whites as henchmen for the devil and naturally evil. These beliefs were further reinforced by shame and guilt whenever they had “impure” thoughts or actions (such as drinking alcohol or swearing or lying). This created a lasting impact of doom and gloom in America. Many American Gothic writers responded in their works to these fears and to the strictness of Puritanism.

In addition, rapid change was causing anxiety about the future:• Where was America heading?• How could it both grow and retain its unity and

coherence?• Were the millions of immigrants good for the country,

or did they bring dangerous and contagious influences?

It is this spirit of anxiety, fear, and even despair that writers in the American Gothic mode tap into.

Elements of Early American Gothic

Instead, old houses, abandoned barns, isolated towns, swamps, and forests replace the castles.

American Gothic is often devoid of castles and objects which allude to a civilized history.

Early settlers were overcome by fear linked to the unexplored territory which surrounded, and in some cases, engulfed them. Back in their native United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), much of the forest had been cut down to make way for farm land. When they arrived in America they discovered a land that was enormously larger than their own [Oregon is about the size of the United Kingdom] with thick forests that had never been cut down.

Fear of the unknown stemmed from this encounter with darkness and vastness because people were not used to this. Thus, vast expanses of forest terrified them, as did encounters with vast deserts and dark swamps where one could easily get lost. Furthermore, this fear was intensified since the wilderness was filled with Native Americans, whom they thought of as in league with the devil.

The Dungeons and endless corridors that are a hallmark of European Gothic are far removed from American Gothic in which castles are replaced with caves.

The inability of many Gothic characters to overcome perversity by rational thought is common in American Gothic. A protagonist may be sucked into the realm of madness because of his or her preference for the irrational.

Madness

Ideas of evolution or devolution of a species; new biological knowledge and technological advancement caused people to question their essential humanity. Parallels between humans and every other living thing on the planet were made obvious by the aforementioned. This is manifest in stories like H.P. Lovecraft’s "The Outsider" and Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil.”

The emergence of the “abhuman” in American Gothic Fiction was closely coupled with Darwinism, which emerged in 1859, and the Industrial Age (much of the 1800s). The abhuman is something that appears human in some ways, but is not in others. The vampire, which was first developed as a creature in Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel Dracula, is a good example of the abhuman, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster (1818).

Cthulu, sculpture by Gabe Perna

Ghosts and monsters function as the spiritual equivalent of the abhuman and indicate unseen realities.

American Gothic Authorsand Their Protagonists and Themes

• “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving is perhaps the most famous example of American Colonial era horror fiction.

• The protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown is both a tormented seventeenth-century Puritan and a representative of America's heritage of religious intolerance and self-righteousness.

• Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe offer us characters who may be encountering the supernatural or may only be experiencing the projections of their own worst selves, their most base and uncontrollable prejudices and desires.

• Hawthorne rejects the promise that science will help the human condition when he tells the story of one researcher's obsessive and destructive botanical experiment on his daughter.

• Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving are often grouped together because they portraits of the human experience by way of horror. Poe accomplished this through the window of a diseased and depressive fascination with the morose, Irving with the keen charm of a masterful storyteller, and Hawthorne with familial bonds to past abominations like the Salem Witch Trials

• In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays a woman so oppressed by the patriarchal assumptions of her husband that she is driven insane

These writers urge us to ask: What is an American? What are our ideals, and to what extent does it seem within our power to realize them? What power, if any, rules us? How much are we in control of ourselves? How well do we even know ourselves? To what extent can we ever be sure of anything?

Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South.

Common themes in Southern Gothic literature include:• deeply flawed characters• decayed or derelict settings• other sinister events relating to or coming from

poverty, racism, and violence

It is unlike its parent genre in that it uses these tools not solely for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South, with the Gothic elements taking place in a magic realist context rather than a strictly fantastical one.

The Southern Gothic style is one that employs the use of macabre and ironic events to examine the values of the American South.

“The colors of American Gothic literature are overwhelmingly autumnal. All American Gothic culture seems tinted by the dank browns of barren trees and wood planked ghost towns, the cracking white paint of old southern mansions and Texas Chainsaw white picket fences, the rotting mold green of decay, the oranges of dead leaves and collapsing pumpkins and above all the grays of thick leaden skies. It is impossible to imagine the American Gothic vision to contain the greens of spring, the yellows of summer or the blues of sky and reflective waters, unless they can be tainted.”

New American Gothic

Authors write New American Gothic rely on the use of private worlds to weave their Gothic intrigue. As such, the destruction of the family unit is commonplace in the New American Gothic. The psyche becomes the setting in the microcosms (small worlds) this particular brand of horror creates. Typically, these stories have a sort of "antihero“--an anxiety-riddled individual of little admirable strength.

things that are familiar, but just not quite right

entities that can appear human at times, but are actually evil, violent, or dangerous at their core, such as the werewolf, vampire, zombie, and serial killer

the mechanism and automation that rationalism and logic lead to

Citations

Campbell, Donna M. (1997). Novel, Romance, and Gothic: Brief

Definitions. Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University. Web

3 August 2012 from http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/novel.htm

Gothic Architecture (2002). The Gothic Experience. Annenberg Foundation.

Web 3 August 2012 from http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/

melani/gothic/gothic.html

Gothic Undercurrents. American Passages. Web 3 August 2012. retrieved from

http://www.learner.org/amerpass/unit06/instructor.html/

Harris, Robert. “Elements of the Gothic Novel.” VirtualSalt. 22 Nov. 2011. Web 3 August

2012 from http://www.virtualsalt.com/gothic.htm