English 199

Notes on the Gothic

Origins

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

· Originally signified Gothic architecture (pointed arch and vault)

Purposes

· 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.

Settings

· Set in the middle ages

· Setting is often a gloomy castle with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels

· Strange sounds and odd representations of nature

Characters and Actions

· Innocent heroine persecuted by a lustful villain

· Appearance of ghosts

· Characters who disappear mysteriously

· Supernatural occurrences

· 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.

Nineteenth-century views of the term

· Covers stories that lack medieval setting but that have a brooding atmosphere of gloom or terror

· Represents macabre or uncanny events

· Includes violence and cruelty

· Portrays strange psychological states

From Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's The Coherence of Gothic Conventions

· When “an individual fictional self is the subject of one of these conventions, that self is spatialized in the following way.

· It is the position of the self to be massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access. This something can be its own past, the details of its family history; it can be the free air, when the self has been literally buried alive; it can be a lover; it can be just all the circumambient life, when the self is pinned in a death-like sleep. 

· Typically, however, there is both something going on inside the isolation (the present, the continuous consciousness, the dream, the sensation itself) and something intensely relevant going on impossibly out of reach. While the three main elements (what’s inside, what’s outside, and what separates them) takes on the most varied guises, the terms of the relationship are immutable. 

· The self and whatever it is that is outside have a proper, natural, necessary connection to each other, but one that the self is suddenly incapable of making. The inside life and the outside life have to continue separately, becoming counterparts rather than partners, the relationship between them one of parallels and correspondences rather than communication. 

· This, though it may happen in an instant, is a fundamental reorganization, creating a doubleness where singleness should be.  And the elements there are to go to reintegrate the sundered elements—finally, the impossibility of restoring them to their original oneness—are the most characteristic energies of the Gothic novel. 

· The worst violence, the most potent magic, and the most paralyzing instances of the uncanny in these novels do not occur in, for example, the catacombs of the Inquisition or the stultification of nightmares. Instead, they are evoked in the very breach of the imprisoning wall. The fires, earthquakes, and insurrections that restore the prisoners of tyranny to their “natural” freedom are tremendously more violent than what has gone on either inside or outside the prisons. 

· Similarly, no nightmare is ever as terrifying as is waking up from some innocuous dream to find it true. The barrier between the self and what should belong to it can be caused by anything and nothing; but only violence or magic, and both of a singularly threatening kind, can ever succeed in joining them again. 

· Of all the Gothic conventions dealing with the sudden, mysterious, seemingly arbitrary, but massive inaccessibility of those things that should normally be most accessible, the difficulty the story has in getting itself told is of the most obvious structural significance. 

· If the story-within-etc. represents the broadest structural application of the otherwise verbal or thematic convention of the unspeakable, it has a similar relation to the convention of live burial . . . . The live burial that is a favorite conventual punishment in Gothic novels derives much of its horror not from the buried person’s loss of outside activities (that would be the horror or dead burial) , but from the continuation of a parallel activity that is suddenly redundant.