Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

and moral function. As mentioned in the first chapter, Johnson aligns himself with other
critics in advocating that literature should seek to endorse a perspective that exemplifies
the highest order of moral and virtuous conduct, not a life “discoloured by passion, or
deformed by wickedness” (464). Likewise, an essay entitled “Terrorist Novel Writing”
in The Spirit of the Public Journals specifically points out the same criteria in
determining the novel’s usefulness while at the same time condemning the Gothic’s
induction of seditious elements:
A novel, if at all useful, ought to be a representation of human life
and manners, with a view directing the conduct in the important
duties of life, and to correct its follies. But what instruction is to be
reaped from the distorted ideas of lunatics, I am at loss to conceive
… (i:229)
With the absence of a critical framework to understand what type of instruction can be
derived from “the distorted ideas of lunatics”—such as the concepts of Nietzsche and
Bataille and the theories of Freud mentioned in the previous chapter—certain
contemporary critics could not fully comprehend the value enclosed in depicting
“wickedness” and the typical uncanny events figuring in much of Gothic writing. It is
only considerably later, with the advent of modernism and psychoanalysis, that critics
started to reconsider the “usefulness” of the Gothic.
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According to Gamer, critics in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century,
assumed that Gothic readers were “young, female, naïve, and easily manipulated” (38),
based on previous assumptions regarding romance’s audiences. Yet by drawing on Paul
Kaufmann’s compilation of borrowing records of British libraries, Gamer argues that this
assumption is erroneous and that the dialogues between writers, readers, and reviewers of
the Gothic is lacking a “dialogical” dimension; he maintains that there is no actual