The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

100 Gothic
the whole sub-world of the unconscious.
Sensibility is shown under pressure.
Sexuality, elemental passions and fear now
moved to the centre of the novelist’s stage.
The word ‘gothic’ initially conjured up
visions of a medieval world, of dark
passions enacted against the massive and
sinister architecture of the gothic castle.
By the end of the century it implied the
whole paraphernalia of evil forces and
ghostly apparitions. The gothic is characterized
by a setting which consists of
castles, monasteries, ruined houses or
suitably picturesque surroundings, by
characters who are, or seem to be, the
quintessence of good or evil (though
innocence often seems to possess a particular
menace of its own); sanity and
chastity are constantly threatened and
over all there looms the suggestion,
sometimes finally subverted, that irrational
and evil forces threaten both
individual integrity and the material order
of society.
On one level the gothic novel was an
attempt to stimulate jaded sensibilities
and as such its descendants are the
modern horror film and science fiction
fantasy. Yet, as the Marquis de Sade
detected at the time and as the surrealists
were to assert later, the gothic mode was
potentially both socially and artistically
revolutionary. The iconography of decay
and dissolution which filled such novels
clearly has its social dimension (William
Godwin in particular drew political
morals from his entropic setting) while
the assertion of a non-material reality
clearly stands as an implicit criticism of
the literalism of the conventional novel as
it does of the rational confidence of the
age itself. The debate between rationalism
and the imagination which came to
characterize the age is contained within
the gothic mode. Horace Walpole was
content to leave his terrors irrational and
unexplained; Ann Radcliffe, or, in
America, Charles Brockden Brown, felt
the need to rationalize the ineffable.
The ‘classic’ gothic novels spanned
the years between 1764 and, approximately,
1820, which saw the publication
of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.
Among the best-known examples are:
The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann
Radcliffe, 1794; The Adventures of Caleb
Williams by William Godwin, 1794;
The Monk by M. G. Lewis, 1795;
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1818. The
strain continued in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries both in England (e.g.
Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn, 1963 and
David Storey, Radcliffe, 1963) and in
America, where it played an important
role not merely in the work of such
nineteenth-century gothicists as Charles
Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe and
Ambrose Bierce or, less directly,
Hawthorne, Melville and James, but also
in the work of authors, such as James
Purdy, John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut.
The Gothic has developed a strong
appeal in fiction and film. Its features can
be seen in a range of authors from Angela
Carter to Poppy Z. Brite, while writers
like Anne Rice have catered for the
general cultish vogue for the Gothic in
contemporary culture witnessed in the
sustained popularity of the Vampire
movie.
See Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror
(1921, reprinted 1963); Leslie Fiedler,
Love and Death in the American Novel
(1960); Montague Summers, The Gothic
Quest (New York, 1964).
See G. St John Barclay, Anatomy of
Horror: The Masters of Occult Fiction
(1978); C. Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of
the Unreal (1981); C. A. Howells, Love,
Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic
Fiction (1978); R. Jackson, Fantasy: The
Literature of Subversion (1981); H. Kerr,